KIGO - A Preface to the Season

This is the preface to my book KIGO: FOUR SEASONS IN HAIKU, published by Indie Earth Publishing, Miami, Florida. It will be available for pre-order and available at local bookshops and online on September 22, 2023. Please consider getting a copy for yourself. Thank you in advance for your consideration and support. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                  KIGO

A Preface to the Seasons

 

 

            Four seasons. There are four reasons for why I selected the structure of a year to express a life in process—still unfolding, at times blossoming, evolving, and understanding the reason for being—while embracing mystery, learning to feel comfortable in ambiguity, realizing that my truth is as sure as anything I’ll ever be, and that faith is not about having the answers but learning to live with the questions.

            And it was these life experiences, events, and, for lack of a better word, seasons—my childhood, adolescence, and early youth—that helped to define my sense of identity, my understanding of what the meaning of my life is, and to identify the questions that are the most salient, difficult, and valuable to me as a human being and artist. It is through these two sources of "being" that I define myself and comprehend what I need to be and do while on this planet, on the side of "living," as it were.

            I have always been told that I feel "too much". I grew into a person who struggled with being that way and yet couldn’t ever stop myself. I was also identified as a "dreamer" and "free spirit," and these labels were not tooted and shared; I kept them within as a "responsible" individual, especially a male, needing to be both comported and formalized. Yet, the magical world of seasons and the daily interplay of my five senses with the world of matter around me instigated deeper questions about why, who, when, how, and where... I didn’t simply accept things as they were; there had to be more and a deeper cause, effect, and purpose—a meaning that either wasn’t shared, or most didn’t want to know.

            The church seasons made so much sense to me. The lives of the saints and the equinoxes and solstices, in essence, spoke to me. Dusks, dawns, twilights, and those stars! My goodness, the constellations—and over the months, they changed protagonists on this eternal tapestry above the electric lights of the city and the occasional flickering ones inside my home. Snow, forests, rain, the open sea, storms, the desert, and the endless sense of space under the desert night sky are indiscernible; they point toward a deeper mystery of cycles, changes, and rhythms. As I studied music, later painting, and world religions, I began to trace these beautiful patterns across all peoples, languages, and systems of beliefs; indeed, as President Kennedy once said, "we all breathe the same air."

            But it’s even more than all this—these encounters with a sense of soul and place beyond myself were grounded forevermore in my life when I read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially The Oversoul, Spiritual Laws, and Circles. In these writings, as in those of the great faith traditions of the East and West, and in the novels and poetry of Jack Kerouac, I found the Golden Eternity was, in fact, manifested by Autumn’s celestial railroad across countless miles painted in orange, brown, red, and yellow, in the palpable wonder I felt at smelling smoke from wood-burning chimneys on chilly Winter evenings, in the smell of rain and the cool drops of South Florida showers throughout Spring, and in the intense embrace of the Summer sun.

            The Four Seasons are the four corners of my world, the cardinal points of my truest sense of existence, and the pillars that sustain and support the ideas, thoughts, worldview, beliefs, and perspectives in the mind that make me who I am. To forget them is to lose myself.

            I chose to memorialize my life in Haiku because the details of my stories are personal, for family and the closest of friends. I am certain that as I age further, those no longer here will come closer to me, and the meaning of those events will grow in even greater significance to me and to those I am blessed to counsel and care for. American Haiku Pop was the term coined by Jack Kerouac to identify and point in the direction of the jazz poetry he was writing (and creating). 

            Just like Allen Ginsburg, Kerouac believed the details of the traditional Japanese poetics called Haiku would require a different headspace and approach as Westerners and as being from a culture so radically different than the one that birthed Haiku. Like Jazz, American Haiku Pop provides the poet with a loose structure and form of Haiku while allowing the poet to improvise and reconfigure the poetics to reflect the life lived rather than seeking to emulate another's structure, which is structured so differently due to religion, culture, and above all else, language.

            I do not claim to be an expert or to have ever achieved the greatness of Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, or innumerable other poets. But in the end, like a jazz musician, I count off, follow the charts, groove to the spirit, and share with you, my readers, my truth, veiled in language, disguised in mystery, and making the space within the song for you to venture into your imagination and see yourself in these poems. This is what art is: a mirror held before us so that we can reencounter and re-commune with our better angels.

 

 

 

Daniel Medina

August 10, 2023

The Feast Day of Saint Lawrence of Rome

Little Havana, Miami, Florida