A Look Back in Amusement

“Why don't we have a little game? Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and that we’re actually alive.” ―John Osborne

I’ve had about 200 haiku and senryu published in Modern Haiku, including poems in sequences and haibun. I’m proud of nearly all the poems that I’ve published there (see “My Poems in Modern Haiku”), but when I look back at the earliest of these publications, starting in 1988, it’s easy to think of a few details I might change. Here are some observations and possible revisions to seven of the earliest poems I had published in this journal, starting with the oldest publication date. I find myself amused to see what I had not yet learned in the years when I was first writing these poems, and I hope the new perspectives offered here might amuse or inform others.

my window opens

     a hundred frogs

          sing to the moon

Modern Haiku 19:3, Autumn 1988, page 13

I’ll pat myself on the back for employing chiefly objective sensory images in this poem, and in giving it two juxtaposed parts. This was new territory for me at the time. I believe I wrote this poem in late March of 1988, after purchasing Hiroaki Sato’s One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English, which I have a record of buying on 22 March 1988 at the Oriental Bookstore in Pasadena, California, and then submitting the poem to Modern Haiku on 31 March 1988. At the time, I had only recently read Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, which radically updated my perception of haiku away from counting syllables, shifting my attention from form to content—and to various techniques that informed the content. This poem was among my earliest to embrace objectivity and especially a two-part structure, and I was fortunate that Robert Spiess accepted it from my first-ever submission of haiku to any poetry journal.

I’m inclined not to change a thing in this poem, perhaps at least in part due to my fondness for it as my first published haiku. But I do observe that the poem seemingly has two season words (frogs and the moon). However, that’s just according to centuries-old Japanese tradition. Where I live in the United States, are frogs spring? And is the moon only autumn? Do we have to follow what the Japanese say in assigning seasonality to natural phenomena? And what allowances should be made for differing latitudes and longitudes , not to mention altitudes, far beyond the limited confines of Japan’s eight islands? In Japan, the moon is considered autumn unless modified, such as by saying “spring moon.” But who says that tradition has to apply to haiku in English? The experience here was a moment of opening my window (in my dorm window during graduate school) and being surprised to hear loud frogs even up on the seventh floor. And yes, the moon was shining (or what if it wasn’t?). It would be a loss to poetry to disallow the writing of haiku about frogs in moonlight, and as Bashō apparently said, don’t let arbitrary seasonal designations hamper the reality of your poetic expression. Or maybe it was kigo-guru William J. Higginson who said that. I concur with having a respect for reality, the way things actually are, and Robert Spiess had no hesitation in accepting my poem for publication despite what a purist might dismiss as the use of two season words. If anything, the personification of having the frogs “sing” might be more of a concern for some readers. Nevertheless, the possibility that I might not write the poem in such a way today is usefully set aside to provide at least a little poetic spell, perhaps borne from naivete, in my first haiku published in English.

passing cloud

      darkening

            his cell

Modern Haiku 21:3, Autumn 1990, page 104

I don’t think I would write this poem today. The “his” is unexplained, for starters. Obviously, it’s someone in a prison cell, but how am I observing this? Do I need to have observed this, or is it okay to imagine it, out of empathy? This raises the question of point of view in haiku. Haiku don’t need to be autobiographical (and readers shouldn’t presume as much), but I do think it’s useful for haiku to maintain a first-person point of view, which this poem doesn’t really do. If it said “my cell,” that would address the point-of-view question, making the poet no longer a fly on the wall—or an omniscient god, as the case may be—but anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never served time in prison, or worked as a prison guard, so “my cell” could too easily come across as not believable, thus clouding the reader’s reception of the poem.

These days, I usually avoid any kind of third-person or omniscient point of view in haiku. However, what if the poem said “the cell” instead? That would allow me to experience “a cell,” such as when taking a tourist visit to Alcatraz. Yet such a choice seems to drain the life out of the poem, pushing it towards a so-what machination. There’s perceived drama in saying “his cell” or “my cell,” if the reader believes it. And yet, when it says “his cell,” the poem becomes more intellectualized and remote (a borrowed experience rather than mine). Ultimately, when I read this contrivance 35 years later, it doesn’t come across as authentic—it hasn’t created authenticity.

