Original subtitles

So thank you all for joining us today.

I'm Amanda Lynn Patton, Tricol's Associate Web Editor, and I'm pleased to

here with you today for Mastering the Art of Haiku, a workshop with Clark

Strand.

So we'll be leaving time for questions at the end of this hour -long session,

and you can ask a question by typing it into the Q &A tab at the bottom of your

screen, and we'll get to as many of your questions as we can.

And today's Zoom session will be recorded, so we'll share the replay link

follow -up email with everyone.

So my guest today is Clark Strand.

Clark is a former senior editor at Tricycle, as well as the author of

books, including Seeds from a Birch Tree, Writing Haiku and the Spiritual

Journey, and The Way of the Rosary, The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine

Hidden in the Rosary.

which was co -authored with his wife, Perdita Finn.

So Clark has 45 years of experience writing haiku, and he teaches the

Facebook group Weekly Haiku Challenges with Clark Strand, and he leads

Tricycle's Monthly Haiku Challenge, as well as the Tricycle Haiku Challenge

Facebook group.

So we'll post a link to Clark's online course with Tricycle, which is titled

Learn to Write Haiku, and we'll share a link to Tricycle's Monthly Haiku

Challenge.

Both of those will be in the chat if you're interested.

And that is all from me for now. So thank you so much for joining us, Clark.

I'll hand it over to you.

Thanks, Amanda.

Hi, everybody.

And we're going to spend the next hour learning about haiku and writing haiku

together. I'm going to assume that some of you know a bit about haiku. Some of

you may know a lot about it. But some people may be coming at it fresh.

So I want to start today by...

Before we talk about anything else, the history of haiku, some other useful

information about it,

how it's developed to where it stands today, I want to talk a little bit about

just the first simple three rules of haiku. We call them rules,

but every rule is meant to be broken sometimes.

And the only rule that really has held true for haiku over the very long course

of its history is...

That a haiku is whatever you can get away with in 17 syllables.

Really, it's just that simple.

It's a very playful art form.

It is a form that invites people to try it out because it's so short and so

simple. And yet its challenges are endless, right?

The challenge is always to say in 17 syllables something that has more than

syllables of meaning.

So I'm going to screen share for just a second.

And we're going to look, we're going to start just by looking at a haiku. This

was actually the first haiku that I assigned, right? The first season where

used for the tricycle challenges when they started a couple of years ago was

Summer Sky.

So this is a poem by Billy Collins.

Going to find it here.

Hold on a second.

There we go.

Okay, just one second.

Doing the usual sort of screen share thing here.

All right.

There we go.

All right, can everybody see that?

The three rules of haiku.

The 575 syllable form.

All right, classical Japanese haiku written in 17 sounds divided into

units of five, seven, and five syllables.

There's a pause in there somewhere, usually after the beginning of the first

the second line, although in English oftentimes we see a pause in the middle

the second line.

The inclusion of a season, right, a season word, a seasonal reference.

And last is a turn or twist of thought.

And here is a wonderful haiku by United States poet laureate,

former poet laureate, Billy Collins.

This was published in the spring of 2015 in the literary magazine

Ravel in their tribute to Japanese form issue.

In the summer sky, a cloud with its mouth open eats.

a smaller cloud, okay?

In the summer sky, a cloud with its mouth open eats

a smaller cloud.

This is what Collins said about this poem.

He said, I follow the 17 -syllable limit because it provides me with a

pleasurable feeling of pushback, a resistance to whatever literary whims I

have at the time.

If you want to create a little flash of illumination, the haiku tells us, start

by counting on your fingers.

A three -line poem with a frog is not necessarily a haiku. Of course, he's

alluding to Baccio's famous poem about the frog jumping into the old pond and

making the sound of water like a plop.

So let's look at this haiku in terms of the three basic principles of haiku, the

three rules.

The opening line establishes a season word, one of the two main rules of

haiku. So the season word here is summer sky.

We'll talk a little bit more about season words in a few minutes, but let's

see, you know, a haiku in action and a season word in action.

In the summer sky, the words also...

naturally fall within a rhythm of five, seven, five syllables.

It's not enough just to cram a haiku with 17 syllables in any random order.

The idea is to make them fit artfully. If you read the poem out loud to

a few times, you'll see that there's a feeling of inevitability to the rhythm,

right? It seems to sit naturally within the form.

Okay, so far so good.

Meeting those requirements qualifies the poem as a haiku. I can't stress this

enough. The bar for haiku has traditionally been set very, very

low. This is a poetic form, right? To fulfill the basic requirements of that

form in its classical iteration simply means writing a poem, any poem, in 575,

including a season word.

It may not be a very good haiku, certainly not a masterful haiku. In this

it's quite good, but you don't have to.

produce a masterpiece every time you do this. And in fact, what we'll learn to

do today is to, you know, sort of put our inner editor on hold, but that

part of our brain that judges what we're writing sort of in the back seat and

just play, right? The word haiku means literally playful verse.

