1.
Can you really write a poem a day for fourteen years? Yes, if the poems are very short, and if you think that someone will read them. I began writing daily haiku in 1999, inspired by a Soft Skull Press anthology called The Haiku Year, in which seven friends, including Michael Stipe of REM, agreed to mail each other a haiku a day on a postcard for a year. An anthropologist friend was my first haiku correspondent, inking her poems on delicate aerogrammes mailed from her fieldwork site in Papua New Guinea.
My companions see
that the sea-turtles are mating
and put their spears away.
Melissa Demian (1999)
Like most Americans, I was first introduced to haiku through an Orientalizing lens of false timelessness. My elementary school teachers — relieved to offer a lesson that matched the attention span of their students — explained the so-called “ancient” art of haiku by spelling out its rules. A haiku poem has three lines. The first line has five syllables. The second line has seven syllables. The third line has five syllables. Each haiku includes a seasonal reference.
Wrapping dumplings in
bamboo leaves, with one finger
she tidies her hair.
Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)
In The Haiku Year, Tom Gilroy’s forward discusses mid-20th century roots of Japanese-inspired American haiku: “Jack Kerouac and Michael McClure and the San Francisco poetry Renaissance started the concept of Western haiku…little three-line poems aiming towards a kind of Zen enlightenment. The Beat Generation was the right time to make a transition to a new kind of haiku, with all that pot-smoking and coffee-drinking and scatting and Japanese haiku books laying on couches next to Whitman and William Carlos Williams. A kind of combustion.” Gilroy follows the Beats’ lead by relaxing the 5-7-5 rules, explaining that the seven friends who wrote The Haiku Year were shooting instead for poems of three short lines each that included a seasonal reference. He added however, that they were attempting to write poems that offer both “the moment seized and rendered purely, captured in an instant of Buddhist (or Zen) enlightenment,” and “reflections on the particular consciousness, or point of view of the author, his or her loneliness, or comedy, or anger.”
Nightfall,
boy smashing dandelions
with a stick.
Jack Kerouac (1959)
2.
When I began writing daily poems fourteen years ago, was I writing authentic, Japanese-style haiku (a form I will indicate with italics), in contradistinction to Western-style, Kerouac-meets-elementary-school-classroom haiku (a form I will designate with Roman type)? Nope. But what I was writing excited me. I had wanted to write poetry for years, but couldn’t: nothing in my life seemed truly poem-worthy, which meant that when I did encounter love, for example, or death, I had no poetic muscle with which to tackle it, and wrote flabby clichés instead. Writing daily haiku unblocked me as a poet.I didn’t have to wait years to let myself write a poem (which of course would have to be the best poem ever); my job was to go through each day looking for just one poem, any poem. I felt like I’d been locked indoors for years, leafing through a field guide and wondering if someday I’d find that special butterfly that would be named after me. Suddenly I was standing outside with a net and the command to just catch something, anything, every day. Suddenly there were butterflies everywhere.
Bartlett pear blossoms:
these long-wristed girls
punch crisp holes in the blue day.
EA (1999)
Rethinking what counted as poetry and poem-worthy freed me to write some terrible haiku, but it also freed me to write a few good ones. Moreover, it has led me to realize that the poem itself is not the point of writing poetry. Instead, I forged this new definition. Daily haiku writing is a practice of attentiveness, the major byproduct of which is a seventeen-syllable poem.
String hangs from a branch.
The moment of wanting to tug it:
that’s the bell.
EA (2012)
As the years pass, I have departed increasingly from the elementary-school form. First I dispensed with the obligation to include a seasonal reference in the poem. Then I jettisoned syllable counts for each line. Although since 1999 I’ve annually made a booklet of each year’s haiku and sent it to friends, most recently I’ve been sharing these poems daily on the internet. Facebook and Twitter made my line breaks look precious rather than effortless, which spurred me to let go of the requirement that a haiku be a three-line poem at all.
Night. The drag queen at the corner pauses, wonders: Walk home, or cab it?
EA (2009)
What remains? A seventeen (or fewer) syllable poem that tries to capture a unique moment in time as freshly and simply as possible.
3.
The revelatory pleasure of listening for a poem in each day led me to develop an exercise for my creative writing students that encourages them — as writing daily haiku encouraged me — to stop fretting over what counts as worthy subject matter. At the beginning of the semester, I ask them to choose someone in their lives, and then each day throughout the semester they have to write that same person a postcard that captures a moment from the day. (They also have to type up their postcards and turn them in to me.) Although this exercise is designed to help perfectionists stop beating themselves up, it differs from freewriting or journal-keeping in two ways: it emphasizes selectivity over exhaustive production, and it also forces students to consider what it means to write for publication — even if one’s “public” is just one other person — as opposed to for oneself.