golden gate park

teen with a boom box—

mime covers his ears

Modern Haiku 21:3, Autumn 1990, page 104

Today I would use normal capitals for the first line (why make it look like it has typos?) and would avoid giving the poem three grammatically separate parts (despite using an em dash that would normally indicate a cut between just two parts). The structural weakness could be addressed by saying “teen with a boom box / in Golden Gate Park,” but another problem remains. It’s that a mime covering his ears is merely cause and effect, and a bit cutesy or trivial. This poem is more of a report than a poem. I’m amused, though, by how easily dated my reference to a boom box has become, and how this poem is a sort of time capsule. For what it’s worth, the very first haiku meeting I ever attended was in the summer of 1989 in Golden Gate Park, a meeting of the Haiku Poets of Northern California.

grey spring day—

the mating koi

flip the lily pad back over

Modern Haiku 22:3, Fall 1991, page 40

I find no problem with this vivid, easily-seen poem, but I do note the “Japanese” content—referring to koi. For some reason, beginning haiku poets have tended to write about subjects that come from Japan, such as bamboo or stone lanterns. Why? I too took my turn at this, whereas today I would write such poems pretty much only while actually visiting Japan, or at least only while exploring a Japanese garden wherever I’m traveling outside Japan (or maybe to just get them out of my system). But even then, such poems are dressed in a kimono, as if the exoticism of “Japanese” subject matter might be somehow necessary or required for haiku—or would somehow be more compelling than subjects native to where I live outside Japan.

just before dawn

summer rain

on the temple bell

Modern Haiku 25:3, Fall 1994, page 8

There it is again. I suppose this could be a temple from some other religion, but I suspect that most haiku readers would assume a Buddhist temple, and thus most likely in Japan. It’s harmless enough but still feels borrowed—or appropriated. Why did I need to write about such a temple? At the time, I had never even been to Japan, where such a subject would be more defensible. The problem is that too many beginning haiku poets are inclined to dress their haiku in a kimono. Such a beginner inclination is too easily and too often a haiku cliché.

paper route

     knocking a row of icicles

     from the eave

Modern Haiku 26:3, Fall 1995, page 25

This poem has been anthologized and reprinted numerous times, most notably in Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology (1999) and Jim Kacian’s Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (2013), both from Norton. Its reception has somewhat mystified me, as it feels a bit ordinary to my mind, though the poem did spring from my time of having a paper route in Winnipeg, and from my use of rolled papers for the unintended purpose of knocking down icicles. On a purely grammatical level, the poem says that the paper route is “knocking” a row of icicles, but of course that’s not what I mean. The indent of lines two and three are an attempt to separate the two parts to dispel that grammatical conclusion, with an “I am” implied at the start of the second line. At the time, I think I had heard that one shouldn’t refer to the self in haiku, a myth that persists decades later (a myth that I won’t take the time to deeply dive into here). There’s nothing wrong with referring to the self in haiku, within limits, which can be done just as objectively as referring to a chair (furthermore, most Japanese death haiku, or jisei, routinely refer to the self). The issue is to control overdone subjectivity and to provide sufficient objectivity that summons emotion rather than imposing it. The inclusion of the self doesn’t mean the poem is automatically subjective at all, let alone excessively so. At any rate, the way I might rewrite the last two lines today, motivated by a grammatical refinement, is as “paper route / a row of icicles / knocked from the eave.” This revision is passive, however, losing a sense of immediate and engaged action that anyone who has had a boring paper route can relate to. I should also add that Paul Miller has written an essay titled “Haiku Toolbox: Dangling Participles (or Happy Participle Accidents)” that generously defends the “ing” problem in certain poems like my paper route haiku. So maybe my paper route poem is fine as it is.

a beer bottle—

the mountain goat

stumbling

Modern Haiku 30:1, Winter–Spring 1999, page 14

There’s a bit of self-righteous virtue-signaling in this poem. More than just a bit. The poem seems to proclaim the I would never leave trash in the wilderness, and that some other cretin did—and a pox of shame upon him or her and all their lowly relations. It’s purely made up, a critique of litter and how it presumably affects wildlife. Really? Disrespect for the environment is a real problem, and I don’t want to diminish that problem here, but the poem comes across as contrived, and thus (to me, now), it fails. It’s possible that someone might actually see a moment like this, but I doubt it. Despite the humour of the goat possibly being drunk on beer (but again, really?), the poem is tainted by contrivance and agenda. Its holier-than-thou environmentalism is too preachy.

I suppose all haiku poets have concerns about some of their earliest haiku. We may wonder, what were we thinking? And we may understand that our earliest poems indicate that we had not yet gained certain learnings. In reassessing the preceding poems, the learnings I hope to have demonstrated may be slighter or more subtle than the leaps I made after my “Godawful Early Haiku,” but even my more recent poems are always worth reconsidering. I revel, though, in the fact that haiku are endlessly rewarding expressions of what it means to be alive.