Over the past 9 years, I have had an on-again off-again relationship with haikus. Currently while writing this, I am in the on-again period of this relationship but what keeps me coming back to this form of poetry? After writing, at the very least, 200 haikus, I thought it would be worth finding out if I had developed any opinions, insights, or innovations to offer (spoiler alert: I have many opinions, not many insights and an aggressive dearth of innovations).
A meet-cute with haiku
The year was 2013, I was sat near the front of a bus, taking us first year students to Wales for a writing retreat weekend which was part of the first semester of our creative writing degree. As we got on to a motorway the cool lecturer, who was a favourite of many students, stood up and with a wide smile changed my life for ever!
Maybe a bit over the top but on that mid-autumn Friday, I was taught what a haiku was and most importantly, asked to start writing them. The beautiful Welsh countryside we passed on the coach was lost on me as I screwed up my face and tried my hardest to write my very best haikus.
Anyone who spent any time with me over that weekend, wandering around the beautiful country estate, was subjected to me turning everything into haikus. People found it annoying, which since I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD is actually a hate crime to call me. I later found out it was particularly annoying to the lecturer who had set the initial exercise as he had no interest in haikus, he’d just allocated the exercise to keep us occupied on the coach.
My obsession with haikus carried on throughout my time at university. As I got used to performing my poetry at open mic nights in sweaty pubs around Liverpool, I used funny haikus to make myself feel more comfortable. As I got more confident performing it felt less necessary to make the audience laugh so I stopped depending on haikus and as a result stopped writing them.
The first return of the haiku
In June 2020, I was going through a period of worsening mental health, despite being lucky and having supportive people around me (friends, family and colleagues), access to therapy and starting sertraline. At that time, I was transitioning back into work after being furloughed during the first wave of the still ongoing pandemic.
I would sit, frozen for long periods of time, staring at my laptop screen, anxiety smashing against my chest. Or pacing through my house furiously playing out the worst-case scenario for each minor work task. I tried to do deep breathing, grounding and mindfulness exercises, each feeling as helpful as acknowledging the rocks being tied to your feet before being chucked in the Mersey.
I don’t know how this was brought up but one day my housemate and I got on to the conversations of haikus. Through my furloughed period I had been prolific (relatively for me) with my poetry writing and returning to work had disrupted my writing routine. My vague recollection was we were trying to find manageable writing goals that I could achieve as I got used to having less time to write.
It quickly turned from a manageable writing task to something I became reliant on to manage my anxiety. Anytime I felt my anxiety peaking, I would set a 10-minute timer on my phone and screw up my face and attempt to write as many haikus as I could. I was using haikus as a way of helping me white knuckle my way through the day.
Over the years I had been given many haiku related books as presents and this was the first time, I delved into the haiku world outside the boundaries of my own notebook, reading both haiku in translation and discovering English language haikus too.
Through this period, I tried to veer away from funny or glib haikus and tried to engage with some of the more traditional aspects of haiku, making the theme nature and using a seasonal word. This on-again phase of the relationship only lasted a few months as the ongoing changes in the pandemic, amongst other things, led me to fall out of the habit of writing all together after October 2020.
The haikus are back again
September 2022 the writing drought ended… sort of. I’d spent almost 2 years unable to write which was upsetting anyway, but in 2020 I’d felt I had made progress in both the quality of my work and understanding my writing process too.
In that time, I had developed new symptoms to my anxiety, I’d feel nauseous when experiencing my peak and found myself unable to eat (I’d consider eating one of my hobbies/coping mechanisms, so this felt strange). Covid had exacerbated my general anxiety and the easing of most/all precautions despite the continued threat to people’s lives was hard to deal with. Still covid proposes a threat, particularly to disabled people and it was difficult to see not only a callous political order drop the pretence of caring but also seeing people who I thought would care so gleefully leave disabled people excluded from society.
Anyway, I had found the CBT therapy I had received in 2020 to be unhelpful and since then I had been diagnosed with ADHD. It took me a while to find another form of therapy that was better suited to me. My new therapist and I discussed zen meditation, mindfulness techniques and this is when I told them about how I had used haikus previously. This intrigued them and we committed to me texting a haiku to them every day. Initially they focused on things I was experiencing and then each haiku shifted to be a direct observation of how I was feeling and how it affected my body.
This is my current phase of my relationship with haiku. Some days the haikus pour forth with gay abandon and sometimes it is a little more challenging to coax the words out onto the page. It is strange for me to have haiku herald a new era for me again, both in respect to my mental health but also my life as a writer.
So, what is a haiku
It seems bold to spend over two thousand words on a blog about haiku and not describe what one is. What can I say? I’m a narcissist (self-diagnosed) and it felt more important to tell you about my life story. As promised by the blog title Haiku and me, you have got a lot of me. However, it is important to tell you what a haiku is just so, though maybe briefly, I’ve covered the haiku portion of this blog.
