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What is excellence in haiku and haiku-inspired poems? And is this a useful question?
   
It is always useful to talk poetry. Having said that, excellence is a subjective term. A judge's ruling, so to speak. According to the laws of the land. There are many laws, rules in the land of haiku. To my ear, an excellent haiku is one I want to read again, remember and live with for the rest of my life.

A talisman of words that are threateningly obvious. A discovery of an unrealized reverence for life:

low tide:
all the people
stoop

(Anita Virgil)

Prayer beads of syllables. An instant appreciation. A visceral knowledge:

gone from the woods
the bird I knew
by song alone

(Paul O. Williams)

An excellent haiku needs to possess a certain clarity. Don't know about others but I find overly intellectualized dense wordliness inscrutable as stone soup. A bit too tricky for my taste. See what I mean. No accounting for taste.

But others who admire hidden riddles and crossword puzzles might have a mind for a different kind of excellence. Excellence is when 9 out of 10 readers say: oh or wow or cool. Of course, who are the readers? You see the trouble with excellence. If we have a group of generally agreed upon arbiters of excellence then maybe we can agree on the best of the best. Plenty of arbiters to go around. But I think a poet knows when he's on the mark. Or at least within striking distance.

More practically speaking, maybe another approach to asking one big question in haiku: what is excellence? It may be useful to break it down into a series of smaller questions which when addressed individually to individual poems might contribute to an overall outstanding poem.

The overall question then becomes not what is an excellent haiku but how do we make our haiku excellent?

An excellent poem doesn't forget the basics but exhibits an accumulation of talents and skills. I found this list below helpful when I came across it online years ago.

9 QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR HAIKU:

(Taken from Anita Virgil's interview on the blog, Haiku Chronicles, Episode 8, "The Crafting of Haiku" The interview was conducted by Donna Beaver and Al Pizzarelli)

#1.    Is it one particular event in the present?

#2.    Is it a moment in which the poet views with fresh insight and awareness? Some common occurrence that points out the inter-relatedness of man and nature?

#3.    Is it objectively presented? Does it allow the reader to experience the emotion, or does it tell the reader what to feel?

#4.    Does it avoid simile, metaphor, personification, clichés?

#5.    Does each word serve a vital function in re-creating the poet's moment of deep response? Has your selection of words, the order in which you placed them, their sound, their tempo captured the quality of the experience?

#6.    If the poem allows for more than one interpretation through choice of words or punctuation or line breaks, does this add to or detract from the poem?

#7.    Has it growth potential? Does it convey more emotion than is experienced at the first reading?

#8.    What is the value of what the poet conveys?

#9.     Is this one of the very few poems that can be said to contain universal significance?

I sometimes refer to these questions when revising a few of my haiku. Most poems I write tell me where to go next. At times, it's helpful to interrogate a poem. Make it stand up for itself. If it can do that, it has a chance at making something of itself.

An excellent haiku shows no sign of having been put through its paces. The ones above or any other rigorous renovation of words. Oh and then there's the magic and the mystery. Key ingredients there's no accounting for. But overall, an excellent haiku is an accurate reshaping of "the poet's moment of deep response" as Virgil puts it above. It's personal to the point of relating to us all.

Haiku; The Charming Art

Recently, I heard a radio interview with a famous actor. A good actor, in my opinion. Accomplished. The interviewer wanted to know how hard was it to talk in that affected voice for so long, in speaking about a specific film. And what an impressive and convincing performance he delivered with that memorable voice. Oh that voice that voice, she went on and on, just drew me in . . .

The actor said: The voice isn't acting. That's technique. Like hair and make-up is used to make me look a certain way. The voice is my way of fitting the structure necessary for the role. But it's not acting. Acting is what happens once all that's second-nature. No longer an obstacle to what I might discover.

Immediately-- I thought: haiku. Haiku is the voice I assume in the film called Poetry. I have to be a poet first to attempt a role with haiku in it. Or, at least, I have to get myself a fine haiku coach to limber me up for the role. A convincing haiku poet is years in the making.

Mr. Yovu's assertion that anybody can write a good haiku is arguable. Anyone can speak German too after years of study but still to a native speaker the language may sound infantilized. But he said good not excellent, I understand. And no wonder. Haiku was introduced in America and it spread like wildfire. We've all counted them out in 3rd grade. Probably not since then for most poets. But for those of us who have pursued our studies of haiku in English we're in a bit of a pickle. Betwixt and between. To shout or whisper.

On the one hand, if we tout ourselves as haiku poets we are no longer visible to mainstream poets. If we claim mainstream poet status the haiku community cries: Interloper. Or: Experimentalist. Or worse: Phony.

So what's an old school word tinker to do? All he wants to do is write. Butt this word up against that syllable make a lap-joint, a dovetail call it what you want--does it hold together? Does it make you want to sing once its done?

