Pretend

Pretend the words don’t have enemies.
May they be beyond

as eyes are, as hills.
This thought consoles me today,

this lie. Let us say the words
into the whipping winds

of the place we live, and wait.
Pretend the words are not somebody

else’s leash. That you are not.

Stopping an Argument Going Nowhere

As a boy, I stood in drowned sneakers

and held up to the sun a crayfish

between my thumb and forefinger,

just plucked from the creek,

its pincers gyrating and pinching air,

trying to reach back far enough

to scissor skin and win release

from pain by pain. Win release

from pain by pain. Even in the dark places

under stones in creeks, whatever stones,

whatever other kingdoms, this immutable

is known. The dark imbricated plates

of her body were soft bronze. She knew me

enough. She’d treat any animal the same

and be blameless, not dwell as we do

after we use our natural defenses

to return to where we can breathe.

I’d call a friend over to see tiny dark eggs

she strummed under her body’s shields,

then drop her for the pleasure of seeing

that tiny splash, the dark zing backwards

into her watermind. She’d flex her entire body

and her big scoop tail would shoot water

through water as she flew to the safe

underplace. Each language, its dark, protective stones.

I am not a boy. I no longer lift

the roofs of stones from creatures.

Let dwell, let dwell.

Time is water and we must breathe under it.

Each in the darkness it calls home.

I Have a Poem in the Current Visual Voice

I love seeing what people come up with each month.

The whole ekphrasis thing. No ideas but in translation.

It

It is never finished.
I wake and walk barefoot
to the backyard,
past the spider universe
of the abandoned nook garden,
branches of everything-all-at-once
strangling or loving, who knows;
should I have said roses
in a poem, pedigree, pedigree
I have no use for.
Something wilder than roses
grows there and through me,
the birds getting excited
at my approach, summer
through us, they flee
in terror but will circle back
as soon as I’m gone,

as soon as I’m gone.

A Grim and Funny Whitmanian Experiment

I thought this article trying to suss out the cause of Walt Whitman's death was darkly funny, especially when the guys started mixing up the bacteria-orgy which Whitman considered a beverage to try it for themselves.

Sort of a new genre there and potential for a new show, poetry Jackass. 

Up next week: the guys try to out-drink Dylan Thomas and avoid acute hepatitis on an historically accurate reading tour.

And I would have guessed long-entrenched syphilis had something to do with Walt's death. Pneumonia and tuberculosis can be associated with syphilis.

Here's another interesting article about poets and suicide which should surprise absolutely no one. Poets who use the first person pronouns more in their poems (narcissistic poets?) are more likely to kill themselves. So too much self-absorption can lead to the ultimate self-absorption?

Thank You For Talking to Me

I say to the rain.
I say to the ingredients of a person
which just erupted in a random conversation
they insisted I taste.

I say to the past,
then lock the door behind it.
I say to the crows
in the cemetery

that act like cashiers,
pretending to make conversation,
but not really.
I say to sleep's

white noise pretending
to be a person pretending
to be me.
Then I nap

and dream of the world
before conversations existed.
How like a glass paperweight
everything was!

dark watery things

she said something to him
and then she watched
headlights cross the ceiling
like spirits disconnected from bodies
they only pretend to inhabit
most days, most nights

not seeing headlights
he said
many more things
so could not see
the souls on the ceiling
as they lay in bed
looking up
still he did not see
he had not guessed
she had said
a final thing

and so when he thought
she slept
she had congress with spirits
on their bedroom ceiling
from the street
who told her how lovely
it would be to live
without a soul
in her body
for just one year

mark the calendar
lest you forget

the things whisked

she found this religion
of just walking
just what she needed
thank you, ceiling
she told the light
and was soon gone

taking a knife and a pillow

Moth

attention is nice
but maybe the quietest days
were the best
being slower
watching endless rain
through old windows
it empties my soul
hunting for my glasses
for an hour
gently cursing
these softest distractions
up and down the stairs
over and over
a moth in the night
invisible to myself
and everyone else

Twenty Bucks and a Stone Haiku

the cemetery
a bag blowing past
says THANK YOU

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the people
we didn't

*

as many cracks
as days
a doll’s face

*
autumn morning
somewhere you change color
without me

*

chipped glasses
plates with hairline cracks
not a bad marriage

*

something in you the way
autumn trees
pretend to shiver

*

cool autumn morning
awakened by small feet
racing away

*

children share secrets
clear sap
from an unseen center

*

old porcelain dolls
in the nursing home
every crack speaks

*

autumn leaves
the colors a warning
a celebration

*

autumn leaves
fall on the railroad tracks…
is this a joke?