Winter Surfer
…No regard for frozen pain
Cover me in neoprene…
…Urine is my warm lover
You’re in my wonder winter-land…
–Columbia student (2005)
When I apply this question of publication to my own haiku practice, although I’d be over the moon if a press picked up my haiku, I find I shy away from sending a manuscript to publishers. In researching the origin of the actual, Japanese, italics-intended haiku, however, I’ve come to wonder if my hesitation has something to do with the form itself.
4.
A relatively recent predecessor of Japanese haiku is renga, multi-authored linked-verse poetry of the ninth century to the present. Renga began as an aristocratic pastime, and though the ranks of renga poets has become somewhat more democratic over the centuries, the form remains a hobby rather than a profession. Historically, renga groups usually consisted of people who already knew one another, be they a master poet and his (or her) disciples, monks or nuns belonging to the same sect, or simply a group of friends or colleagues. Groups numbered three to six, though sometimes included as many as twenty, and tended to meet at one another’s houses, with the duty of host (which included preparing a banquet and hanging seasonally-appropriate art) rotating from member to member. Poets had only a few minutes to compose each verse, and no time to rewrite: the point was not to create and publish a masterpiece for the ages, but to show off one’s talent with a fresh-sounding verse, one’s erudition with a verse that referenced older poetry, and one’s ability to keep an eye on the big picture with a verse that linked well to its predecessors, all in front of a handful of people who might be able to further one’s political or mercantile career.
Renga can be of any length, though well-known forms include 100-verse, 36-verse, and 18-verse poems. The verses of a renga alternate between two and three lines in length, the two-liners containing seven syllables each, the three-liners following the 5-7-5 pattern we now associate with haiku. A renga always opens with a 5-7-5 three-liner, known as a hokku, while all the subsequent links of verse, each by a different author, are called haikai. In the late 17th century, renga poet Matsuo Bashō began composing hundreds of verses in hokku form that were in fact designed to stand alone, a practice echoed by later poets Yosa Buson (1716-1784) and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). In the late nineteenth century, a renga poet named Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) championed Bashō, Buson, and Issa’s hokku verses as well as the practice of writing stand-alone poems as 5-7-5 three-liners. Shiki renamed these short poems haiku, fusing the terms hokku and haikai, the opening verse and its subsequent links.
The old pond:
a frog jumps in—
the sound of water.
Bashō
5.
I was surprised to learn that the word haiku, far from being ancient, is roughly the same age as Yeats’s Celtic Revival movement, which similarly engaged modernity while keeping one eye reverently on the past. Shiki’s invented word haiku suggests “The Opening Verse Is the Whole Poem” poetry, “Alpha-Omega” poetry, “Look No Further Than This” poetry. Shiki coined the neologism haiku in order decouple these short poems from their roots in renga, a form perhaps better suited to producing social relationships among poets than to producing poems. Unlike renga, which Shiki claimed was “not literature,” haiku were meant to be considered on their own terms. Half a world away, meanwhile, Walter Pater, the idol of the Aestheticist movement, was making similar arguments against judging art by what it could do for its producers or consumers, in language that revived the early nineteenth-century battle cry of Art for Art’s Sake.
The tree cut,
dawn breaks early
at my little window.
Shiki
Shiki invented the word haiku during the cultural upheaval that attended Japan’s rapid Westernization in the late nineteenth century. Shiki, though known for his love of baseball and Western civil liberties, does not appear to have read Western poetry, no more than Gwen Stefani appears to have read Japanese in order to write her pop song “Harajuku Girls.” But he lived in a Westernizing milieu, and his friends included novelists Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, themselves engaged in incorporating and rejecting aspects of Western literature into their work.
Smoke whirls
after the passage of a train:
young foliage.
Shiki
To repurpose an anthropological term, renga can be considered a “high context” art form: its individual links of verse are not designed to stand alone, and the point of the renga is not the finished product, but the collaborative writing process, which involved an exclusive coterie of fellow-authors and the sharing of food and liquor. The Western poetry that Shiki’s contemporaries would have encountered it, by contrast — published, portable, single-authored works produced and consumed in private— could be described, on a relative scale at least, as “lower context.”