In this regard, I agree with Mr. Yovu's belief that non-haiku poets don't care about haiku as much as the heat of the language used by the poet. They are in search of the stand-out poet. The fire-in-the-belly poet. A top-tier athlete/poet to use an Olympic metaphor. Who cares what language they speak. (And as we see in the Olympics, they can emerge from even the smallest villages with grit and guts).

Thing is: Given the relatively brief confines of the haiku form, the haiku poet must stick the landing every time. In fact, the haiku lands on the page all dismount and no running start. Haiku is not a passive sport, charming as it might be. The reader's gotta be responsible for something.

The role of criticism in all this? I would say that non-haiku poets need to get up to speed on what's happening in modern haiku these days. How do we assist them? Well if you want to attract a poet's fresh eye you have flash a shiny new word their way or series of words. You basically have to fish with fire. No easy task. Excellence in poetry is achieved by individuals not genres. Absolutely.

If we are in search of greatness, let it be in the next poem we write. I agree with Mr. Yovu's skeptical view of the promotion of certain sub-categories of haiku over, say, overall outstanding poems by specific poets. Traditional, Contemporary, Innovative. Yes, thank you, I'll take elements of all three please. Not one over the other. Sometimes, I do feel like we're in some super-socially responsible charter school where everyone gets a prize just for coming to school that day. Contests are tricky. Judges are human. Prone to specific tastes, etc, etc...

I have always contended that haiku is no different than any other kind of poem. Different rules, no rules. It's the original language art. All the same mainstream poetry rules apply to haiku (no discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader--push push push--go to the limit--some time-bitten coach screaming in you ear--That all ya got?!) And, by the way, it must sing for itself, with all its innocence and experience intact, or risk being forgotten.

In re-visitng this question briefly and reading the density of discussion above I am reminded what drew me to haiku in the first place--and a bit further away from the longer free verse I had been writing--clarity. Or is it a purity of language. A step away from academics toward the wilderness of life. For me, that's haiku. What can haiku poets learn from other forms of poetry? (Especially, the poetry one might encounter in the major literary journals) A quick, flip but accurate answer: What not to do.

What can haiku poets learn from more mainstream poets?

First, I can only tell you what I have learned. What I continue to learn, which is:

Discipline. Control. Pace. Where to break a line. How to write with your ear. Trust it. And create your own cadence. To value close observation that speaks a certain rhythm all its own. To crash words into each other and see what happens. Or to sing the lyric dreamily like dropping a path of words along a trail. . . luring the reader closer. I'm thinking of a particular Mary Oliver poem that begins: "It is a negligence of the mind not to notice. . . " That kind of turn of phrase: "a negligence of the mind" is something that haiku poets are trained to steer clear of. Too intellective. Cerebral. Up to the ol' poetry parlor tricks. Yet language is musical when we train ourselves or give ourselves permission to listen for that disembodied phrase, for that one unforgettable wonder of a word like undulate, cudgel, soliloquy. Some words beg to be spoken aloud.

Compelling non-haiku poets pledge their allegiance to language first, it seems, not rules. First the sound, then the sense.

Non-haiku poets have taught me an abiding love of language. Word by word. That a good book can sometimes be the dictionary. Haiku poets have taught me this as well. But I came to poetry as a young undergraduate memorizing Dickinson's "The grass so little has to do a sphere of simple green with only butterflies to brood and bees to entertain..." Or Bishop's wonderful lines from "Insomnia": "...into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me." Longer form mainstream poetry was my introduction to the world of lyric language. Short, heart-breaking lyrics hobbled my heart from the get-go. I would never stray far from Poetry. Haiku came much, much later.

The haiku poet can learn from the non-haiku poet how to take chances and how to invent words. e.e.cummings' "mud-luscious", for example.   Certainly, word inventing is not confined to the realm of mainstream poetry but you don't often see it in English language haiku. Why not? It's supposed to be light verse. Why not laugh a little more. 21st-century haiku requires good ol' fashioned, traditional innovation.

I have learned from non-haiku poets how to film a poem. How to set the lights, cue the music, yell: "Action!" And then when to be quiet. Silent. How not to step on your one dramatic moment that makes the reader stop—feel. Remember. Thank you Ellen Bryant Voigt for tapping out like a schoolteacher the notes of my own singing. For telling the class—showing them, with arms overhead that "your poem is exactly that -- a sustained crescendo -- hold it." No one said it would be easy. We all begin with a blank page. We must teach each other to never give up. To write only what matters even when we don't know what matters.
Write it all. 
Sort it later.
Sustain your crescendo as if that is all anyone will ever hear.