*
autumn market
different gourds
with the same problems

*

autumn morning
something running fast over
my head wakes me


*

hometown years later
even the creek’s
changed beds

*

groundhog hibernates
our clocks slow down
then reverse

*

the vacant house's
welcome mat
snowflake by snowflake

*

autumn morning
cold finds
a tooth’s crack

*
ANTIQUES store window
autumn leaves reflect
over old metal

*

winter morning
a tree that killed its children
waves at me

*
October schoolbus
autumn leaves board
in a hurry

*

asking what number
snowstorm this is
no one knows

*
autumn morning
the carp turn
slower circles

*

under canal leaves
disgust a century old
wedding ring smolders

*

waking in cold
to write of coldness
warms me

*

autumn crickets
a tempo
tells a story

*

autumn crickets:
imagine dying
without loneliness

*

funeral champagne
tiny bubbles stroke
forgotten places

*
reading obits
an unseen jet rumbles
towards no one’s home

*
in time

the pleasures of time
replace the pleasures
of place

*
my old school
my stomach rumbles
on its stone

*

the kid eating stones
on the playground
is a bird

*
the only thing
weirder than words
what they replace

*

a leaf falls
in the cemetery
a sort of Thank You

*

Van Gogh
freezes the cornfield
before winter

*

Van Gogh's cornfields
just before winter
forever

*

Van Gogh's paintings
lose color every year…
the snakeskins no one finds


*

missing each other
by mere eons
you and God

*

museum room
full of paintings the feeling
we just missed God

*
weather report
from behind icy fingers
on her nipples

*
snowstorm
all the infidelities
need rescheduling

*
Indian summer
an affair that promised to end
shops for skis

*

we visit you
in a cemetery
to talk about debt

*

dead winter
on my dad’s grave a twenty
under a rock

*

winter morning
you wake and your lover
is years away

*

winter morning
all the lovers on this bus
look like boxers

*

winter morning
lost coffees left on buses
tell us their names

*
winter to spring
a bus kiosk’s plexiglas
scratched like home

*
a real home
even the diamond
has scratches

*

autumn light
the clock turns backwards
when we do

*
autumn leaves
I can’t decide
on a collage

*
winter night ocean
still growing colors
in abalone

*
buried love
the night ocean
colors abalone

*

buried love
the night ocean
mothers pearl

*

visiting Van Gogh
feeling all the purple
we aren't

Monday

You said yesterday was the first day
of autumn everything. It was not. Today is.
Am I a breeze in your mind
as you are in mine? This window glass
through which I watch you is ancient,
possibly as old as Lincoln's forehead,
making wavy gravy of the landscape.
I wanted to send you some old art
along with its resident silverfish. Autumn
prepares to mount its exhibitions. You know
that usually means sex. Art workers
are usually oversexed and on ghosts.
Ghosts cannot harm us. (I would that
they could.) Today, I asked autumn what
she thinks of you, and it was all under her breath,
like a Ouija board. Just push the planchette
so we can get this over, get into bed.

Sunday

Each person is a cup of ghosts.
Each person like a spoon in a warmth
you can stir and drink close to sleep.
A white square in the museum is useful.
A black square in the museum is useful.
You mostly stir the way birds do
around the museum. You listen to the grass
move through walls, without seeing.
You say the word Sunday to hear
the shape it takes. Someone blows glass
far away, thinking as of a child
who will be your first reflection?

