On Writing The Lily & The Aster

I did most of the writing for The Lily & The Aster last summer. I was inspired by the fact that, here in suburban Connecticut, I am surrounded by nature. From a rumble of thunder in the sky to the rhythms of a cricket’s cry, I became sensitive to the details in the vast and remarkable natural backdrop. These subtleties came to the foreground and found their way into my haiku. I wrote in a purely methodical manner, alternating between reading haiku and writing it. It became a particularly pleasant and meditative process as I challenged myself to a daily quota, writing for hours on end.

In The Lily & The Aster, I was forced to write within the bounds of a form, the haiku, which has pre-existing rules for style and structure. A haiku is three lines, 17 syllables and generally concerns nature. Naturally, in the early stages, I seemed to break all of the rules until I adapted to the form. When I did adapt, I could sense whether there were enough syllables without counting and I could easily adjust components of style without much effort. I wrote a total of 400 haiku and narrowed the sum down to 150 for the book. I hope that you have enjoyed haiku shared previous to this text.

As far as the title, I chose two summer flowers, perhaps the most ubiquitous one and a rarer variety. Together I think that the names sound both poetic and musical. It sounds, to me like the name of a classic jazz album from a certain day. I chose the title for all of these reasons.

The title too says something about the book. It says that the book is definitively about summer and essentially about nature. It is about those seasonal ornaments (flowers) which adorn our doorsteps and are among nature’s marvels which inspire just the sort of poetry that is in this book.