try to write a haiku that is “like Bashō’s” or “like Issa’s.”
Work on developing a haiku that truly reflects you. If you can write a haiku that expresses you, then you are writing a good haiku.
My job is not to judge whether you have written well or poorly, but to help you write a haiku that is true to yourself.
We can each write haiku because we each have a soul. Every soul is equal in a haiku group, and there is room in a haiku group for every soul.
By listening to the haiku of others, you will learn about yourself and your haiku. And others in turn will learn about themselves through your haiku.
With that, the session began. Someone handed me five long, narrow strips of paper and told me to write down five haiku. I desperately tried to create haiku on the spot but could not even decide which language to write in, much less a theme. I turned to Sound of the Tide, who had just finished writing out:
蝉しぐれ句を練る人等美しく
semishigure ku o neru hitora utsukushiku
the beauty of
people struggling with haiku
cascading cries of the cicada
SOUND OF THE TIDE
Did that haiku come to you right now? I mean, are you receiving some inspiration? I asked. Of course not, she answered. I am only writing down the best five I’ve written over the past two months.
I looked around the room. Silence reigned. People knelt on the floor and bent low over their work, copying out their haiku. I stared at my five blank strips of paper. Now I am really in over my head, I thought. Here was a serious group of poets and I had just come here to . . . well, why had I come here? As an adventure? On a lark? I looked down at my strips of paper, which were as blank as my mind.
Slowly, words began to percolate inside me, and I jotted them down. As soon as I had a string of seventeen syllables, I moved on to the next. In all, I wrote down five haiku that first day: three in English and two in Japanese. They were not even mildly good haiku. Haiku should be spontaneous and come from within, I had read. These were desperate and pulled out of thin air. But that day, they were all I had.
Someone passed an empty cardboard box around the room, and we all put our five strips of paper in the box facedown. As poor as my haiku were, at least they were now out of my hands. I leaned over to Field and Stream and asked her again the name of our teacher.
She whispered back, Kuroda Momoko, but she’s just Momoko-sensei to us. She is very active. She’s written many books on haiku and won prizes for her works. She has a column every Sunday in the Nikkei newspaper, and she often appears on haiku programs on television. But don’t let any of that intimidate you. She is very thoughtful and will be very respectful of your work.
The cardboard box came around again, and this time we each pulled five haiku strips from the box at random. Sound of the Tide, sitting next to me, told me to copy these five haiku onto a single sheet of paper. When everyone finished this task, we passed the sheets around the room. There were a total of about thirty sheets, one for each member of the group, including Momoko. As the sheets came around one by one, we read the haiku, and if a particular haiku struck our fancy, we wrote it down on a sheet of paper. At the end of the session, after reading about 150 haiku, we were to narrow our selection down to our five favorites and read these aloud to the group.
Sound of the Tide must have seen the look of confusion on my face. She turned to me and explained: The idea is to ensure anonymity. We write our haiku down on strips of paper without our names on them. But if we choose our favorite haiku just from the strips of paper, we might still be able to guess from the handwriting whose they are. On the single sheet, they are in someone else’s handwriting, so it is really hard to guess who wrote them. I had watched Momoko write down her five haiku on strips of paper and put them in the cardboard box with the rest of us. It would be easy to feel obliged to choose Momoko’s haiku, or to pay homage to Dr. Mochizuki, our group’s organizer, by picking his haiku. Equality and artistic integrity, I was learning, are essential aspects of a haiku group.
After reading through the sheets of haiku and choosing our favorites, but before reading them aloud, we took a break. I was one of the last still reading and writing. My legs were numb from kneeling Japanese-style at the low table. A woman came up to me and said, It hurts to sit like that, doesn’t it? There’s really no need to do so for such a long period of time. I looked around the room and saw that most of the men had been sitting cross-legged and many women had shifted from a straight kneeling position to tucking their legs slightly to the side. One woman had her legs straight out on the tatami and was wiggling her toes as she chatted with her neighbor. Here, try this, said the woman as she folded a zabuton pillow over and pushed it beneath my legs. I had been trying hard, too hard, to be Japanese.
When everyone was done and our short break ended, we moved on to the next phase of the session. Beginning with the person to the right of Momoko, we each read aloud the five anonymous haiku we had selected. After each reading, the author of the haiku announced himself or herself to the group.
My turn came and I read out the following haiku:
被爆後の生命をつなぐぶどう棚
hibakugo no inochi o tsunagu budōdana
after the bombing
life hangs on
to the grapevine trellis
TRAVELING MAN TREE
あかつきの夏富士の上星ひとつ
akatsuki no natsufuji no ue hoshi hitotsu
summer dawn
above Mount Fuji
a single star
SOUND OF THE POND
本を措くやがて秋富士見ゆる頃
hon o oku yagate akifuji miyuru koro
I set aside my book
Mount Fuji soon appears
in autumn form
DANCE
風の香ににじむ水色手漉き和紙
kaze no ka ni nijimu mizuiro tesuki washi
the scent of a breeze
wafts pale blue
washi paper
FIELD AND STREAM
掛物を水墨にかへ夕涼み
kakemono o suiboku ni kae yūsuzumi
black ink hanging scroll
now changed
the evening breeze blows cool
OKA TAKEHIDE
Momoko
