Follow Secret Kilns on TWITTER!

Village of the Secret Kilns is now on twitter! Secret Kilns is our online store featuring high-end hand-crafted ceramics from kilns in Okawachiyama village in Imari, Japan.

David will be tweeting when new items appear in our shop, posting photos from local pottery-related events, answering questions, and generally just getting in touch with fellow lovers of Japanese pottery (and the people who make it).

If you're interested, why don't you follow us? We'd be happy to see you there sometime.

If you glance down this page you'll notice that my last post was about haiku. I've been having fun incorporating some haiku into the Secret Kilns pottery website. After writing some initial tweets with their strict 140 character limit, it made me think that haiku are like the tweets of poetry. Trying to say a lot with few words.

I always enjoy reading new haiku. If you know a good one (or if you're inspired to write one!), why don't you tweet us...

Two more days until Christmas!

Dave

5-7-5

I'm into simplicity these days. A recent trip to Hong Kong was great, but there's nothing like international air travel to hammer home (by contrast) that simple is good.

I also spent the better part of this fall re-designing our online pottery store to be simpler in form and function. Less is more!

I like haiku. The idea of saying a lot with few words attracts me. I've had fun incorporating some classic Japanese haiku into the VSK site.

Haiku sometimes lose their strict 5-7-5 syllable structure in translation, but brevity remains essential. A couple of my current favorites (translation by Peter Beilenson, followed by poet's name) are:

Dead my old fine hopes

And dry my dreaming

But iris blue each spring

-Shushiri

and...

Here, where a thousand captains

Swore grand conquest

Tall grass their monument

-Onitsura

Haiku often end with an image of infinity. I guess both of these haiku are similar in that they contrast the desires and mortality of man with the image of plants growing. These two poems both convey the melancholy that often pervades Japanese haiku.

In Japan, Matsuo Basho is widely considered the greatest haiku writer ever. I highly recommend his book "Oku no hoso michi" (Narrow Road to the Deep North) as translated by Donald Keene. It's a really wonderful read.

Speaking of Basho and reading, I'll finish this blog post with one more haiku from the master himself:

No oil to read by

I'm off to bed. But ah!

My moonlit pillow!

Dave