Today is the 30th of June, 2024. In 1978 Delacorte Press released a book of poetry entitled June 30th, June 30th by Richard Brautigan. Richard Brautigan was a poet and novelist born in 1935, perhaps best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. This is an edition of Trout Fishing that also includes the poetry collection The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1969) and my favorite of Brautigan’s novels, In Watermelon Sugar (1968). I would highly recommend William Hjortsberg’s massive biography Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan for more information on Brautigan, it is a brilliant, well written biography.

June 30th, June 30th is a collection of 77 poems that Brautigan wrote while living in Tokyo, Japan for 7 weeks in 1976. His visit came to an end on June 30th, 1976. The poems are short, which is typical of Brautigan’s style, and follow a diary-like format, with each being dated. While it is not one of my favorites of Brautigan’s works, it does include some beautiful poems:

Floating Chandeliers

Sand is crystal
like the soul.
The wind blows
     it away.

                    Tokyo
                    May 28, 1976

Worms

The distances of loneliness
make the fourth dimension
seem like three hungry crows
looking at a worm in a famine.

                    Tokyo
                     June 6, 1976

Fragment #4

in a garden of
     500 mossy, lichen
     green Buddhas

a sunny day

     these Buddhas
     know the answer
     to all five
     hundred other Buddhas.

                    Never finished
                    outside of Tokyo
                    June 23, 1976
                    except for the word
                    other added at
                    Pine Creek, Montana,
                    on July 23, 1976

Land of the Rising Sun

sayonara

Flying from Japanese night,
we left Haneda Airport in Tokyo
four hours ago at 9:30 P.M.
     June 30th
and now we are flying into the sunrise
over the Pacific that is on its way
     to Japan
where darkness lies upon the land
and the sun is hours away.
I greet the sunrise of July 1st
for my Japanese friends,
wishing them a pleasant day.
The sun is on its
     way.

June 30th again
above the Pacific
across the international date line
heading home to America
with part of my heart
     in Japan

Brautigan, himself, did not feel that this collection was particularly strong. In his introduction he states that the “quality of [the poems] is uneven but I have printed them all anyway because they are a diary expressing my feelings and emotions in Japan and the quality of life is often uneven.” There is something to be said about using a poetic diary to record your life. I started writing (mostly) daily thanks to Brautigan back in 2013/2014. I was studying at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina. I was not a very good student, finding most of the courses very boring. Ultimately, I skipped most of my classes to camp out to smoke cigarettes and write around campus or, more importantly, spend time in the library. The library had a great deal of books that were impossible to find elsewhere in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina. It was there that I first encountered Anais Nin, J.G. Ballard, Lorine Niedecker, and of course Richard Brautigan.

I devoured everything of Brautigan’s I could get my hands on, and his work has impacted everything I’ve written since. Most importantly, thanks to June 30th, June 30th, I have written a diary entry nearly every day for over a decade. Some days my entry is straight forward “I did this, then this, and this is how I felt”. Other days I record just my dreams from that evening, and others yet I write a poem, recall a memory, take a photograph, or doodle a picture. This daily habit has been instrumental in helping me dive into myself, learn about myself, and solidify my ideas. Alongside zazen, this has been my longest daily habit. The repetition becomes beautiful.

Do you have a daily writing habit? If so, when did it begin? Let me know below.