At its best, haiku is an amazing form of poetry that uses simple imagery to communicate something elusive in few words. My new book, currently in production, includes haiku about love, nature and politics. While the book is composed of more than 150 haiku, there will be roughly 20 short poems also included in the book.
Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry, whose subject matter is typically nature, but which can vary from war, to religion, to love and whose structure is usually three lines composed of 5-7-5 syllables, respectively. Although the work of traditional haiku poets like Basho, Buscon and Issa adhered to the rules of structure, the rules have eased more recently. American haiku poets usually write haiku with 17 or fewer syllables or, simply, short-long-short in the three line structure. The brevity of the poetic form allows for many pauses and plenty of opportunity to digest the written material.
Richard Wright is a well-known modern writer who has made a tremendous contribution to the tradition. His 817 published haiku are substantial, particularly for Wright, who was a novelist by trade. In HAIKU: This Other World, we find him as an exile in France observing the natural world around him. I imagine his haiku writing must have been soothing, even meditative for him not far, at that point, from the end of his life. I recently finished his volume of haiku and plan to write more about what it is I admired about his work. It is Wright's haiku, in particular, that inspired me to get started on my own work to contribute to the tradition.
Writing haiku was certainly meditative for me. The practice of finding some small kernel of meaning and bearing it out in a short poem (or haiku) was somehow very satisfying. The form's flexibility in terms of content also makes haiku appealing as a form, as well. When writing, I can choose to write objectively, remaining neutral and keeping my opinions out of the poem as was common among traditional Japanese haiku poets, or I can write a subjective haiku, making my perspective of what may be going on in a poem obvious. Either approach makes for interesting writing material.
Additionally, haiku's subject matter has evolved to include not just nature haiku, but haiku about love, war, religion and politics. While it might seem that this is a tremendous break with tradition, in fact, in recent years, it has been discovered that many traditional haiku poets wrote haiku on many different subject matter. Interestingly, many of the masters of love haiku were women.
In sum, I chose haiku as the main form of poetry to employ in my new book because of the way the form has evolved over the years in structure and in content, but also because of the strength of the tradition. In addition, writing them is meditative and stretches the imagination. I hope that reading them will have the same effect.
