Jared Beloff
The World is a Burning Haibun We Sing to Ourselves
Commentary
Jared on "The World is a Burning Haibun We Sing to Ourselves":
About a month ago, my five year old daughter woke us up with her face and mouth covered in blood. She had bumped her mouth against the wall somehow, and her loose tooth was bleeding at the gums. Maybe my brain wasn’t fully awake, or maybe it was because this wasn’t the first early morning bloody face I had woken up to, but I didn’t react much. I wiped her off and helped her back to sleep. It was absurd. It was normal.
I have been working for the past year on a manuscript of climate poetry, much of which projects into the future in order to think about a past that is our present. The changes we are living through, grieving over or selectively ignoring highlight the ways our normal is unrecognizable, fraught with elements of the absurd.
I have been trying to write about the midnight orange skies on the west coast, a result of intense forest fires exacerbated by extreme heat. It wasn’t until I started teaching t.a. greathouse’s amazing poem “Burning Haibun” which reimagines the haibun through diminishment, the black char of erasure, that I found a way to capture the surreality and loss of living our lives, especially parenting, in the face of our current moment.
About a month ago, my five year old daughter woke us up with her face and mouth covered in blood. She had bumped her mouth against the wall somehow, and her loose tooth was bleeding at the gums. Maybe my brain wasn’t fully awake, or maybe it was because this wasn’t the first early morning bloody face I had woken up to, but I didn’t react much. I wiped her off and helped her back to sleep. It was absurd. It was normal.
I have been working for the past year on a manuscript of climate poetry, much of which projects into the future in order to think about a past that is our present. The changes we are living through, grieving over or selectively ignoring highlight the ways our normal is unrecognizable, fraught with elements of the absurd.
I have been trying to write about the midnight orange skies on the west coast, a result of intense forest fires exacerbated by extreme heat. It wasn’t until I started teaching t.a. greathouse’s amazing poem “Burning Haibun” which reimagines the haibun through diminishment, the black char of erasure, that I found a way to capture the surreality and loss of living our lives, especially parenting, in the face of our current moment.
Biography
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Jared Beloff is a teacher and poet who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find his work in Contrary Magazine, Rise Up Review, Barren Magazine, Bending Genres, The Shore and elsewhere. He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses. His work was nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize for 2021. Find him online at www.jaredbeloff.com
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