1st Sailing

Quick heads up. The 2nd Sailing while be posted very soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t said a few words about why you read haiku, won’t you take a moment and do so?

By the way, sometimes I like to *look* at haiku. If there was ever a haiku photographer (or some such illogic) it was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I look at (read) his haiku-photographs to experience the geometry of things. Click on my name for an example. Notice for one, the jux of cobblestones and cakes….

Others have already pointed out many of the reasons I read haiku, but I’ll throw in my two cents.

The simplest response would be that I enjoy it and reading a well-written haiku makes me unbelievably happy. When I read a haiku that blows my mind or makes me think in a new way, I’ll often have a lighter step for the rest of the day.

My needs for writing and reader haiku overlap. Depending on the day, I may be looking to strengthen my skills as a writer, and other days as a reader, but in the end, they complement one another. As a writer, I like to see what others are writing (Michael Welch made a good point about catching up with friends), and what seems to work for them–word choice, style, form. As a reader, I look to become more perspective, but also to let my mind explore new territory and come to a better understanding of the haiku, of the art of haiku, of people around me, etc.

Perhaps more importantly I find reading haiku to be a discipline in its own way. Something that must be done on a regular basis to seriously engage the art and the community. But at the same time, it’s therapeutic, and sometimes I approach reading as a meditative practice. Sometimes I will read haiku to pause and breath, to take a break and to put myself in a certain frame of mind–to let go and to open up. Haiku is a form of escape without really escaping reality. It merely means stepping back and looking at things quietly. Haiku offers an experience for both the reader and writer that is equally welcoming (albeit challenging at times) to both parties. I’m fond of the the fact that the text, the lines/words are just the beginning. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that even as a reader I am participating. I am not just the recipient of the poem, but then providing something back by my own reading/interpretation of it.

As others have noted in their own practices, I often read for inspiration and always keep a pen and paper nearby while reading. How I read affects how I write not only my haiku, but my prose and story telling. Sometimes I think haiku is what I was looking for for years but never really realized until I found it.

One response I have to this 1st Sailing comes in the form of a question. If you find yourself in a room with two windows, one large, a picture window perhaps, and the other tiny, which one are you drawn to?

I read haiku for multiple reasons. One is because a good haiku, for me, is an approach to infinity. Somehow, it collapses time in its focus on the instant. That instant becomes eternal and makes the universe — in both time and space — feel as one. The whole universe feels like it snaps into place. Thus a good haiku is both comforting and transcendent, even if the subject matter might be dark.

Another reason is much more practical. Anyone who has been involved with the haiku community for any length of time soon makes friends, and virtual friends, with many other haiku poets writing this poetry. So reading haiku is a simple way to “catch up” with one’s friends! When I receive a haiku journal, I scan the index and turn to poems by particular people. Of course, you have no way of knowing if the poem is recent or several years old (even if just published), nor should we assume that all haiku are strictly autobiographical, but even if we are not catching up with each friend’s personal life, we can read haiku to catch up with the art of each friend’s haiku life, and that too is a valuable blessing. It’s enjoyable and stimulating to see if favourite writers are branching out to new ways of writing, or if something we know has been going on in their life has inspired a particularly strong or moving haiku that we haven’t yet read. The name of each poet is a sort of “brand” and I always enjoy seeing what various poets are doing — and in reading poets who are new to me.

Another reason to read haiku, of course, is for the variety of voices. Sometimes we write haiku in a narrow comfort zone, and it’s good to understand where those boundaries exist. Reading sufficient amounts of haiku (or any poetry) will help us better understand our poetic limitations and perhaps suggest avenues for new exploration. I’ve long thought that we shouldn’t read haiku (or other kinds of poetry) just for the sake of understanding ourselves, but also to understand others. Sure, the poet should have some degree of respect for his or her audience to make the poem reasonably clear. But sometimes the reader also needs to move — to understand where the POET is coming from. Thus the “strangeness” that exists in some haiku may be the fault of the reader just as often as the writer. In The Art of Reading Poetry, Harold Bloom says that “poetry at its greatest . . . has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for expanding consciousness.” This difficulty, he says, he has “learned to call strangeness.” As I have written elsewhere, we should apprehend haiku not just from where we are, but from where the poet is. This is why it is important to read haiku regularly. For some of us, haiku is as essential as breathing.

Indeed, as any writing teacher will tell you, the best way to learn poetry is to read as much of it as you can. The same is true of haiku — which, I believe, requires trained readers just as much as trained writers (I believe Seamus Heaney has pointed this out before). Anyone who is new to haiku should read plenty of haiku simply to learn haiku — to see what works and doesn’t work, and figure out why. Anyone who is more seasoned haiku can still continue to read haiku for these reasons. Fortunately, whatever the reasons might be for someone to read haiku, the poems themselves remain their own best reward, and I’m grateful to countless haiku writers who have enriched my life, and also my own poetry, by the examples of their haiku.

Michael Dylan Welch

I think haiku addresses a key aspect of experience and one which troubles the mind: the yes-no of ultimate meanings in experience. The gap between the parts as I understand it and try to practice it allows a flash of otherwise non-cognitive awareness to happen; I used to call that “the hinge of heaven” but “heaven” doesn’t say these days what I mean. Haiku addresses the existential problem indexed by thinkers as the ontological difference. Haiku among poetic forms is wonderfully suited to this job of work.