Van Gogh's Long Drive Home Haiku

cops in darkness
drive and smile
at other cops

*

if a tree falls
in the forest…
fireflies

*

sunflowers…
all the faces
born to travel

*

night cops in cars
wait for darkness
to well up

*

complaining about
carbon footprints he swats
a bee with newspaper

*

slow down your walk
until it’s lovemaking
air your partner

*

watching waves
on the beach
in a cup

*

morning fog
the old zinc bucket
behind everything

*

spring rain
the graffiti of dead boys
looks new again

*

the funeral
only the dead man
knows everyone

*

night beach
ancient female
thunder

*

all night
dark waves crash saying
she  she  she

*

leaving the gym
still dark
inside my body

*

even your eyelids
taste her
crashing morning waves

*

3 a.m. gym
a few satyrs
frown at each other

*

August street
children and flies
bug a dead cat

*

Christmas snow
cats glower
at carolers

*

naked cop
without his gun
feels naked

*

making the best
of a bad century
Mae West

*

everyone sees
the rain fall but no one
sees it rise

*

no longer calling
the last crickets
listen

*

all the past days–
are they tight sardines
or gone clouds

*

sardine tin–
death makes
strange bedfellows

*

old man
staring at a tin of sardines
remembers an orgy

*

long drive home
headlights narrow
his feeling

*

an apple
so perfect
my hunger fades

*

dark river
chuckles on stone steps
all night long

*

old men piss
slow at racetrack urinals
dreaming of speed

*

night horsetrack
the odds of everything
hide in a fog

*

young soldiers dead…
on a battlefield crows jingle
their good luck charms

*

rehab clinic
at dawn the erections
dream of home

*

too tired to explain
he gets another tattoo
instead

*

in the bar
he lets his tattoos
do all the work

*

bar’s alpha
even his arm cast
collects phone numbers

*

breeze in night’s screen door:
he watches dark willows
change clothes like women

*

after the crash
his shoes stayed on the back porch
all winter

*

small wings
in the candle wax
summer night

*

summer night
the kitchen’s cricket
getting closer

*

kitchen-trapped cricket
pretends not to care
he’s dateless

*

some dates
just end badly   a cricket
in a kitchen

*

be gentle
with our kitchen’s cricket
the dateless wonder

*

summer crickets
under the stars
dateless wonders

*

night fishing
a cigarette glows
twice

*

the best part
of being a cricket
you’re never lost

*

horny crickets
all night tell
absolutely anyone

*

Sunday dawn
crickets who struck out
finally shut up

*

he sprays his mom’s
favorite perfume on her ashes
before guests

*

my dead mother
atomizing
in my memory

*

summer hookup
she makes love to his tattoos
not him

*

watching sparrows
not knowing
what i am

*

a tugboat
far below this hill
slowly pulls my mind

*

freezing night
a far dog barks
at lowness

*

a loon’s cry…
dead friends
listen through me

*

deep ocean
dreamless sharks
made of time

*

no one left
she talks
to the house

*

morning fog
freshens the graveyard
behind town

*

deer in the yard
a ninety-year-old
raps on the glass

*

a psych textbook
titled YOUR PROJECTIONS
ABOUT THE MOON

*

she comes home
from the library
younger with grass stains

*

a man jumps
from a bridge some birds
briefly join him

*

we talk
behind its back
the childless apple

*

dawn branches
a bunch of birds call bullshit
on night

*

night auction
more chairs
than his funeral

*

flea market
checking each link
in a stranger’s necklace

*

balloons trapped
in a hospital room
barely breathing

*

husband to husband–
all the picture frames
she gives away

*

rain on the roof
a story fainter
every year

*

polite smiles
people give milk glass
as they pass

*

deep under
the alphabet
the animals

*

the only one
children love in a graveyard
the snowman

*

we pass the cemetery
and think
no porch light

*

August cicadas
our ice cream
shedding its skin

*

after feeding pigeons
she feeds the coworkers
on Ambien

*
separate beds
separate checkbooks
same young lover

*

swimming in
the dead neighbor’s pool
her moonlight’s nicer

*

breaking up
still, they smile that their bed
has a limp

*

autumn sunlight
even the leaves know
they’re toast

*

in your sleep
you talk to years
without their skin

*

not a total loss:
Gettysburg
National Park

*

your death too
is the leaves
changing color

*

hating the world so
while he’s held in warm arms,
her lover the chihuahua

*

such angelic carving
a big bed goes traveling
divorce by divorce

*

ginkgo leaves
things won’t say
how old they are

*

after a week
of constant snow
expect mice

*

some words can squeeze
through holes much smaller
than themselves

*

the things
mice must think about holes
squeezing through!

*

two floors down
a murder
sounds like a dance

*

boy’s first time
and she’s pregnant…
deer taste moonlight

*

a touch
on the shoulder a leaf
in the graveyard

*

it’s raining outside
leaking inside
we’re making love

*

sniffing his shirt
left here years ago
a Golden Fleece is born

*

a swampy new love
she doesn’t check her mailbox
for days

*

animal eyes
in the zoo thinking man
this is a long visit

*

a breakup:
don’t click, call or visit
beloved emptiness

*

her mother’s hand
on the old man’s hand
that painted a rice grain

*

on his grave
we leave a geranium
armpit stank he loved

*

quiet house
cicadas louder
than the t.v. news

*

waking up
worried about bussing
my dream’s plates

*

abandoned orchard
deer thank no one
for cool moonlight

*

the sunflowers
nothing here
is old

*

Arles tour bus
sunflowers on the side
lost faces in windows

*
a small girl
is in love with sunflowers
half her age

*

brushing it off
an aroused firefly
lighting her breast

*

Arles
blue sky
begins to hiss

*

night sky
stars heat up
the sky boils

*

jar of fireflies
on a windowsill Vincent paints
Starry Night

*

U.S. puzzle toy
some wooden states
keep falling out

*

waking to no name
the cream rises
over the milk

*

fireflies
in a paper cup
still warm

*

after a late walk
your foliage
next to mine

*

frog’s splash
then endless commentary
of toads

*

how young they seem–
dust motes turning
in sunbeams

*

streetlight in fog
a bat passes by
dreaming hello

Frameless Sky

I'm happy to have had some writing accepted for Frameless Sky, "a Japanese short-form poetry video journal."

Many thanks to editor Christine L. Villa.

I love her "Trust me. I'm a haiku poet." shirt.

Dark Veined

Dark little pond
sky rains into you
the night is
sneaking into you
manmade pond
between the interstates
you twinkle
with parking lot lights
of dusted motels
one side
of the highway talks
after a stroke
each room
with a faulty light
twinkles
each television
and each gust
between the sliding glass
the body’s
interstate stares
into you

Some Poetry Acceptances

I'm very happy to have had work accepted this week for upcoming issues of Presence (U.K.) and Failed Haiku.

Presence is a print journal. I would highly recommend subscribing if you enjoy haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun and related forms of poetry. Ian Storr makes great selections, so I find myself returning to the journal for multiple readings. Each issue has the richness you'd expect of an anthology.

Failed Haiku (the title is a sly way to tell you the magazine publishes senryu) is consistently exciting and brash. I've never visited the site and not had a great time and had my mind expanded in the bargain. Mike Rehling does a wonderful job of editing that every month (yes, it comes at you roughly every thirty days!)

May's issue of FH is being edited by the wonderful Kala Ramesh. There's a metaphysical quality to many of her haiku, so I look forward to seeing how the issue shapes up. Here's a really interesting essay by Ramesh, "Silences as Seen in Indian Aesthetics.  