Peter,

Very generous of you to offer highlights, a kind of Reader's Digest version of all the poets' responses to the question: "Where do your haiku begin?." You've given me a chance to quickly revisit the pieces I so enjoyed reading.

I like your alternate/ follow-up question as well: "With which haiku, or haiku poet, did your love of haiku begin?" . . .so many that I'm still thinking that one over. Certainly, one poem that influenced me early on was Bob Spiess':

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

As a beginning haiku poet, I got up early, way before work, to read the poems of others further along the path, as they say. Bob Spiess was one of the first poets I read. He seemed like a quiet, simple man living out there in Wisconsin. A Midwesterner like myself choosing his life and words carefully.

His poem "Becoming dusk" affected me by redefining what a writer is. I was used to longer poems by long-winded poets. More "intellective" poems, as Bob often warned about my early haiku efforts. I had to "learn how to unlearn" as Marge Piercy advises the poet.  Spiess' ability to zoom-in on this one image of a fish in a bucket at the end of the day captured me. The fish's time is up. . . And yet, and yet. Up and down. Up. Down. The very motion of life.
That striving toward life struck me as exactly what I was trying to do with these short poems about simple scenes. Perhaps, what all poets strive toward. The value of one unforgettable image. That catfish on a short leash is inside me, an engine of sorts, or rather, an energy source for my own haiku.

--Peter

A fascinating read all these months later.

Pond
err ing
hike-ku 

--Peter

Where do your haiku begin?

My haiku begin on foot, most often. I walk each day as most of us do, to get from Point A to Point B. But I make it a point of my daily writing practice to walk from Point A to wherever I end up. Of course, my dog helps lead me astray. On these walks come poems. Not always, but often. Many unformed, rough-edged, mundane observations but a few beginnings worth taking back to the shop for polishing. All this takes time, which I would argue is the key ingredient in most quality writing. Even if a poem or two lands fully formed at your feet, it is the result of the patient work that comes before.

All poetry comes from some passionate need to give voice to the unexpressed.

Haiku happen at just the right speed.

The haiku I choose to pursue often begin with a phrase, a word, a feeling. Each seems to lure me closer. Haiku are the Xs on my life map in the making. The result of some voracious need to wander. A treasure hunt for language. What must be said? What has to be shown? Then . . . how to sing it.

My haiku begin where there's a void.  A silence. An open space that might fit the poem taking shape in my head. To be honest, I have no idea where my haiku begin. The worlds I discover in my haiku are the moments I'd like to remember. Life bookmarks. I place one here, drop another one there like bread crumbs just in case I need to find my way back. At the same time, my haiku begin by getting lost.

Submission deadline for the next issue of TINYWORDS (13.2) is June 1, 2013.  Submit your haiku and other small poems to www.tinywords.com Thanks.

"a little inn
with a swinging sign board
the evening chill"     
             --M. McClintock

"How is the life in me changed by the language of the poem?" You ask a great question and a hard one to answer. . .

I am reminded of life's ephemeral nature, caught as I am when I read this poem,  for a moment, hanging in the swing of that breeze-blown sign, its implied creaking sound a music all its own. The song is sad to my ear because of its relentlessness--all those short little "i" sounds. Like a string of ifs.

The little inn is a quaint, inviting image in L1 to my mind
counter-balanced with the somewhat haunting feel of L3
that frames an opening for the reader to be wedged right there in the middle of the road, so to speak, caught off-balance as so often we are in life.

The language is vigorous in the poet's pursuit of this end, hammering home a short-lived enchantment. That's what my ear tells me.

--Peter Newton

Gisele,

Hi, I'm new to this Forum thing. But I enjoy reading it.

Haiku for me has become a way of life. Some people meditate, some people go to church. I write haiku and other short poems. At the start of each day I try to sit still. A hybrid prayer-meditation-caffeine-induced trance. Being snowed-in helps, or maybe I'm coming down with something. I make excuses to put the world on hold. So I can sit awhile and feel the world wake up around me.

Am I inspired to write? I don't think so. It's just that a quiet mind does seem more receptive to that elusive haiku moment. Which, by the way, is rare. Usually something strikes me but let's not forget that haiku is a form of poetry. An act of creation that requires work to refine and edit. Hopefully, well. The thing is, I've written poems a long time. But haiku is different. There's a quality in the process of creating one and sometimes, yes it feels like I'm a reporter, just the facts please--that I find freeing. No heavy emotional poetry just a slowly somersaulting leaf in sunlight and somehow I feel young again. Like I can start over just like the seasons do. Each haiku is like that. A beginning.

A poet friend of mine once said: "Create the space in which the poem can happen." And how do you do that? I asked, a little frustrated with his tendency for the obscure. "One word at a time." Great, I said. Thanks.

--Peter

                 "Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life"       --Donald Justice