Hai means playful or comical, casual.

Sometimes people translate it that way.

Ku means verse. So haiku means a playful art form, playful verse form.

So to make a successful haiku requires a third element, what

Collins calls a little flash of illumination.

In Japanese circles, it is called haiku humor, a form of laughter that vectors

off in elusive or unexpected directions.

This is the turn of thought.

that gives the 17 syllables more than 17 syllables of meaning.

Now, the trick of a good haiku, right, is to satisfy the basic requirements of

the form, but more than that, to produce a poem that has what Basho called

surplus meaning, right?

It's like the, if any of you are Doctor Who fans, it's like the TARDIS. It's

bigger on the inside.

than it is on the outside. On the outside, a haiku has very small

It's just, you know, five by seven, basically. Five syllables by seven

syllables, right?

Five syllables wide and seven syllables deep, right?

But on the inside, there's a whole world that we enter into. In this case, poets

looked up at the summer sky and seen a cloud, right? He's engaging in a pastime

that, you know, has amused children and adults for...

probably going all the way back to the upper Paleolithic, you know, when people

began to interact with the natural world in a sort of a mythic way, imaginative

way. Look up at the sky and we see shapes in the sky, often animals.

Cloud animals is a season word for summer, by the way.

Right. Because it's a time when we're more likely than not to sit outside and,

you know, leisure, maybe at the beach or, you know, while hiking to gaze up at

the sky and to contemplate what we see there in a relaxed, creative,

sort of way.

So Collins looks up and he sees a cloud and one, it looks vaguely like a fish

perhaps. And one end of the cloud seems to have its mouth open and then

gradually it overtakes.

another smaller cloud and eats it, right? Now that alone is delightful.

There's that element of haiku humor to the poem.

And so we immediately, when we first read it, we're engaged immediately just

the level of enjoyment, right?

But the more we begin to think about it, you know, there are other levels to the

poem. Every good haiku has two or three different levels.

And so, you know, the more we look at it, the more we begin to have thoughts

like, right, the big fish.

eat the little fish, even in the sky.

The big fish eats the little fish, even in the sky.

And if we push it a little further, right, and we give it a Buddhist

then we end up with something like, you know, the ceaseless drama of eating and

conquest and domination and the big fish eating the little fish and all the

elements of social Darwinism, all of that takes place against the backdrop of

perfectly blue sky.

All of these things are actually quite empty when we look at them deeply and

pierced to their essence.

So this is an example of a very fine haiku written not by an ancient or

modern Japanese poet, but by an accomplished poet writing in the English

language. Okay.

So let's talk a little bit about these three rules.

First of all, you're never...

ever really truly going to master them. What we master when we master haiku,

right? To master the art of haiku is simply to learn to write haiku every

right? For pleasure, for enjoyment, as a spiritual practice perhaps, as a

practice of mindfulness or awareness.

And so we don't necessarily have to produce a masterpiece every day or even

something, you know, that we necessarily want to share or publish, but something

that we find satisfying.

I've been writing haiku for 45 years, but what that really means is that I

every day at least one haiku that I like, right? I don't stop until I've

produced a haiku that I like.

If I like it a lot, I'll share it with other people on social media or I'll

write a postcard or maybe submit it to an anthology or a magazine or something

like that. But the point is not to get the poem published or even necessarily

share it. The foundation of writing haiku is to write haiku every day.

Now, my teacher's teacher.

A Zen master named Soen Nakagawa Roshi once

told my teacher who asked him about haiku and how to master the art of

haiku. He was asked, well, Roshi, what should I do to master the art of haiku?

Because Soen is a famous haiku poet in Japan.

And he said, mastering haiku is easy.

Just write 10 ,000 of them.

Mastering haiku is easy.

Just write 10 ,000 of them. Ask my teacher, did you do that? And he said,

Well, I did actually do that. And I took him quite seriously. I received this

transmission when I was still quite young and it really stuck with me. I

kept count. Like I never like, you know, marked off, you know, hashtags, right?

It's not like being in prison and counting down the days until you're

into some state of mastery.

It's more like a daily habit of writing haiku, a lot of haiku.

Like the one haiku that I will write down in my little five -year diary at

end of every day, maybe one of 20 haiku I've written during the day.

All you need to write haiku really is a pen and a paper or the notes app on your

phone or just some place to record your musings in a playful way.

But basically all you really need is this. I call this the five -finger

inexhaustible sketch pad.

5, 7, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Interestingly, a few years ago at Stanford University, they study about

counting.

It was thought for a long time that children who learned basic

arithmetical functions by counting on their fingers, right? But it was thought

that it slowed them down.

