Tom Clausen '73, student supervisor in Mann Library's circulation department, poses with one of his haiku poems, which has appeared on the Mann Library elevator wall.Adriana Rovers and Frank DiMeo/University Photography
By Ann Caton '96
Every morning for the past six years, a different nugget of poetry has been written on the wall of the elevator in the Mann Library stacks.
"It's become a little ritual, something that I enjoy doing," said Tom Clausen '73, a student supervisor in the library's circulation department and a devotee of the spare poetic form known as haiku. "A lot of people express appreciation at there being something in the elevator other than the four walls."
The idea for the daily haiku began after a custodian, tired of dealing with the constant dose of graffiti on the elevator's walls, begun putting up a blank sheet of paper each day to collect the random scribblings.
"Some of the day's entries were, I felt, less than ideal to be shared, and so I would start off by trying to get things going on a positive note," Clausen said.
He began putting his own work and the work of other poets, gleaned from books and periodicals, on the day's clean sheet.
"I've probably been remiss not to identify any of them," he said of the authors he borrowed from, "but a haiku ultimately, to me, is not someone's possession or property. When the leaves are rustling in a courtyard and someone is sitting there at a table for one person and there's a moment of, maybe, melancholy or awareness or loneliness or mystery, a haiku ultimately is all of these disparate but unified elements speaking for themselves through those few carefully chosen words."
The three-line construction of haiku derives from the opening to a longer Japanese form of poetry known as Kasen Renga. And over the years, some Mann Library elevator riders have objected to Clausen's less-then-strict adherence to the form -- Clausen's haikus don't always contain the traditional 17 syllables -- but his persistence, or perhaps talent, seems to have quieted his critics.
Clausen, 44, who lives in the same Ithaca house in which he grew up, wrote poetry daily in high school and as an undergraduate in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences -- but he said, his style "tended toward being out of control and excessive and spontaneously lavish."
About eight years ago, as a Cornell employee, he enrolled in a poetry class taught by Phyllis Janowitz, poet and professor of English.
"One of the things that I came away from that class with was a very strong sense of refining and cutting back on excess of expres sion," Clausen said.
Shortly afterwards, he read an article about Ithacan Ruth Yarrow, a naturalist at the Cayuga Nature Center and a haiku poet. The combination of the class and the article, he said, "was the spark of an interest, an intrigue that I followed up on. It just captivated me that a haiku was something you could not be excessive in."
As his daily ritual proves, Clausen is still captivated by the form.
"Haiku for me is similar to what some people might consider a religious practice; it's a way of relating to every day, or to the passage of time and the flow of experience. There's a salvation aspect to it, because you're constantly looking for messages that confirm what you think or what you feel or what you know, and in nature there are so many cues that are available to tap into that intuitive or inner sense of truth."
After six years of reading and writing haiku, Clausen published his first collection of original work in 1994 and released his second collec tion, Unraked Leaves, last year.
Married, with two young children, Clausen says the demands of the poetic form are quite compatible with family life.
"Haiku fits in with the kind of lifestyle that exists at home," he said "There are random little moments here and there, between [family] demands, to read a haiku and savor it."