Haiku for Healing Interview – Mike Montreuil

A big thank-you, Mike, for agreeing to this interview for Haiku for Healing.

You’re a widely published and well-known poet and editor of the Japanese short forms. What is it that particularly appeals to you about haiku?

Way back, let’s say just after the fall of Richard Nixon, I began writing poetry simply because my first girlfriend was writing it herself. Call it puppy love, if you will. But I was hooked. Yes, I did write A LOT of bad poetry. But by the time I graduated from college, in the early eighties, I realized that my twenty to thirty lines could be condensed to four or five lines and have the same meaning as those longer poems. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that I discovered haiku via the anthology Milkweed: a gathering of haiku edited by Marshall Hryciuk.

I knew I had found a means to write without all the angst, bullshit, and other things like love. However, it became a way of observing and writing what my Métis grandfather told me. Listen, see, and use your other senses to feel the world.

Would you say that haiku lends itself as a healing tool? Please could you expand a little on this.

Yes, haiku lends itself to healing. For me, it became a way to get to the heart of my emotions. This was true when my dad died in 2001. It was during his wake that it hit me; I could not look at him. Then a few years later, if I remember correctly, I wrote this “haiku” about him. My memory tells me it was this one.

losing dad
his wrist watch
still too big *1

But we must remember that tanka and haibun are excellent vehicles for healing.

In the healing aspect, is it the natural image that triggers an emotional response or is it the thought or emotion that seems to find a corollary in nature?

That’s a very good question. For the most part, my grief doesn’t last long. I lived four hours from my parents and I was never there at the times of their deaths. I became very stoic in my grief. Now when I have a thought or a memory about my parents and grandparents it is mostly of the times when I last saw them. My maternal grandfather had Alzheimer’s and my mother, dementia. Honestly, I don’t know how they suffered. My healing is thinking about the past and the good memories. It is only when I think of my paternal grandfather that I turn to nature, listening to the pines or aspen leaves moving with the wind. It is the murmurs and the silence between them that heal me.

Would you share a few poems that you have written exploring the therapeutic potentials of haiku. Have you used any of the other related forms?

memories
of another time
drifting snow *2

on the road back
from home
what I left behind *3

nothing left
but her ashes—
until I too
am able to rise
like a phoenix *4

You write in both French and English. In which of these two languages are you most able to use the alleviative possibilities of haiku and its related forms?

It’s usually in English, when I write a haiku. It’s easier for me to find the right words for the haiku. For tanka, it’s about 50-50, but it’s harder, in French, to respect the syllable limit. The same is also true for haiku.

What would say to a poet looking to haiku for healing?

First of all, be honest with yourself. Secondly, do not be afraid to write it as a tanka. Lastly, use the memories of the good times to help your healing.

Notes:

*1.  Unpublished
*2. Unpublished
*3. Unpublished
*4. Unpublished

Coming up on Monday, 24th August:  

Glenn Coats’s poignant and eloquent haibun article on his childhood trauma of sexual assault.

Bios

Mike Montreuil has been writing haiku and other Japanese forms since 2001. He became the Publications Editor of Haiku Canada Review in 2018 and held the position until May 2026. He is also the Managing Editor and the Tanka Prose Editor of the on-line journal cattails. In May 2026, Mike has begun his two-year term as President of Haiku Canada.

His books and chapbooks are listed at shorter lines. His two latest books are every so often, a collection of cherita and Needing a Vacation, a collection of 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.

Read past Haiku for Healing posts here.

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