Haiku from Index Cards

Index cards for about three-quarters of my published haiku and senryu that start with the letter A.

Since 1988 I’ve published thousands of haiku and senryu in hundreds of journals and anthologies (see “Links”). I keep track of these haiku using 4x6-inch index cards and arrange them alphabetically in index card boxes. The poems presented here are selections from these boxes, featuring haiku and senryu that have mostly not appeared elsewhere on this website, although some do appear in trifolds and a few other places. I’ve arranged the poems in thematic groupings and miscellanies for each letter of the alphabet, and have retained the alphabetical order for all poems within each grouping. By this arbitrary choice I hope each poem might be considered individually rather than as part of each set, although some unfolding sequential serendipities do still occur.

These selections serve as a sort of time capsule of my haiku and senryu writing, representing both older and more recent poems, as well as variety of styles, tones, and subject matter. I might not write some of the older poems the same way today. And maybe not even certain more recent poems either. I also dive into the first poem for each letter of the alphabet with a short essay exploring that poem’s history, with some bonus essays. The choice to feature whatever poem happens to be first for each letter of the alphabet gives a view into the range of haiku I’ve written without privileging what might be my best poems.

I began my index card system on 12 January 1990, inspired by seeing such a system used by editor and writer Gary Swanson, who was a cousin of my then-girlfriend (in 1989 we had visited him in Maryland, I think it was). I had asked Gary how he managed his writing submissions (in these days before some of us had computers or knew how to master them), and he showed me his index cards. He used them to track prose submissions, but I immediately knew they were perfect for haiku, because I could write an entire haiku on each index card. I know the 12 January date because I noted it on the index card for the poem "noon haze— / an aspen leaf / waving," which says it was “The first card written in this new record-keeping system! —12 Jan 90.” That card included a record of my submission of the poem to Woodnotes on 12 September 1989, returned 17 September 1989, and then submitting it to Haiku Quarterly on 11 December 1989, with “ACCEPTED” (I always put that in capital letters) marked on 13 January 1990. The poem was published in Haiku Quarterly 2:2, Summer 1990, page 26. Since these two submissions predated my index-card system, I must have been keeping track in some other way, although I’ve now forgotten the details. But I do remember that early decision to celebrate each acceptance with capital letters, and to say each unwanted poem was “returned”—never “rejected.” I also remember deciding on 4x6-inch cards, so there would be more space to record publication data than 3x5-inch cards, which was clearly optimistic.

One little historical detail these index cards have reminded me about is that I wrote out a handful of very early poems using a tilde (~) instead of a proper em dash (—). These poems would have been published in 1990 or earlier, before many of us even knew how to make em dashes, and I probably wrote down how the poem was published (which first happened before I started my index card system in January of 1990). I first began using PageMaker layout software in late 1988 and early 1989, on Windows 3.1, and began learning proper typography at this time, including em dashes, but I believe a few of these poems were published with tildes because some journals were still figuring this out.

Another historical detail is that in most of the 1990s I would record the year for submission or acceptance dates with just two digits. Thus, 1992 would often be recorded as just 92. That habit disappeared with the turn of the millenium, where it just seemed odd to write 00 or 01 for a year, at least for me. We may have done this because the 2000s were also a bit of a novelty, but I wonder how long it might take us to drift back into the habit of writing out years with just two digits again.

Speaking of dates, you might also find it interesting to note the span of time between when each poem was written and when it was first published, which varies for some poems, but is often many years, as indicated after each poem included here. The lapse was shorter for most of my older poems. But more recently it has sometimes been taking eight or ten years before I catch up with publishing poems from old notebooks, with some exceptions. The selections here were all published by about September of 2024 (with the exception of my lone poem that starts with X), but were mostly written many years previously. For this project, I reread all 4,500+ published haiku in my index card boxes, which has been like attending a family reunion. One eyebrow-lifting realization in reviewing all these haiku and senryu is how many of these poems first appeared in Geppo, and how many verses appeared in rengay or other linked-verse collaborations.

“Haiku from Index Cards” initially amounted to the addition in May of 2025 of more than 35,000 words over 166 new pages, celebrating 1,391 poems, most of them added to Graceguts for the first time. I’m sure, though, that I’ve neglected to include many perfectly wonderful poems, and perhaps could have omitted some that I chose to select, but there you go. Enjoy all these poems!

For additional details on my writing and publishing process, see also “My Haiku Notebooks” and “The Practical Poet: Tracking Your Haiku Submissions,” and have a look at “An Alphabet of Haiku.”