Toll Booth Lit for Christmas

Commentary posted to the Haiku Foundation’s Virals blog on 10 February 2010. See also “The Light in the Darkness” by Ruth Yarrow, “Toll Booth Lit for Christmas” by Paul Miller, and “Toll Booth Lit for Christmas” by Karen Sohne and Bill Pauly.

by Allan Burns

toll booth lit for Christmas—

from my hand to hers

warm change

—Michael Dylan Welch

I find this a haiku worth entering and exploring. Much of what seems most important here is unstated yet implied, in the manner of haiku. The lit toll booth stands as an oasis in surrounding darkness. The contact between the driver/poet and the woman working through the holiday season is both fleeting and a matter of state-mandated taxation. After the moment rendered, the car disappears back into darkness. A line of other cars follows in its wake; a mechanical routine continues. The holiday season, as isolated in time as the booth is in space, soon gives way to the dead of winter. Probably only one driver among the unnumbered, namely MDW, thought to make a poem of this quotidian experience—and I admire that act, the excavation or translation of something many of us would not have thought to use as the basis for poetry.

The theme here, it seems to me, is one central to the work of E. M. Forster—“Only connect.” It is not a sentimental theme, but a profound need in the midst of our darkness and alienation. In that light, some of the divisive nature of the comments following the initial post may appear ironic. I do, however, appreciate the idea that friendship is not sycophancy.

Much of what I’ve said here merely augments the fine original comments of Ruth Yarrow (and some others that have followed). [See “The Light in the Darkness.”]

I reject two extremes: 1) the anti-intellectualism that denigrates thoughtful, engaged critical analysis (for what else can show us why we value what we do?) and 2) intellectual or ideological commitment to the notion that haiku must be something and not something else, when its very strength resides in the fact that its varieties and potentiality are infinite. Worthwhile haiku must be entered with a liberal spirit, not portrayed reductively. And the best criticism, I believe, combines sympathy for the particular effort with lucid insight. That is not to say all efforts are somehow beyond criticism, not at all.

In this case, I think Michael Dylan Welch has written, quite successfully, one kind of haiku—maybe not the kind some of us tend to value the most—but entirely successful and skillful when taken on its own terms and premises. I prize it for having wrested, in the manner of haiku, something worthwhile away from routine, oblivion, the surrounding darkness.