So some educational researcher decided to test this out and see if that was

actually true. What they found was just the opposite, that those children who

learned to perform counting and basic mathematics using their fingers, right,

right at the very beginnings, they were just learning to count and to add and

subtract, actually scored higher later in life on higher mathematical

So they wondered why this was. So they did brain scans and discovered that

finger manipulations are tied to higher levels of spatial and

mathematical capabilities, right? It also is the section of the brain that

controls musical ability, musical talent, right?

Facility with reading notes and playing music.

And so when we think about that in poetic terms, basically what that means

that you are engaging in a kind of a mindfulness practice

keyed to language when you count syllables on your finger, right? So

far from sort of slowing you down or putting you in a straitjacket or

like that, you are engaging with the part of your brain that makes language

music or poetry.

So let's talk a little bit about these three rules and where they come from. Go

back in history a little bit.

Starting around probably at least 13 or 1400 years ago, Japanese people began

to compose songs, right? Oral compositions in units of five

syllables and seven syllables.

The typical song was very short.

Five, seven, five.

And then maybe another verse, five, seven, five, seven, seven.

So it was almost like iambic pentameter is in English, right? Or blank verse,

the way Shakespeare wrote, just a basic rhythm of English.

Right?

That basic rhythm underlies most spoken English throughout the world.

It's not, you know, exactly that rhythm, but it's the rhythm that's most often

to occur.

It's like this in Japanese. In Japan, even today, you know, you'll see, hear

jingles that are written in 575, right? You'll see advertisements that take that

form, right? It's a sort of, it's a structure that underlies language and

therefore undergirds a thought.

in Japan among the Japanese people. So they began to compose these songs.

Very early on, they discovered the capacity for playing a kind of a

game with this form.

And so one person would compose a verse of 575 syllables and would

invite another person to complete the poem, giving it a little twist, a little

clever twist on the meaning of the original.

by adding a 14 -syllable verse of seven and seven syllables together.

And so you would end up with a complete poem with two authors.

And so this playful collaborative art form is really the

basis for haiku.

Over the years, what happened was...

people decided that this was so much fun, right? It was such a challenge,

little word game that you played with somebody else, that they wanted to bring

in more people.

And so rather than just two poets composing a poem together like this,

would get a whole group of poets together, right? Sometimes two or three,

sometimes more, maybe 10, maybe 100.

And they would compose long poems that began 5 -7 -5, then 7 -7, 5 -7 -5,

7 -7, and so on.

It was a kind of a plotless narrative that developed.

Because the Japanese people were so closely keyed into seasonality, to the

passing of the seasons, right? It was a very animistic culture in which very

intimately and closely related to nature and the changes of nature, subtle

changes of nature taking place every day, that they would make the seasons

subject of this narrative. So it's kind of a circular narrative that would go

through all the different seasons over the course of this poem.

There wasn't much plot to it. The only real rule was that your verse could only

complete the verse that directly came before it. In other words, you were

collaborating in a kind of a jazz improvisational way with the poet who

written the verse directly before yours.

And then another poet would come along and compose a verse to follow yours.

This is where haiku originated.

What we call haiku today was simply the opening verse, the hoku, or first

verse, of a long, collaborative, linked verse poem called a ringa.

Basho was a master of haikai no ringa, or comical linked verse,

right? He was, this was his job, this was what he did. He traveled all over

place having verse writing parties with people.

He was a kind of, we call him a haiku master today, but really he was more of

master of ceremonies. He would go and he could travel around and convene these

verse writing parties. People would come to learn, they would come to pool their

poetic resources, have fun together, and sometimes produce great masterpieces.

As time went on, people began to realize there was something special about that

opening verse that set it apart.

from all the verses that followed it. And so they began to compose them on

own, verses of five, seven, and five syllables.

The rule for starting a Renga, the rule for this Hoku was that it be five,

seven, five syllables, and it include a reference to the season that was

happening right then, right? Something from the season. It might be the autumn

moon. Or at this time of year, it could be the first crickets, something like

that. And so it would compose that verse.

But there was one more rule.

And that was because it had no verse before it, because it was the first

right? It didn't play off anything else.

It had to be able to stand alone.

Let's think about that for a second.

In these longer collaborative compositions, right, none of the verses

designed to stand alone because they're all playing off the verse that came

before them, right?

But the hoku couldn't do that. And so it had to contain a kind of a twist or a

turn of thought within itself.

And so the trick became, just what it is today, to compose a 17 -syllable

poem that contained a little twist or turn or tweak of meaning

that made this tiny little poem explode with meaning.

That's the beauty of it, that a haiku is something so small, but it can be quite

deep, right? You can find yourself stepping off the edge into deep water

sometimes with a really, really beautiful poem.

So let's think a little bit about how that played out.

So haiku is always a social art. Even today on Tricycle, it's a social art,

right? We all write on the same season word every month. We have a kind of an

online community of people who decide for one month that they're going to

on the same theme as everybody else and they submit poems.