Buying leeks
And walking home
Under the bare trees
Buson
How do you pitch radical Westernization to a nation of proud traditionalists? Tell them it was their idea in the first place. In 1887, when the Empress decreed that all the women of the court would henceforth wear Western dress, she did so by citing ancient precedent. In a gesture that probably appealed to nostalgiacs and forward-thinkers alike, Shiki’s invention of the term haiku both heralded a new form capable of being appreciated alongside works of Western literature and asserted that form’s antiquity and cultural purity. Weren’t Bashō, Buson, and Issa writing haiku long before Commodore Perry’s black ships reached Japan?
All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.
Issa
6.
Identifying how Shiki’s new (or “new”) haiku form rejected two key aspects of renga — its linked and participatory nature — helps me understand how those aspects live on in my own haiku practice, and in particular in my haiku publication practice. Where eighteen, or thirty-six, or even a hundred linked verses of renga constituted a poem, now one solitary verse of haiku stands in its place. While I love locking down a startling, purely-experienced moment into seventeen syllables as much as the next haiku poet, there’s also a way in which the poems don’t feel finished until they’re gathered into an annual collection, where the good-haiku-day poems balance out the blah-haiku-day ones, and the funny ones can inject breathing space around the solemn ones. The linked whole tells the story of a year. Meanwhile, the participatory nature of the form that morphed into haiku survives as the pleasure of hearing back from friends to whom I’ve sent each year’s collection, and of posting each day’s poem online. While I have had a few magical experiences of writing haiku in a group (such as the Hailstone Haiku Circle in Kyoto, led by Stephen Gill, or Rachel Simon’s poetry group in Yonkers), the sociable aspect of the renga banquet lives on more frequently in the “likes” and comments I get from friends online, and in the rare and delightful seventeen-syllable reply I receive.
Reading lines like recipes. 1 tsp wimpled nuns. 1 C river.
Holly Rae Taylor (2013)
When I read The Haiku Year and started writing and exchanging daily haiku, I didn’t know just how young the form was, especially given the long history of the renga from which it was cut loose. Though more than a century of vigorous Japanese production and consumption of haiku indicates that Shiki’s innovation was a success, my own experience suggests that the linked and participatory aspects of renga that Shiki tried to pare away re-adhere to haiku with remarkable ease. Much as I love writing haiku for haiku’s sake, I have let many aspects of the form fall away: the seasonal reference, the number of syllables per line, even the line breaks. What persists, however, is this: It’s as parts of a whole, an art-for-connection’s-sake whole, that these seventeen-syllable verses keep me coming back for more.
Old pier.
Late sun lights the gray wood gold.
You are still not tired of beauty.
EA (1998)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
This is terrific, and I heartily agree. As for the word "project" as it applies to poetry, might it be an unfortunate byproduct of academia, where it is expected that one is always working toward some specific goal, i.e. a dissertation, a scholarly paper, a lecture, etc. Just another example of our culture's over-identification with masculine ethos. What you're describing – intuiting a poem – brings in the feminine (for both men AND women), the unnameable, mysterious forces within that work together with the conscious self to write the poem into being.
Having a "project" isn't bad, necessarily, but it isn't how poems happen.
I, too, chafe at the word "community" and find that it really does not apply to the world of poetry and poets, in the way that you've defined it. "Special-interest group" might be more accurate.
Thanks for this – it's made my day.
Mari L'Esperance
Hey Dottie, this is a wonderfully lucid articulation of thinking about poetry, cooked the intuitive way. It makes me long to hear more of your thoughts on the nature of creativity and its mysteries. I know I can find out more by reading your poems, but I also like what you've written here. It has your verve. I think it's great that you speak so energetically about what you're doing, and it's wonderful that you accurately use terms from Husserl's phenomenology in making your vibrant case. Why shouldn't poets attempt to define their own work, or, if they don't want to, explain why not they're keeping mum? There's no obligation to spill the beans, of course, but why not? I totally agree with everything you're saying. But what about when somebody sincerely asks a poet, "What kind of poetry do you write?" Well, when that happens, it annoys me when poets answer: it's just poetry, it is what it is, you either get it or you don't. Talking around and about poetry doesn't hurt poetry. Quite the contrary. Thanks for doing it so well!
intersting post, dottie. i myself am sort of intrigued by the idea that we poets may well be no different than bankers, lawyers, scientists, painters, musicians, and that, for once, we AREN'T special.
in some sort of counter-intuitive leap in my mind, i feel like this could help poetry. like, if we acted a little less special maybe people at large would take more of an interest. maybe they wouldn't be so imtimidated. because, in reality,, the majority of people don't see themselves as specil, i don't think.
anyway, just my two cents.
best,
j
I always thought of a "project" as an obligation, or series of tasks, which are quite determined. This is much different from the creative act, which ideally (for me) is something that begins on a lark and bends up and turns and goes on until you are bored…then you do something else!
