Contents
Definition
Introduction
This Path of Dew: The Haiku of Mitsu Suzuki
Shiki: Writing from Everyday Life
Haiku and Loss
Senryu: Art or Attitude?
Haibun
On the Road with Basho
Karumi
Chiyo-ni
The Ordinary in Haiku
Voices of Nature
Suggested Reading
Resources
Definition
Originating in 17th century Japan, haiku is a brief, non-rhyming verse form characterized by a singular moment of recognition. A traditional haiku (in English) is written in the present tense and based on a seventeen syllable format of three lines, in a pattern of 5-7-5 syllables. Modern haiku often varies from that format while honoring the ideal of brevity.
But haiku is much more than that. Writing in the Wales Haiku Journal, editor and award-winning poet Paul Chambers observes that it is “the sharing of a moment of sensory illumination, which causes a subtle yet often profound, emotional resonance” http://www.waleshaikujournal.com. While many awareness practices disregard or deny emotional content, the practice of haiku embraces it, thus, there are as many joyful examples as there are sad and wistful ones. Haiku poet Clark Strand, author of Seeds from a Birch Tree (Hyperion, New York, 1997), writes that “Haiku is a both a very outward and a profoundly contemplative inner kind of art. It is not possible to sacrifice either one and still be writing haiku.” If we do, he concludes, “our poems will have no heart.”
Introduction
The art of haiku evolved from an earlier poetry form, the renga, a linked, collaborative effort that begins with a three-line verse called hokku. The great renga master, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), also practiced writing hokku apart from renga, and is now recognized as the “father of haiku.” But it wasn’t until poet and critic Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) advocated calling these compact verses “haiku” that it was formally acknowledged as an independent literary form.
The main purpose is to express a slice of life and, in so doing, enhance awareness of ourselves and the world. Mitsu Suzuki, author of A White Tea Bowl: 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life (Rodmell Press, 2008), has observed that haiku is “a practice of meditation and life…” that “helps us penetrate deeply into ourselves and cleanse ourselves.”
Probably the most well-known example is by Basho:
The old pond.
A frog jumps in —
Plop!
(trans. R.H. Blythe)
In this version of the Japanese original, the fundamental event is depicted through two primary images and an aural cue: out of the waters of stillness comes life, movement, and sound. The emphasis here is on direct perception — the verse invites the reader to share the essence of the moment, without an obvious authorial persona. As authors William J. Higginson and Penny Harter point out in The Haiku Handbook (Kodansha USA, 2013), the ideal of the Basho School-haiku is that “both the language of the poem and the mind of the poet should be transparent to the reader….” Much has been written about these three lines, yet there’s a playful, even celebratory aspect to them that’s often overlooked, and this aspect presages Basho’s later work which stresses karumi, or lightness of tone.
While haiku generally doesn’t use the pronoun “I,” it nevertheless recognizes the person and the richness of human feeling — from wonder, ebullience and laughter to loneliness, anger, and sorrow. Here’s one by Issa that’s somewhere in between the poles:
blossoms everywhere
this New Year’s Day — yet something
remains unopened
(version by j.g.)
A more thorough introduction to the subject would include reading a few anthologies and browsing through a handful of dedicated journals. Or, you may want to start by reading the “four greats” — Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. As you do, you‘ll notice that their work often contains a reference to the season. This practice stems from the hokku which traditionally contained an image to date it (cherry blossoms in early spring, for instance). Many haikuists today continue to evoke nature through the use of official “kigo,” words that allude to the seasons and affirm our deep connection to the elements, and to plant, animal, and insect life.
Among the many Japanese poets who expanded the scope of nature-focused haiku is Keneko Tohta (1919-2018), who incorporated his WWII experiences as well as surrealist-like images akin to imagist poetry. Americans such as Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, Jane Reichhold, Nick Virgilio, and Elizabeth Searle Lamb continued to broaden the scope so that, now, it’s hard to imagine many topics that would be out of bounds. Reading old and new haiku from around the world provides an opening into a dialogue that spans time and cultures. Writing and sharing it with others, both in person at haiku meetings and in print and online journals, we can cultivate that dialogue within ourselves and our communities.