Now, because people are submitting so many poems and because we basically kind

of meet only once a month to do this, right?

You know, there aren't... quite so many, you know, opportunities for feedback

and so forth and so on. I'm able to choose one winner and two honorable

and to write something about those poems. Unfortunately, I can't write

of them. But there are other ways in which haiku poets gather together.

I also run a weekly challenge group on Facebook where we do what we do on

Tricycle every week. There's a new season word, and all the members of the

will write on that same season word. Each person can submit up to eight

right? And then I will read through all those hundreds of poems and choose

anywhere from five to 20 poems to write commentaries on.

and then anywhere from 20 to 40 honorable mentions.

And so we create a kind of a poetic community where we're constantly writing

with one another and interacting with one another on these themes. We get to

know people really well in the community like that.

So haiku is a collaborative art form in which we join together, pool our

resources, we inspire one another, and basically we have fun.

Somebody will come into this group or maybe into the year -long master class

that I teach or any of the other sort of haiku formats, the six

-part course that starts next week right on Tricycle, Learn the

Art of Haiku, Learn to Write Haiku, Mastering the Art of Serious Play.

Right.

And they will say, gosh, I'm having such a hard time or I'm so stuck or I can't

think of anything to write. Or, you know, people will will say, you know,

is harder than I thought. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'll

any good.

My answer is always the same.

You're not having fun.

You're not doing it right.

So the answer is always to relax and to play.

Over the years, I have traveled.

all over the place to teach haiku, taught haiku in maximum security

the Juilliard School, in convents and monasteries, public schools.

Some of my favorite venues have been elementary schools.

Because to go in and just explain the very simple principles of haiku, a

word, right? I'm listening now to a, yeah, I'm listening now to a blue jay

calling right there.

Birds are connected to the various seasons.

So it could be anything. The children are very good at going out and spotting

things, you know, seasonal indicators, right, season words.

And they're also very good at counting with their fingers. So they do

well at haiku right from the beginning. I included some.

verses by very young children in my book, Seeds from a Birch Tree, right?

Because I found that they were able to write haiku quite effortlessly because

their ability to play. The inherent playfulness of the form favors a kind of

childlike mind.

So let's talk a little bit about season words because season words are really

sort of the bread and butter of haiku.

One of the biggest differences between the Japanese haiku tradition and the way

it's practiced around the world is the season word.

Japanese have been using these words associated with various seasons, right?

Plants, animals, festivals, holidays, things happening in the heaven, various

types of weather, snow, autumn rain, sleet, right?

Autumn equinox, the winter.

They're solstice, right?

Things that are happening in the heavens, on the earth, in the animal

in the plant kingdom.

You know, the Japanese divide these into various different categories, and they

have whole lists of words under these.

So, for instance, spring might be dandelion, right? Or this time of year,

could be, you know, we're right at the toward the end of summer.

I mean, you know, if you live in America, Americans have, you know, sort

idea that June, July, and August are all summer proper, but the autumn equinox

doesn't really happen until usually somewhere between September 20th and

And so, you know, the true tipping point for the season is a little later than

we imagine it. So we're right on that sort of cusp now. I'm hearing outside on

any given day, cicadas, right?

And also crickets. Cicadas are summer word.

Crickets are for autumn. The two singing insects that overlap somewhat.

So those are two types of season words.

What I'd like for you to do now, because in a few minutes, we're going to

experiment with building our own haiku.

Right. We're going to you're going to suggest some seasonal topics and Amanda

going to come back on live. She's going to tell me what some of those are. We're

going to start to play with some of those words and and try to build one or

haiku, you know, in about 10 minutes or so, just to sort of see how it's done.

It's really pretty easy.

Haiku are easy to write. It might be difficult to, quote, master haiku, to

write, you know, poems that a lot of people read and enjoy and love so much

want to pass them on and share them with other people like you would share a

post on Facebook or Instagram.

But we can begin to write haiku right away.

And who knows, you may get really lucky.

So let's think about the different types of season word.

There's the season proper, right? That includes simply the word summer or

autumn. It can also include the names of the month, August, right?

July, June, right? For autumn, September, right?

So, but beyond that, like things like chill, right? The first to chill,

that's a season word.

Some of you, depending on where you live, may have first felt that first

of autumn already, right? It might have already happened. You might have stepped

outside and gone, oh, gosh, I need to go back in and get a sweatshirt or a

sweater, right? There's that moment that comes when you go, oh, season has

turned, right, or is turning.

So that's the season proper.

Then there's what's happening in the heavens.

This time of year, you know, we're entering into a season where the leaves

going to begin to fall.

And the quality of the air is going to change.

And when you go out at night, you're going to see more stars.

You're going to see more stars because of the crisp clarity of the cool air,

right? The autumn skies at night are often very bright.

And also because there are fewer leaves on the tree.

But there are also many celestial phenomenon happening this time. Harvest

for instance, right? Autumn moon.

