David Graham's
P O E T I C   L I C E N S E
Notes on Poetry, Poems, and Poets 
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​David Graham's POETIC LICENSE January 2020 No.41

Imaginary Birdfeeders, Real Birds: Notes on Haiku

So what is it about haiku? One of the most enduringly popular of poetic forms, it’s rooted in a rich and ancient culture. Its deep association with Zen Buddhist history and practice also lends it great spiritual and philosophical weight. But at the same time it’s also—at least in this country—highly likely to bring out the wiseass in all sorts of folks, poets and nonpoets alike. A surefire gag for political satirists, for instance, is to cast some politician’s words in haiku form—in order to highlight their emptiness. Any trip to a big bookstore or the virtual shelves of Amazon will turn up numerous spoof anthologies (Farewell, My Dudes: 69 Dystopian Haikus, for instance, by singer/songwriter Jonathan Rice). Such books have little to do with the profound works of Basho or Buson.

The intriguingly titled Lesbian Sex Haiku Book (With Cats!) by Anna Pulley is “a humorous guide to lesbian sex, dating rituals, and relationships,” as its Amazon blurb puts it. It aims “to dispel all myths. Haiku paired with hilarious watercolor illustrations of cats in various stages of sexual awkwardness will enlighten, demystify, remystify, and most importantly entertain as you learn about all the aspects involved in girl-on-girl action.” Opening the book, you will find such things as this haiku about lesbian pick-up lines:

Pronounce Annie Proulx's
name correctly―watch lady's
cargo pants fall off.

Or this handy definitional haiku:

Lesbian sex is
like water polo—no one
really knows the rules

I guess I understand why the cats are in this book. But why haiku? It’s pointless to ask, I suppose, but still I find myself wondering why humorists so often reach for the old 5-7-5 when they could employ, say, mock heroic couplets, limericks, or other poetic forms.

Taste in humor varies, as we all know. Personally I find such poems sometimes amusing, if seldom laugh-aloud funny, but in any case no harm is done thereby to Basho’s reputation. Just as it remains undamaged by the haiku in The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, words from his speeches arranged by Robert Sears, or Bigly Covfefe: Donald Trump's Presidency (So Far) In Haiku, a similar effort by Jack Clifden. Equally benign, I’d say, is the after-dinner game called Haikubes, a set of 63 dice with single words printed on each side. At your next dinner party you may entertain guests with this somewhat highbrow pastime, creating new haiku with each roll of the dice. And as for cats, type “cat haiku” in the Amazon search box, as I just did, and you’ll discover 307 books to choose from, some written by cats, others simply about them.

While working on this essay I stumbled upon an online “haiku generator,” into which I typed in a few random words of my own and was rewarded with the following haiku:

Cat - A Haiku

summer evening
A little, blue cat gallops
into the pulpit

To my delight, the robot responsible for “my” haiku also generated a number of “auto-praise” reviews of this immortal work, including: “The juxtaposition of cat and pulpit is truly inspired. --The Daily Tale” and “Amazing how so few words can set a scene so perfectly. I close my eyes and all I can see is the summer evening. --Hit the Spoof.”

Furthermore, in recent decades the haiku form has become a staple writing exercise in Language Arts and Creative Writing classes in the public schools. It’s easy to see why. Writing haiku gives beginning writers good practice in both economy and the power of concrete detail. For novices few tasks are easier and more fulfilling than spinning out some ordinary imagery and dividing one’s lines into 5, 7, and 5 syllables. And some of the results can indeed be striking. (I am not mocking such pedagogy.)

Still, poets themselves, even including some serious haiku fans such as Billy Collins, cannot resist poking fun at the form, as in this example from his little known collection, She Was Just Seventeen, published in 2006 by Modern Haiku Press:

If I write spring moon
or mountain, is that
haiku plagiarism?

Then there is Richard Brautigan’s classic take-down of much bad haiku for the way it strains unconvincingly after profundity:

Haiku Ambulance

A piece of green pepper
     fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
     so what?

So what indeed? I’m not sure, but I feel that the tendency of many English language poets to veer into humor with haiku has to do with the widespread assumption that, at least in our country, the haiku form has long since been utterly colonized by amateurs and sentimentalists. Anyone who’s scanned the poetry shelves at used bookstores has seen more than a few such productions. “Birdfeeder poetry” a friend once termed it. You know: tender but listless and predictable reports on the world of Nature, utterly lacking in the bite and depth of the traditional Japanese masters. Often these productions seem to come with bad line drawings or soft-focus photos of twigs, wrens, or babbling brooks. Printed in cursive script, sometimes, on green paper. Self-published, more often than not.

