Hockey Haiku The Essential Collection

Introduction While historians and enthusiasts alike argue hopelessly over the hockey haiku's official beginnings, its history remains shrouded in myth. Some talk generally of its inception during the decline of the Samurai class in Japan, suggesting that the ritualized aggression and disciplined servitude of the Samurai were displaced and ultimately projected onto the prehockey haiku form once hockey came to dominate the imaginations of the Pacific Rim nations.1 Even though its lineage could be traced back to Japan, how hockey haiku found a toehold in North America still baffles scholars.2 We do know with some certainty that by the time of the "Miracle on Manchester" (Los Angeles, 1982)3 hockey haiku had gained its full ascendancy. Regardless of such misty origins, hockey haiku has inarguably become a curious mix, at once as ubiquitous as a top-shelf cookie jar and as protean as the cookies within. Ask any goon on the street and he will inevitably spin yarns about his grandfather whittling pygmy hockey sticks out of Scandinavian birch while reclining in his rocking chair, dictating hockey haiku to grandmother, cooking her miso in the kitchen. Or reed cutting with Uncle Yamamoto, his bellowing voice suddenly malleable, more inviting as he recited the classic hockey haiku he'd learned in school. Who doesn't have a similar story, a similar life lived within the transgenerational umbrage of hockey haiku?4 And to be sure, everyone writes hockey haiku. We are drawn by the seemingly contradictory equipoise and brutality inherent in its form and content. As with its prototype, the raw prehockey haikuwhere the impulse was spontaneous, the strokes of the artist far past scrutiny, part of muscle memoryso, too, the sport of hockey. Ask any Art Ross Trophy winner after a pretty goal. He'll say the goal was not as much the motivation as it was the end result of mindlessness.5 Put together the solitary discipline of haiku and the automatic grace of the hockey player: what you have is a perfect balance of yin and yang. Indeed, the refinements to the prehockey haiku form that came with its marriage to hockey, in hindsight, seem inevitable. We might say that each element of this systemic art form counterbalances or "checks" the other. While a certain hockey haiku might detail in stunningly brave strokes the artful stickwork of a Pavel Bure, yet another might paint in quiet reverie the brutality of the game's darker side: paybacks as grotesque as any Mafia hit.6 It is the unique ability of each element of hockey haiku to morph into its other. In so doing the form does not merely test our very notions of objective truth, it shatters them like so much Plexiglas under the force of an Al MacInnis slap shot. Hockey haiku, thus, represents the perfect harmony of Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies: graceful brutality, ordered chaos, the blood that courses through our veins, and, if we are unfortunate, onto the ice.7 Many critics have bandied about notions of the modern hockey haiku's illegitimacy, its seeming disdain for the "rules" set forth by the prehockey haiku masters.8 Though it needs no apology, we offer instead a "reading" of the manners and exigencies of hockey haiku. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, in his moving translation of prehockey haiku,9 does away with the syllabic order of 5-7-5.10 Our readers will notice that the poets we have selected for this anthology reinstated the syllabics. Their adherence to the preestablished, if prosodically foreign, syllable count recovers a good deal of prehockey haiku history. It also mimics, in its studied rigor, the facts of the hockey game: three periods, with the midperiod being elongated by the short intermissions on either side. But there are otPoch, John is the author of 'Hockey Haiku The Essential Collection', published 2006 under ISBN 9780312356071 and ISBN 0312356072.