July 2017
I have been writing haiku for forty years and longer poems for fifty. Writing haiku opens my mind, my senses, and my spirit. It helps me get in touch with what is most important—paying attention to what I’ve called, “that click in the gut,” or "leap of the spirit.” When asked to define poetry, I have always said that writing a poem is, first and foremost, an act of seeing, followed by connecting. Writing haiku helps me to feel relationship between myself and other, so that, in a way, I become other.
While some writers believe that haiku must only be written from immediate and actual experience, others create haiku from long ago memory, from fantasy, or from combining the real and the imaginary. I believe that both immediate experiences and remembered or imaginative perceptions are valid haiku sources. For me, haiku must be brief and image-centered, and devoid of overt metaphor or simile. Both my haiku and longer poems result from a sudden awareness of connection between a perception and the feelings that arise from it, or from my sensing a unique relationship between and among aspects of the object or experience perceived, remembered, or created.
Haiku should show what the poet experienced that made him or her have a certain response, and if the poet has done a good job, the reader has a similar response when reading the haiku. I want to connect with the reader through shared experience.
Although most haiku seem to center on moments in nature, others need not do so; instead, verses may comment on human interactions with the natural world or with one another, and on human activities and observances. For example, after a particularly difficult discussion with my then thirteen-year-old daughter, I wrote:
closed bedroom door—
her shadow darkens
the crack of light
Another time I experienced a synthesis that made me wonder about the use of the heavens for warfare, or just cluttering them with tons of space junk:
distant thunder—
overhead a satellite
moves in the dark
I believe it is important to set the poem in a particular time and place, to use present tense for immediacy, and to keep it short (one to three lines). I have even written a few one-line haiku, inviting the reader to experiment with the location of the break or “turn” so characteristic of the of best haiku:
mallards leaving in the water rippled sky
I could have divided this poem in several places, but to do so would have disturbed the unbroken gliding of the ducks from the water into the sky. I wanted the reader to feel all the possibilities, such as "mallards leaving--
/ in the water / rippled sky" or "mallards / leaving in the water / rippled sky." Haiku can certainly teach us the importance of appropriate line breaks, and I have applied what I learned about line-breaking in haiku to my longer poems. Also, I avoid rhyme since overbearing sound can detract from the image.
Haiku can also be connected to create a sequence, moving from moment to moment of the perceived experience. On a trip to Japan in 1997, I wrote the following. As I read it now, I revisit the time and place:
The Scent of Cedar
At Nikko Toshogu Shrine, for Yatsuka Ishihara
stone lantern—
five chambers rise
in the cedar's shade
broken cedar stump
its mildewed center open
to the Earth
mist between the cedars
and on the far hillside
a forest of mist
on the cedar slope
cut pieces of a trunk
touch each other
stone lanterns
darken in the dusk—
the scent of cedar
During the summer of 1987 my husband and I were fortunate enough to spend the night in a pilgrims' dormitory on Mount Haguro in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. When I entered the room, its entire far end open to the sky, I quickly crossed the space to the edge of the tatami-matted floor and opened my arms:
fingertip to fingertip
and still more sky—
Mount Haguro
That is how haiku happen. For me, each haiku I write is like breathing out, giving back to the earth recognition, affirmation, and gratitude. I am reminded of how seldom we really notice what is going on around us, and how important the most ordinary things can be. Writing haiku is one way of translating the Earth—
honoring what the mountain, the dragonfly, the neighbor, and even the dirt under our feet mean to our existence. Whether we know it or not, we are one with them. The writing and sharing of haiku can bring us together as we celebrate our connections with the larger world that we share, while at the same time affirming the particular times and places of our lives and our human responses to them.
Copyright © 2002 Penny Harter. All rights reserved. After an earlier publication in Newsweek Japan, this essay opens my entry "Seeing and Connecting" in The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku, edited by John Brandi and Dennis Maloney, © 2005 by White Pine Press.
While some writers believe that haiku must only be written from immediate and actual experience, others create haiku from long ago memory, from fantasy, or from combining the real and the imaginary. I believe that both immediate experiences and remembered or imaginative perceptions are valid haiku sources. For me, haiku must be brief and image-centered, and devoid of overt metaphor or simile. Both my haiku and longer poems result from a sudden awareness of connection between a perception and the feelings that arise from it, or from my sensing a unique relationship between and among aspects of the object or experience perceived, remembered, or created.
Haiku should show what the poet experienced that made him or her have a certain response, and if the poet has done a good job, the reader has a similar response when reading the haiku. I want to connect with the reader through shared experience.
Although most haiku seem to center on moments in nature, others need not do so; instead, verses may comment on human interactions with the natural world or with one another, and on human activities and observances. For example, after a particularly difficult discussion with my then thirteen-year-old daughter, I wrote:
closed bedroom door—
her shadow darkens
the crack of light
Another time I experienced a synthesis that made me wonder about the use of the heavens for warfare, or just cluttering them with tons of space junk:
distant thunder—
overhead a satellite
moves in the dark
I believe it is important to set the poem in a particular time and place, to use present tense for immediacy, and to keep it short (one to three lines). I have even written a few one-line haiku, inviting the reader to experiment with the location of the break or “turn” so characteristic of the of best haiku:
mallards leaving in the water rippled sky
I could have divided this poem in several places, but to do so would have disturbed the unbroken gliding of the ducks from the water into the sky. I wanted the reader to feel all the possibilities, such as "mallards leaving--
/ in the water / rippled sky" or "mallards / leaving in the water / rippled sky." Haiku can certainly teach us the importance of appropriate line breaks, and I have applied what I learned about line-breaking in haiku to my longer poems. Also, I avoid rhyme since overbearing sound can detract from the image.
Haiku can also be connected to create a sequence, moving from moment to moment of the perceived experience. On a trip to Japan in 1997, I wrote the following. As I read it now, I revisit the time and place:
The Scent of Cedar
At Nikko Toshogu Shrine, for Yatsuka Ishihara
stone lantern—
five chambers rise
in the cedar's shade
broken cedar stump
its mildewed center open
to the Earth
mist between the cedars
and on the far hillside
a forest of mist
on the cedar slope
cut pieces of a trunk
touch each other
stone lanterns
darken in the dusk—
the scent of cedar
During the summer of 1987 my husband and I were fortunate enough to spend the night in a pilgrims' dormitory on Mount Haguro in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. When I entered the room, its entire far end open to the sky, I quickly crossed the space to the edge of the tatami-matted floor and opened my arms:
fingertip to fingertip
and still more sky—
Mount Haguro
That is how haiku happen. For me, each haiku I write is like breathing out, giving back to the earth recognition, affirmation, and gratitude. I am reminded of how seldom we really notice what is going on around us, and how important the most ordinary things can be. Writing haiku is one way of translating the Earth—
honoring what the mountain, the dragonfly, the neighbor, and even the dirt under our feet mean to our existence. Whether we know it or not, we are one with them. The writing and sharing of haiku can bring us together as we celebrate our connections with the larger world that we share, while at the same time affirming the particular times and places of our lives and our human responses to them.
Copyright © 2002 Penny Harter. All rights reserved. After an earlier publication in Newsweek Japan, this essay opens my entry "Seeing and Connecting" in The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku, edited by John Brandi and Dennis Maloney, © 2005 by White Pine Press.