The following essay was originally published in the online poetics magazine The Woodlot in May 2024. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site.
---
Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip of Burrard Inlet. From time-to-time king tides or teenagers will lift them and deposit them a few feet away. Salt-hardened, they seem ancient. I wrote poems while leaning against the big ones or resting my feet on the smaller ones, over and over until I had a book.
*
 |
| Weather, 2024 |
In May 2024, Gaspereau Press published my fifth poetry collection,
Weather. The book contains 156 poems, one for each week of the first three years of my daughter’s life, mirroring the structure of my 2016 collection,
The News (one poem per week during my wife’s pregnancy with our son). The poems in this new book are quite a bit shorter, and the majority are what I consider haiku. They follow the rules of the form unevenly—only one of the poems, for instance, has a 5-7-5 syllable count. Many elementary school teachers would be taken aback, as would some haiku purists. I, too, felt trepidation as I stumbled my way into a genre of poetry whose origins lay far from my country, and whose history I was only coming to understand.
*
August rain—
every bulb
of the blackberry
*
That might be my favourite thing I’ve ever written. Is it a haiku? Yes, I think so. You might disagree. Oh hell/oh well.
*
Haiku master Matsuo Bashō once said “Even if you have three or four extra syllables, or even five or seven, you needn’t worry as long as it sounds right. But if even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all your attention.” In writing haiku, this is my goal: to include not one unnecessary syllable.
*
 |
Narrow Road to the
Interior, 1702 |
That Bashō quote, translated by Sam Hamill in his
Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, renders the Japanese word “on” (or “sound,” the measurement under which the haiku’s 5-7-5 count is tallied) as “syllable.” While the two are similar, “on” are more attuned to subtlety than English syllables, which do not differentiate between long and short vowels. Bashō’s own name, for instance, is composed of three on but only two English syllables (the “ō” is a long “o” that counts as two on). As haiku translators such as Hiroaki Sato and Robert Hass have argued, this means that the length of thought in a Japanese haiku is usually shorter than seventeen English syllables (Sato estimates his translations come in at closer to twelve). My primary interest in haiku is the ability to contain both deep meaning and fidelity to one’s perceptions in the briefest of images. The haiku in
Weather never exceed seventeen total syllables, but often contain fewer. And again, in the spirit of Bashō and many who followed him, the middle line is not always the longest.
*
the shortest night of the year
the stars
in no hurry
*
I played with enjambing this poem so that the middle line held the most syllables, but decided the stars were spacious enough. Two star-syllables with five syllables of night sky around them.
*
Beyond the poem-a-week structure of The News and Weather, the poems in the two books bear little resemblance to one another. When I wrote the roving, intertextual lyric poems in The News, my time was largely mine; my concerns existential, political, abstract. Now, with two children and a mother many years into a dementia diagnosis, far less time is my own and my concerns are restrained to the limits of my senses: what I see, what I hear, what I touch. What touches me. The weather. My life, like my poems, has transformed from lyric to haiku. It is in many ways unrecognizable. And yet it is the same life. When I catch myself obsessing over form, I remind myself that it is the same life.
*
Even just there I’ve got it wrong, or not fully correct. Traditional haiku were often political and intertextual. Bashō’s literary allusions are relentless. Court politics abound. And The News, my abstract, political book of non-haiku, itself quotes a poem each from Bashō and Issa. Is there anything more hopeless than a category? And yet every paragraph has a beginning and an end.
*
Fourteen Weeks
No people in the park today,
one goose—groundskeeper
trimming and fertilizing.
How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.
I practice what you’re teaching me
until I am a bench or tree
or air and the bird’s snitch
snitching of the grass
replaces engine sounds
accrued at 10th and Fir.
Dry creek
glimpsed
by lightning.
Ancient elephant knees.
Ulna rising from camouflage.
Webbed foot aloft, primaries
doing their steady work on the heel.
And that long black beak.
Grass and then no grass.
*
 |
| The News, 2016 |
This is that poem from
The News. The first italicised part is a haiku by Bashō. The second is a haiku by Kobayashi Issa. I guess I should have seen this haiku thing coming.
*
Sometimes you search for something for years before finding it. Sometimes you find something and only then realise you’d been searching for it all along.