Floated-Outside-It Haiku

gentle rain
into the river
barely talking

*

meteor shower
somehow somehow
the promise

*

having died
long before this Monet
we’re evenly matched

*

distant night train
an egg’s armor
begins to crack

*

green peeling staircase
paint every year
greener in memory

*

invisible girl
orange peels
for a city block

*

finding purple shells
low tide babbling
in our purple prose

*

watch a snake…
imagine it with hands
smacking its rosary

*

a loving mother
eats her children’s
gnat clouds

*

t.v. news
moth’s searing love of the bulb–
forgotten safeword

*

before he jumps, his joy
knowing a dark river
feels nothing

*

antifreeze leaks
the moon’s reflection
in a cold puddle

*

you wake to a mirror
speaking an unknown dialect
of moonlight

*

distant gunshot
so far away the sound
a lid crawling off

*

soft shell crab night–
we hear someone
eating a coffin

*

bacon strip
you eat a pig’s burn
ape orgasm

*

high school years later
lab’s floating pig fetus
only face i recall

*

buying meal worms on credit
he realizes his children
are watching

*

dark parked car
playing Bizet for fireflies
no one else

*

Christmas morning
dark centuries
open their presence

*

walking home alone
leaving drunk fireflies clearly
trying too hard

*

waking at night
promising darkness
things, things

*

fireflies
just seem to want more
every year

*

night airport
tired moonlight
coming and going

*

bales of hay
the crow at morning
a preacher

*

crickets in frost
cross the same field as me
as zero

*

dark autumn pond
reflections misquoting
like the rest of us

*

night hires
standing at the door
more reptile jackets

*

shuttered GOLD’s gym
geese preen in the lot
clones stretching

*

summer pond
child asks a small fish:
“which one’s your mother?”

*

beery winds
through dark branches
of downtown trees

*

twenty minnows
swam into me tonight
then a huge moon

*

balcony slouching a woman slouching there on it smoking made of straw

*

desert winds
tree widows their branches
moaning Kama Sutra

*

two story trees
violet membranes
bottled-up in paint

*

abandoned merely
cuz she is a skeleton
poor tree

*

juicy plum
(the joke in stars)
anything waits

*

spring breeze
you suddenly realize
he’s older on top

*

charles schwab
downtown wall fakes
lower case airs

Twenty-One Book Suggestions Towards Creating a Haiku Library

ELH, English-language haiku, has been a leopard changing its spots for a little over a century now (some might argue longer and cite a very few distant outliers). From what was arguably a fraught beginning, marred by facile and obtuse attempts to pedantically imitate Japanese haiku by doing what amounted to “bad remixes,” English- language haiku grew to find its own way of doing things, and in time it was truer to the spirit of Japanese haiku by accepting what could be carried over into English and rejecting what could not. This synthesis produced strong new voices rather than pallid echoes.

The past several decades have been an increasingly fertile period for English language- haiku, and several landmark anthologies have been published fairly recently. ELH has continued to mutate, and interesting new species (more surreal haiku, more L=A=N=G-inflected, multilingual, etc.) can be found every day now in the grasses of the open fields, grazing on the past but living very much in the present.

For explanations of why contemporary haiku is seldom written in the 5–7–5 syllabification you might have been taught in elementary school, a quick internet search will lead you to a broad choice of articles explaining the fundamental differences between Japanese and English, and how the differences in these languages militate against this. (Short answer: it leads to “clunky” haiku and the idea of a haiku as a “single breath” is stressed to its breaking point.)

I wanted to share a brief list of twenty-one books from my nascent haiku library. The titles listed here range from the classics to the contemporary. I am only a handful of years into my exploration of haiku, so this is not a list where omissions have been made from a place of felt omniscience. Glaring omissions could very well be charged to ignorance. This is simply a list of books I love and ones that I return to repeatedly. Perhaps you will find titles included here you wish to seek out. If so, the list will have served its simple and humble purpose.

There are so many other great titles in my collection (not included here) to which I return fairly constantly, but I wanted to limit the list to a manageable size. I believe many if not the majority of these titles are still in print. For the titles not in print, most are easy to find through the major online secondhand retailers for a very good price. A very few might be slightly more scarce, but they do pop up somewhat regularly on the same sites at very reasonable prices.

1. Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013).

“More than 800 poems originally written in English by over 200 poets.” Edited by Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland and Allan Burns. Introduction by Billy Collins.

A really gorgeous cross-section of a century of ELH. A landmark anthology.

Representative poems:

summer afternoon…
losing the superball
on the first bounce

— Stanford M. Forrester

the shadow in the folded napkin

— Cor van den Heuvel

so suddenly winter
baby teeth at the bottom
of the button jar

— Carolyn Hall

behind the camera
I face
my family

— Eve Luckring

I meet the twin she
never mentioned the mist
lit briefly by the sun

— Chris Gordon

2. Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku (Turtle Light Press, 2012).

Straight out of Camden, New Jersey, the legacy of Nick Virgilio is a cool shadow made of words that falls over the reader.

His dedication to the art form, and the memory of those he loved, including a brother who was killed in Vietnam, are remarkable. He died way too young, but the careful craftsmanship and deep feeling in the writing are what bring so many haiku lovers back to his work, time and again.

This collection is a free-form biography of the poet and includes roughly seventy pages of Virgilio’s poetry.

Snapshots in words by friends and actual photographic snapshots are included, so you feel you really get to know the man. I ended up coming away impressed with his nearly monastic devotion to his art. It’s clear he was very humble and grounded; the interview with him which is included makes you like him even more.

Representative poems:

taking my picture
with the cardboard president:
this Election Day

morning sun
on the foggy moor:
becoming a child

lily:
out of the water…
out of itself

3. Global Haiku: Twenty-Five Poets World-Wide (Mosaic Press, 2000).

George Swede, a widely-published haiku poet, created this slender anthology with a real literary heft. He chose a small sample of work by twenty-five poets from around the globe. The selections are memorable and the gestalt of the reading experience (so many different takes on what a haiku is) is fertilizing.

