New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners -Jacob D. Salzer

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Jacob D. Salzer. Jacob is the author of five collections of poetry. He is a recipient of the 2024 High/Coo Chapbook Award for his book A Lost Prophet: Haiku & Tanka (Brooks Books, 2024). Jacob edited Frogpond for two years, serves as a co-commentator for the Haiku Commentary blog, and is the founding editor of the Haiku Poet Interviews blog. He is also a freelance editor at Mayfly Editing. Thanks for sharing your haiku journey with us, Jacob!

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, Jacob! How did you come to learn about haiku?

I started a daily meditation practice in high school through The American Meditation Society. Since being a teenager, I have always had a deep interest in Buddhism and the power of a quiet mind, observation, poetry, visual art, and music. I especially enjoyed the lyrics of the album Lateralus by the band TOOL, which are deep, complex, psychological, emotional, and spiritually charged. My mother is an artist. My father is a mechanical engineer. As a hybrid of both, I have the heart of an artist and a mind that often notices the details. Combined with my interest in poetry and meditation, haiku sounded interesting and seemed to be aligned with Buddhist values. (While I don’t see haiku as inherently Buddhist, I thought being mindful of the present moment resonated with much of Buddhist thought). In addition, as a child, I spent a lot of time in nature with my family.

With my upbringing in mind, I was naturally attracted to haiku. I wrote my first haiku in 2007, when I was 19 years old. I took a course called “The Way of Haiku and Haibun” taught by Kate Crow at The Evergreen State College. She told us that haiku is about capturing a moment. She said, “Write what you see, without judgment.” As a result of this, observing became a cornerstone of my early haiku. In the course, we also read tanka, renku, and haibun. The required coursebook was The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (Bt Bound, 1995) translated by Robert Hass. At the end of the course, the final assignment was to put together a collection of my haiku, tanka, haiku sequences, and haibun. My collection was titled, “The Silent Witness.”

Here is the first haiku I wrote in 2007, followed by a few more of my earliest haiku. These haiku are also included in my new book: A Missing Thread: Selected Haiku & Senryu (Lulu Press, Inc., 2026):

cold night
my visible breath
quietly vanishes

deflated balloons—
it rains quietly
autumn evening

under one blanket
small whispers
falling asleep

By 2011, the two-part juxtaposition in my haiku became increasingly predominant, as I started writing frequently about the mysteries of identity, nature, dreams, and relationships.

For those just starting out, what advice would you give?

I have a webpage titled, “Tips for Writing Haiku: An Introduction” on my poetry website Mare Liberum, where I post a lot of my published haiku, tanka, and haibun to read for free. I also appreciate tips for writing haiku that my friend Mary McCormack said in her interview in Frogpond 47:2 Spring/Summer 2024 (which can also be found on my Haiku Poet Interviews blog here).

In general, I appreciate how the images in haiku speak for themselves. Aside from the “show not tell” technique (by writing down our observations with simple words), I also admire haiku that have a two-part juxtaposition, where the two parts are not too close together or too far apart from each other (to paraphrase my friend Nicholas Klacsanzky). The space (Ma in Japanese) between the two parts in a haiku creates a rich psychological ecology of insight, depth, beauty, mystery, and discovery. In short, I would recommend writing down observations (using all five senses) and also exploring the relationship between the two parts in a haiku. What can we discover along the way?

What suggestions do you have for how to read haiku?

As a learning experience, when reading published haiku in journals, collections, or anthologies, here are some questions I would encourage readers and/or beginners to ask themselves:

• Why do you think the editor published this particular haiku?
• What does this haiku make you feel?
• What atmosphere does it create?
• What meanings or interpretations do you arrive at after reading it?
• Does the haiku inspire you to learn more about particular subjects?

The answers to these questions will give us insights into the qualities of a well-written haiku. These questions also give us a glimpse into the heart and mind of the poet and the editor(s) as well.

In a Western society that often promotes a “more is better” lifestyle and attitude, I greatly appreciate how haiku demonstrates that, sometimes, “less is more.” In general, I think we need more space for observing, listening, and mystery to live better and more fulfilling lives. Perhaps that could be a starting place to write haiku: to become a good listener and observer of both our inner and outer worlds, and how they influence each other.