*
In addition to rules around syllable length, traditional haiku include a kigo (“season word”), which indicates the season in which the poem occurs, and a kireji (“cutting word”), which marks a shift in the poem (often indicated in English using a long dash: “—”). In my poems I have frequently included my own version of a kigo or kireji, but have not felt beholden to the traditional application of each, many of whose subtleties are lost in the transition from Japanese to English, or from Japan to Canada. A simple example: in Japan, the rainy season (the kigo “tsuyu”) falls in the summer, while on the coast of British Columbia the rainy season is… well… everything but summer.
*
how reassuring!
waking at midnight
to the sound of heavy rain
*
In which month does this poem take place? I suppose there are any number of options. But if you live in Vancouver, you probably answered “November,” the month in which I wrote it.
*
In North America, haiku are often dismissed as child’s play, unserious stuff for adult readers. I, too, once dismissed them. Yet if you say “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “In a Station of the Metro” or “The Red Wheelbarrow” you find yourself safely in “the canon.” The imagist movement, built on Eastern traditions, has as some of its foundational pillars poems that were by-and-large haiku. Each does its own unique dance with the tradition. Look at any one of the thirteen “ways,” throw the title in as a line in the Pound poem, lop off the Red Wheelbarrow’s “so much depends upon”: haiku, haiku, haiku. But with time haiku became something else: a way to teach primary school students to count syllables. The essential link between Eastern and Western literary traditions became severed in the popular imagination.
*
I disliked “The Red Wheelbarrow” when I first read it in high school. It’s so simple, I thought. It can mean anything, I grumbled. Within a year, though, I was carrying a copy of it in a slot in my wallet designed for a credit card. It remained there so long that the text imprinted on the clear vinyl cover, the words lingering after the paper disintegrated. Over time, I had found my way to meaning in the poem. Or I had found my way around meaning. What I had initially rejected about the poem became what I most deeply loved. It’s so simple! It can mean anything!
*
Haiku 1-4
1
I can’t help but hate
haiku. They end abruptly
just as they’re getting
2
going. See? I need
another just to finish
this simple thought, and
3
maybe it’s true that
all the love in the world could
fit in a matchbox
4
but who would want to
try, and where, in that case, would
one store their matches?
*
 |
| The Other Side of Ourselves, 2011 |
I published this poem in my first book,
The Other Side of Ourselves. I still like it quite a bit. It is right in some ways and wrong in others and maybe that’s why it’s stayed alive for me. The first haiku of the four was turned into a button for a
Pandora’s Collective fundraiser and a bunch of people wore it at the party. I got to watch as strangers bowed towards other strangers’ t-shirts to read those words, then laughed, then counted on their fingers and seemed pleased.
*
In discussing the sonnet, Ken Babstock once spoke of its shape as a “blast shadow from history”: the shape itself communicates meaning, even if the poem otherwise disregards the form’s strict requirements. While the metaphor is apt in considering haiku, to compare the form to “blast shadows,” a term tied to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, is wholly inappropriate. The fault there is of course mine, not Babstock’s—no writer can control what others do with his words, transforming them by placing them in a new context. I longed for an alternate term, then one day I was out in the park and I found one.
*
just north of the fallen log
the frost shadow
of a fallen log
*
Before that December morning, I hadn’t noticed how morning frost lingers longer in shadows, leaving the shape of the shadowing object in the grass. Paying attention to the natural world gave me the image I needed to make sense of my art.
*
Whatever these poems were that I was writing, their “frost shadow” was that of the haiku, a form which crystallised for me at a time when my life provided little time or mental space for literature. And yet I was also so much more alive, my nerve endings raw and overwhelmed by the world arriving and arriving with its endless jabs and questions. (The burden of ice on a grass blade, and how it sharpens it.) The haiku’s frost shadow saw me through.
*
Some bristle at the idea of set form—prescribed rules and shapes—in poetry. I sympathise with them. We turn to poetry to escape life’s little boxes. But there is no escape. The boxes of language always restrain, as do the boxes of our minds: the structures through which we organise the world. No matter the shape or content of a poem, no matter how “formal” it is or how devout its author in following assigned rules, all successful poems both crave restraints and strain to escape them. This makes them feel alive to us, a part of our human experience. All poems, in the stanza (“room,” in Italian) of their restraints, bounce between walls seeking the night’s sky. A formally rigorous poem is simply more familiar with its floor and ceiling, its possible skylight.
