New to Haiku: Charlotte Digregorio Interviews Haiku Poet & Educator Bob Lucky

As part of New to Haiku’s Interviews with Haiku Educators series, Charlotte Digregorio shares her interview with Bob Lucky. Thanks, Charlotte and Bob!

Bob Lucky (born Robert Wayne Lucky, Aug. 15, 1956, Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA) is an American poet, writer, and editor. He is the author of five collections of haibun, prose poetry, and haiku and senryu, including Ethiopian Time (2014, Honorable Mention, THF Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards); Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (2018, Second Prize–winner in the James Tate Poetry Chapbook Contest); and My Wife & Other Adventures: Haibun of Bob Lucky (2024, Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award 2025). He founded and wrote the print newsletter The Asian Foodbookery (1996–2000) and served as an editor of Contemporary Haibun Online (2014–2020). His successes in haikai competitions include Honorable Mentions in the H. Gene Murtha Senryu Contests for 2016–2018 and 2023; winner of the Samurai Haibun Contest (2020 and 2023); winner of the Second Annual Rachel Sutcliffe Memorial Haiku-arts Contest for both haibun and haiku (2024); and Second Place in the Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Awards (2024). Since retiring in 2020 from teaching International Baccalaureate language and literature, Advanced Placement world history, and creative writing in international schools, he has resided in Viana do Castelo, Portugal.

1) Bob, I’ve always enjoyed your haiku and senryu, and I often reprint your published poems on my blog. How and when did you first discover haiku and senryu, and what do you love about writing them?

Charlotte, thank you for asking me to do this interview, and for publishing my poems on your blog. As for my discovery of haiku, like most people my age, it was in the 4th grade when the teaching plan was to introduce students to the syllable. I started writing haiku again when I was in high school and continued in college. I never thought of publishing haiku, although a three-line poem I published in my college’s literary journal looks suspiciously like a senryu:

on the arm
of the old chair
an old arm

I have no idea when I began to consciously think about senryu, but I was certainly writing them before that, before I even knew what they were. I like haiku and senryu because they are tools for looking at the world in a certain way. They teach you to be observant, to pay attention.

2) Tell us about your educational background and how it was that you decided on a teaching career in language and writing. At what levels did you teach?

You might want to grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine as this could take a while. I went from being a good high school student to a mediocre college student at Dartmouth College. It took me a year to find my bearings. I often feel that going from Texas to New Hampshire was the biggest culture shock of my life. As a freshman, my plan was to be a theater and creative writing major. I took a few creative writing workshops/courses with Jay Parini. He was very kind, although he once told me to never again turn in an assignment on Scottish toilet paper after I’d typed an essay on onion skin paper. It must have been on sale. I was, to put it bluntly, out of my depth. I remember in a freshman seminar I commented that John Milton’s Paradise Lost was a work of blind faith. Everyone howled with laughter. It took me a week to figure out why. Toward the end of my freshman year, I started skipping classes and hanging out at Baker Library, where I read, read, and read, mostly literature by region—South American, Japanese, Scandinavian. It was a great education.

Somewhere along the way, I took an ethnomusicology course and a Chinese religion/philosophy class and suddenly my major was a combined major: History of Religions and Anthropology. This led to a semester in London at King’s College, where I studied Hinduism and ancient Near Eastern Religions. Afterwards, I attended the Chinese University of Hong Kong with the Yale-China program, where I studied sociology, Chinese religions, the nightlife in Kowloon, and took two erhu lessons. I also started a research project on the Indians in Hong Kong, but realized six months wasn’t quite enough time.

I wound up getting an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1986 with a focus on Indian popular culture, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2012. In that time span, my wife and I got together in India—she was working on her M.A. in Ethnomusicology. We later lived in Japan for three years, had a child in Seattle, travelled around the world for a year and a half, and got our public school teaching certifications and began teaching overseas. She taught music, and I taught history and English, sometimes AP, sometimes IB. Somewhere in there, I taught ESL for a non-profit and Anthropology at a community college.

3) At what point did you decide to teach abroad and why? How many years did you teach in foreign countries and where?