Suggested Reading
Seeds from a Birch Tree, Clark Strand, Hyperion, NY, 1997
Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart, Patricia Donegan, Shambala, 2008
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa: edited by Robert Hass, The Ecco Press, NJ, 1994
The Genius of Haiku: Readings from R.H. Blythe on Poetry, Life, and Zen: The British Haiku Society, Hokuseido Press, 1995
The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku: by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter, Kodansha USA, 1985
A Zen Wave: Basho’s Haiku and Zen: Robert Aitken, Weatherhill, 1978
A White Tea Bowl: 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life, by Mitsu Suzuki, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Norman Fischer (Rodmell Press, 2008)
Resources
Haiku North America sponsors biennial conferences on haiku that include readings, panels, workshops, and more. www.haikunorthamerica.com
Haiku Poets of Northern California sponsors an annual reading that’s open to the public, and a members only anthology. www.hpnc.org
The Haiku Society of America promotes “the writing and appreciation of haiku and haiku related forms in English” and publishes the journal Frogpond. www.hsa-haiku.org.
Journals
Frogpond
Wales Haiku Journal
Hedgerow
Bottle Rockets
The Heron’s Nest
Modern Haiku
Presence
Dodging the Rain
Mayfly
This Path of Dew: the Haiku of Mitsu Suzuki
For centuries, people from all walks of life have written haiku to mark the season and as a way to appreciate the gifts of bare attention: seagulls gliding above a cliff, soft pink of the first camellia flower in winter, the stillness of autumn dusk, steam rising from boiled noodles, children’s voices drifting from the playground, rainwater in a hollowed-out rock, early morning light on morning glories. This is the kind of news that informs the heart, but it doesn’t always evoke joy; it may also evoke a certain sadness at the transience of life, and this feeling may not be specific. The most effective haiku leave something unsaid, suggesting rather than defining, and in that way they may come to live in the reader’s imagination, however briefly.
Years ago, I had the privilege of hearing Mitsu Suzuki read from her book of haiku, Temple Dusk (Parallax Press, 1992; trans: G.Wood and K. Tanahashi). In his review of that collection, David Schneider observed that “many of the poems have the quality of ‘objective heart’ — a subtle poignancy where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.” He cited this haiku by Suzuki as an example:
since my youngest days
the same mole
New Year’s mirror
This poem would be considered a winter or New Year’s haiku due to the inclusion of the kigo (seasonal word), “New Year’s.” It takes us from youth to maturity, from spring to winter via the image of a mole, and in just three lines invites deep reflection. What is it that we see when we look into the mirror? Here, the poet may be alluding to a lifetime of various roles — as a young girl in Japan, as a wife (of Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi), as a mother and grandmother, as a tea ceremony teacher, and as a widow — through it all, there is this one abiding thing, represented by a mole. Yet apart from personal associations, the mole simply is. Look at that, the poet says, as we might say when gazing at a full moon, or a newly sprouted tomato.
Some of the best haiku resonate with both the reader’s and the writer’s associations while intimating a broader perspective. “The art (of haiku) depends entirely on the poet’s own realization,” Schneider observes, and that clarity “can also move the reader’s mind without warning.” Here’s another by Suzuki, this one from her final collection, A White Tea Bowl (Rodmell Press, 2014; trans: K. McCandless; ed: K. Tanahashi):
learning from haiku
sustained by haiku —
this path of dew
As the lines above suggest, the practice of haiku may serve as a path toward enhanced awareness or self-study, but it’s a path that’s unmarked and subject to happenstance — a “path of dew” that’s ever-changing. If you look for it only in the extraordinary, you might miss what’s right before you. Here’s one more, from Temple Dusk:
eating a persimmon
I remember the one
who loved this taste
On first reading, this haiku might suggest nostalgia for someone no longer physically in the writer’s life; the tart flavor of the persimmon awakens the memory of this person. Yet another reading may suggest that the writer is recalling herself in her younger days, as a child perhaps, and is experiencing something different as she bites into the persimmon. What that is, exactly, the reader isn’t privy to — we can never understand the experience of others precisely the way that they do, of course. What these lines may allude to are the subtle changes that occur in our lives: how youthful passion evolves over time, for instance, and how memory intertwines with the present, deepening our experience of the moment.
Memory may seem like a topic that’s off-bounds in a form that specializes in renditions of the now. Yet, even a haiku that’s written in the present tense is a form of recollection, isn’t it? The experience that prompted the writing of the haiku isn’t the same as the process of writing it. In the same way, the experience of reading a haiku isn’t the same as the experience of analyzing it. In the end, though, the joy of haiku isn’t in analysis but a sense of the world that’s not strictly delineated by terms such as past, present, or future. The tart flavor of a persimmon captures this sense of timelessness.