And so there are things that are happening in the heavens.

The sky and elements, the category is called in Japanese, and it includes

weather as well. So autumn rain, drizzle, right?

Autumn clouds.

We learn to attune ourselves to what is going on in the world around us through

haiku. And these categories help us to sort of think and conceptualize and

to relate to the different manifestations of the seasons in our

After that, we have the earth, the landscape. Think of it as anything

happening on the ground.

right uh falling leaves right the grass beginning to turn or uh if you know for

late summer depending on where you are we just had a lot of rain in the cat

skills green leaves is a wonderful summer word right myriad green leaves

is the japanese season word for late summer because the leaves are so thick

that sometimes you look up and you can't even see the sky through them

After that, we have humanity.

Now, interestingly, of the six main categories of season words for each

the six categories, only one of them addresses human life. Isn't that

interesting? One in six.

So haiku is not an anthropocentric discipline.

Right? Haiku is really an animistic art form. You're looking around you and

seeing that the world is filled with living things, even things we don't

normally think of as animate, as having life force or volition or identity, as

being sentient. A haiku poet sees as real.

You know, Ito will write a poem about a pebble as if it were a person, right?

I mean, that's the level of intimacy with nature and the natural world that

cultivate as haiku poets.

So what's happening on the earth and the ground is important around us. And the

human element as well is important, but only insofar as it exists as part

of the whole and as it exists in time in this endless, eternal cycle

of the seasons, right?

It's like that Zen circle that you see sometimes painted, right, in black ink.

But it symbolizes, for the haiku poet, that symbolizes not necessarily

emptiness, the enlightened mind, but nature and the cycles of nature, which

eternal. right, and are constantly flowing into one another. One thing is

constantly becoming another.

As a haiku poet, we become highly attuned to that so that even things from

seasonal manifestations of human life, like graduation for late spring,

might as a season word, or various holidays like the 4th of July,

Day, Labor Day.

Labor Day weekend we've just experienced.

So these are part of that cycle. Human life is situated within the

cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that govern the natural cycles of this

world. After that, there are plants, flowers, foods,

various vegetables, and then there are animals.

Traditionally, it is said that the subject matter of haiku, the real

matter for haiku is flowers and birds. Now that's shorthand, right? It's not

just flowers and birds. Flowers and birds are symbols, right, for the beauty

of nature, right? They're symbols for all of life.

And flowers and birds in haiku includes human beings as well, right?

Human beings...

also have their songs. Haiku is like a human bird song.

I think that's sort of where I want to leave us today.

Don't think of this as something difficult, but as something very, very

One time, a few years ago, I was in the habit of giving up early in the morning

before I'd start my day, and I'd go outside and I'd say a mantra, a Buddhist

mantra at that point, and sit out on my back deck.

And, you know, I would chant a mantra. Sometimes it was Namo Amida Butsu. You

know, other times it might be Nam -myoho -renge -kyo or Om -ma -hum -va -ju -hu

-ru -pe -mi -si -dion, right?

And so whatever practice, you know, I might have been doing or experimenting

with at that point, I would go out on the back deck and I would chant.

One day, I got so deeply immersed in the chanting, right as the sun was coming

up. that I found myself lost in it and my eyes closed, maybe even

fallen asleep briefly.

I opened my eyes and along the deck were probably 30 or 40 birds

perched on the railing, all looking at me.

And I was astounded by it. And I thought, why are they here? Why

did they come so close all of a sudden? I've never seen anything like this.

And I thought, what are they thinking?

And then it occurred to me, you know, they're looking at me and they're

thinking, I didn't know you guys had a song.

You make so much noise. It's so chaotic.

But you have a song.

You're just singing your song to me.

So the birds came in, heard me saying, basically, human bird song.

Mantra is like human bird song.

Well, haiku is like a little snatch of song. It's a little snatch of...

of the lost life of things, that sort of essence of human life that we learn

to verbalize by becoming very attuned to nature and to our own true nature.

All right.

So we're right at 436, right on time. So Amanda, have you been gathering some

season words?

All right. We don't have that many in the chat yet.

Do you want to ask participants to send some in? Yeah, why don't you type a few

season words. Look around you and think about those categories and choose

drought, then rain, whales.

Yeah, whales are actually in haiku for reasons I've never quite understood, a

winter season word. But, you know, whale watching, I think there is a case to be

made that whales.

in the United States are maybe a summer season word because people go on whale

watches typically more often at that time of year, at least in the Northeast.

I don't know if they do that on the West Coast as well.

So whales are one.

I'm looking at some of the other words coming in.

Goldenrod, dew.

Dew is a autumn season word, yeah. The first dew drops are beginning to come

now.

So many.

Sound of crickets.

Mist. Fog. Spider web.

Tiny mushrooms. Mushrooms tend to be a late summer or autumn word in Haiku.

Falling leaves.