We always wanted to be abroad, and we went to Portugal in 1990 after leaving Japan. I had a romantic idea about settling there that involved goats and cheese, but family and finances called, and we returned to the U.S. In 2001, we sold almost everything, took our son out of 3rd grade and home-schooled him while we wandered the world for a year and a half and visited friends, some who were international school teachers. That’s the life for us, we thought.

My wife and I had taught English in Japan but our teaching at international schools began in 2004 in Bahrain. A couple years later, because of a safari in Tanzania that we took our son on for his 13th birthday, we decided to skip the job fair in Bangkok that year, but eventually found a job in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The school and the students were a delight, but not being able to save any money on the salary, and thinking of impending college costs, we moved on to Hangzhou, China, where our son graduated from high school a few years later.

At our next job fair, we were offered a job in Ethiopia. As our son was going to university in the UK, we thought it would be nice to be a little closer to him. I was given a creative writing course to teach along with my IB English Language and Literature courses and World History. My first chapbook, Ethiopian Time, came out of those experiences.

From Ethiopia, we went to Saudia Arabia in 2014 for the last six years of our international teaching careers. It was interesting. We knew very few Saudis, but mingled with South Asians, Southeast Asians, South Americans, Africans, Europeans, Canadians, and Americans. It was in many ways a multicultural oasis in the desert. And then in 2020, during the Covid years, we managed to get to our apartment in Portugal and begin the retirement adventure.

4) Did you incorporate your gift for creative writing into some of your classes? Did you include haiku?

Outside of the creative writing courses, the only time I incorporated whatever creative writing skills I had was in writing comments on report cards. I always had to keep my audience, the parents, in mind. I can’t recall writing a haiku in the comments. Short form poetry is at a disadvantage in many curricula. If I remember correctly, any poem or excerpt from a poem for the IB oral exam had to be around 20 lines or more. It may be different now, but probably not much.

5) What methods did you use in teaching poetry workshops? What did your students enjoy and find challenging about writing haiku?

Every creative writing course I taught in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia was loosely modeled on the workshop. We would read and discuss examples of a genre or specific form and then write pieces in that form, most often in response to some prompt. Afterwards, we would workshop them. The culminating project was often a chapbook of poetry or flash fiction. Occasionally, someone would turn in a long short story or novella. A popular unit was prose poetry, especially the poems of Gertrude Stein and Christian Bök, surprisingly. Creative writing students enjoy a challenge, and writing a prose poem based on Bök’s Eunoia was a fun one. Stein’s Tender Buttons was one of my favorite prompts. We would read and discuss a few of the poems and then I would ask them to write a prose poem that was “meaningless.” Humans have a hard time with meaninglessness, and if they can’t find meaning, they’ll make it up. Those were some great workshops.

Haiku was a hard sell. Most students came to it with a 5-7-5 mindset and saw it as something for kids. As you know, haiku aren’t easy to write, and I think one has to learn how to read them first, so there just wasn’t enough time in a one semester-course, unless the entire semester was dedicated to it. I also felt uncomfortable pushing haiku and haibun because I couldn’t stop thinking about college professors making their latest textbook required reading. (Not that I was anywhere near that level.)

6) You’ve won significant haiku, senryu, and haibun awards. What do you feel is most challenging about writing haibun effectively? Is it more difficult for you to write haibun than it is for you to write longer prose poetry?

Thank you for mentioning awards, but I have to say, I’m not a fan of contests. I do enter one from time to time, but only if I think I have something that already “fits” and there’s no entry fee. I have entered the Rattle chapbook contest a couple times, because it’s a great exercise in putting a chapbook together, as well as extending your subscription. I do see the rational for contests and entrance fees, but I’m not comfortable with treating writing as a competitive sport. And, since I don’t think I’ve ever written a prose poem that goes over a page, I’ll address the haibun question.

