LiminalEdge
Unraveled
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2025
- Posts
- 2
Friends,
Those of you familiar with traditional haiku, and the greats Basho, Buson, etc., will have heard of the gingko walk. This is simply walking in nature, settling your mind down a bit, opening your eyes to something you may not have noticed before and seeing things clearly, appreciating what you see, jotting down a few notes and, maybe, just maybe, be inspired to write a poem.
I write more senryu, haiku's little brother that is more about human behaviour, and can be more playful (and it's a great form for erotic poetry, IMHO) while keeping the same essence of haiku's objectives. I like my senryu edgy and bold and irreverent. Alan Pizzarelli is my favourite senryu poet.
So I want to try to adapt the gingko walk to the edgy, messy, deliciously dangerous world of human affairs. Go out into the streets and open myself to the beauty and absurdity of it all, and hunt for images, fragments, emotions, phrases, poems in everyday life.
I'm sure lots of you do this sort of thing anyway. Pretty much the Beats and others have done.
But has anyone thought of it as a form of the Gingko Walk? As a deliberate step into the chaos to see what you can find? How did you do it? How did it go?
I'd love to hear about it.
Those of you familiar with traditional haiku, and the greats Basho, Buson, etc., will have heard of the gingko walk. This is simply walking in nature, settling your mind down a bit, opening your eyes to something you may not have noticed before and seeing things clearly, appreciating what you see, jotting down a few notes and, maybe, just maybe, be inspired to write a poem.
I write more senryu, haiku's little brother that is more about human behaviour, and can be more playful (and it's a great form for erotic poetry, IMHO) while keeping the same essence of haiku's objectives. I like my senryu edgy and bold and irreverent. Alan Pizzarelli is my favourite senryu poet.
So I want to try to adapt the gingko walk to the edgy, messy, deliciously dangerous world of human affairs. Go out into the streets and open myself to the beauty and absurdity of it all, and hunt for images, fragments, emotions, phrases, poems in everyday life.
I'm sure lots of you do this sort of thing anyway. Pretty much the Beats and others have done.
But has anyone thought of it as a form of the Gingko Walk? As a deliberate step into the chaos to see what you can find? How did you do it? How did it go?
I'd love to hear about it.