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

While my love of nature is frequently found in my haiku, I also have several haiku that involve dreams and trying to imagine what the dreams within other species might look and sound like. I have a deep interest in psychology, identity, dreams, and nature. Here are a few of my haiku that explore the area of dreams and identity:

who am I?
the darkness in the eyes
of a barred owl

– Chrysanthemum 33, Fall 2024 issue

a ship’s skeleton
at the bottom of the sea
the whale’s dream

– Heliosparrow Poetry Journal, September 26, 2024

My hope is haiku like this provide an initial spark towards deep introspection and conversations. We often seem to be drawn towards linear human narratives, but have we considered what life looks and sounds like through the eyes of an owl or a whale?

As a side note, my interest in dreams began after watching a movie in high school, Waking Life, which is a profound and interesting movie about dreams and lucid dreaming. I highly recommend it.

You started the Haiku Poet Interviews blog in January 2021. Looking back, I started posting New to Haiku near the end of 2020, with my first Advice for Beginners interview posted in January 2021 as well. (Wow! We were clearly on a similar wavelength there.) I know the loneliness of the pandemic factored into how I structured my column here at THF. What prompted you to start your blog? What do you enjoy about interviewing haiku poets? What have you learned about haiku (and haiku poets!) from the process? 

First off, thank you for starting the New to Haiku series. It’s a valuable service that you provide to the haiku community.

I started the Haiku Poet Interviews blog for several reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to build community, especially during the pandemic. I had also read thousands of haiku but often didn’t know anything at all about the poet behind the poems. I was curious to learn more about haiku poets and their life journeys. This provides more context around their haiku and starts a conversation about many different topics.

Because my Haiku Poet Interviews blog is international, we also receive glimpses into different cultures and different worlds/worldviews. I greatly appreciate diversity.

I also provide several links in my interviews of key people, places, and resources. I intend my interviews blog to be a learning hub where people can take a deep dive into different subjects and haiku books, various websites, journals, etc. In that sense, the interviews have an academic purpose as well.

I also wanted to know why people have continued to write haiku, sometimes for over 40+ years. What is it that makes someone dedicate so much of their time towards reading and writing haiku? How can very few words say so much? This is the magic of haiku.

Finally, I was also motivated to launch the Haiku Poet Interviews blog to help market haiku books by fellow haiku poets. I feel there is a need for poets to be seen and heard, and this blog provides a platform for that, that will hopefully open doors and windows within readers (and also hopefully result in more book sales)!

I have been introduced to so many different cultures and upbringings by interviewing poets. I think that’s what I enjoy the most about the interviews (as well as building community and seeing people leave positive comments).

Talk with us about your latest poetry collection, A Missing Thread: Selected Haiku and Senryu (Lulu Press, Inc., 2026). In it, you span an impressive 19 years of writing haiku. How did you organize the collection and decide which poems to include?

I organized A Missing Thread chronologically. I start with my first haiku written in 2007 and finish the collection with haiku I wrote during the first half of 2026.  I include a nature photograph I took at the start of each year. There is also a gap between 2007 and 2011, and between 2011 and 2014. During those gaps, I was busy finishing college and starting my career in the medical field. I graduated from The Evergreen State College in September of 2010 with a Liberal Arts Bachelor’s Degree in Humanities. In college, I studied a wide variety of subjects including psychology, painting, music, poetry, nutrition, teaching, creative writing, neurobiology, statistics, and physics. Admittedly, I had significant financial pressure during and after graduating from college and didn’t have much time to write haiku. However, from 2014 and each year after, I consistently wrote haiku.

I selected what I believe are my best haiku written during each year. As the book progresses, readers will see how I’ve grown and evolved over the years. It’s interesting to notice what themes appear, my experiments with one-line haiku, and what subjects I like to write about the most. At the end of the book, I include a keyword analysis to show how often certain words appear in the collection. The word that appears most often in A Missing Thread is rain, which appears 24 times, followed by:

• dream(s) (23 times)
• wind and tree(s) (both at 20)
• sea (17)
• scent (16)
• darkness, song(s), and light (each at 14)
• river(s) and forest (both at 13)
• eye(s) (12)
• winter, snow, and sound (each at 11)
• tangled, hand(s), and evening (each at 10)
• moon, voice(s), and thought(s) (each at 9)
• old and water (both at 8)
• breath, dark, moss, lost, time, autumn, dead, tide, and mountain (all at 7), and
• mother (6), and so on.

