Haiku for Healing Interview – Sean O’Connor

In this H4H interview, tackling the themes of death, war, dislocation and cruelty Sean O’Connor, award-winning poet, and editor says that writing is not so much a therapeutic working through of his own personal feelings as it is of creating a connection, a conversation with the reader. The therapeutic benefits are at the discretion of the reader.

Thank you Sean, for making time for this H4H interview. You come from a country with some of the most iconic writers and poets like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney, to name a few. So, what is it particularly about haiku and haibun that drew you to these short forms?

Seamus Heaney spent much of his life abroad and both Joyce and Beckett lived in exile. Indeed, Beckett wrote some of his most significant work in French. Many Irish writers have gained cultural and artistic sustenance from other parts of the world. In my case, Japanese literature and culture deeply influence my writing.

Whilst haiku and tanka are poetry forms that are ‘short’, haibun can be any length, therefore, I don’t think of myself as a writer of ‘short forms’ but as a writer who works mainly in Japanese literary forms.

Would the healing potentials of the forms be one of the reasons?

As with all art, I think literature has therapeutic potential, however, whilst art can have therapeutic benefits, artists are not therapists. Emotional connection is at the core of literature, and this is where it may have some therapeutic effect.

Would your experience as a psychiatric nurse have made you particularly attuned to the therapeutic possibilities of these short forms? Please could you share a few haiku or haibun that are based on your experiences.

It depends on what is meant by ‘therapeutic’. What is intended to be clinically therapeutic is very different to what can be said to ‘be therapeutic’ in a general sense. There are ‘therapeutic’ benefits to going for a walk, but this is not the kind of benefit clinicians are talking about when they use this word. We can see that there are many levels of meaning to the notion of what is ‘therapeutic’. For my part, I do not see my writing as being of therapeutic benefit to myself. However, I do think that if we write with enough care, the writing can generate an emotional connection in readers that can be therapeutic. It is the readers who can best evaluate this.

Gabriel Rosenstock describes your second solo collection, Even the Mountains, about your experience of living in a rural village in Japan, as ‘A book for all seasons by a latter-day Lafcadio Hearn’. How did Japan impact you as a poet of these short forms?

By the time I moved to Japan in 2008 I had already been writing in Japanese forms for many years and had been the editor of a print journal (Haiku Spirit). Although very challenging at first, my understanding of Japanese literary forms was transformed over the five years I continuously lived in Japan. I had to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about haiku, in particular. There is far too much for me to recount here, so I will confine myself to two points, and only briefly.

Firstly, as with all writing, a haiku can be ‘too short’. If we overfocus on brevity, we can end up not writing ‘enough’.

Second, I began to understand that a kigo is not merely a reference to ‘nature’ or ‘season’, indeed, kigo sometimes don’t refer to either (for example, ‘April Fool’s Day’). A kigo is a literary device used by haiku poets to generate emotional resonance in their haiku.

These two points alone were quite a challenge to me at first. It took a few years before I felt I was able to assimilate them. I continue to work hard to improve my understanding.

A Patch of Earth features haiku, haibun and tanka addressing the complexities of death, loss and grief. What characteristics of these forms enabled you to address such deeply personal and painful subjects?

With all the haiku in A Patch of Earth (including those in the haibun) I put a lot of work into selecting the most effective kigo I could, to communicate the emotional palette of the work. This process compelled me to try and find fresh approaches to kigo, such as the first line of this haiku:

nights drawing in –
wondering how Dad is
in his patch of earth *1

A Patch of Earth was the first book in which I wrote tanka (waka) in its original two-verse structure (a three-line verse above a two-line verse) and adhered to its long-standing syllable structure of 5-7-5-7-7. I was inspired to do this after reading tanka by Gabriel Rosenstock where he had used this approach. (He usually wrote ‘freestyle tanka’).

By doing so I found that I had to revisit the poem repeatedly. At times I had a draft that I thought was as good as I could get it, however, it did not ‘comply’ with the structure, so I had to rewrite it. At first, I was reluctant to do so as I did not think the piece could be improved. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the process of rewriting that is necessary when we work to an age-old structure can significantly improve the outcome.

last snowflakes settle
a mountain stag’s plume of breath
soundlessly swelling
    can you hear it through the earth?
    my father’s bones are singing *2

The title, A Patch of Earth, refers to my father’s grave and I wrote the book over the first year after his death. However, the book is about grieving, not about my grieving. Consciously working in structured processes helped me to generalise my personal grief and thereby draw the reader into the experience.

Note: ‘nights drawing in’ won second place in the HSA Haiku Award 2022.

What other difficult topics have you written about in your haiku and haibun? Please give a few examples.

Dementia is the theme of Fragmentation. For this I drew on my experiences of caring for people living with dementia while I was a psychiatric nurse, and my time accompanying my father during the final years of his life.

snow and mist;
the whole of this world
– ending here *3

The God of Bones enters the turmoil of war, upheaval, social dislocation, and human cruelty. It seeks beauty in the darkest corners of this fragile life. The God of Bones ends with this haibun:

Perfection

Just days old, the four babies lie crossways in a single cot. Four round faces; mouths gasping, their unfocused eyes swimming with wonder.

A blanket has been clipped above the cot to protect them from flying glass should the windows blow in.

Spring sunlight –
so perfectly formed
eight tiny hands *4

Finally, what would you say to a poet seeking to explore haiku as a tool to write about both personal and wider global issues?

There are two points I would like to make on this, and they are connected.
Firstly, do not rush to publication. Haiku are especially difficult to write well. Before submitting for publication, give yourself at least six months to edit, re-edit, re-write, reconsider, reflect, and craft everything you write. Once it’s out there you cannot take it back.

Secondly, write for the benefit of others.

Notes

*1.  A Patch of Earth, Alba Publishing, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, 2023.
*2. A Patch of Earth, Alba Publishing, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, 2023.
*3. Fragmentation, Alba Publishing, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, 2021.
*4. The God of Bones, Alba Publishing, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, 2022.

Coming up on Monday, 27th July:

H4H interview with Mike Montreuil, widely published poet and editor. It sheds some light on how he uses haiku, tanka and haibun to explore the difficulties of expressing one’s thoughts, concern and love to those closest to us when they are in decline with dementia and dying.

Bios

Sean O’Connor is an award-winning poet, author, and editor. He has written six books, was the founder and editor of The Haibun Journal (2019-2025), editor of the Irish print journal Haiku Spirit (1998-2000) and is the haibun editor of the long-standing print journal Presence. He has judged several international literary contests.

O’Connor’s work has been widely published, translated, and anthologised worldwide. He won the HSA Merit Book Award: Best Haibun Book 2021 for Fragmentation and in 2022, his book The God of Bones was awarded honourable mentions in both the HSA Merit Book Award and in the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. His fifth book, A Patch of Earth, was awarded an honourable mention in the HSA Merit Book Awards, 2024. He recently launched By Dogen’s Stream: The Zen Poetry of Sean O’Connor which includes an introductory essay by Prof. Thomas Festa. Sean was awarded two Literature Bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland. See www.seanwriter.com

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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