Essence #5

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Then as now, poets found their voices in haiku through divergent styles in the first decades of the Haiku Movement. Let’s take a look at the diversity of the styles and objectives of Anita Virgil and Robert Speiss, two poets who were in all three editions of Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology:

Anita Virgil’s early haiku are just as fresh and daring as when they were first written. Before she wrote haiku she was already writing short poems. She studied the Japanese masters next, but holds fast to her own direction in haiku. In “walking the snow crust,” she goes beyond presenting two images and succeeds in offering three images that meld into opposite experiences. Quite a feat for a brief haiku.

Anita Virgil sent in her first haiku to Haiku Highlights in ‘68. She looked for what was “fresh and moving” even “timeless” and then sought to create “enduring freshness” in her own haiku. From the beginning, Virgil viewed haiku as poetry, not as a way towards enlightenment. In her own words:

          “Because I had always tended to write extremely brief poems before,
          the brevity of the haiku along with its elegant restraint felt as natural to
          me as coming home. Always having been disinclined to adhere to “rules”
          per se, I felt no restriction upon me other than the pursuit of fine poetry
          and the powerful use of language with which to evoke feeling.”

the swan’s head

turns away from sunset

to his dark side

In a genre which prefers two images to create depth, “the swan’s head” is successful with one-image because there is what Henderson called “internal comparison” of the choice of the swan to instinctively chose dark over light. To hear Anita Virgil talk about the process of writing “the swan’s head,” a guide to writing haiku and some American haiku history, go to https://haikuchronicles.podbean.com/ and click on November and December 2009 under the archives for Episodes 8 and 9 produced by Al Pizzarelli and Donna Beaver.

Darkening
the cat’s eyes:
a small chirp

Not only cats show their instinct to hunt and kill. This haiku is intuitively suggestive of the cat’s intentions on a spring day.

rustling beneath
the leaf cover, I pluck
the bean cool

There is lushness in this visual haiku, which reveals the quest for natural hidden treasures and the pleasure of something cool on a hot day. Anita Virgil’s haiku continue to exude freshness and timelessness today.

*Virgil’s first three haiku were published in A 2nd Flake, 1974 and the fourth in One Potato Two Potato, Etc., 1994.

Robert Spiess is one of the most beloved of American haiku poets. His long editorship, first with American Haiku and later with Modern Haiku kept him in the middle of the Haiku Movement. His personal style was what I would call contemplative. There is a real spirit of serenity in his haiku.

Muttering thunder . . .
   the bottom of the river
      scattered with clams

Spiess often chose images that are commonplace in nature, but each image was reinforced by a second image with a similar mood as in “Muttering thunder” which paired faint thunder with the movement of clams. He wrote his own aphorisms about haiku aesthetics, numbered them, and called them “Speculations.”

Becoming dusk—
the catfish on the stringer
   swims up and down

the field’s evening fog—
   quietly the hound comes
      to fetch me home

Spiess lived in Wisconsin and the cadence of his life and his sense of place is palpable in his haiku. In “Becoming dusk” the fisherman seems to be reluctant to take the fish out of the water as he concentrates on his catch. While in “the field’s evening fog,” the poet seems oblivious to the time and the fog. His dog’s response may be a daily ritual. This exudes calm and enduring fellowship.

One of the things that endured Spiess to other poets was the time he took to guide and nurture them as an editor. Haiku poet, Billie Wilson, who now facilitates the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award Competition for Modern Haiku in his honor, was helped so much by him through his letters that she went to visit him a year before he died in 2002. She wrote in the haijinx:

               “I have held this man in such a special place in my heart for
               so many reasons.  He opened the door to the haiku world for me
               in spite of the pitiful poems I sent him . . . . He mentored
               so many of us. Where on earth did he find that kind of time! 
               And yet he did maybe because he loved haiku as much as all of
               us put together. He passed that love along to all of us. It is
               perhaps the central aspect of his immeasurable legacy.”

*“Muttering thunder” was published in The Turtle’s Ears, 1971 and the other haiku of Speiss were in Shape of Water, 1982 and Cottage of the Wild Plum, 1991.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Essences began as a column written by Carmen Sterba in the North American Post in Seattle, WA, a bilingual newspaper in Japanese and English. Its purpose is to go back to the roots of the “haiku movement” in North America: the major poets, the individual styles of haiku, the books, the journals and conferences as they evolved from the sixties and seventies onwards. This will be a short version, so feel free to add information and comments as we go along.