And I confess that, until roughly decade or so ago, I largely sympathized with such sentiments. To be sure, I knew something about the great Japanese haiku tradition via translation and the work of scholars and poets like Robert Hass (whose book The Essential Haiku remains, in my view, essential). I knew a fair amount about the classical haiku tradition, thanks to translators like Hass, Lucien Stryk, and Robert Bly. I loved many works by Shiki, Issa, Basho, Buson, and the other notable names in this tradition. The great haiku masters remain great. But modern and contemporary American haiku? With some exceptions (works by Langston Hughes, Kerouac, Snyder, Richard Wright, and June Jordan, for example), it was largely birdfeeder poetry, in my informed opinion. Or, as in the case of Etheridge Knight, it was a kind of brief interlude, a few poetic bagatelles performed in between writing the major poems he is most known for.

The only problem, as it turns out, was that my informed option simply wasn’t any such thing. I was in fact dead wrong in thinking of haiku as a minor and largely forgettable current within the broader river of contemporary American poetry. While I had enjoyed a reasonably rigorous literary education at some very good schools, and was a card-carrying academic of long standing with a specialization in contemporary poetry, my attitude about haiku was based mostly on blind prejudice. I knew that good poets sometimes dabbled in haiku, but I was unaware of the thriving, variegated, and powerful world of English language haiku (called ELH by aficionados), which was hidden right under my nose. Turns out that ELH was being written all across the country, a whole subculture operating in parallel with the several poetry worlds with which I was familiar.

A brilliant former student had a lot to do with finally filling me in. About a decade ago, Brent Goodman and I had begun swapping poems daily during April in honor of National Poetry Month. As we initially discussed the ground rules of our correspondence, whether we would write in conventional forms or not, etc., we finally agreed that our only rules would be No Rules—except, we half-jokingly added, No Haiku! Seventeen syllables just didn’t seem enough of a challenge. Plus the whiff of all those birdfeeder books and limp classroom freewrites dissuaded me, anyway, from thinking the form worth my time. I believe Brent knew better, even then, but he didn’t immediately correct his former professor.

Then out of the blue a couple years later year Brent announced that as a personal challenge he was going to write nothing but haiku that April. He’d been exploring the form more and more seriously, and by then even I could see he was getting seriously good at it. My competitive juices started flowing so, of course, I followed suit. We’ve been at it ever since.

Brent also very graciously began to educate his old prof, making recommendations of journals and books to read, and websites to look at, even sending me books. He made me aware of The Haiku Society of America, which, far from being nothing but a group of amateurs, contains some real poetic firepower. It’s been operating since 1968, which somehow my fancy education in poetry prevented me from noticing. They also publish journals, run contests, hold national and regional conferences, sponsor lectures, solicit reviews, and more. Here is their website, if you’re interested: http://www.hsa-haiku.org/

In the years since, Brent has continued my education by suggesting journals I might read, poets to be on the lookout for, haiku organizations that are very much worth my time. Recently he took over the editorship of a fine journal called Prune Juice which specializes in the haiku-related forms of haibun, senryu, kyoka, and haiga. https://prunejuice.wordpress.com/ He even published a few of my haiku from our April swaps—even though I had not submitted them. He’s about the only editor I would let get away with that!

Gradually, with Brent’s help, I began to recognize how excellent much of this poetry was. Even now I’m no expert, lord knows, but at least I’m not quite so miserably ignorant as I was. And the more I have tried my hand at writing good haiku, the more I respect the form and its true experts. Far from being too easy, writing a really good haiku is damn hard!

As I read haiku journals and explored anthologies and collections by individual haiku devotees I discovered many fine poets previously unknown to me. (Among other things, I also learned that most ELH poets have largely abandoned the 17-syllable requirement. Who knew?) In truth, it’s remarkable how little overlap there was between the poetry circles I moved in and this one I was beginning to learn of.

