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Of Longing and Loneliness and Love

Author: Richard Hauken

Haiku: A Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world. ~ Dictionary.com

Petals of Haiku is a short but powerful collection of poems documenting the ordinary and extraordinary life of the author, Richard Hauken. It is both retrospective and introspective, highlighting the warring emotions of love and loneliness, dreams attained and longings as yet unrealized, and the impacts of a mental disorder.

Petals of Haiku is divided into three parts. The first portion is Family, Home, and Friends.  Through each poem, we learn about the author’s family, the people who have influenced him and continue to remain dear, whether living or passed on. The section paints a portrait of family, fractured, yet whole at the same time. The author documents his relationship with his mother and father and with his stepmother and stepfather. These four adults, coalesced together, form the frame of his upbringing, and through the poems, you can see how each person has helped shape the author, has influenced his life, has provided support and love and wisdom. We also see poems here about siblings and pets, grandparents and extended family, best friends past and present, residences, a first car (a personal favorite poem of mine), and the important hospital staff who helped the author throughout his hospitalization and diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.

This section evoked so much of my own childhood for me, and made me visualize places I’d lived and loved, anchors during my formative years. The ode to family brings forward the author’s love and asks us to stop and think about the people we would write about, to pause and see the importance, the lasting nature of people who either come through our lives briefly or remain from beginning to end. It’s a moving moment that brings up childhood experiences and desires, and as the author grows through his poems, we walk alongside, feeling close to him and also oddly nostalgic for our own formative truths. It does what good poetry is supposed to: it connects you deeply to another and it also makes you go further into yourself.

The second section documents love and lust. Here, the author talks about his dating life, and again, we feel that pang of reminiscence. I felt that he expertly captured the heartache of millennial connections. Early on he talks about wanting a serious relationship and being “too intense,” having friends and family tell him to relax and embrace the casual hookup nature of millennial youth culture. I felt for the author here and understood deeply, since I am a similar sort of person, the sort who found passing acquaintances painful and longed for deeper, more meaningful, more lasting connections. This is, in many ways, an ode to a generation and (in my personal opinion) our collective failed approach to lasting romantic connection.

The author creates two types of poems in this section. He has the more traditional love poems and erotic counterpoints (read, explicit). Here the author talks about desires of both the mind and body, and while the lyricism is lulling and ultimately tantalizing, the hint of wistfulness in this section is also strong. The author shares a continued longing. He is not yet a husband. He is still searching for the special connection, and this bittersweet review of past loves (either realized or merely fantasized about) is deeply affecting and personal. This is a person revealing their soul here, and we cannot fail but feel a connection and also recollect on similar experiences. The spice of old longing never quite fades.

The final portion of the collection is devoted to spirituality. In essence, it has two parts. The first portion is the author thinking back on his relationship with God and on his reconnection with the Bible during his hospitalization. This section contained some of my favorite poems, focused on the nature of God and on humanity’s failure to praise him. The author brings up the idea of God’s loneliness and longing for us, and this insight stayed with me, echoing again and again.

The second portion of this section is where the author shares more about his schizoaffective disorder and the voices he heard (mainly from a self-identified entity called The Assembly but also from God), telling him about his destiny and identity as the anti-Christ. I was curious about schizoaffective disorder and did a bit of research. According to this Mayo Clinic article, this disorder is a blend between schizophrenia with its psychosis features (i.e. hearing or seeing things that are not there) and a mood disorder (either depressive or bipolar, which can involve mania). I recommend spending a moment learning about the nature of the disorder, as it helps unfamiliar readers to understand the poems better and visualize the author’s experiences and better understand the power of his recollections and the force of the voices themselves.

It was really impacting to have someone so fully share an experience like this, to record the thoughts and feelings, the tide of paranoia alongside the sense of destiny. It’s both terrifying and beautiful, and the author leaves us with a lasting impression, having exposed his soul once again by sharing such a monumental life event.

We leave the collection thoughtful, knowing another person as we never truly have before, and turning that knowledge inward, asking ourselves, if we had the talent, what would we write, what would we share? What ordinary and extraordinary moments have coalesced to create who we are and shape what we long for, where we hope to go next? I hope this author releases further collections and continues sharing his life’s journey with us.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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