Nowhere Else to Go

Overlooking San Francisco to the north is an iconic peak that rises to 2,579 feet above Bay Area waters. For centuries, Mt. Tamalpais has inspired legends and reverence and is also the birthplace of mountain biking. Robert Hass has long had a view of Mt. Tam from his kitchen. Alan Watts had a cabin here, and in the mountain’s honor Gary Snyder described “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais.” At its summit, Snyder wrote, “All about the bay, such smog and sense of heat. May the whole planet not get like this.” In her own “Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais,” Judy Halebsky has written more recently that “we’ve always tried to structure our time and attention. Bashō left the city. Cold Mountain lived in a hut. Hirshfield spent 1000 days sitting Zen. I go between coffee shops, walk myself from dawn to night. call up the poems, the prayers. ask to be lifted out of here. send up a flag so the spirits can find me. when I call, they come.”

We hope, too, that the Haiku North America conference is a jubilant flag raised so the spirits can find us, not just the spirits of haiku, but spirits of the earth and of deeply observed experience. We think, too, of Lew Welch and western migration. In “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings,” he wrote:

          Human movements,

                           but for a few,

          are Westerly.

          Man follows the Sun.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

Our haiku gathering, of course, is not a homage to Mt. Tam, or even a celebration of the Bay Area, but of haiku poetry and of the many poets who write haiku. This poetry is a kind of guiding beacon. Just as the mountain rises over the San Francisco Bay, haiku stimulates our poetic lives, drawing us, inspiring us. There is nowhere else to go.

The 2025 Haiku North America conference is the first to be held in the Bay Area since the first two of these biennial conferences took place here in 1991 and 1993. Back then, we called HNA a gathering of the tribes, and we believe that’s still true. Much has changed in three decades (the internet! social media! global warming), and haiku has evolved too. We now welcome a broader spectrum of what haiku can be. The genre continues to grow as a literary art, with an increasing number of journals, events, and engaged poets and readers. The Haiku Society of America recently topped 1,000 members, about two or three times what the membership was when Haiku North America started. Each of us has grown as individual poets, too. This year’s conference celebrates this growth, and an ongoing feeling of gratitude and exploration that affirms our conference theme of discovery. We also welcome new voices who might just be starting their delight and growth in haiku poetry.

And yet, despite our progress and expansion, we are still on a first-name basis. This is why, once again, we have arranged the poems in this new Haiku North America anthology alphabetically by each poet’s first name. We have much to be proud of in our discoveries, with much yet still to encounter. So here we are. Perhaps haiku is the last place, for us if not for others. As Lew Welch concluded in his poem, “There is nowhere else we need to go.”

Michael Dylan Welch and Chuck Brickley