"Hearing Hailstones"

 

This is probably the oddest, or most coincidental, moment of my life. In high school, during lunch if I had nobody to spend my time with, I would go to the library and look through there collection. It was a rather small library, maybe 10 bookshelves, but it was perpetually unoccupied so I knew I wasn't bothering anybody by taking up the space and getting nothing done. Because poetry was brief and noncommittal, I could pick up a book without having to read it in its entirety, and spent most of my time looking through that section. Eventually, I stumbled on a book of Basho's Completed Works, translated into English.

 

The poems felt nearly meaningless, being so compressed, but they were brilliant in there ability to create an image and evoke feeling. They were passing thought and experience crystallized into a single breath: the perfect blending of the self, and feeling, into one's environment. I felt as if there was something devotional, to what I am not sure, in the occasional act, the moment of revelation, wherein one tried to perfect a thought with ink on paper, and from then on I wanted to write. I never quite mastered that kind of linguistic and intellectual compression, but the sense of obligation it and other poetics instilled, perhaps unintentionally, to make sense of the intermingling of self and environment, inherent to perception, lingers in nearly all things I attempt to do or create.