*
As I write this, I’ve recently turned forty and am feeling the first inklings of actual knowledge. But no, if I’m honest, much of what I’m beginning to learn I’ve known since I was a child—it’s only taken time, and a bit of hard living, to confirm these things for me. There’s no straight path to knowledge: it leaves and arrives, leaves and arrives, hopefully enriched with each return. I know a great deal about poetry and then I know nothing, and in that not-knowing, new/old knowledge is already gathering. In the middle of teaching a poetry class, I’m struck by the sense that I know less than my students. It’s been many years since I felt the thrill of being new to poetry, of planting all one’s life experience, all one’s hard-earned knowledge, in the rich soil of our art and watching it take purchase. In following what my students grow, I remember. I learn again.
*
I have been studying haiku for six years. I’ve barely started. Compared to the great wealth of information on the form, I know almost nothing. But in studying haiku the thrill of poetry returned to me. And I think at moments my knowledges (life, lyric poetry, haiku) aligned to make poems which I knew more than any one of them. Which knew more than me. I will study poetry for the rest of my life and, if I’m lucky, a few more such moments might come. This is Keats’ “negative capability” as applied to poetic craft: to hold simultaneously the faith that you know nothing and everything about how to write a poem. On your best writing days these two forces—nothing, everything—move in tandem, and you can’t tell who was leading the dance until you look back much later. Sometimes it takes years to see. To write a form is a lifelong task with no arrival.
*
To write a form from another culture and language—oh, the challenge is redoubled. In the face of that, it’s easier to say nothing, to sit in silent reverence. But to fully revere you must eventually engage. To learn you must practise. To worship you must pray.
*
one arm draped
on the nurse log
dreaming my little poems
*
Another reason why I, and the majority of English-language haiku poets, do not adhere to a strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern is because when we respond to Japanese haiku masters we are actually responding to their translators, many of whom (such as Hass and Sato) do not attempt to align Japanese on and English syllables. This is our tradition. It is at once an extension of the Japanese tradition and a transformation of it—from certain perspectives, a rejection of it.
*
 |
| In Praise of Shadows, 1933 |
In his 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics,
In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki lamented the losses that came with the Westernization of Japan, most notably the loss of shadows that resulted from the widespread adoption of electric lighting. Tanizaki felt that perhaps literature could be a place where those shadows could be preserved. “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”
*
In writing haiku as a Westerner, I am extending its shadow. In writing haiku as a Westerner, I am flicking on an electric light.
*
These “notes” were originally written as an afterword to Weather. I put it in the manuscript and took it out again many times. Eventually, some fellow poets and my editor, Andrew Steeves, talked sense into me. Take it out of the book. The poems don’t need their author worrying over them. They will be received how they will be received; they will become what they become. I am grateful to them all for that advice. But like a nervous parent on the first day of school, I’m still over here on the edge of the playground, worrying.
*
too cold to write down
the poem about clouds
keeps changing
*
I will look back on this essay many years from now and be amazed by all I got wrong. I will look back on this essay many years from now and be amazed by all I knew.
*
I’ve spent an abundance of time worrying over the faithfulness of my poems as “haiku,” and have come to the conclusion that they are the best offering I can make to the Japanese masters and their long tradition, and also to my family and to our little corner of the wider world—all of which have given me so much.
*
I remind myself that positioning a certain type of traditional haiku as “faithful” pushes aside all the poets who have experimented with the form in the intervening centuries, be they Masaoka Shiki or Takayanagi Shigenobu or Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio. And it also suggests that “traditional” haiku was lowered flawlessly from the heavens, and not itself developed over many years of experimentation. Reviewing the history of haiku—and of poetic form in general—it seems clear to me that to honour a tradition you must be willing to break from it. If not, you are engaging in a practice detached from that of the poets you’re honouring. You become a parody. To honour someone you must be committed to being someone else.
*
Or, as Bashō put it, never “lick the drool of your predecessor.”