Shiki: Writing from Everyday Life
The haiku of Masaoka Shiki (1868-1902) often depict ordinary things and activities — eating persimmons, gazing at his garden, and swatting flies are just a few of the moments he focused on in his work. But for Shiki, who suffered from spinal tuberculosis (he died at age 34), the ordinary sometimes held deeper implications:*
winter drafts —
even the empty tea kettle
sighs
in a single day,
poppies blossom
and are lost to the wind
In his early twenties, he served as a columnist and editor for the Tokyo newspaper, Nippon, showcasing haiku as a respected literary form, according to Stephen Addiss (The Art of Haiku, Its History Through Poems and Paintiings by Japanese Masters, Shambala, Boston, 2012). In an influential essay, Furu ike Ya (Old Pond), Shiki praised Basho’s well known lines about a frog jumping into a pond (1686) as the start of authentic haiku, exemplifying what he referred to as shasei, or the practice of verbal sketching from life, according to Addiss. (Shasei might best be described as a distillation of naturalism and minimalism, in which nothing is added but much is left out.)
Although he suffered a serious hemorrhage in 1895, Shiki made a slow recovery, editing the journal,Hototogisu (Cuckoo), and all the while continuing to write his beloved haiku. Confined to his room in his last years and dependent on morphine to dull the pain, his limited view took in the beauty and bounty of his garden:*
craning my head
I can just see
patches of bush clover
two apples
on the table
one green, one red
Much could be said about the above lines, but the restraint here offers a glimpse into the silence of negative space — the space between the apples, the space between the table-scape and the bedridden Shiki, the space between the haiku and the reader — and it’s here that these haiku reverberate.
The following is sometimes thought of as his death poem, but was actually written years before he died*:
Just say this:
“He loved to sketch haiku
and eat persimmons.”
Now recognized as one of the foremost figures in the literature of Japanese haiku along with Basho, Buson, and Issa, Shiki is also credited with helping to advance haiku from its strict focus on nature to include modern references.
*versions by jg
Haiku and Loss
Long after my father died, his old straw hat remained by the glass door leading to the backyard. Most everything else had been moved around or discarded to make way for the new. But there the hat remained. At some point I’d traded a few of his bonsai pots and display stands to his friend and teacher, and three of the remaining stands were stacked in a corner by the door, the hat resting on top.
I passed by this little homage daily, half sensing its significance when, one day, I felt that it was time to put mourning aside and dispose of the hat or, at least, put it in a closet someplace. But when I bent down to reach for it, it suddenly didn’t seem like my father’s hat. It was just a hat that was coming undone around the edges — letting go, just as I realized I was letting go of the heaviness of the days leading up to his death, and my grief afterwards. I think I knew at that moment that the experience was a haiku or contained a haiku, but what it was, exactly, I didn’t know. I went to the desk, sat down and scribbled seven words in three lines (bottle rockets, summer, 2019). The whole experience marked a certain passage, if not closure.
There are many treatments of loss in the literature of haiku, including the late Nick Virgilio’s eloquent lines about the death of his brother, Issa’s lament about the pain of surviving wives and children, and Buson’s controversial haiku about stepping on his wife’s comb, to cite just a few. (See: “Thirty Mesmerizing Haikus that Capture the Essence of Life and Loss,” by Anwesha Madhukalya, 10/9/15, www.scoopwhoop.com.
Senryu: Art or Attitude?
It could be said that senryu isn’t so much an art as it is an attitude, a certain irony toward life and a sense of amusement at the foibles of just about everyone, including ourselves. When I think of early senryu I think of the old song, Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries (“so live and laugh at it all.”) Popularized in eighteenth century Japan, the form derived its name from Karai Senryu, who was associated with one of the major anthologies of the day, Yanagidaru (Willow Cask), according to William J. Higginson and Penny Harter (The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku, Kodansha, USA, 2013).
Like haiku, senryu may follow the 5-7-5 pattern, but unlike haiku they tend to focus on human nature rather than the natural world, as the examples here illustrate.* Poets were a popular target and even Basho came in for a bashing now and then. This anonymous piece takes on the tradition of the death poem while not naming names:
the old poet,
getting a second wind,
rethinks his death poem
Filial piety is sacrosanct in Japan and, thus, all the more tempting a subject:
parents — ever notice
how saintly we recall them
after they’ve passed?
