Haiku Newsletter:

I want to start by saying that I’m not a haiku scholar. So what I’m going to share is only what I have learned and experienced with haiku so far, and what I think is important for you, as a reader, to get a feel for right now. Most of the information in the following “About haiku” section comes from Robert Hass's book “The Essential Haiku.” As part of that, I will organize and paraphrase information from the book, and I will quote and cite directly. Also, I will only go into a little detail on one of the haiku masters, but I’m cognizant that all of their lives, Basho̅, Buson, Issa, Chiyo-Ni, and Shiki, spanned the great flowering of the Haiku form. I encourage anyone interested in haiku to look into them.

General background of the form:

During Japan's Edo period, the haiku master Basho̅ reinvented, popularized, and imbued the form with power and seriousness. The meaning of haiku is “playful verse”, and in English consists of three stacked lines containing 17 syllables(5-7-5), which, of course, is different from the structure in Japanese that 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 haiku contained at least two images, and a season was traditionally evoked as one of those images.

Interestingly enough, the spirit of hokku required that the language be kept plain. 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 immense subtle thinking about how he could give depth and resonance to the image of the poem. (Robert Hass xii).

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 humanness 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).

There used to be an idea that the seasonal reference must appear in either the first or third line of the three-line poem (Robert Hass xiii). I believe that this was partly thought of as necessary for two reasons: so readers were not taken by surprise or confused by a season showing up in the second line, and 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. But haiku masters didn’t always follow that idea; it works perfectly fine not to, because sometimes the story needs to be expressed a certain way, and to keep that essential meaning, it can’t conform to any ideas about how it “should” be.

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 deeply spiritual way to compose haiku. I’ve experienced 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, and readers and writers of poetry, we can 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. Though a helpful practice, we apply this in a way that, while reading haiku, we naturally go straight to concluding its final mysteriousness and silence, and that it is objective and could never be subjective, and to just 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; acknowledging how we sometimes do this can help us see another perspective. (Robert Hass xv).

Another perspective as readers of haiku is that we are the co-authors of the poet’s poetry. I’ve heard it said that a haiku isn’t complete until it's shared with another person or people, and that this other person is the co-author- who isn’t necessarily supposed to just try and 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 rather than separate. There is only the illusion of separateness.

What’s worked for me in writing haiku:

I believe that there can be a lot of benefit to knowing and understanding the deeply spiritual and traditional origins of haiku, both as a writer and as a reader, as a helpful guideline, practice, or idea. I have learned that even the masters don’t adhere to all of the ideas about how haiku should be, and I believe that is a good mindset to have, because it’s a way of expressing what’s in one's heart, one's own consciousness, ideas about oneself and about the world, showing others our language and culture and personal background through this unique expression.

If one followed another poet's exact footsteps, or read every book on how to write a haiku and the rules they should follow, could their unique expression be lost in all the ideas about how their poetry should be? For example: what kind of punctuation to use and when, what to capitalize, where and when to include a seasonal reference, how to revise haiku, how to practice writing haiku, and so on. Of course it’s totally understandable if anyone wants to find out any of these things; after all, it can be helpful guidance, practice, or suggestion, but how can we understand the particular story we want to tell that comes from within us and not from any book or poet, and then how can we find what works for us in expressing that story or view of the world into a haiku? And that’s precisely what I’ve been discovering with my haiku. For me, writing haiku is not about molding my self-expression to imitate another poet or to fit into all the ideas of the haiku form, but rather about using the haiku vehicle and what resonates to tell the story I need to in a true way. And I believe that any poem written from the heart cannot be done wrong.

Fall of 2024:

Autumn daylight waned

and earth stepped quietly with

a journey he walked

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 masters like Basho̅, whose clarity in expressing the world and 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 that gut feeling turned out to be very true. 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 is a practice for me; I continue to learn about the form and how it flows through me as I continue to grow. I hope that through this platform and by sharing my haiku, I and others will feel less alone and find resonance, inspiration, and community.

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

I intend to keep my content and navigation simple. Especially in the beginning, when I’m just figuring out how things work. I will do my best to ensure things are straightforward, my content is engaging, and 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 haiku so readers can receive a variety of them, to learn about some of the ways of the form among it’s limitless possibilities, and hopefully have a wonderful experience.

Lastly, I’ll commit to creating more haiku and poetry-related content with intention and mindfulness. I’ll explore other ways to bring this to my audience by posting it on my website, making sure it is simple, engaging, and valuable.