Open any “mainstream” poetry journal or anthology and you’ll easily recognize the stars, the prizewinners who dominate the world I still know best: poets as different as Joy Harjo, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, and Billy Collins, to name just a few who have served as national Poet Laureate. Likewise, the world of English language haiku has its own stars, most of whom remain invisible to mainstream academic poets such as me, and no doubt to poets in other, non-ELH circles. For instance, how many of these poets have you read—Vincent Tripi, Cor van den Huevel, Raymond Roseliep, Anita Virgil, Lee Gurga, Gary Hotham, Alexis Rotella, Alan Pizzarelli, Karen Sohne, Nicholas Virgilio, Penny Harter, J.W. Hackett, Carol Montgomery, Ruth Yarrow, and William J. Higginson? (Faithful Verse-Virtual readers may pat ourselves on the back for knowing our very own frequent contributor, Penny Harter, but what about the others?) And yes, all the above names will be recognized by those who follow ELH poetry.

Many of the above poets I first encountered in The Haiku Anthology: Haiku & Senryu in English, edited by Cor van den Huevel, originally published in 1974, and eventually reaching its third edition (Norton, 1999). It’s full of wonderful and, I’m told, path breaking work. In 2013 editor Jim Kacian published Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, with many of the same poets featured, along with extremely useful historical and critical background. It also includes a generous sampling of earlier poets (such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell) whose poetry anticipated and provided the seedbed for the later flowering of English language haiku. After Brent’s guidance, these two anthologies have been among the most important parts of my education in contemporary haiku. I recommend both highly. As I do Penny Harter’s brief essay in the July 2017 issue of Verse-Virtual, and this scholarly essay, in three parts, by Barbara Louise Ungar: https://barbaraungar.net/extras/

I’m no expert on haiku, in English or Japanese, but one thing I have learned is that, just as with the poetry circles I came up in, English language haiku is subject to fierce disagreements about just about everything. Happily, as an amateur and interloper in ELH-land, I don’t need to pay attention to any of that, if I don’t feel like it. Most days I don’t. I can blithely ignore all the historical debates, the hair-splitting and factional squabbles about definitions and essential qualities, and just enjoy the bounty of this new/old poetic realm. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing ever since Brent opened my eyes to the available riches.

As for the formal and thematic essentials of the genre, I may take up such matters in a later column, or I may not. As I say, there seems to be debate about everything; and there’s certainly much to say about such matters as haiku vs. senryu; the structure of haiku; the necessary ingredients; the differences between the classical tradition and contemporary examples; and much more.

For now, I want to leave you with a brief sampling of the sort of examples that convinced me that we’re not at the bird feeder anymore. (All poems except Brent Goodman’s are from one or both of the books mentioned above). It’s not the kind of poetry I was raised on, nor do I find it easy to analyze, just to love.

If you’re a haiku skeptic as I once was, see if you don’t agree with me that the pieces below are poems of powerful observation melded with wondrous economy. Haiku aficionados talk about “the haiku moment,” that sudden flash of perception that this tiny form aims to capture in words, and which, in a good haiku, resonates in your mind long after you’ve absorbed the words themselves. In a way, I think a haiku can be described as a highly distilled instance of what in the traditional Western tradition we’ve come to call “the lyric moment.” Haiku also focus generally on a single moment, of course. Moreover, most good Western lyrics tend to achieve much of their energy from juxtaposition (contrasting now vs. then, large vs. small, near vs. far, sacred vs. profane, happiness vs. sorrow, etc.). So the haiku can be seen as a radical sort of minimalist lyric. It strips down the lyric moment to a single juxtaposition, achieved typically via imagery alone, not abstraction.

So see if you don’t find some firecrackers going off in your head when you savor the tiny wonders below. In good haiku tradition, I will let these pieces speak for themselves.

In my medicine cabinet,
    the winter fly
has died of old age

—Jack Kerouac

walking into and out of
the sound
of the brook

—Wally Swist

quietly
the fireworks
far away

—Gary Hotham

twilight
staples rust
in the telephone pole

—Alan Pizzarelli

behind sunglasses
I doze and wake . . .
the friendly man talks on

—Anita Virgil

low tide:
all the people
stoop

—Anita Virgil

she turns the child
to brush her hair
with the wind

—Anita Virgil

walking the snow-crust
    not sinking
          sinking

—Anita Virgil

the old album:
not recognizing at first
my own young face

—Elizabeth Searle Lamb

Google Earth
everywhere I search
another river

—Brent Goodman

windows sealed for winter
I bookmark one text
with another

—Brent Goodman

half-erased day moon
retelling the story
without me in it

—Brent Goodman

ordering my tombstone:
the cutter has me feel
his Gothic “R”

—Raymond Roseliep

in the doll’s
head
news clippings

—Robert Boldman

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