Bookstories 31: Mankh’s Haiku One-Breaths

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One by one I got into reading haiku books, some at the suggestion of a local haiku poet. Eventually people started gifting me more books. A combination of Basho’s “learn about pines from the pine and about bamboos from the bamboo,” my spiritual path and affinity for meditation & Eastern ways, and the in-depth approach of Kenneth Yasuda’s The Japanese Haiku all helped provide a balance of book-ness and direct experience. Noticing that there weren’t too many how-to write haiku books, I decided that was the thing, plus to have half the book be an anthology, mostly from local poets plus a good amount of my haiku. A friend suggested the pocket-size, which afterwards seemed so obvious I wondered why I didn’t think of it.

—Mankh (Walter E. Harris)
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