The last eight days I have been posting haiku, in a series that made its way through the alphabet from A to Z.
Each haiku in the series was a definition (more or less) of a word that started with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. And some days contained more haiku than others.
What I’ve really been doing is tracing out a shape. I actually started with this shape in mind, and then decided to paint it — piece by piece — with haiku, over the course of eight successive days:
This project has been, you might say, a form of Oulipo.
Oddly enough, I was at a party last night in which quite a bit of conversation centered around the relationship between poetry and Oulipo. I didn’t talk about my project, because it wasn’t finished yet.
Or maybe that wasn’t so odd. Words are strange creatures. The things we say, seemingly in the moment, can often turn out to be part of larger shapes that are revealed only later.