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30 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2010
Harvesting radishes,
he points the way
with a radish
Labor Day rally —
the candidate turns toward
the glare of autumn
autumn field —
two sides of the same flock
taking off, landing
our culture’s appreciation of haiku has been hamstrung by the mistaken idea that their primary characteristic is seventeen (5-7-5) syllables. The fact of the matter is that the Japanese and English languages are so different that most writers and translators of haiku in English (and other Romance languages) don’t write according to any fixed syllable count.
Instead they – we – emphasize haiku’s brevity, immediacy, imagistic language, and intuitive quality as distinguishing characteristics. Furthermore, the fact that haiku’s power lies in its subtly and suggestiveness – in apprehension by intuition rather than through logical explication – makes it easy to discount in an academic culture that tends to celebrate intellectual and linguistic brilliance. What I think is probably most important, though, is a misperception that real haiku – as opposed to 5-7-5 Internet spam – is merely a highly specialized form of meditative nature-poetry. In short, people don’t realize the range of subjects, experiences, and emotions haiku can express.
As the “pioneering” haiku poet in the [Spalding MFA] program, I knew in advance that two of Spalding’s faculty members valued the Japanese short forms, but feared the rest of the faculty and my classmates might not take my work seriously. To my delight, what I encountered, instead, was a great deal of interest in and support for what I was doing. In fact, the response I received most often was something along the lines of Wow, I didn’t know that you could do so much with haiku; I didn’t know that it was such a contemporary form.