New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners-Deborah A. Bennett

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Deborah A. Bennett. Deborah’s haiku have appeared in publications such as Rattle, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and First Frost, and her poetry has been long-listed for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award. Alan Summers recently described her as “possibly one of our finest living practitioners of haiku (and hokku) and fusion of both.” Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Deborah!

In Advice for Beginners posts, we ask established haiku poets to share a bit about themselves so that you can meet them and learn more about their writing journeys. We, too, wanted to learn what advice they would give to beginning haiku poets. You can read posts from previous Advice for Beginners interviewees here.

Welcome to New to Haiku, Deborah!

Thank you so much for this opportunity to share my love of and to advance the cause of the haiku form.

You are very welcome. How did you come to learn about haiku?

I came to haiku as an adult during the Covid pandemic. I had always been an avid reader of poetry and was gifted Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku. As the book emphasized haiku as being rooted in the Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, I began a mindfulness practice, with the examples of haiku masters Bashō, Buson and Issa, and attempted to write haiku that carried the power of direct observation, spontaneity and Zen alertness. In the beginning I wrote with much reverence to the [haiku] masters, but after a while, I took Bashō’s advice and gave up imitation for writing from my own experience.

Do you have a haiku mentor? What advice did they give you? Did someone else’s haiku greatly influence your own?

I was grateful to find the haiku communities of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They included many experienced haiku enthusiasts who were encouraging and supportive and who offered me feedback and guidance, as I was very new to the basics of the form.

Where do you most often write? Do you have a writing process?

There is no one place I most often write. I carry a small notebook with me wherever I go should inspiration come. I read once this quote by Bashō: “A poet needs to discipline himself everyday.” So I committed to writing a haiku a day. I love a kigo to root the poem in nature and in the moment, and a cut to add wakefulness, clarity, simplicity and a mysteriousness which brings one back to the poem again and again to see something you hadn’t seen before.

How do you approach reading haiku?

I was fortunate to have found so many books by haiku poets that taught me haiku could indeed be subjective, that they could be personal expressions of one particular human life. I read Temple Dusk and A White Tea Bowl by Mitsu Suzuki, who wrote intimately about grief; Sonia Sanchez, who in Morning Haiku, wrote poems dedicated to heroes of the Black community; and Richard Wright‘s Haiku: This Other World, written in the final months of his life, revealing his subtle reflections on life and aging.

What are some of the fun ways that you have used or experienced haiku?

Rengay was a joy! Getting together with haiku friends to create something beautiful is an experience I will never forget. Also, writing prompts! One of my favorite podcasts is The Poetry Pea on YouTube. There is a monthly video prompt where haiku poets from around the world offer their poems to inspire and be inspired.

I’ve read that some of your inspiration for haiku comes from the teachings of ancient religious philosophers. Which teachings have most influenced you and your approach to haiku?

One ancient philosophy that has greatly influenced my work is best expressed by one of my favorite poets, Li-Young Lee:

“In Chinese culture the ancient Tang Dynasty said that there has to be a moment in the poem where you ‘raise the head – yang mei tu chi.’ That meant to ‘raise the consciousness’ to see the huge universe in the context of the poem. They saw the poem as an object through which you come to know the Tao or God.”

I write this quote on the first page of all my haiku notebooks––” yang mei tu chi.”

During your 2022 interview with whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, you said that you are drawn to write one-line poems. What do you like about one-line haiku versus three-line? What advice do you have for new poets about how to lineate their haiku?

It was discovering the “free-verse” haiku of Santoka Taneda that led me to one-line poetry. I was amazed with that resonance and with that silence I’d been searching for in my own poetry. To write one-line was never really the dream. To write silence is the dream. So my only advice for beginners is to remain a beginner. Hold on to the beginner’s mind. Never stop studying your craft and letting something new be revealed to you.

Deborah A. Bennett‘s work has been long-listed for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Individual Poems and translated into Japanese by Hidenori Hiruta for the Akita International Haiku Network. Her poems have most recently appeared in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Rattle.