Monks weren’t immune to sarcasm as these anonymous lines show:
clearing the sacred hall
in about three seconds flat
the great monk’s fart
Here, Buson may be suggesting that it’s our own myopia that keeps us from seeing the truth about ourselves:
my hair and spring,
both gone —
eyesight failing, too
Contemporary senryu are plentiful but are often misidentified as haiku or given some other title, such as “innovative haiku,” according to poet and editor Alan Pizzarelli, https://poetrysociety.org.nz. Others fall into a gray area, somewhere between a senryu and a haiku, like this one I wrote earlier this year:
not so unhappy
to see them this year —
weeds everywhere
There’s a reference to nature here and a suggestion of spring, two of the elements of traditional haiku, yet there’s also a hint of irony and popular wisdom — it may be that only someone of a certain age would be “not so unhappy” to see weeds, considering the alternative. If I had to select a label for this piece, I’d call it a senryu due to the primary focus on human foibles.
Contemporary senryu may have outgrown its origins as a form of entertainment in wine shops and tearooms and taken on a somewhat more serious role, while still maintaining a focus on irony and sarcasm. Dr. Susan Galletti Campion, for instance, has examined the rising influence of women’s voices in senryu, offering that it “opens doors” for women and “invites us to have a voice in a way haiku does not.” (Women’s Voice: Senryu Has Its Place).
But is it art? I think so, at least it can be, but because of its brevity it resembles more the quick strokes of a caricaturist than the layered work of a portraitist.
*versions by jg
Haibun
These days, haiku is a relatively familiar poetic form to readers and writers around the world. Less well known is haibun, which pairs haiku with prose. In its more traditional style, haibun often serves as a kind of travel diary, with commentary about the journey leading up to, and/or following, a haiku. Some contemporary approaches more closely resemble prose poetry, while others may use haibun as a means for contemplation. Patricia Donegan, author of haiku mind, describes the practice of combining hai (haiku) with bun (sentences) as “a springboard for the contemplation of a specific theme, be it adversity, nowness, or compassion.” It addresses “the story or reflection behind the poem,” she writes. Here’s a haiku by poet Elizabeth Searle Lamb, one of the founders of the Haiku Society of America and a former editor of their journal, frogpond:
pausing
half-way up the stair —
white chrysanthemums
Haiku such as this invite us “to slow down and tune in to this fleeting moment, to appreciate what’s right in front of us,” Donegan observes. They offer a pause in our routines, and an opportunity to foster deeper awareness. While some readers may be struck by the transience of the moment described here, some may focus on the beauty of the image of white chrysanthemums, or their sheer presence. Still others may be drawn to explore the position of the subject “half-way up the stair,” poised in mid-life, or the symbolism of white chrysanthemums which, in Japan, are often used at funerals. In this way, a particularly rich haiku may prompt exploration of issues in our own lives; at the same time, it can point to the commonality of our stories through the writing of haibun. (haiku mind, 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart, Patricia Donegan, Shambala, 2008).
On the Road with Basho
Few poets personify the archetype of the wanderer so much as the 17th century Japanese writer Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). He developed a hybrid form, haibun, to reflect both his inner and outer journeys, alternating prose passages with three brief lines that came to be known as haiku. His travels were a way for him to keep his work fresh while also giving him a freedom he wouldn’t otherwise have had as a civil servant, scholar, or monk. In 1687, he started a solo journey that’s reflected in his travelogue, Notes for My Knapsack (Oi no kabumi). Here he describes riding his horse during a storm and stopping beside rice fields*:
winter rice fields,
my horse and I — shadows
in the rain
Rather than rely on literary allusions to cherished sites, Basho wanted to visit them in person, and this practice gives his work veracity and a sense of immediacy as in this haiku, dated 1688 and composed while on a stay at the temple of Zenko-ji, located below Mount Obasute:
dissolving all thoughts
of the four sects — moonlight
over Mount Obasute
(The reference to sects refers to the various schools of Buddhism.)