Bats.

Berries. Geese. Carolina wren. Love Carolina wrens.

Okay. So let's take, this is a classic season word, dew, right?

It's an autumn word.

You know, some people consider it an early autumn word because late autumn,

tends to become more like frost usually, right? But dew forms, you know, the

difference in the early morning as the air becomes saturated and it

condenses on the ground on various different surfaces.

Dew and haiku, as long history as the season word, is generally

associated with the

brevity of life, right?

Dews are symbols of purity, sometimes in some poems, symbols of innocence, but

also they feel very fragile.

One of the most famous poems ever written by a Japanese haiku poet on

dew was by Kobayashi Isa, who wrote this poem after he

lost his second child.

lost his wife and all of his children. They all died before him.

And he wrote this very famous poem. He says, it's

a dewdrop world.

I know it's a dewdrop world.

And yet.

And yet.

It's a dewdrop world.

I know it's a dewdrop world.

And yet.

And yet.

right can't quite get those in english translation can't quite get those last

four syllables into into five right but but you get the idea and japanese is a

very compact simple little poem and he what he's saying is that i know that

as the diamond sutra says all composite things are like a dream a fantasy a

dewdrop and a flash of lightning they are thus to be regarded and yet

I find that so hard to accept.

Beautiful poem of heartbreak and mourning.

Yeah.

So let's write a poem about dew now. So it's just one syllable.

So here's the trick that you'll learn very quickly if you take up the art of

haiku.

Getting a season word to sit comfortably inside of a five syllable phrase.

You're halfway there.

Most Japanese haiku and most haiku in English consists of getting the season

word into a sort of a compact sort of form so that you can then

juxtapose another image with it. Most haiku work through juxtaposition. That

means you give one image, which is usually the season word, and then you

juxtapose another phrase or image with it to bring out its latent meaning.

But if you just have that five syllables with the season word in it, then really

that's kind of all you've got, right? It doesn't really do anything. It just

sort of sits there.

So you have to place it side by side with something that brings out its

So does anybody want to suggest in the chat? I mean, what might we do with do,

right?

Just play with that a little bit.

Throw some ideas out.

What is it about do? What is it called to mind?

Dew on morning grass, a dew drop glistens, renewal.

Dandelion dew, sparkle, transparent. Yeah, transparency is a big part of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, life.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, so.

I like this idea of transparency. I find that the transparency of do, I find the

part of it sort of essential nature.

And yet, if you say just the word do drop, you don't necessarily think

transparent. So that makes it possible to come up with a juxtaposition.

So let's think about that for a second and try to build a haiku off of that

idea. So if you look at a field of do, right, you don't necessarily take

in its transparency.

you have to get actually pretty close to a dew drop to experience it as

transparent, right? Now, this is a classic haiku technique to zoom in on

something very, very small, like a nature photographer who wants to

dew, and rather than photographing a dewy field, right, focuses on one flower

with dew drops on it, right?

Or even on a single drop of dew.

And so let's, for our haiku, do that.

Let's go through. Somebody just wrote magnifies, right?

Transparent.

A transparent lens that magnifies.

Yeah, a transparent lens.

Single drop of dew.

Single drop of dew. So we've decided it's going to be one drop, right?

Single drop of dew. So that's our five -syllable phrase, single drop of dew

that magnifies everything.

Single drop of dew that magnifies everything.

Because what you notice when you look at a single drop of dew, right, is that

because of its convex surface, right, it tends to...

wrap the whole world around it right that magnifies everything

okay now let's think for a second so we've got our first two lines

okay we're not necessarily going to write a masterpiece here but we're going

write something that satisfies the basic requirements of haiku so we've got our

575 syllable form got the first 12 syllables right so and we've got our

word we've got that compact little phrase at the beginning right single

dew that magnifies everything last thing we need is the turn of thought

and we want if possible to uh create something

slightly light right we want to we want something that's

Light heartbeat, but might mean something more. I sometimes say that the

haiku is saying nothing while appearing to say almost, saying something

while appearing to say almost nothing, right?

Saying something while appearing to say almost nothing. So haiku is almost

nothing. It's just 17 syllables. It's this tiny little thing.

So how do you do that with only five syllables to go?

How do you close the deal?

So we've gone into this field.

We've decided we want to write about dew. We've walked out in the morning.

said, I want to write my haiku for the day. And the dew is out. It's beautiful.

I say, I want to write about the dew.

Something about the transparency of the dew, maybe, or its clarity, or the

surface of the dew drop, the way it reflects light or captures light and

right? So we lean down close.

to look at a group of dewdrops and then even closer to get to an

actual dewdrop, whereupon we write the following poem.

What was the first line again?

I've forgotten it. Do you remember, Amanda? Single drop of dew. Single drop

dew that magnifies everything, including...

my nose, right?