Also included is Swede’s essay, “Towards a Definition of the English Haiku,” which makes good, reasonable arguments and is a great introduction to ELH for someone seeking a perceant overview in a short form rather than a disquisition.

Representative poems:

on the second floor
corpse
with the night light on

— Margaret Chula

getting louder
the calf
the auctioneer

— LeRoy Gorman

empty silo — 
spring wind pops the metal
in and out

— Michael Dylan Welch

a mayfly
taps the screen — 
warm beets slip their skins

— Peggy Lyles

4. A New Resonance: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku (the series 1–11, followed by Echoes 1 and Echoes 2). (Red Moon Press, 1999-current day).

This is a really great, ongoing anthology series in which a number of poets (I think it’s seventeen in each volume) are represented by fifteen of their strongest haiku.

Echoes 1 and 2 were follow-up anthologies, seeing where the poets were in their writing process, years later.

I’m still in the process of collecting these as I find them online, and they never disappoint.

The samples below are from A New Resonance 2.

Representative Poems:

all day long
i feel its weight
the unworn necklace

— Roberta Beary

rain stopped
her silk blouse
on the chair

— paul m.

watching carp feed
the lovers
open up

— W.F. Owen

highway’s edge
deer carcass half eaten
by mirage

— Judson Evans

after chemo
wanting only to read
seed catalogs

— Pamela M. Ness

5. Weeding the Cosmos, John Brandi (La Alameda Press, 1994).

John Brandi has his own freewheeling take on the haiku/senryu. He calls his three-liners “twists.” I sense a strong affinity with the Beats’ take on the haiku in these poems.

Brandi can write ravishing haiku in the traditional sense when he wants. It’s just that he likes pushing the envelope too, and more is the delight for readers.

Representative poems:

(unfortunately site formatting here doesn’t allow me to space these exactly right)

Feet stop
but the mind
keeps walking

Autumn haze:
under her robe
a shrine in a clearing

Angry, I walk
through the spider’s web
instead of around

After everyone
is awake
the dog quits barking

6. The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku (White Pine Press, 2005).

This is a really lovely anthology edited by the above-mentioned John Brandi with Dennis Maloney.

Thirteen (yikes!) poets share their work here, and many of them also share (in prose introductions) stories of the path which led them to writing haiku.

I loved all aspects of this book, including the design.

I loved all the poets’ essays, but I was particularly smitten with Margaret Chula’s account of her life in rural Japan.

Representative poems:

winter afternoon
not one branch moves — 
I listen to my bones

— Patricia Donegan

before sleep
he opens the window
to let in the rain

— Penny Harter

elevator silence
our eyes escape
into numbers

— Christopher Herold

the sound
of rain on the sound
of waves

— -Elizabeth Searle Lamb

7. Listen to Light, Raymond Roseliep (Alembic Press, 1980).

Confession: I don’t know much of this poet’s biography yet. I know he’s no longer with us. I just found his take on the haiku (and other short forms included here) refreshingly different.

Representative poems:

wind on the flesh,
what’s left
of the moon

autumn stillness:
the cracks
of your hand

on the night wind
I hear the silver pin
sing in your hip

8. Off the Beaten Track: A Year in Haiku (Boatwhistle Books, 2016).

This gets my vote for the most creative take on the haiku anthology I’ve seen, and perhaps it’s the one truest to the spirit of haiku as a seasonal literary form.

It’s also a very fun anthology with a streak of the perverse running up and down its spine.

The uncredited editor (Hamish Ironside) asked a dozen writers to produce a haiku each day for a particular month to which they had been assigned. Six of the writers were experienced haikuists; the remaining contributors were accomplished writers but relatively new to haiku. This made for a very wild mix. I think of one of those wildflower seed packets you pick up in spring. You have no idea what’s going to grow and that’s part of the fun.

You get a real range of takes on the haiku in this anthology. Momus is even in here. His funny, sometimes cavalier takes on the haiku can seem like wonky paper airplanes purposefully designed to crash as soon as they leave the launcher’s hand. But I think he was having fun with “haiku subversion.”

I’ve returned to this anthology dozens of times and my interest still shows no signs of flagging. I highly recommend this one, as it’s a destabilizing sort of anthology and I think destabilization is good if you’re looking for inspiration in your own writing.

Representative poems:

It’s over on the left,
making a noise like the sea.
Oh, it is the sea!

— Hugo Williams (January)

the surgeon’s wink
just before
I’m under

— Hamish Ironside (February)

tricks of the light snow that tickles your nose

— Matthew Paul (March)

spring sun — 
my shaver changes pitch
as I plug it in

— Michael Dylan Welch

alone on the lawn
with dandelions
in his hands

— Matthew Welton (May)

stretching
my imagination
Venus flytrap

— Christopher Herold (June)

The night is empty.
Birdsong fills it like water,
a shard of water.

— Sally Read (July)

My favorite in the entire collection is

meadow wildflowers

definitely cremation

— George Swede (August)

(sorry…can’t format that correctly on this site…supposed
to just be a few spaces between the first two words and the last two
on a single line).

no rain today
my wife’s blood thinner
than it used to be

— Bob Lucky (September)

A harpsichord might taste
Like an orange
If it was a citrus fruit.

