Haiku Thoughts (Intro)
I haven’t written or thought about haiku for a long time, but I came back to it recently for the poetry club at the high school I teach at. Haiku works well as a training ground for beginner poets, because it is a form, a short form, one that requires concision, precision, and a preference for imagery and the five senses, and one with a rich history of experimentation across multiple languages that is seemingly easy to master.
Basically, you can read and write a lot of haiku, and get better quickly. For most of us the really good ones come rarely and somewhat mysteriously, but the satisfaction of writing one is immense. Haiku are little gifts with a lineage. The excellent ones are magic, but it can take familiarity with the form to recognise how hard they are to write, so for me haiku are among other things a great way to explore the idea of form itself.
Unless I’m doing a-haiku-a-day (a great exercise in daily observation), I’ve only written them consistently when travelling. After writing the little sequence of haiku (see below1) I posted on Mastodon about a hiking trip to Lorne, and with some travel ahead this year in mind, I felt like thinking aloud about haiku as a form, perhaps revisiting some of the theory and classics of the form, and thinking about form in general. My initial thread got longer and longer, so on the spur of the moment I thought in 2023 I’d turn it into a post a month on haiku.
For now, I’ll take one haiku from the Lorne sequence as a starting point each month. Whether I get to December or not, or stick to the sequence, I don’t know, but let’s see. It’s perhaps a little self-indulgent to analyse my own haiku, but part of the reason I gave up writing haiku was how dissatisfied I became with my own work, and many of the haiku by other poets I was reading in journals I hoped to be published in, and it seems kinder to savage my own haiku.
But I’ve also found it a great learning process over the years to engage with the drafts of other poets and debate the choices made, and—now that I’m no longer in a writing group of any kind, for the first time in 15 years—I find myself missing it.
Most of those 12 haiku were dashed off without any thought of publication or analysis, so hopefully will be good fodder for conversation. And if not there will be plenty of others.
I first got into haiku when I wrote and posted a haiku a day for six months while walking the length of Japan in 2008. Delusions of being Bashō! Most of the haiku were terrible, but I wrote a lot of them—usually more than one a day—and got better, and it led me into 10 years of reading and writing poetry. I’m now working on a novel, and semi-seriously describe myself as a retired poet, so maybe another reason to do this is to think about what I’ve learned about writing from poetry.
For me, haiku are a kind of journal entry, baubles of memory, moments of insight or sudden presence. Somehow the process of drafting them fixes the memory, at least in the case of those based on a specific real moment—so much so that regardless of quality I often vividly remember the moment they refer to when rereading them more than a decade later.
I love the quality the best haiku have of being an effortless sketch. They share attributes of wit—the brevity, the a-ha moment, the single breath. The quest to capture a real moment, to make a little snowglobe or firefly or temple bell or lightning strike, is what keeps me coming back to haiku I think, despite frustration.
I’ll leave it there for now with some links and resources, and post my entry for January in the next week or so.
Happy new year—here’s to a creative 2023.
A few short articles
1. If you’re unfamiliar with the differences between English & Japanese haiku (e.g. the problem with 5-7-5), this is a great intro to haiku by Ashley Capes.
2. More on the fragment/phrase theory he mentions (as well as a vast collection of haiku material) at the Haiku Foundation.
3. This piece by Martin Lucas, Haiku as Poetic Spell, starts to get at some of the dissatisfaction I’ll talk about.
Books
The first one in particular is worth getting if you don’t have it, even for non-haiku poets or general readers, and the second too if you’re interested, which includes a fantastic essay on nature and nature-writing in the West.
(a) Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years / Philip Rowland, Jim Kacian, Allan Burns (eds.)
(b) Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku / Allan Burns (ed.)
(c) The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa / Robert Hass (ed.)
(d) The Haiku Handbook / William J. Higginson & Penny Harter
(e) right under the big sky I don’t wear a hat / Ozaki Hôsai (trans. Hiroaki Sato)
(f) The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Approach to English-Language Haiku / Richard Gilbert.
Lorne (12 haiku)
on the tent
the first morning—
cicada shell
hikers head out—
ducks, cockies, galahs
move in
black cockatoos
cry over the forest—
where am i?
phantom falls—
we picnic under the eye
of the drone
the little girl
hands me a white feather—
I accept
the rain
spatters on the tent—
dawn chorus
forest bridge—
in sunlight, the fish
disappears
rock hopping
up the gorge—boot,
boot! boot! boot!
at the falls—
pouring cold water
over my head
my hand pats
the trunk of the tree fern...
how odd it is to forget
on the headland
scratching in my notebook—
last year, the same thoughts
the smooth stone
I put back on the beach—
starting the car