What is a haibun? To write one effectively, you need to know what it is you’re trying to write. The Japanese term haibun designates a composition of prose + haiku, a prosimetrum, but that no longer defines the form of English-language haibun. Maybe a couple journals adhere to that definition, but the major haibun publishers accept a variety of forms/genres + haiku as a haibun. It’s a terminological muddle. I’ve certainly published a few such hybrid pieces over the years, but I’m trying to cut back, or at least not publish them as haibun. When I edited/curated Contemporary Haibun Online, I occasionally accepted such pieces. I’m not a purist or prescriptivist, things change, but sometimes when I read “haibun,” I scratch my head—and rediscover that I’m bald. It’s definitely an interesting time to be a writer of haibun, whatever it is.

7) Living in foreign countries, how did this influence your teaching? Was teaching abroad more structured than it would have been in the U.S.?

As everywhere in the world of education, most schools have a curriculum or some sort of outcome in mind. This is a big influence on any teacher. If you don’t follow the curriculum, you don’t get rehired. Many schools at which I taught were following an AP or IB curriculum, sometimes a mish mash of US and/or Canadian curriculums. And sometimes chaos. Many hours were spent and lost in meetings, reminding us of what we should be doing. Whenever I went home to visit family and friends, people would ask what it was like teaching in China or wherever. It’s like teaching here. I would plan my lessons, grade papers, drive to work, and go shopping for dinner afterwards. On the weekends I’d party. The structure of daily life is pretty much the same wherever you are. But cultural differences do make it interesting at times, and because of that, I’ve learned more from students than I ever taught them.

8) Of the countries you’ve lived in, which country most influenced your writing, and which most influenced you as a teacher? Why?

If you’re paying attention, wherever you live influences your world view. I think reading though, more than where you live, influences your writing. I’ve always read a lot of work in translation, and I’m also a big reader of literature in various English dialects. Rotten English is a good anthology to get you started. I’ve enjoyed torturing myself with Scots poetry for decades, and introducing students to Tom Leonard’s “Six O’Clock News.” I think it was in 1990, I met Bruce King, editor of the classic Modern Indian Poetry in English. I thought I was the only one outside of India who knew Nissim Ezekiel. King set me straight. I also taught Ezekiel’s “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” and several of his standard English poems. Right now, I’m reading British poet Daljit Nagra’s Indiom, which is an entertaining introduction, but much more, to Indian English and its literature. I’ve taught a couple of poems of his as well. Since the majority of my students were not native English speakers, the prompt to write a poem in their countries’ vernacular English was often liberating for them. It was also a popular unit in some of my creative writing courses.

I haven’t really answered your question. I think Japan has clearly been an influence on my writing—I mean haiku, tanka and haibun. But probably Ethiopia for teaching, because of the amazing diversity of the student body.

9) How many foreign languages do you speak?

I butcher every language I speak, including English. When I was living in India as a graduate student, I got fairly comfortable with Hindi, and didn’t have to think too much before speaking. I took Spanish in high school, but I suspect whenever I did speak it, it was very Spanglish. My MFA program was bilingual English and Spanish. I really enjoyed that because the requirement was to be able to read Spanish. Fortunately, although I may sound like the village idiot when I speak, I’m a good reader and a fan of grammar. Along the way, I picked up some Japanese (café and train station Japanese), a little Chinese and Thai, almost all of which I’ve forgotten. I wanted to learn Arabic when I was working in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, but classes seemed to be focused on learning the Qur’an, and, to be honest, English is the de facto lingua franca, or at least one of them, in the Gulf States because of the diverse nature of the work force. I’m lazy. By the time I was living in Ethiopia, my brain was full and my Amharic was limited to some niceties and the very useful word ishii [translation: okay, alright, sure, I agree]. Now, living in Portugal, I can talk my way through the daily routines. But I do read a lot of Portuguese and some Hindi these days, mostly haiku in Hindi. Last year I picked up a book of Galician food history in Galego, and between Spanish and Portuguese, I can muddle my way through that.

And I’m a closet translator. It helps me as a writer to see how languages put themselves together, how writers make meaning. It started decades ago in India with Mohan Rakesh’s travel book Kashmir Se Kanyakumari Tak. I copied the entire book by hand, leaving room for the translation between lines. These days, I plug away at Portuguese prose poems and fragments by Adília Lopes and the greguerías of José Jorge Letria.

But, do I speak any foreign languages? Not really. But every language I do speak sounds foreign.

10) Why did you choose Portugal for retirement, and do you have plans to return to the U.S.?