— -Momus (October)

A finger puppet
Of the current president
On the bookshop floor.

— Fabian Ironside (November)

The smell of pine
through the house:
sap like flames

(Eireann Lorsung, December)

9. breathmarks, Gary Hotham (Canon Press, 1999)

This gorgeously-designed, small (6 x 4 inches) book includes eighty haiku and an astonishing number of them feel like instant classics the first time you read them.

Gary Hotham has a different sort of take on the haiku. He doesn’t go for loud color (many of his poems almost feel as though they’re in black and white) or garish effects.

Many of the haiku have an almost Shaker severity to them, but it almost always works in favor of the poems.

I return to this book quite often because I like the different sort of brain waves it helps me reach.

Representative poems:

night comes — 
picking up your shoes
still warm

music two centuries old — 
the color flows
out of the tea bag

one mirror for everyone
the rest stop
restroom

10. Haiku 21: An Anthology of Contemporary English-language Haiku (Modern Haiku Press, 2011).

Edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, this anthology is a bellwether. As the plasticity of the haiku form is explored, dividends are reaped.

Yet the anthology doesn’t have one whit of superciliousness about it; none of it is infected with the “We’re avant-garde and you’re not!” virus. Poems that could have been published in a traditional haiku anthology are also present. I think that statement endorsing coexistence adds a strength to the anthology. It shows an awareness of the healthiness of the continuum.

The only thing that makes something avant-garde, anyway, is a break with expectation. And great haiku (in any period) specialize in that breaking of expectation. So let’s agree great art is great art, and labels are just labels.

Representative poems:

plum blossoms
a specimen of my dream
sent to the lab

— Fay Aoyagi

child’s wake
the weight
of rain

— Francine Banwarth

three oceans
exported into orbit
in a small cocoon

— Richard Gilbert

later you realize it was actually a piece of your own body

— Chris Gordon

quiet graveyard
warm breeze and an end
to alphabetic order

— LeRoy Gorman

fog-bound road — 
walking on the inside of
the inside world

— Caroline Gourlay

spring wind
water in the shape
of fire

— Jim Kacian

words

still pink
close to the bone

— Eve Luckring

into the afterlife red leaves

— Peggy Willis Lyles

sun on the horizon
who first
picked up a stone

— paul m.

lake — someone’s
swimming thru
yr blindness

— John Martone

how deer
materialize
twilight

— Scott Mason

it’s only february comes after it’s only january

— Marlene Mountain

morning after
the mountain comes
to the leaf

— Philip Rowland

three times I’ve said
“your husband…”
now we can just talk

— John Stevenson

a falcon dives
how completely
I surround my bones

— Peter Yovu

11. lakes & now wolves, Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press, 2012).

Scott Metz can write devastating haiku in the traditional mold, but also roves into new plasticities. I find all the sides of his icosahedron interesting.

Representative poems:

mountaintop — 
she silently points to
a glass-bottom boat

without permission part of me begins to bloom

another god
built of words
moon tugging

fallen, trampled moss. the month then the year got away

falling
asleep

on the
bone

of her
edges

12. Haiku (Knopf, 2003).

Edited by Peter Washington, this is part of their Everyman’s Library of Pocket Poets.

It’s a decent little anthology and very easy to find. Before I read them, I feared the translations of the Japanese classics (Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki, etc.) copyrighted by R.H. Blyth back in 1952 might be interpretations which hadn’t aged so well. Yet most of them impressed me. They felt like genuine captures.

Those translations from the Japanese are the bulk of this book. But there is a smaller selection of “Western Haiku,” both traditional, which are mostly “haiku” the editor saw and imaginatively excerpted from lyric poems by poets like Keats, Shelley and Tennyson, and modern, which are more contemporary haikuists like Kerouac, Virgilio and even a few living writers.

This anthology isn’t going to bring you very strongly into a larger sense of the contemporary English language haiku, but it could give you a decent grounding in the history of the art form.

Representative poems:

In the market-place,
The smell of something or other — 
The summer moon

— Boncho

A stray cat
Asleep on the roof
In the spring rain

— Taigi

Do not kill the fly!
See how it wrings its hands,
Its feet!

— Issa

a phoebe’s cry…
the blue shadow
on the dinner plates

— Anita Virgil

13. favor of crows, Gerald Vizenor (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).

First, let me specify that I’m not going to be able to format Vizenor’s haiku properly, because of the site formatting here. He has the three lines centered in his haiku. So just imagine that slight shift.

Vizenor writes what I think of as traditional haiku and does it very well.

At first, I thought maybe this collection was too traditional, too staid. And then the silences in the poems began to grow on me and in me. And he does have a playful side. I ended up returning to the book frequently.

maple leaves
frozen in the river ice
come ashore

every footprint
erased by the gentle waves
tease of creation

party moths
danced last night in a lantern
sunrise stories

cold rain
old woman walks a mongrel
scent of cedar

14. Haiku: Poetry Ancient & Modern (Tuttle Publishing, 2002).

The anthologist here, Jackie Hardy, came up with a great organizing principle for this thick, smaller-sized collection. The five sections of the book are the ancient elements of Taoism: earth, air, fire, water and wood.

Hardy doesn’t allow herself to be tied-down by too-literal a construction of the elements. For example, fire might be the dying sun on the surface of a lake, or embers rather than fire itself. Or it might be fireflies. And so on, throughout the book. You feel the general abidingness of these elements, how they are still the substances by which we live and die. And it’s a great way to connect contemporary haiku to classical forbears. These are things we share with those who lived in distant times. Traditional haiku focuses on just such timeless elements of nature.