*
Haiku emerged from the collaborative verse form renga, the “hokku” being the opening line in a renga session, where alternating lines of 5-7-5 and 7-7 on were contributed by the various participants. Bashō worked as a sōshō, or master, who presided over renga sessions and taught lessons on the form. One in seven of his surviving haiku, including his most famous, “the old pond— / a frog jumps in, / sound of water,” were in fact hokku: the opening offerings of expansive collaborations, no sooner recorded than handed off to a neighbour to be transformed.
*
 |
| Haiku in Canada, 2020 |
The tradition of collaboration in haiku has endured through the centuries. Some of the earliest, and richest, examples of haiku written in Canada come from World War II haikukai (haiku circles) held in Japanese internment camps in the interior of British Columbia—a form of both collective resilience and resistance. “mountain life / gathering fallen wood / the right job for an old one,” wrote Kaoru Ikeda in Slocan, BC in the early 1940s.
*
Haiku circles exist across the country to this day. This tradition stands in contrast with that of Western lyric poetry: declarations of the singular soul. Though Weather contains 132 haiku, its spirit is still firmly grounded in the lyric tradition: Weather is memoir. The ego-driven “I,” omnipresent in lyric poetry and appearing more sparingly in haiku traditions, looms over the whole project.
*
Wawa
My daughter’s first
word
for water and
dog
the sign and the
sound
the inlet and the
rain
bow run in
it.
*
This poem from Weather isn’t a haiku, though in mirroring Williams’ form in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” it shares only a couple degrees of separation. It has been pointed out to me that “Wawa” is a town in Ontario, a US convenience store chain, another name for Chinook Jargon, and a word—in various languages—for an estuary, a baby, a tree, entrails, and a pitiful human being. Some have told me this multiplicity of meaning is a weakness of the poem. Some have told me it’s a strength. My daughter knew none of this when she pronounced the word “water,” or translated the sound of a dog barking into her unique language. For a while there my daughter must have thought dogs were always thirsty. Maybe they are.
*
 |
| Spring and All, 1923 |
Every word contains within it many others. Every shape, every image, the same. The simpler the word, the more richly filled. Williams’ red wheelbarrow and white chickens. Rilke’s “
house, bridge, fountain, / gate, jar, fruit tree, window.” There are edges to words, to things, to shadows, but also there are none, just the slow shifting of light. It’s what makes translation impossible; it’s what makes translation possible. Looking. Saying what you saw. Knowing you could never see it all because part of the seeing will be done by your reader. What I see today is a collaboration with what you will see tomorrow.
*
I think often of Czesław Miłosz’s pointing hand in his poem “Encounter”—the red wing, the hare in the road. I think both of the many things each item represents and the singular living thing each was. One hand, one wing, one hare. I think of all Miłosz was, that day eighty-eight years ago in Lithuania. No language shared between us. Still almost fifty years until I, his companion in that wagon, would be born. Just a red wing, a hare, a pointing hand beside me, guiding my eye.
*
Here I sense a seeming contradiction in poetry, made particularly manifest in haiku. Poets who look outward more than inward, who give us first and foremost an account of what their senses perceive, often reveal their unique selves in a more fundamental way than others. I feel I “know” Bashō and Issa more than most other historical poets I’ve read, be they Shakespeare or Keats or Neruda or Frost. Those poets were singing songs, telling tales. They were performing and I was in the audience watching them. Haiku is far more intimate, and intimately social. Reading haiku masters, I feel as though I am sitting beside them and they are pointing at a passing insect, or the way a breeze shifts a tree. At frogs and creeks and lightning. We are together talking casually, often late into the night, of seemingly small things—perhaps the greatest of life’s intimacies.
*
Whatever people think about my fidelity to the haiku form in Weather, I hope that in reading my poems they will feel accompanied. I’m never lonely when I have a book of poems with me. That can’t be true. There must have been exceptions. But that’s the rule.
*
low winter sun—
deep in the fallen log
bright moss
---
All poems were written by the author, with the exception of the Bashō and Issa poems, translated by Robert Hass, and the Kaoru Ikeda poem, translated by Keibo Oiwa. The Jun’ichirō Tanizaki quote was translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. The Bashō “drool” quote was translated by Hiroaki Sato.
Bibliography
Sato, Hiroaki.
On Haiku. New Directions, 2018.
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō.
In Praise of Shadows (Trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker). Leete’s Island Books, 1977.