It’s worth noting I have several other poetry collections and chapbooks that are smaller than A Missing Thread, including: Sea Wind: Haiku (Lulu Press, Inc., 2025), My First Trip to Japan: Poems, Photos & Stories (Lulu Press, Inc., 2025), A Lost Prophet: Haiku & Tanka (Brooks Books, 2024), and Unplugged: Haiku & Tanka (Lulu Press, Inc., 2022). I’m currently working on a milestone collection of tanka as well.

I noticed that you use the phrase “doorways into other worlds” with regard to your writing and interviews. What does this expression mean to you? How does it influence your various creative endeavors, which also include painting and drawing?

On my Haiku Poet Interviews blog, I initially chose the subtitle: “Glimpses into other worlds” because I feel that haiku and the interviews are just that. We can never know the entire journey of someone’s life and how we are mysteriously connected, in both obvious and subtle ways. As a result, we receive glimpses, which I better equate to windows or doorways into other worlds.

In my Haiku Poet Interviews emails, I now use the subtext, “Windows into other worlds.”  The windows in a haiku could be windows into other cultures, religions, spiritual paths, psychological viewpoints, etc. But I see each haiku is also a window into the mystery of the poet’s life and the mysteries of life itself. No matter how much knowledge we acquire, it seems life will always be full of intuitive moments and mysteries.

It seems that some people think the world is purely objective and “out there,” but is it not true that our thoughts and beliefs affect the way we see and experience the world? What happens to the waking world when we fall asleep? In a sense, I feel the mind is like a projector, projecting our thoughts that shape the world and our worldviews. What happens when we receive a different worldview or when our personal worldview is temporarily disrupted? In a way, I feel haiku are like small portals of fleeting moments that can break through to something different, unique, complex, and beautiful. While haiku are small, they can also simultaneously point to an entire world. In addition, if we sleep 8 hours a day, one-third of our life is spent sleeping and dreaming. That is a significant amount of time. While I am not a dream analyst, I think our dreams are windows or doorways into the worlds of the subconscious mind and collective consciousness of humanity and of life itself. On that note, I also admire the work of Carl Jung. I think dreams are an important part of human life and that we should pay attention to our dreams.

In the introduction of A Missing Thread, I start with a quote by Chief Joseph and show how it’s related to haiku:

“It does not require many words to speak the truth.”  — Chief Joseph (1840-1904)

“This quote by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe speaks to the power of haiku. Haiku demonstrates how very few words can speak volumes. However, the power of haiku is not only found in words, but in what is wordless, implied, subtle, and unspoken. I often see haiku as windows into other worlds and into the mysteries of life, death, and everything in-between.”

I think a painting or drawing can be a portal, window, or doorway into other worlds as well.  I think what’s equally important in visual art is, ironically, what we can’t see (i.e. what is the story behind the canvas, the paint, the supplies? How much work and time did it take to make the piece? How did the artist feel when they made this piece? Did the artist research subjects before painting or drawing? What do we know about the artist’s life and upbringing? What does the painting or drawings mean to the artist and to the observers? What are the possible interpretations? What stories does the art tell? Equally important: what will remain a mystery?) Interestingly, I also feel like I’m entering other worlds when I play music as well, particularly when I play piano.

In short, I think what is invisible is just as valuable as what is visible. Indeed, I’ve learned that appearances can sometimes be deceiving and there is more to life than what meets the eye.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences with New to Haiku, Jacob.

Thank you, Julie, for the opportunity to be interviewed! I greatly appreciate it.

Jacob D. Salzer is a Pacific Northwest poet and editor who primarily writes haiku, tanka, and haibun in English. He is the founding editor of Mayfly Editing Services and the Haiku Poet Interviews Blog and was a past managing editor of Frogpond: The Journal of the Haiku Society of America (2023-2024). Jacob is the author of several books, including A Missing Thread: Selected Haiku & Senryu (Lulu Press, Inc., 2026), Sea Wind: Haiku (Lulu, 2025), My First Trip to Japan: Poems, Photos & Stories (Lulu, 2025), Maui Wind: Poems, Photos & Stories (Lulu, 2025), A Lost Prophet: Haiku & Tanka (Brooks Books, 2024), and Unplugged: Haiku & Tanka (Lulu, 2022). Jacob frequently writes about psychology, sociology, dreams, and the mysteries of identity and nature.

Websites:

jsalzer.wixsite.com/mareliberumhaiku

https://haikupoetinterviews.wordpress.com/

https://jsalzer.wixsite.com/mayflyediting

https://haikucommentary.wordpress.com/