In a mainstream western context, Haiku is a short Japanese poetic form that in the English tradition consists of 3 lines totaling 17 syllables, the first and last line have 5 syllables each and the middle line 7 syllables. On top of this, haikus are usually about nature in some way and have some reference to a season.
In some ways this description is erroneous, missing out on a lot of the form’s intricacies and nuance. This is pretty much how it was described to me on my first discovery of haiku and I suspect this is similar for many other people when they first learn about haiku in the UK. My limited understanding is that Japanese doesn’t have syllables in the same way as English does and therefore when written in Japanese they aren’t measured syllabically.
There is the poetic form called the senryū, which I believe has similar technical considerations as the haiku but are considered to be darker in tone and not about nature (in light of this I think some of what I have written would probably be senryū but I don’t understand these things enough to make that assertion myself.)
There are loads of other poetic forms that either precede or have developed from the haiku and I envy the google rabbit hole you’ll embark on now. Some of those include the Renga, the haibun and the specular gogyohshi-ku (I believe this last one was invented by Jacob Sam-La Rose but at the very least he taught me this form when I was on an Arvon course in December of 2017).
There are numerous people and places that have a wealth of information on haiku and all its related forms which would be sounder sources than me. If you are interested in finding out more, I’ll provide some links at the bottom of this article.
So why am I obsessed with Haikus?
Though two out of the three instances in my life where I have been most zealously writing haiku have been linked to mental health, I don’t think this is the primary reason that I like haiku as a form.
The low hanging fruit of likability is the form’s accessibility. I find most poetic forms fascinating but if you don’t have an abundance of time in your day writing one or two haikus is just more practical than banging out a sestina in 10 minutes.
As someone with dyslexia, the shortness of haiku allows infinite rereadability; no matter how slow I read I can engage with the poem, I can hold it in my mind all at once and explore it in its entirety. There are many long poems I like and when I’m not writing haiku, I do tend to write poems on the longer side. Could I learn a longer poem off by heart? Probably but the amount of time it would absorb eclipses my ability to engage with any other work for a long time.
The extreme limit of the form is intriguing. Fitting a satisfying poem in just three lines, seems like a tall order. Often when writing a haiku, we are capturing a snapshot of life, when I read someone else’s haiku, I squeeze every ounce of interpretation out of it. Over three short lines, the world opens up to us. Like humans, the haiku’s body is limited but its emotional life transcends those restrictions.
Haikus provide us with a casual enlightenment. One of the most famous is about a frog jumping into a pond (Basho), the subject of the haiku isn’t heightened or extraordinary. The philosophy of haiku doesn’t ask us to transcend the earthly world but in fact to pay closer attention to what is around us. The haiku meets us where we are and joins us to play in the dirt.
Having said I’m not interested in haiku for purely therapeutic value, it is still interesting to think about why I have found them so helpful when it comes to managing my anxiety. In the Gaelynn Lea song ‘Moments of Bliss’ it says “all our chaos can be pared down to this (…) moment of bliss.”
The chaos is funnelled into something that is, at least temporary, manageable. In my experience I have found mindfulness, meditation and breathing exercises feel like they are asking me to ignore or turn away from the things that make me anxious. Counting the length of an exhalation doesn’t help engage with those things that overwhelm me. It feels tantamount to ignoring an oncoming car while being stood in the road.
A haiku allows me to look at the overwhelming chaos and find ways in which I can pare it down.
Recently I have started taking medication for my ADHD. Before my first dose I was hoping it would be able to quite the raucous crowd in my mind. I was hoping that for the first time in my memory I would be allowed to be alone in/with my thoughts. At first, I was slightly disappointed when taking my new meds as the chaos was still raging on. My brain still as loud as before.
However, on the first day on my meds, when I sat down, I found myself able to concentrate. My brain was still raucous, but I was able to navigate the chaos. Not that writing haikus and taking my meds have the same psychological effect, but there seems to be an analogous process. Both help me face the chaos I’m feeling and to pare it down to something a little less overwhelming.
(Just a quick disclaimer, I’m a silly non-expert, I am just speaking to my experience and in no way making any claims about how successful these approaches would be for other people. Meds can have serious repercussions and a stigma attached to them. I couldn’t find any evidences that there are any adverse side effects to writing haikus but I don’t want to be responsible if you discover any.)
Other people on haikus
As I said before, here are some links to resources where you can find some information on haikus.
The Haiku Pea is a great poetry podcast with a journal and a sister podcast attached that are all worth checking out. More information can be found at: poetrypea.com
This video by Kent Morita is where I learnt that haikus aren’t measured in syllables which you can find by clicking here.
Not a link but a book, Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart by Patricia Donegan is excellent. (And is where I found many of my favourite English language haiku). As always buy books from your local community book shop if you can.
There are some interesting articles about haiku on the Presence website which is a haiku journal. Find it here.
And of course for those of us situated in the UK there is British Haiku Society which has information about local haiku groups and loads of interesting articles of its own.
Thanks for reading my blog, tell me what you thought of it in the comments below and please feel free to share it with anyone you think would find it interesting.