Matt Tierney • kasen renga: Staples of Life

WHAT AN EXPERIENCE A collection of Haiku by Matt Tierney The title that I have chosen for this chapbook, What An Experience, comes from everything I have done in this class for the entire semester. I chose this title because as I was trying to point out one specific thing that we did in class to inspire a great title for this and to sound really creative, I found out that everything we did in class was one of those specific things. I couldn’t just single out one of them, so I decided to have a title that expresses my feelings about this Global Haiku Traditions class. I have never really taken a poetry class before, so I never really understood any of the many different forms of poetry. By learning about haiku, writing them, snapping, and having lots of fun in the process, this whole semester was a great experience. And the whole semester of this class was like a perfect haiku moment, because any haiku that I read from this class or about this class instantly make me picture all of the different things that we have done in class, the jokes we have cracked, the awesome haiku that we have written and listened to, and learning of a form of art that I never knew. So that is why I chose this title. With the haiku and everything else that I have put in here, there was no real criterion that I used to see if one made the cut or not. I just read over everything that I have written and if it sounded somewhat decent to me I just threw it in here. So here are my haiku, so good and some probably not so good.

Reader's Introduction As I have read through his work, he had some haiku, senryu, haibun, and renga that weren’t so good. But since I haven’t taken this class and I don’t fully understand what it takes to create such things, I’ll give him credit. Some of the haiku that he has written sound really good and produce a very bright image to me. Like he stated in the above paragraph he really didn’t use any criterion to judge which one made it in and which one didn’t. And I tried to make him take out the ones that sounded not so good, but sometimes that just didn’t work out. So enjoy the good ones and please be patient with the bad ones. I know I enjoyed reading this.