First Blog Post:

I started my haiku journey through workshops at a local Zen center that I attended. I was fascinated by the simplicity but also complexity of the form, and how intimate it was reading and hearing haiku, especially from the haiku masters, like Basho̅, whose clarity in expressing his experience was unlike anything I’ve ever come across. I’ve never been much of a talker, so how poignant and short the form is really resonated with me; I had a gut feeling that it could be my means for expressing myself, and I followed that intuition. More than two years later, I’ve still been creating haiku and sharing them with a close person in my life. This person encouraged me to share my poetry with other people, and I’ve slowly been freeing my voice, opening up to others about my journey of spiritual practice and healing.

Haiku has been a journey for me; I keep learning about the form and how it flows through me as I grow. I hope that through this platform and by sharing my poetry, I can encourage and inspire others and myself to turn inward and find our authenticity, discover who we are and the stories within, come to understand the different parts of ourselves, let go of what does not serve us, and move towards healing.

Where I’m looking to go with my website and newsletter:

I will do my best to ensure that my content is engaging and simple, similar to a haiku, and that those subscribed to my newsletter receive one haiku every two weeks. Also, I write a variety of haiku that cover the seasonal, spiritual, and personal aspects of my life. I will work on sharing these so you can receive a variety of them, to enjoy some of the ways of the form among it’s limitless possibilities.

Lastly, I’ll commit to creating more haiku-related content with intention and mindfulness. I’ll bring this to you by posting it on my website.

Read onward if you want to discover the origins of haiku.

-Basho̅, Buson, Issa, Chiyo-Ni, and Shiki- spanned the great flowering of the Haiku form.

-Most of the information in the following paragraphs I paraphrased and categorized from Robert Hass's book “The Essential Haiku.”

General background of the form:

During Japan's Edo period, haiku master Basho̅ reinvented the form, popularized it, and imbued it with power and seriousness. The meaning of haiku is ‘playful verse’, and in English it consists of three stacked lines containing 17 syllables (5-7-5), unlike Japanese, which uses 17 sound units. In Basho̅’s time it was called hokku, meaning ‘starting verse’. Hokku arose almost accidentally from the popular practice of linked verse, and from there it detached itself.

From the start, hokku was very attentive to time and place, beginning with a theme from classical poetry-that of the Heian court-which involved a season of the year. Then an image would be added that seemed to find the essence of the classical theme. The form required accurate, original images, created mostly from everyday life (Robert Hass xii). This means that hokku contained at least two images, and a season was traditionally evoked as one of those images.

Interestingly, the spirit of hokku required plain language. Basho̅ believed the plain speech of hokku functioned to put right common speech: “A poet needs to discipline himself every day,” he said. And Basho̅ did, devoting many years to subtle thinking about how he could give the poem’s image depth and resonance. (Robert Hass xii). -I need to note here that Basho̅ said a poet needs to discipline “himself” every day instead of saying “themself”; this is male-centered language, poetry and being a poet is of course for everyone.

First part of haiku: The season

I will reiterate that time and place were crucial for writers of haiku, and that the seasonal reference was once widely thought necessary for a complete haiku. The seasonal reference helped readers locate themselves in the poem, and emitted a powerful sense of the nature of people in the common place of daily life and its cycles. (Robert Hass xiii).

The traditional seasonal themes “that accumulated resonance and associations came from earlier poetry and the Japanese way of thinking about time and change,” as well as place. For example: “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens,” “a sudden summer shower, images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, the cormorant fisherman in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in spring.” (Robert Hass xii-xiii).

People used to think the seasonal reference had to appear in the first or third line of the three-line poem to count as a haiku (Robert Hass xiii). My take on some of the reasons this was thought to be necessary: so readers were not taken by surprise or confused by a season showing up in the second line; because establishing the seasonal setting right away or at the end added to the ease of establishing a location for the readers; and, in the third line, establishing a finality to the poem. For poets, it also functions as a traditional practice. But haiku masters and other haiku poets didn’t always follow that rule/idea; it works fine not to, because we want to tell a story, and to keep that essential experience, it can’t always conform to any rule of how it “should” be. The haiku master Buson who’s known for his painterly mix of precision and strangeness shows this non-adherence in a winter haiku:

“An attentive reader might be led to ask what the connection is between the unexpected snow in the second line and the tethered horse or the rather mysterious snow in both stirrups.” (Robert Hass xiii).

Second part of haiku: Buddhist reflection on nature

To better understand the role Buddhism plays in haiku, a distinction and comparison can be made between its differences from Christianity and other cultures:

In the Christian faith, there is a sense that nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn’t. “There is no creator being in Buddhist cosmology, there is no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers.” At the core of Buddhist metaphysics, natural things are thought of in three ways: That they are transient; that they are contingent; and that they suffer. (Robert Hass xiii).