Single drop of dew that magnifies everything, including my nose,

right? So getting so close to dew drop that you notice your own face inside of

your own nose because the convex shape is amplified. So there's that humor.

Also has that slightly self -mocking quality that we find used so often in

haiku. Haiku poets love to make fun of themselves, right? Take themselves

lightly. right? That's a central part of the art of haiku. If you study the

haiku of Basho, you know, we have a little over a thousand poems that he

us, a thousand hoku, right?

Really a very, very small number compared to the, you know, 20 ,000

Shiki and, you know, more than that written by Isa, right? But so many of

are such masterpieces. If you look at those poems, you ask how many of them?

are, you know, have this sort of self -satirical sort of quality, you know,

making light of himself, making light of a lot of things, right? And an

enjoyment of light that includes an element of humility about oneself,

right?

So we've written a haiku together, right? So we just started from scratch,

a season word, we thought about it a little bit.

And we put it together in 17 syllables.

So it's really not much harder than that, right?

It's not easier than that. And it's not harder than that. It takes a lifetime

to, quote, master haiku. But the way you master it is by simply everyday writing

haiku. And gradually, you get better and better at it. And over the course of

doing it, you make very, very good friends. Because haiku is a group art,

something we do together and practice together.

So I'm wondering, someone said a single drop of dew that magnifies everything

under my bare feet. Interesting.

Yeah. I think that's maybe, I like that under my bare feet. I would take that.

See, one haiku begets another.

I would take that and make it the basis of a different haiku using dew. Start

with the bare feet, right? And then work the dew in somehow.

So are there any questions?

Mandy, you spot any good questions?

Yeah, so we have a couple questions.

Okay. So one of them from Sally Kwan.

Does the season word always show up in the first line?

No. Season word can come anywhere in the poem.

You know, in classical haiku, the most common place for the season word is in

the first or the third line.

But really, it doesn't matter. It just has to occur somewhere.

In the haiku.

And I'll just throw out there the fact that in a Japanese haiku,

typically only one season word appears in each poem. Otherwise, you don't know

exactly where to look, right?

Haiku tend to have a very crisp, clear focus.

And so you want to know, you know, it's like your touch screen on a

phone, right? When you're using your camera, right, to take a photo.

And you touch on the screen where you want the sharpest focus to be, right?

And Season Word is a little bit like that. It tells the reader where to look.

shows us the part of the poem that has the sharpest focus, the center of

interest in the poem.

So no, but the Season Word can come anywhere.

Okay, we had a few questions that were similar. So this one's from Andrew Adar.

I've always felt that the 17 -syllable rule arose organically from the

particular features of the Japanese language.

Are we being too formalistic and restrictive when we reject English

three -line poems with a season word and an illuminating flash as not haiku

because they break the syllable rule?

Oh, I see. Yeah. Well, this is a big question, but it's only a big question

a fairly small number of people.

The number of people who are writing haiku for and reading

the English language haiku magazines throughout the English speaking world

up to a few thousand people.

Right. And among the what you would call the specialty haiku community, the

people who read a lot of books about haiku and, you know, and have developed

this idea that a haiku in English.

ought to approximate the literal length of a translated haiku in Japanese. It

all gets very complicated and, you know, very expert -driven.

But basically, that is the group of people, the haiku specialists, who

in writing basically short -form or free -form haiku.

But that group constitutes less than 1 % of the general poetry

reading public, 99%.

And this percentage I'm coming up with because, you know, a former president of

the Haiku Society of America, Charles Trumbull, wrote an article, famous

article, about this very subject.

You know, 99 % of the general public believes a haiku to be 5 -7 -5 in

So the average person, if you show them a poem that isn't written in 5 -7 -5 and

call it a haiku, they'll say, no, that's not a haiku. And that may seem very...

limited you know a very limited mindset but here's the trick haiku as it exists

in japan is a popular art form that means that uh you know it's not a

art form that people produce genuine uh profound art using that form but it's

regarded as something that anybody can do So the rules have to be very, very

simple and straightforward.

So the fillable rule is actually designed to free us into creative

rather than to restrict us.

So the fact of the matter is it doesn't really matter what anyone, you know,

thinks a haiku ought to look like. And people can write a haiku in, you know,

five lines or ten lines or eight lines, just like you can write a limerick in,

you know, in eight lines that doesn't rhyme and call a limerick.

Most people won't believe you, won't believe you've written a limerick unless

follows the traditional syllable and rhyme scheme.

It's a little bit like that with haiku. The general population believes that

haiku is 5 -7 -5 in English.

In many other countries, it's the same way. So I write for a popular audience.

honestly don't care a whit what the haiku magazines think because I write

you know.

thousands and thousands of readers, maybe more than that.

The Tricycle Challenge, monthly challenge in the Tricycle column in

Tricycle magazine, that has the largest reach of any venue for haiku in the

English language.

More people are reading the On Haiku column than are reading any other haiku

publication in the English -speaking world, right? The reason is simple.

