Adapting the Gingko Walk

[LiminalEdge]

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.

 

[LovelyLadyLicker]

Oh wow, I didn't know there was a name for what I occasionally like to do (Gingko Walk, that is).

I often take walks in nature and feel inspired to create some art from it all in the quiet of the evening.

As fate would have it, I was inspired to create a mix of the Gingko Walk and Senryu.

The inspiration:
On my daily golden hour walk, I ran into the neighborhood perv while I had my back turned and was sniffing some freshly bloomed flowers. He approached me and tried to strike up a conversation, to which I immediately dismissed him and whatever nonsense he was spewing. I remember calling the interaction "poetic" when recounting it with a friend.

It went a little something like this:

The sun sets on my fading youth
But swollen rivers twist and writhe
Uncomfortably; a familiar sight
I brush the moss atop my weary skull
It clings with infested certainty
The wind taps my shoulder
Beckoning me to behold the sight-
There she is
She pinches my nose; holds my gaze
I lean into her soft, rosy folds
She blushes
Our moment, tender and innocent
Overshadowed by a towering memorial of concerning peace
Its grin bright enough to burn the sun
Bricked up; a familiar sight
Her petals shrivel
I skip across the mud
The sun sets on his fading youth

I tend to compare the goings abouts of nature to human behavior anyways, so it was right up my alley.