Whether in urban or natural settings, it doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing. If I’m walking down the street and notice something in its suchness, or if I see something odd or unusual, something common or uncommon in the world around me, I’ll write about that too. Some people simply record ideas and impressions, writing and refining their poems later, but I usually compose and revise the poem in my head, then and there, and write it in my notebook as fully polished as I can make it. If I have a notebook with me, I’ll jot down the poem. Then I try to express my moment of heightened awareness in words-or perhaps the words come virtually at the same moment as the experience. The poem comes at that moment in the wordless form of immediate experience-sight, sound, taste, smell, feeling. If I’m stopped along a mountain trail, bending to drink from a spring, I might suddenly become aware of my commonplace act by noticing a fallen pine needle in the water. The first and most common way I write haiku is from direct experience. And we need not feel overly constrained in how we write haiku, if our goal is to produce poems that connect with readers, whether a friend we send a poem to on a postcard, or thousands of people who might read our haiku in a magazine. We each have unique and personal-and usually valid-ways of writing. How do you write haiku? Not how do you write haiku, but how do you write haiku? The pleasures and rewards of haiku are many and, as both product and process, haiku can be approached in many ways. “The art of poetry lies simply in the skillful telling of a lie.” -Bashō (translated by Makoto Ueda, from “The Nature of Poetry: Japanese and Western Views,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature #11, supplement, 1962, 142–148) Writers write from empathy.” -Nikki Giovanni If you write from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. “Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. Please also read Kathleen Rooney’s 2013 essay from Poetry magazine, “Based on a True Story Or Not,” in which she says that an audience’s refusal to accept made-up poetry seems to be “a catastrophic failure of imagination and empathy.” See also “Haiku Stances.” Don’t miss the postscripts that appear at the end. The poems in this article were originally published in the following magazines and books: Bare Bones, Canadian Writer’s Journal, Dogwood Blossoms, Fig Newtons: Senryu to Go (Press Here, 1993), Frogpond, Haiku Canada Newsletter, Haiku Moment (Tuttle, 1993), Haiku Quarterly, Midwest Haiku Anthology (Brooks Books, 1992), Mirrors, Modern Haiku, Northwest Literary Forum, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The San Francisco Haiku Anthology (Smythe-Waithe Press, 1992), Timepieces 1995 (Cloverleaf Books, 1994), Tremors (Press Here, 1990), and Woodnotes. I first wrote this paper around 1995, and delivered a version of it at the May 2001 Haiku Canada weekend in Kingston, Ontario. First published in Haiku Canada Review 2:2, October 2008.
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