Paperclip Poems

My “paperclip poems” are haiku and senryu from my index card boxes that have needed more than one card, paperclipped together, to record their histories of submissions, contest entries, and publication. I’ve occasionally recorded other uses, such as being read at the Baseball Hall of Fame or for the Empress of Japan, printed on balloons, or etched in stone. But mostly I’ve recorded the contest, journals, or anthologies where I submitted each poem, and each card marks failures as well as successes. As scientists will say about failed experiments, they’re never fully failures because they’ve demonstrated what hasn’t worked, taking each experiment closer to success. Editing can be subjective too, and having a poem returned to me (I never say “rejected”) is not something I take too seriously. Conversely, I try not to take acceptances all that seriously, either, except to be grateful.

My paperclip poems include some of my most widely published haiku, but also a few that have been returned a lot before finally seeing publication. The following are all the poems (so far) that have needed a paperclip on their index cards to accommodate a second, third, or even fourth card. In contrast, some of my more successful haiku have not yet warranted a second index card, partly because I wrote them much more recently, but the poems that have more than one card tend to be among my best or most widely published. These paperclips, I like to think, are a serendipitous hint of success—or in some cases, persistence—and I hope you enjoy reading them all.

Sometime early on in my use of index cards to track my haiku and senryu, I started adding a small red dot sticker to the upper-right corner of favourite or best poems. The glue has not aged well on those stickers, first added around 1995 I’d guess, and most of them have fallen off. But they’ve left a small round residue on the cards, which has been another record of poems I liked the most. I stopped using those stickers years ago, though, so making a list of all such “red dot” poems would probably not be all that helpful and would cover only a few limited years. But in some of the photos of my paperclip poems, you can see that yellowed circle up in the corner. These dots served for at least a few years as small affirmations for my favourite or sometimes best poems. More recently, but inconsistently, I also pencilled in small stars, so you’ll see some of these on the following index cards also.

—3 June 2025

The preceding poem differs from other “paperclip poems” in that it has not been published widely. Rather, it has been returned widely, finally finding publication after 29 tries. My wife and I became U.S. citizens in 2023, and for many years before that I was conscious of gaining citizenship, so this poem was always important to me. The reference to Fay Aoyagi next to the date this poem was written suggests that Fay probably got her U.S. citizenship at that time. The dirty fingernails do not apply to Fay, but they do represent that good stereotype of the hardworking immigrant. My edit to change “with dirty fingernails” to “with dirt under his nails” (an idiom for hard work) tried to emphasize that point, but this change came near the very end of my attempts to publish the poem. The setting is a citizenship oath, so I was trying to imply the raising of hands, but it seems no editor saw that, or appreciated the poem enough before it finally saw publication in Geppo in 2020. It took only 18 years of trying. On the other hand, for a ceremony as significant as a citizenship oath, surely a hardworking immigrant would scrub his nails.