Secret Famous Haiku Desk Part II: The Aftermath
As briefly as I am able: My sister’s boyfriend bought a desk used from a Four Seasons in Washington, D.C. As it turns out, Michael Stipe, Grant-Lee Phillips, Jim McKay, and Tom Gilroy had tagged the underside of the drawer with original haiku in 1995. That event kicked off a yearlong haiku project that spawned a website, a book, and many spin-off projects.
I wrote about investigating the origins of the desk drawer with my sister—a police detective—and put out a call to get in touch with the authors in a post here on Real Pants in May 2016. And now, almost a year later, which is when sequels come out if the series is all planned out ahead of time, the writer and artist Shin Yu Pai is telling the story of what happened next over at Atlas Obscura. It’s about how we were able to return the drawer to one of the original authors, and what he had to say.
Included in Pai’s piece are a choice quote from Gilroy about being on one’s back or belly, one from me about mercy, one from Stipe in which he teases the existence of many more secret famous desk drawers.
Read the article at Atlas Obscura.
Param Anand Singh is a poet and translator who used to be called R.M. O'Brien. A sticker he made might be in a movie.
Latest posts by Param Anand Singh (see all)
- First We Take Brian Williams - April 10, 2017
- Secret Famous Haiku Desk Part II: The Aftermath - April 4, 2017
- It’s Weird to Try to Champion Poetry While Also Arguing That Songs Aren’t Literature - October 13, 2016
