This book contains the first four chapters of Matto's freestyle haiku and spiritual poetry.
Chapter 1: ""The six months of haiku in this chapter chronicle my life and my feelings as I dealt with some painful experiences. During this time I grew emotionally, I learned a lot about the world, and I became close to new friends. By the end of this trying time, I realized important truths about myself, about love, and about loneliness.""-Matto
Chapter 2: ""During the five months I wrote these haiku, I found myself drawn to elemental energies. In particular, I felt the wind. Scientifically, wind is the mixing of different bodies of air as they rise and fall. To me, wind is about change, serendipity, opportunity, and renewal.
Air is essential in our lives, and it is frequently taken for granted. There's a lightness to air, and similarly there's a lightness in many of these poems. This chapter is about my spirit reconnecting with nature and the world. It is in this chapter that my spirit breathes again, mixing energy and life back into me.""-Matto
Chapter 3: ""The Spring of 2011 was a wonderful time for me: I found a new love, I found Peace for a while, and I felt a renewed connection to family, friends, and nature. My positive and optimistic mind carried out into the world, and these poems are a history and glimpse of this beautiful time.""-Matto
Chapter 4: ""The Spring and all it's beauty had passed, and in it's place I found an increasingly troubled mind. The relationship I had so strongly yearned for had broken apart, I faced wave after wave of layoffs where I saw my friends leave, and the home I thought I found started to feel flimsy. These challenges affected my words, as well as my productivity. I wrote far fewer poems in this time; a few less than 100 poems over the course of an entire year.""-Matto
About This Poetry
Matto's short poems may not seem like haiku, because they do not follow the traditional form that many readers might expect. These haiku are written in a free-verse style, that Matto calls Freestyle Haiku. He discovered the possibility of this more freeing style of haiku from the writings of the Zen priest, Santoka Teneda (1882-1940). He wandered and traveled during the later years of his life while writing haiku.
Matto enjoy's writing Freestyle Haiku, because it allows him to express abstract and powerful feelings in only a few words, free from a mandated structure. The words on his page are the most direct crystallization of his feelings and experiences, and the brevity of haiku draws attention to the exact words he chooses.
A meaning-rich haiku can be challenging to read; treating one like prose will leave it flat. The goal of a haiku is often to conjure up something beyond the words and their individual meanings. The reader must add themselves to the poem, to experience the words in the way they're presented, to try and feel the poem.
About the Author
Monk Matto: poet, author, photographer, filmmaker, artist, inventor, teacher, engineer, carpenter, producer, entrepreneur, spiritualist, martial artist, Chimera wrestler, and Jedi Knight.
...Ok, maybe those last two are only true in a figurative sense. Monk Matto lives in the Washington D.C. area, and enjoys cruising around on his old motorcycle.