Thank you Dottie! I needed to hear this today.
Is this project from a series you're working on?
Amen. I think if you're actually a poet, you should be living it, not working on projects. Audiences outside the poetry world (of which there are none, unless you bring free copies of your book to everyone you work with, and then there are twenty) don't relate to projects, they relate to life. Plus, poetry is about *poetry* and not projects.
I suspect this is academia gone wrong, again. A poet's project sounds decent when you write a dissertation on themes running through a poet's body of work, but not as a description of it. You do it after the fact. It makes me imagine a corck-board with a post-it attached, denoting the project. 'Now, how to incorporate it into this poem?'
Like those half-witted creative writing classes, where they teach you to always write a disposition, and begin with a theme. Then you must find out what message you want to give your readers. Choose a point of view, a setting and protagonist.
I am so glad that people agree with me here. I feel some need to clarify even further, especially in light of a couple of the comments and responses I have seen both on and offline. Thanks so much for reading and commenting, by the way!
When I set out to critique the term project used in the context of poetry, I was less concerned with policing a particular word than demoting the linear thinking the word connotes and promoting the transformative thinking a new discourse might encourage.
My problem is less with the word project or community than with the linear way we, poets, have of describing our field.
I do think poets are special, but more so I think all artists are special. Or more so even, I think the thinking of artists is special for its nonlinearity. I truly believe that if this kind of metaphorical (versus linear) thinking––that artists either naturally do or have been taught to do through a variety of factors––was promoted more in all people we would have a new and better world. The first step, I think, is poets taking enough pride in their work to not borrow terms to describe it. But instead to take this time in history to describe our process better, so as to inspire young poets everywhere. And yes, this notion being unearthed is a call to arms.
What does this have to do with the term project? We poets should take some ownership to use words that we can truly stand behind. If we decide that a term that works for us is project, then so be it. But there needs to be less of a disconnect between how the world sees our field, how we talk about our field, and what our field truly thinks. I, for one, think a lot of the language of our field is outdated and/or ordained in some fashion that is not representative of many of our important processes and ideas. The way we create, for instance, is not understood well and many of us still revert to thinking of inspiration as a spiritual versus cognitive process. (And whatever your religious beliefs, this is just lazy thinking on all ends.) We have a lot of words that are distinctly our own (take “stanza” for instance, or the word “poem” for another). Why not make a whole contemporary discourse that is all our own?
I understand that poets are humans like members of every other profession. We need to eat, time to sleep, and the chance to have a meaningful life. We are also people who, on some level, deal purely as novel language creators. That is our real role in a society, however much the world these days seems to malign or not respect our efforts. That is a big charge and we must respect ourselves if we expect the rest of the society to respect us. I, for one, am beyond sick of feeling the quiet shame that goes with telling people I am a poet. Being a poet means I am a novel language creator. It does not (necessarily) mean I am an academic, a liberal, a snappy dresser, a socially awkward person, an intellectual snob, a really cool person, an alcoholic, an untrustworthy person, a smoker, a free spirit, etc. (Or it could and that’s ok, but it doesn’t necessarily mean all that.) It means simply that I am an expert in creating new forms of language and I should be judged and respected as such by those who value language and the world new language creates. Because language is what makes the world. Because all action is born out of an idea, however embodied that idea may be.
Being a poet can mean a whole host of infinite things other than being a novel language creator, true. But nowhere in the idea of being a poet does it mean I am (you are) conducting a project when I (we) write poems. Conceding to a linear tag is a seemingly small concession down a long road of being frightfully misunderstood.
Thanks again for reading my post and for reading this comment!
Bravo! Poetry as creating new forms of language is a project I can heartily endow.
Yes! I work in IT by day and writes poems, well at other times. IT projects pretty much kill creativity in IT so why bring that language into the arts?
The act of writing a new poem, for me anyway, is the act of destroying any kind of project that might be happening, even if just a little bit. Every poem is figuring out what a poem is, or more often than not, what it’s not.