The collection includes some stellar Japanese art from centuries past and the design work that went into this volume is substantial. It’s a real looker of a book. But the literature chosen is the real reason to purchase the book. The selections are memorable. The editor’s selections include both classical and contemporary haiku. Basho rubs shoulders with living poets. It’s a great swirl of time.

Representative poems:

WOOD

morning sneeze
the guitar in the corner
resonates

— Dee Evetts

smoothing paper
on my fingertips
the roughness of words

— Jackie Hardy

FIRE

midnight heat
fireflies travel
in the river’s echo

— Humberto Gatica

thirteenth century glass
catches fire
late afternoon

— Katherine Gallagher

EARTH

the cold night
comes out of the stones
all morning

— Jim Kacian

first snow
the neglected yard
now perfect

— Elizabeth Searle Lamb

METAL

loose now
on her knuckle
the thin gold

— Susan Rowley

framing the space
where she once was — 
my mother’s ring

— Don McLeod

WATER

on the rock
waves don’t reach
fresh snow

— Tantan

third year of drought
lake’s slow retreat
into itself

— Jean Jorgensen

15. haiku mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart (Shambhala, 2008).

Poet Patricia Donegan collects some of her favorite poems in this volume, and gives brief meditations and readings of each poem after the presentation. This format works very well and her selections are sublime.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this book included on many syllabi, since it has great structure and generous explication going for it. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a sequel, since I believe this book has enjoyed a wide popularity.

Donegan is very conversant in the history of Japanese haiku, but also very aware of contemporary Japanese haiku. So there is a respectful inclusion of a significant number of writers from Japan, living and dead. I really liked that about this anthology.

Representative poems:

shaking
the packet of seeds
asking, are you still alive?

— Kiyoko Tokutomi

disgusting — 
people arguing over
the price of orchids

— Shiki

moonlight — 
through thin clothes
to naked skin

— Hisajo Sugita

16. Feathers from the Hill, W.S. Merwin (included in Flower & Hand, Copper Canyon Press, 1997).

America just lost one of its greatest poets with the recent death of Merwin. Arguably “our Neruda,” albeit just a bit darker, his poetry had real range, and the collection of haiku he published in 1978 with Windhover Press, Feathers from the Hill, is an underated classic (well, underrated when it’s not missed entirely, as it usually is).

I list the Copper Canyon compilation volume which includes this book above, since that book is much easier to find and much more affordable than the scarce first appearance of the title.

Merwin is still Merwin in these poems, but he wisely respects the subtractions haiku asks of us, in order to get to the piths of nature and consciousness. That’s why this large collection of haiku works so well.

Representative poems:

Solitary wasp writes
white eggs
up south window

Even among spoons
favorites emerge
days rising through water

The landlord’s children
lock up their dog
and shout at it

Towards the sea
wings of flies
flash with sunset

When it says
good-bye
say thank you

In the samples from the book above, I would cite numbers two and five as Merwinized haiku. The other three I would consider closer to pure haiku. I enjoy feeling that tension in the book between the desire for Merwin to be Merwin and the desire for Merwin to let the haiku completely take over.

17. Book of Haikus, Jack Kerouac (Penguin, 2003).

Kerouac went his own way with pretty much everything he did in writing, and aren’t you glad he did? Right down to the incorrect but oh-so-him plural of haiku.

I love haiku books that are the size of a slice of bread and this is one of those.

Kerouac is generally considered an important shaper of the contemporary haiku. He had his own agenda, his own conception of Buddhism, and his own love of freedom. Probably the last of the three turned out to be the most felicitous part of his arsenal when it came to writing haiku. I don’t think people read Kerouac’s haiku today for the Buddhism (although I could be wrong). I think probably most people read his haiku for the pleasure and the shifts in consciousness it can engender.

He was clearly a natural, an adept. But he did a lot of growing too, probably helped by his careful study of his own process.

I love that the editor of this collection, Regina Weinreich, decided to throw everything, even the kitchen sink haiku, in here. She was going to make a selective cut of Kerouac’s haiku, but then decided against it. I’m glad she did. It’s nice to be able to make up our own minds.

Kerouac sometimes wrote traditional haiku, and some of those hang with the best of them. But he also wrote very Kerouac haiku that hang in space also, and are very nervy and alive.

In brief, it’s the stuff.

Representative poems:

New neighbors
 — — light
in the old house

All that ocean of blue
soon as these clouds
pass away

Train tunnel, too dark
for me to write that
“Men are ignorant”

All day long wearing
a hat that wasn’t
on my head

The birds
surprise me
On all sides

18. Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Basho (Knopf, 2018)

Probably everyone literate realizes by now what a great translator David Young is.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to reckon it, these Basho translations are your chance.

The respect Young accords previous translators, and especially the late Jane Reichold, is rather touching. He even includes an appendix in which you can cross-reference his translations to hers (from 2008).

I was really moved to see the warm reception given Basho with this new set of translations. The book has been roundly appreciated. Pick it up and you’ll see why.

