Haiku for Healing Interview – George Swede

Welcome to the interview feature of Haiku for Healing with George Swede, eminent haiku poet and editor, who first mooted the role of haiku in therapeutic poetry.

George, thank you for agreeing to do this interview for the Haiku for Healing project. Was it as a teacher of psychology or as a haiku poet that you saw the potential of haiku in poetry therapy?

My interest in the power of poetry to help deal with emotional issues first arose when I was in my early teens (1950s) and wrote some poems that mercifully became lost. But the effects of their composition seemed to help in struggles with family and identity. I returned to writing poems in the late 1960s after my first wife and I separated. Then, for a year I became a school psychologist in Toronto and saw how some troubled pre-teens and teens were helped by writing about their problems. When I started my academic life at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), I learned about the Association for Poetry Therapy (now known as the National Association for Poetry Therapy or NAPT) in the United States and presented a paper, “The Role of Haiku in Poetry Therapy,” at the Sixth World Poetry Therapy Conference in New York City, April, 1, 1978. This paper became a chapter in my book, The Modern English Haiku, Columbine, 1981.

In “The Role of Haiku in Poetry Therapy,” you say, “I believe that patients should be introduced to haiku during the latter stages of poetry therapy when they already have acquired some detachment from their problems.” (Page 41). Can this objectivity in haiku be achieved by the use of imagined or fictionalised scenarios? For instance, Buson wasn’t a grief-stricken widower, when he wrote this oft-quoted poem:

It goes into me
the comb of my long-gone wife
stepping on it in the bedroom

Trans. Yuki Sawa and Edith M. Shiffert, Haiku Master Buson, Heian International Inc, 1978

In poetry therapy the therapist selects well-wrought, intimate poems that deal with clients’ problems, such as grief. The hope is that introspective, metaphor-laden poems will encourage clients to write their own verses which can then be used as a basis for discussion. This process usually works well in the beginning, when clients need to find a way to express deep feelings. But, at some point, the clients’ poems and subsequent discussions will reveal a readiness to move away from their inner world and look outward, to things other than the self. When this happens, my article recommends the use of the haiku, a form that specializes in finding meaning in the world around us. Buson’s poem is a perfect example. It describes a real-life event (stepping on the dead wife’s comb) while at the same time pointing out a lingering, but no longer overwhelming inner grief.

Again, you observe that poetry therapists seldom used haiku perhaps because they perceived it as being too short. But do you think that its brevity is actually an asset? Could you expand a little on this? 

Short poems can be a good choice for clients who had no need for poetry therapy until they were struck by a serious physical illness, especially an incurable one such as Parkinson’s disease. Such persons might not need to deal with the complex metaphors of longer poems. They might benefit more from reading and writing haiku, a form which requires them to look at objects and events outside of themselves—the world of nature and the world of human interactions and the artifacts humans have created.

Besides Parkinson’s, what other conditions might be helped by haiku? 

I would say that any other incurable condition that results in years of suffering before death might benefit from poetry therapy. Ones similar to Parkinson’s are multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), cerebral palsy, etc.

Your query triggered memories of the summer of 1967 when I attended my only creative writing workshop. It was run by Tom Arnett who had cerebral palsy. His communication skills were so good that you soon ignored his muscle tremors and slurred speech. Considering our topic, the workshop was a kind of role reversal—someone with palsy conducting poetry therapy with persons needing to express deep feelings yet beset with doubts and anxiety.

What would you advise a poet who is thinking of haiku for healing?  Please could you give a few pointers as to how a poet could get a sense of the wonder and hope that you describe?

My own experience might be helpful. I had been publishing free verse for six years before I encountered Makoto Ueda’s anthology, Modern Japanese Haiku, sent to me for review by the University of Toronto Press in 1975. The 400 haiku (20 pieces each by 20 poets) were a revelation to me of the range and variety of experience that can be expressed in a short-form poem. This wonderful anthology captured my imagination and I began to write haiku. Soon reading and writing haiku became my primary interest. Looking back, I realize how often my engagement with the form served a therapeutic purpose.

It’s over four decades since you first espoused haiku as therapeutic poetry. Has your perception changed? Please could you share a few details?

When poetry as therapy first emerged as something distinct from other art therapies (drawing, painting, sculpting, drama, writing) in the 1960s, the cases discussed in its early literature featured mainly common problems such as loneliness and alienation. By 2024, the list has mushroomed to include almost everything in the current psychiatric manual, the DSM-5. But this is not all. A growing addition to poetry therapy literature has been the appearance of cases dealing with the psychological trauma of long-term physical diseases, especially those which so far are incurable, such as Parkinson’s.

Finally, would you give us some examples of your own haiku for healing?

The one example that immediately stands out for me is the haiku sequence I wrote about my half-brother, Robert Paynter, who committed suicide in 1984 at the age of 26.

ONE WEEK’S DUST

My dead brother’s room
morning sunbeams touching
his things

The family gathered–
a tear of embalming fluid runs
from my brother’s eye

Gripping the coffin’s ring
I remember his cries for
“a horsey ride”

The last rites
cloudless sky over
the crematorium

My dead brother’s desktop
on his wallet
one week’s dust

I reread my brother’s
suicide note—tomatoes ripening
on the sill

(Frogpond, May 1985, Vol. VIII, No. 2, p. 17)

Coming up next week: information about Haiku for Healing Google Classroom with distinguished poet and editor, Geethanjali Rajan.

If you have any questions about Haiku for Healing, please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

Bios

George Swede co-founded Haiku Canada in 1977; served as editor of Frogpond (2008-12); and was Honorary Curator of the American Haiku Archives (2008-09). He has also edited or co-edited 8 anthologies of haiku and non-haiku and published over 50 collections of haiku and non-haiku.

Writing as therapy has been an interest since the start of his poetry career in 1969 when he published his first poem. Subsequently, he gave papers and wrote articles on poetry therapy, and, when giving readings and workshops in schools, he focused on the therapeutic benefits of poetic expression, particularly via haiku.

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

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