Ginko Walks

The Ginko walk is literally a praise/poem making walkabout. For an hour or few people walk, looking at the world together, in small groups perceiving the spring afternoon or the moon or whatever the season and characteristics of the time and pre-chosen place. The nature of the practice is to have a relaxed social exercise, in the mental and physical sense of exercise.

Since Haiku Canada’s venue this time at York U was a aboretum in bloom, finding beauty wasn’t hard. A poem is another matter.
Haiku is a slow craft. Because it often has as a writing domain something with a strong emotional charge conditioned with the control of hindsight, it takes time to edit and prevents it from being meaningless verse.
There’s a balance of not being too blunt or expository, nor too oblique nor cliché while responding within the frame of what has been written where possible. There’s attention to sound and pace without falling to too painterly. Because there’s only a few phonemes, it’s easy as watercolor for things to get muddy. You might roll a poem over for a year or a decade, refining while trying to get closer to that sense of freshly made naturalness.
An advantage of the ginko walk practice is that it gives permission to write quickly.
Anything can only be only a failure if a timeline is imposed, which it is. Although you have your notes and drafts that can be developed into a poem later. I brainstormed 21 first drafts, 4 of which might have legs.
Without having permission to start more than you will finish, without permission to start, and permission to throw away and without a kickstart to begin those that might become something, how else are you going to get to the 10, 40 or 100 drafts it will take to be something worth reading?
The ginko poems made are shared fairly soon after. Having internalized a corpus of poems and being well-conditioned to write helps to create on the spur of the moment.
In Haiku Canada and Haiku North America meetings, you pick your best effort of the walk and drop it in box where it’s judged.

This year George Swede was the judge at Haiku Canada.
In his introductory remarks he talked about the Ginko, how it can put one into a state of quiet stress, the brain full of beta waves which are not the best for creativity. You want alpha waves to be in your creative comfort zone but here you are, wondering, am I lost? You are roaming in an unfamiliar place, and on a tight timeline. You want to reach for some aha of transcendence but what arrives may come in any stage of composition. You’re more likely to manage a preliminary sketch. Or perhaps some field notes. A rough poem, perhaps. This year two haiku from the walk stood out as more advanced, one by Ellen Cooper (?) and one by LeRoy Gorman.

Those will be published in a future issue, perhaps at Haiku Canada in Calgary, 2013.