Representative poems:

(apologies again for format disrespect as the site won’t allow me to present these in the terraced form Young presents them in his book)

Octopus in a jar
briefer dreams
summer moon

Loving this
snow aroma
singing wind

First rain of winter
today’s a day
people get older

Everyone in this house
has gray hair, walks with a cane,
visits the graveyard

Sight of that mountain
makes me forget
I’m getting old

19. The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999 version).

If you’re only going to buy a very small handful of haiku anthologies, this should definitely be one of them.

This anthology went through several re-edits in its decades-long evolution. It was first published in 1974. The version I have was published in 1999. That’s the third manifestation of the anthology. It’s now more than three hundred pages. I wouldn’t want to cut anything. It’s a vade mecum.

The poets who made their name after that date (1999) are obviously not going to be included here. But there’s so much strong work collected here.

Editor Cor van den Heuvel did a fantastic job of creating a sense of the haiku as a vehicle for the metaphysical. Or that’s my reading of this anthology, anyway, because so many of the haiku selected seem to be reckoning the quantum world-view which was replacing the prior paradigm.

Representative poems:

inside
the hailstone
ripples on a pond

— Carl Patrick

morning surf
a dog fills the sky
with seagulls

— Jim Boyd

I hear her sew
I hear the rain
I turn back a page

— LeRoy Gorman

Half of the minnows
within this sunlit shallow
are not really there.

— J.W. Hackett

the haiku
completely gone
by the time I’ve dried my hands

— Karen Sohne

Darkening
the cat’s eyes:
a small chirp

— Anita Virgil

20. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa (Ecco, 1994).

I’m a fan of Robert Hass’s poetry and I like having a number of different translations of classical haiku to compare.

I think sometimes Hass is a little wordier with his translations for the sake of drawing clearer pictures of what he believes to be happening in the poems. Sometimes vagueness in haiku is a friend. But sometimes a Hass translation finds something in the original text you didn’t see in the other translations. And many of the translations are memorable and stick with one, probably because of the poet’s strong ear.

This volume contains some great ancillary features on each of the major poets translated here, excerpts from Issa’s journals and Basho’s diaries and from Buson’s New Flower Picking. So that’s all the more reason to add this fine collection to your library.

Representative poems:

Even in Kyoto
hearing the cuckoo’s cry — 
I long for Kyoto

— Basho

A gust of wind
whitens
the water birds

— Buson

The pheasant cries
as if it just noticed
the moutain

— Issa

21. The Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku (Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1993).

I very much admire this anthology edited by Bruce Ross.

It’s over three hundred pages of haiku, largely in the traditional sense. The consistency of the editorial choices makes one realize that an anthology composed pretty much entirely of haiku written as they were written centuries ago in Japan can still be a very impressive thing, a significant aesthetic and spiritual experience for the reader.

It’s not that the poems in the anthology shun features found in the modern landscape that would not have been present in the past. There are images of such things in some of the poems included here. It’s that even when such things are present in the haiku, they are still functioning in the manner of images in poems written several centuries ago in Japan. The traditional haiku poem has a sort of ancient math it does. The juxtaposition at the heart of the traditional haiku, that shifting at the point of its sudden turn, is a sort of equation and inequality at once. Well-written haiku sometimes almost give me a sense of deju vu, the feeling that my life has been lived before and elsewhere. We know that, in a way, our life has been lived before. But not quite. It’s that little bit of “not quite” that is the spiritual backbone of the haiku. The poems in this anthology mine that “not quite” so well. This is how tradition that follows the rules may continue without becoming boring. This is not a boring anthology. But it is a traditional one. 

I return to this anthology when I feel I might be losing focus and getting too far afield of the haiku’s origin. I find it helpfully clarifying and inspiring at those times.

Representative poems:

no two falling
the same way
cherry petals

 — Brent Partridge

utterly still
the bluejay cries
utterly what i am

 — Bob Boldman

it’s a wonder
the wind doesn’t take it
the cat’s shadow…

 — -June Moreau

march winds…
the mailbox
also moans

Elizabeth St. Jacques

cool morning
colors slide
up and down the spider’s thread

 — Peter Yovu

Post-script: If you have any recommendations for haiku anthologies you think are indispensable, feel free to leave a comment below. I realize there are thousands of books and chapbooks by individual haiku poets I have yet to reckon, but I figure anthologies are fewer in number, and a great shortcut to figure out whose work you want to seek out and read more in depth. I am always looking to grow my collection. I am ever grateful for all the free pdfs of books available for perusal at the website of the Haiku Foundation. I would recommend that site.

Chrysanthemum (Germany)

I'm a reader and fan of Chrysanthemum, a dual-language, German-English poetry magazine.

I was happy to learn I will have poetry in an upcoming issue of the journal.

And your work, if accepted, gets a courtesy translation into German. How cool.

Thanks to editors Beate Conrad and Klaus-Dieter Wirth.

I'm Very Happy to Have Had Some Monoku Accepted into Under the Basho 2019

I'm very happy to have had some monoku accepted into the ongoing Under the Basho project.

I linked you to the main page for the magazine/archive, since there are so many great categories of related literary forms to explore there. I really look forward to going deeper into that archive.

Thanks to poet/editor Johannes S.H. Bjerg, whose writing always draws me into his conversations with form and its malleabilities.

Poetry Forthcoming in Shamrock Haiku Journal

I'm grateful to have had work accepted for an upcoming issue of SHJ, an international journal of haiku, senryu and haibun.

Many thanks to editor Anatoly Kudryavitsky.

I'm a fan of this magazine.