In 1689, he embarked on a five months long journey with his friend and student, Sora, and this trip is portrayed in his most well-known work, The Narrow Road to the North (Oku no hosomichi). Moved by the turn out of his pupils to see the pair off in their little boat, he composed these memorable lines:
grasses are fading,
birds are chattering — and tears
blur the eyes of fishes
Early on, they paused at a grotto at Back View Falls (Urami-no-taki), where they sat in meditation behind the waterfall, still considered a sacred pilgrimage site today:
hearing water fall
from the inside out — entering
summer’s temple
In his final years he visited Ueno, Nara, Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka, among other places, meeting with students, and continuing to cultivate the notion of lightness, or karumi. In Osaka, he became ill and died there in the fall of 1694. These are among his last lines, reflecting his dedication to haiku, renga, and life on the road:
on the vast way —
not tilling the same small plot
year after year
worn and ill —
this traveling heart lingers
in autumn fields
*all haiku versions by jg
Karumi
The quality of karumi, or lightness, can be found in Basho’s haiku as early as 1667. He was twenty-three years old when he wrote the following:*
cherry blossoms
in the breeze — breaking out
in laughter
Haruo Shirane, Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, has described karumi as “a focus on everyday subject matter, on the use of ordinary language, and on a relaxed rhythmical, seemingly artless expression.” Here the traditional topic of cherry blossoms takes on an unusually welcome aspect. Rather than contrasting the beauty of the flowers with sadness at their brevity, for instance, Basho depicts the exuberance of the moment. Is it the blossoms that have broken out in laughter or the poet? Or both? In this case, ambiguity adds to the impact of the lines.
Much haiku is celebratory in nature. An exclamatory haiku such as the one above is a good example of this. Another approach, common to the Basho school of haiku, presents two juxtaposed images, offering up a view that embraces them both. Below, a view of the garden, written near the end of Basho’s life, evokes a minimalist yet wholistic response:
morning dew —
muddy melons
on the ground
Here there’s no trace of poetic conceit, just the pristine scene as Basho found it. In that sense, karumi may be considered not only in its literal sense as “not heavy or dark” but as possessed of a light artistic touch, allowing the reader to bring to the scene what he or she will. Even on his deathbed, Basho found an unexpected lightness:
flies everywhere —
how lucky they are to meet up
with a sick man
In the 20th century, Nakagawa Soen was a lifelong practitioner of haiku. As a literature student at Tokyo Imperial University, he wrote his thesis on Basho and later became a Zen monk and teacher. This haiku, written in 1946, presents two images pointing to the connection of ordinary things:
small plums
and dewdrops —
alive together
Although penetrating, there’s nothing heavy about these lines. Instead there’s a clarity and freshness, and a sense of happiness at the simple pleasures. We, too, are alive together with the plums and the dewdrops. How wonderful! These are the primary characteristics of karumi.
*all versions by jg
Chiyo-ni
Anybody who’s ever lived around morning glories knows that they often turn up in unexpected places — curled around a shovel or a ladder, growing around a drainpipe, or climbing up a fence post, to name a few. The haiku, below, reflects that trait*:
morning glories
wrapped around the well bucket —
borrowing water
According to D.T. Suzuki, this haiku by Fukudo Chiyo-ni (1703-1755) conveys the experience of suchness, in which the speaker is “perfectly at one with reality” — so much so that she went to a neighbor to borrow water rather than disturb the scene she described. Chiyo-ni began writing haiku at the age of seven and by seventeen was well known throughout Japan as a follower of Basho’s style. Below is one of many haiku she wrote expressing evanescence*:
clear water
cool to the touch —
fireflies vanishing
Late in life, she became a nun in the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, while continuing to write haiku and renga. Here are a few more examples of her work*:
pampas grass,
made for this life
in the wind
from the heart of this one vine,
countless gourds
flickering
between maple leaves —
twilight
*trans. jg
The Ordinary in Haiku
To practice haiku is to be attentive to the ordinary, as Basho pointed out. “If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as a renga verse. Haikai, however, needs more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy,” he wrote (The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass). Here’s a classic haiku by Basho that depicts the ordinary in nature (translated by Burton Watson):
“Day by day
the barley ripens,
the skylarks sing.”
In good times the crops ripen and birds sing, yet sometimes we forget how important these seemingly mundane events are. Haiku such as these invite us to return our attention to everyday subjects — the changing of the seasons, the music of tree frogs in the branches, mist enveloping the moon, just-washed leeks in a bucket.
The ordinary isn’t without its surprises, as in this observation by Buson:
a shaft of sunlight
on the sleeve of a paper robe
turns it to brocade *
What could be more unassuming than a paper robe? Yet, in these lines, Buson reveals the ordinary and the extraordinary as one, related by a trick of light, a matter of perception.
Here’s another by Buson:
at year’s end, walking
along Cherry-Flower river —
garbage floating past *
This haiku might have been written today about any number of our polluted rivers. While the sight of floating garbage may have been a sorry one for Buson, it nevertheless conveys an eye that isn’t attached to romanticized notions of beauty.
This focus on the ordinary in Japanese haiku can be found in Zen, too, as exemplified by the maxim byojo shin, kore michinari (ordinary mind is the way), attributed to Zen master Mazu Daoyi. But not all early haiku poets studied Zen, as Stephen Addiss points out in The Art of Haiku. Many were followers of other sects such as Taoism, Confucianism, or Shintoism.