Because we make the rules very simple so that anyone can do them. Everyone has a

chance of mastering it if they can understand it as a simple thing.

Not a lot of secret handshakes here, right? In fact, there are no secret

handshakes. 575, season word, do with it what you can. Give it your best shot,

right? Tremendous freedom within those basic parameters.

Any others?

Yeah, so this one's from the chat from Paul Rutherford.

Any rules on the use of punctuation?

Well, no, not really.

Here's the interesting thing. Japanese haiku do have punctuation, but it's

spoken punctuation. The punctuation marks are actually spoken, right? Like

basically is like a colon.

These are called cut words, and they evolved in Japanese poetry over the

centuries as a...

a way of sort of like cutting the poem in two, creating those pauses in a poem.

Like Basho's famous old frog pond, furuiki ya, kozu tobikomu, mizu no

otto, right? Old pond, a frog jumps in the sound of water.

Furuiki means old pond. Ya is like a pause. It's spoken, but it

indicates like a colon. It's usually translated into English as a colon.

So we don't really have spoken punctuation in English, right? The

of speech are such that you could write a haiku with no punctuation. I use

punctuation personally very sparingly, but I do use it when it's called for.

But sometimes I write a lot of my poems don't have any punctuation at all

because the rhythms of spoken English indicate where the pauses are to come.

Hope that helps.

Anybody else?

Yeah, we probably have time for maybe two more questions. So this one is from

Kurt Linderman.

Should haiku always be written in the present tense, especially with verbs

ending in ing?

Yeah.

Well, this is a very common myth.

misunderstanding about haiku.

The people who wrote about haiku early on, R .H. Blythe, T .T. Suzuki, Helen

Watts, people like that, they were very heavily influenced by Zen philosophy,

you know, being in the here and now and all of that.

They were more influenced by Zen than they were by haiku, and they knew a lot

more about Zen than they knew about haiku.

So they created a lot of rules that Japanese poets have never followed.

So haiku tended to be present tense oriented, but not always. Many of

greatest masterpieces are basically reminiscences, right? So they are

past tense.

Ita as well.

Pretty much any rule you can come up with for haiku has an exception.

So in English, really, the best approach is to take that, whatever you can get

away with in 17 syllables.

You know, take that to heart and allow yourself a lot of freedom.

If you focus on season words and try to learn to use them, you'll find that your

poems are generally much better than they would be without them.

But even so, you may find that there are some poems that don't even need to have

a season word, right?

Maybe one more?

Yeah, so this one is from the chat from Joy Riera.

Do you have any haiku books you recommend for leisure reading and to

You know, whichever ones, you know, whatever scratches you where you itch.

know, there's so many really good ones.

There is one book that is recent

that I think probably is the single best anthology of modern Japanese

haiku that's ever been written. And reading it and studying it.

will really give you a sense of what people are doing today in Japan, where

there are 10 million haiku poets and pretty much every major newspaper has a

haiku column, usually on the front page, right? I mean, it is an insanely

popular art form in Japan.

So there's a book called Well -Versed, Well -Versed, an anthology

of... Modern Japanese Haiku, I think is the subtitle, or something like that, by

Ozawa. He is a famous modern

haiku master and haiku editor, and he writes a column for two of

Japan's leading daily newspapers.

And he collected 300 haiku by 300 great modern Japanese haiku poets, one haiku

apiece. And he has commentary, you know, on each poem, one page of commentary,

and he sort of breaks it down and tells you what the season word is and stuff

like that. So you really get a range, a sense of the range of possibilities.

Then also, if you want to read a great modern master, Richard Wright, the

African -American novelist, spent the last year of his life doing pretty much

nothing but writing haiku.

And some of his haiku...

are truly great, great masterpieces, among some of the best haiku that have

written in English. And he generally follows the 575 form.

So look for The Haiku by Richard Wright.

All right. That's great. I think that's all the time we have for questions. But

thank you, everyone, who submitted a question.

So we're going to close out now.

Thank you, Clark, for being with us today. Thank you very much, Amanda.

you, Carolyn.

It's been a real pleasure. And I hope a lot of you will join us for the six

-part course that's beginning next week.

Or look me up on Facebook and join the weekly haiku challenges. At the very

least, the takeaway from this should be to submit to the monthly challenges on

Tricycle. Right there, free. If you're a subscriber, it's very easy. Even if

you're not, you can just go straight to...

tricycle .org forward slash haiku and submit a poem. The season word, early

autumn season word for this month is dragonfly.

So have a lot of fun. You can submit as many poems as you want.

Yes, thank you. So we just shared both of those links in the chat.

And lastly, Tricycle offers these events free of charge and your support really

makes a difference. So if you'd like to make a donation to Tricycle, that link

is also in the chat.

But that's all for today.

So thank you everyone again, and we hope to see you again soon.