Latest / The Culture Club: Books, Art, Film, Music & Entertainment / Haiku for the Stapler: Finding Poetry in Your Junk Drawer | The Culture Club
Transcript
- There is a specific, quiet tragedy in watching your favorite pen roll under the fridge and vanish into the dust bunnies forever. Or maybe it’s just the stapler that refuses to bite. Let’s dig into the velvet of something mundane today. I want you to picture your junk drawer. You know the one. It’s the black hole of domesticity where keys go to die, rubber bands stretch until they snap, and half-empty tubes of lip gloss gather like survivors of a shipwreck. And right there, buried beneath a tangle of charging cables that don’t belong to any device you own, sits the stapler. Just sitting there. Heavy. Metal. Silent. For years, I treated it as an enemy. A bureaucratic obstacle between me and my filing cabinet. But recently, I’ve been trying something strange. I’ve been writing haikus for it. Now, before you scroll past thinking I’ve finally lost my mind, hear me out. We are drowning in noise. We are scrolling through feeds of people eating gourmet meals or hiking mountain peaks, and we forget that our lives are mostly made of small, friction-filled moments. The jammed printer. The wet sock. The toaster oven that burns the crust on one side but leaves the center cold. What’s the texture of this? When we stop seeing objects as tools and start seeing them as characters, everything changes. The stapler isn’t just a tool; it’s a judge. It decides if your paper is worthy of being bound together. It holds power. Tiny, metallic, paper-cutting power. A haiku is simple, right? Five syllables here, seven there, five at the end. It’s a constraint. But constraints are where creativity hides. When I write about the toaster, I’m not thinking about voltage or heating elements. I’m thinking about the wait. The anxiety of the pop-up. The way it feels like a heartbeat in the kitchen. Here’s what I wrote last Tuesday: 'Silver teeth biting / Crispy edges, soft heart inside / Pop up, let me breathe.' See? It’s silly. It’s slightly absurd. But it forced me to stand in my kitchen for three extra seconds. To look at the appliance that feeds me and acknowledge its presence. To thank it, even if silently. We live in a culture that demands speed. Do more. Be faster. Optimize your morning routine so you can squeeze in another hour of work. But poetry, especially tiny poetry, is an act of rebellion against efficiency. It asks you to slow down enough to notice the grain of the wood on your desk. The way the light hits the rim of your coffee mug. The satisfying thunk of the stapler closing. It’s a micro-meditation. You don’t need an hour of silence or a retreat in Bali. You just need thirty seconds with a stapler. You need to admit that this object has a story, and that story is yours too because you interact with it every day. I remember growing up, my mother had a habit of talking to her plants. Not in a creepy way, but in a respectful way. She’d say good morning to the ferns. She believed they heard her. I didn’t believe in the listening part, but I believed in the connection. Writing haikus for everyday objects is a way of building that same bridge. It’s saying, 'I see you. You are part of my life.' It transforms the sterile into the sacred. The mundane into the magical. When you name the thing, you own the moment. You stop rushing past it. You become present in your own home, in your own body, in your own day. And please, do not worry about making it perfect. If your haiku has six syllables instead of five, who cares? Life is messy. Your thoughts are messy. Let the poem be messy too. I once wrote a terrible verse about my vacuum cleaner that rhymed 'dust' with 'must,' and I laughed so hard I cried. Humor is part of the process. It disarms the pretension. We don’t need serious art criticism here; we need joy. We need to find beauty in the broken hinge on the cupboard door. In the chipped enamel of the teapot. In the sticky key on the keyboard. These are the artifacts of your existence. They are proof that you live, that you create, that you matter. So here is my challenge to you, my dear listener. Pick one object near you right now. It could be your phone, your shoes, the lamp on your nightstand. Look at it closely. Really look. Notice its weight, its color, its function. Now, try to capture it in five-seven-five. Don’t overthink it. Let the first words come out. Share it with yourself. Write it on a sticky note and put it on your mirror. Or just whisper it to the air. It’s a secret pact between you and the world. A reminder that you are paying attention. That you are alive. And that is enough. That is more than enough. Take care of that stapler tonight. Tell it you appreciate its service. I’ll be back tomorrow with another corner of the culture to explore. Until then, keep looking closely. Love you.