the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light
of the world, the ocean‘s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?
Colin:May I ask, Michael, how you maintain your motivation and could you allow us a glimpse into your current projects and anything that you may have planned for the future?
Michael: I suppose motivation comes from ideas, at least for me. I‘ve written about 2,000 neon buddha poems and they deserve to be a book, I think, or maybe two or three. So that‘s a project I‘m thinking about. Some of the poems play with idioms or puns, and those could work well together. Others are more surreal or serious. Does it work better to separate or integrate such variety? I wrestle with that and other questions. I‘m way overdue for a book of my haiku, too (I don‘t consider my neon buddha poems to be haiku). I would really like to return to submitting my haiku and longer poems more regularly for publication (I‘ve been on an extended lull for more than a year, mostly on account of directing the Haiku North America conference and more recently the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway for the Haiku Northwest group). At least I‘m managing to write a lot of poetry, perhaps more prolifically than ever, but I also need to spend time catching up with my notebooks.
Perhaps an explanation of my writing and publishing process is of interest. I carry a notebook with me most of the time, and jot a majority of my haiku into it (although my neon buddha poems have often been typed directly into the computer). I‘ll dip into my current haiku notebook for special purposes before the notebook is finished, or to pick poems to share at the monthly Haiku Northwest meetings we have in the Seattle area, but usually I don‘t try to publish anything from each notebook until the entire notebook is finished. At present, though, I‘m several notebooks behind. Each notebook has between 400 and 500 haiku in it, and I‘m at least seven notebooks behind. The largest one has at least 1,000 haiku in it, another 800, each poem unique, since I work out each haiku in my head extensively before I write it down. If the average is 500 poems per notebook, that‘s at least 3,500 haiku, senryu, and tanka I need to sort through, not even counting my half-full current notebook. Sorting through them means to reread each poem, perhaps revising it, and deciding if I might want to publish it. Then it means writing it out on an index card, together with the date and location of composition (and any revisions). I like the index cards because they are easy to sort when sequencing them, or for the purposes of deciding which journals or contests I might submit them to. I‘ve been
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