In Japanese and European poetry, the melancholy of autumn is an equally traditional experience; however, “it is not fundamentally assimilated into the European system of thought. English poets had words for these feelings, they called them “moods”. For example: “in pensive or in wayward mood”, which as poets is them “trying to assimilate psychological states for which the official culture didn’t have language.” Basho̅’s Japan did, summing up the transience of things with old phrases like “swirling petals,” “falling leaves,” and “deep autumn”; this was very much a religious thought. “Basho̅’s ‘Deep autumn’ is a poem about the transience of things, and Basho̅ has connected it to a particular expression of spiritual loneliness.” (Robert Hass xiii-xiv).

The transience of things and the spiritual loneliness to which Basho̅ refers in the haiku below also connect to the Japanese terms Wabi and Sabi. Wabi refers to the ordinary, everyday things of life, and Sabi refers to the solitude found in life; many haiku were and are created with Wabi and Sabi in mind.

This poem of Basho̅’s goes beyond just representing a traditional Japanese way of thinking about being, and that’s part of what makes haiku so interesting: there is something more. “They have a quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it.” There’s a sense of mysteriousness because they don’t usually generalize their images or feel the need to moralize; they could be said to subvert cultural certainties. So there’s a mysteriousness about the image, a silence about the haiku; its wordlessness has its roots in Buddhist culture, particularly Zen. (Robert Hass xiv-xv).

Last part of haiku: Connection between haiku and Zen

The “Ginko walk” is an informal Zen Buddhist walking meditation practiced to deepen connection with nature and the present environment. It’s also done as a spiritual way to compose haiku. I’ve experienced and learned this practice at haiku workshops at my local Zen center; the guidelines directly from the booklet are below:

“The first ten minutes: Leave the task-oriented mind behind and keep your notebook in your pocket. Use the time walking in nature to situate oneself in the landscape, being aware of and noticing the weather, sky, plants, animals, people around you. The second ten minutes: Let nature displace day-to-day concerns in your mind. How? Use the senses. What do you hear, see, smell, feel, taste? Maybe the breeze lifts a strand of hair across your cheek, a crow cries, snow slides off the roof, scent of… The rest of the Ginko haiku walk: Now, find a comfortable spot. Take out your notebook and pencil. Let the image you land on offer up all that it can. Put down every line that comes—there might be more than one choice that sounds right. Put them all down in the moment. There could be a dozen poems in one image!”(Vermont Zen Center).

As humans, we often get caught in the meaning-making activity of the mind. Zen practice trains people to get closer and closer to seeing things as they are. Like bush warblers and snowfall, which can feel intimate to us, we can see our mind as just another phenomenon. Similar to this Zen practice, while reading haiku, we can go straight to concluding its final mysteriousness and silence, and that it is objective and could never be subjective, and leave it as it is. Therefore, we may not be able to fully grasp how personal the poems are, or see the scent of the poet's particular life. What could help us connect more to their lives? Having a fuller sense of who the poet is would certainly help, but we still return to the poem's mysteriousness anyway. (Robert Hass xv).

Another perspective on reading haiku is that we are co-authors of the poet’s poetry. I’ve heard that a haiku isn’t complete until it's shared with another person or people, and that this other person, who is the co-author, isn’t necessarily just trying to intuitively guess what the author means by the poem, but instead what the poem means to them and how it resonates with their life. This connects to Buddhist thought that we are all interconnected.

How do you like to approach reading poetry though? What works best for you?

When it comes to writing haiku:

I believe knowing the deeply spiritual and traditional origins of haiku can help you connect with the form and the poets of the era, and it can serve as a guideline, practice, or idea for both writers and readers of haiku. And even the masters don’t adhere to all of the ideas about how a haiku should be; I believe that is a good mindset to have, because poetry is a meaningful way of expressing what’s in one's heart, one's own consciousness, views about oneself and about the world, and showing others our language, culture, and personal background.

If one followed another poet's footsteps, or read every book on how to write a haiku and the rules to follow, could their unique expression be lost in all the ideas about how their poetry should be done? For example: what punctuation to use and when, what to capitalize, when and where to include a seasonal reference, how to revise haiku, how to practice writing haiku, and so on. Although guidance, practice, or suggestions can help, how do we understand the particular story we want to tell from within us, and how do we find what helps us in expressing that experience as a haiku? And that’s what I’ve been learning and discovering with my haiku. For me right now, it’s not about fitting my self-expression to imitate another poet or to fit into any particular rule or idea of the haiku form, but rather about using the form and parts of it that resonate to help me express myself from the heart.

Fall of 2024:

Autumn daylight waned

and earth stepped quietly with

a journey he walked