A Psychedelic Basho

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers

Chapter 1 - A Psychedelic Basho At community college I began writing bad poetry around 1967.  When I realized that I was not cut out to be a science student, I immersed myself in arts courses and declared myself a poet.  Some poems submitted to the student magazine reminded the editor of haiku.  Having never heard of haiku, I didn't know what to make of the comment, but browsing through a literary magazine I found a classified ad offering copies of Haiku magazine from a Toronto address. Haiku duly arrived, and I fell in love with the haiku form.  The similarity between haiku and the brief poems I had been attampting was obvious, and soon I was submitting haiku to the editor of Haiku, Dr Eric Amann. After initial rejections.  I was thrilled when Eric Amann accepted several haiku for his magazine.  Encouraged, I began to devote myself to writing haiku.  Basho, the wandering haiku poet/priest of medieval Japan, was added to my role models.  The lonely life of a commuting college student in Florida presented a few of my early poems: Christmas vacation     tame ducks starving         by the campus lake Rain     gray doves         strung on a wire Light breeze     striding across campus                 a thin professor Almost from the beginning of my student days I had been fighting an appeals battle with the draft board.  Unfortunately I had registered in Georgia, just before our family moved back to Florida.  In retrospect, and after corresponding with former classmates many years later, I believe that I was an easy target for the Atlanta draft board.  Living out of the state, drafting me wouldn't stir up any local antagonisms, and the fact that I was also a resident alien (as a Canadian citizen by birth) probably didn't help my cause.  Ongoing struggles to keep my student status caused me to intensely question the Vietnam War, and I was living day-to-day with the life-and-death questions of duty to country versus participation in an unethical war.  This personal turmoil provided a fertile ground for writing haiku poems.  Often I had insomnia, and I would think back over my life.  A family vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains provided: Cavern pool     tourists watching                          blind fish Memories of a far off Halloween in Canada when I was five years old inspired: Halloween     a young boy         in a skeleton suit              Some days I would escape to the beach after class: Lobster antennas     waving from the twin caves          of a cement block Blue sea     bobbing red and white         lobster trap buoy Summer moonlight     rotting on our roof         a starfish As I became more and more disillusioned with the Vietnam War, I began to hang around with the other radicals and longhairs on the campus.  Miami was, and is, a very reactionary city, and psychedelia, which had flowered in California in 1966, was just reaching Miami in 1968.  I was one of the first long hairs on campus, and the second guy on Key Biscayne to grow long hair.  The centre for the slowly evolving hippie community in Miami was Coconut Grove, an artistic haven located around the Dinner Key docks and the adjacent waterfront park: Bay wind blowing     Coconut Grove sailboats         tinkling rigging First green appearing     buds on the new stake hedge         and chameleons The flower     of this old tree         a treehouse At the peak of the Vietnam War, in June 1969, I received three draft notices in a week.  It was time to leave.  I flew from Miami to Nassau: Mounted sailfish     lining the walls         of Nassau airport              From Nassau I caught a flight to Luxemburg, and then I caught a train from Brussels to London: Luxemburg     black paint on pink brick              U. A. I lived with my cousin and his wife on the outskirts of London for several months.  It wasn't a comfortable arrangement for any of us.  I continued writing my haiku, always carrying a notebook with me in a tote bag.  One of my first visits was to Piccadilly Circus, where the traffic island in the centre of the world's busiest intersection had become an international hippie rendezvous under the statue of Cupid.  The day I visited Piccadilly there was a bust for hash smoking.  A bobby was about to arrest me when he spied my London guide book, and he let me go: Piccadilly Circus     Cupid's fountain spraying               hippies By now I had a large collections of haiku, many of them published in Haiku and numerous other small haiku journals which had sprung up in the United States.  I spent many days visiting Kew Gardens, and after one afternoon of meditation, I explored a side road on my way back to Kew Station.  I found a little printing company, and somehow got the courage to go in. I'd like to publish a collection of my poems, I shyly told the balding, potbellied printer.  Despite my hippie appearance, my American accent tipped him that I might have money, and he got me to show him what I wanted. When he saw my Luxemburg poem with the swastike, he wanted to know if I was a fascist.  I convinced him that I wasn't a fascist, only a poet, and he agreed to print my poetry in little booklets for £50 for 500 copies. A week later I went back and picked up the box of my first chapbook, Cricket Formations.  I lugged the booklets down the hill to the post office in the hamlet of Kew, and spent the afternoon mailing them all over the world. Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

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Eel Pie Dharma - contents   |   next chapter (2)

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Eel Pie Island (words & pics)   |   history of haiku   |   Alan Watts - This Is It   |   draft resistance

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comments to weed@wussu.com
revised 24 October 2005

Note: May 7, 2011
This is the first chapter of my 1990 memoir/haibun Eel Pie Dharma. Many thanks to fellow Eel Pie Island Hotel communard Weed for posting EPD online about a decade ago. A few years back Weed reported that EPD has been receiving over 1,000 visits a month on his website - this would likely mean that after a decade online EPD has been read by tens of thousands of viewers, making it possibly the most widely read English language haibun (well, if we don't count Jack Kerouac's seminal books like  Dharma Bums).

So far on my blog I've somewhat resisted temptations to overt self-indulgence and self-promotion (I hope). But one of the functions of a blog is personal narrative, so sooner than later I plan to drink a bottle of FuZion red, or several bottles of chilled Zywiec beer, and tell the history behind the creation of EPD.