Let me answer the easy question first: I have no plans to return to the U.S. I have family and good friends there and may visit again one day, but I’ll never live there again. I’ve been abroad a good chunk of my adult life and feel out of touch with America. Of course, for reasons only a good psychiatrist could possibly fathom, I wanted out from the age of 15. I was researching moving to Australia or Belize when I was in high school. My maternal grandfather had turned me on to The Whole Earth Catalogue and that gave me all sorts of ideas and dreams.

When my wife and I were teaching in Saudi Arabia, we began thinking of where we might retire. For years we had thought we would end up in Southeast Asia, probably Thailand or Malaysia. But a muggy spring afternoon in Saudi Arabia reminded me of how much I disliked sweating. As a consequence, we made a list of alternatives. Some South and Central American countries were high on the list, partly because my wife felt she wanted to be within striking distance of the U.S. Then there was Europe, but not all of Europe was affordable. We considered Bulgaria and Cyprus, toyed with the idea of Malta and fantasized about Istanbul. Then one day, I said, “What about Portugal?” On our next holiday we drove around the country and wound up in Viana do Castelo, a place I had strong memories of from our visit in 1990. We were smitten, again.

11) You founded and wrote the newsletter “The Asian Foodbookery.” Is cooking your hobby? Which Asian foods do you most enjoy cooking and eating?

I do not come from a foodie family and was a very picky eater as a child. Slowly my taste buds discovered the world. It was in Hong Kong in 1979, that I became seriously interested in food and culture. In 1984, while studying Hindi in New Delhi, I wrote in my journal that I wanted to quit graduate school and write about food. The Asian Foodbookery came later and ran for 5 years at the tail-end of the 20th century. It was a heady time for food newsletters. The food historian Rachel Laudan has called it the golden age of food newsletters. My newsletter focused mostly on book reviews and selected recipes from the books and the connection between food and culture. I tested those recipes in my home kitchen. I had a good stove. Because of work schedules, the results of those tests were usually dinner when my wife finished her evening piano teaching. I did most of the cooking in our household because of her schedule.

Once we got into the international school circuit, things changed: the kitchens in our new homes were often very basic, a burner or two and a rice cooker. Eating out was a cheap and tasty choice, and we occasionally had cooks in our employ, which in Ethiopia was important if we didn’t want to spend our free time bleaching vegetables and plucking the occasional chicken—or coaxing the flavor out of scrawny store-bought chicken. About the only time I cooked in Ethiopia was when I boiled up a week’s worth of “dog food,” butcher scraps and rice. Our cook avoided doing it when she could, because the smell was awful.

These days, my wife does most of the cooking. She thinks I need vegetables. When I do cook now, I rarely use a recipe and much of what I make leans toward a Tex-Mex flavor profile. Perhaps I’m returning to childhood. I make some mean versions of Frito pie. I also love the challenge of reimagining leftovers and using up odds and ends in the fridge and cupboard. I get very creative with sandwiches, too. However, when I do cook Asian, it’s usually Indian (and a little Mauritian these days), Japanese curry, or a generic stir-fry.

12) Please share three of your favorite haiku and/or senryu that you’ve published in your decades as a writer.

This is a difficult question, maybe impossible. I’ve picked the three mono-ryu [single-line senryu] below because they’re connected to my interest in greguerías. The first was written around the time I discovered the greguerías of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, aphorisms of a sort that involve humor, wordplay of various kinds, and the manipulation of syntax.

My first poem reads like a greguería, minus punctuation. Well, it’s a complete sentence. The other two can be read with a kire, or not, which makes them a bit more like haiku. I’m currently trying to translate the greguerías of Portuguese poet José Jorge Letria, but the wordplay, when I do get it, is often beyond my English capabilities.

nothing in the window is everything

Modern Haiku, 43.1, Winter-Spring 2012

 

my wife who knows what she knows

Frogpond, 43:2, Spring/Summer 2020

 

dead pigeon whose god is innocent

Modern Haiku, 55:2, 2024

Bob, thank you for taking the time to share your delightful ideas about your creative life with The Haiku Foundation.

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time. 

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.