In this haiku from 1813, Issa evokes a still-popular form of Buddhism through an ordinary, everyday image, suggesting that the The Pure Land may be with us in this very moment, if we would only recognize it.
The Pure Land —
isn’t it here and now
in the morning dew?
*versions by jg
Voices of Nature
With its de-emphasis on the “I” and emphasis on nature, traditional haiku often invite us to let go of our preoccupations, if only for a moment. The following haiku by Issa (1763-1827) is a good example of that:*
at home on a branch
racing downriver — a cricket
chirruping
This piece locates the reader in its environment with just two words, “branch” and “downriver.” Here, the cricket appears as a locus of experience, at home and singing from its perch as the world rushes by.
One of Basho’s students, who later became a nun, Chigestsu (1632-1706) was also adept at conveying the voices of nature:*
songbird riffing
outside the window — pausing
from dishwashing
Here’s another domestic scene, this one from Ryokan (1758-1831):*
sounds of pot scrubbing
mixed with the voices
of tree frogs
A good haiku offers more than an escape from our cares; it may also depict them as universal, as these lines by Chigetsu suggest:*
a murmur now,
cry of the katydid
grown old
Onitsura (1660-1738) manages to depict the music of silence in these three lines, no small feat:*
silent music
of blossoms, drifting
through air
This one, by Buson (1716-1784), isn’t exactly a voice, yet still evokes its subject:*
winter night —
the patter of rats, walking
across dishes
A follower of Pure Land Buddhism, Issa suggests a kinship between nature and faith in the following haiku. There’s something about the call of geese overhead that commands attention and announces our “place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver has put it:*
passing overhead,
a flock of wild geese, chanting
Amida Buddha’s name
Besides his well-known lines about the dreams of “lost warriors,” written in 1689 (and mentioned in my last post), Basho wrote another war-related haiku that year after visiting a shrine to the warrior Sanemori:*
how sorrowful —
under an old helmet,
cries of a cricket
Is Basho’s sorrow for the cricket and/or Sanemori? Or is it for the folly of war, in general? This piece leaves much unsaid. What does it evoke for you? For more on this subject, see Basho’s classic Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings.
*versions by jg
Suggested Reading
Seeds from a Birch Tree, Clark Strand, Hyperion, NY, 1997
Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart, Patricia Donegan, Shambala
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, Edited by Robert Hass, The Ecco Press, NJ, 1994
Haiku: The Poetry of Nature, David Cobb, Universe Publishing, NY, 2002
A Zen Wave: Basho’s Haiku and Zen, Robert Aitken, Weatherhill, NY, 1978
The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, Kodanasha, NY, 1992
The Genius of Haiku, Readings from R. H. Blyth on Poetry, Life, and Zen, The British Haiku Society, Hokuseido Press, 1995
Resources
According to their website, the American Haiku Archives in Sacramento, California, houses the “largest collection of haiku and related poetry books and papers outside of Japan.” Founded in 1996, it’s the official archive of the Haiku Society of America. It also offers special exhibits such as the recent tribute to Kiyoko and Kiyoshi Tokutomi; located in the California State Library Historical Room in Sacramento, CA, the exhibit is open to the public. To learn more about the archives and their current exhibits, visit www.americanhaikuarchives.org.
The Haiku Society of America was founded in 1968 “to promote the writing and appreciation of haiku and related forms in English,” according to their website, and “sponsors lectures, workshops, readings, and contests,” as well as a journal, Frogpond. www.hsa-haiku.org
Haiku North America sponsors biennial conferences on haiku that include readings, panels, papers, workshops, and more. www.haikunorthamerica.com
Haiku Poets of Northern California began in 1989 and sponsors an annual reading that’s open to the public, a newsletter, and a members-only anthology. www.hpnc.org
The British Haiku Society was founded in 1990 to foster the appreciation of haiku and advance the writing of haiku in the U.K. They publish a newsletter, The Brief, and a quarterly journal, Blithe Spirit. In addition to sponsoring an annual conference, they host discussion groups, special events, workshops, and haiku walks. The Society also promotes the teaching of haiku in schools and colleges and has developed a teaching kit that can be seen on their website. www.britishhaikusociety.org.uk
The Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo maintains thousands of haiku collections and journals and publishes a monthly bulletin announcing events, contests, and exhibits.
Jerome Gagnon Blog 