New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners-Margaret D. McGee

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Margaret D. McGee. Margaret is a haiku poet and an Episcopalian religious leader. Her book, Haiku––The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines (SkyLight Paths, 2009), explores using haiku to develop a daily connection with the sacred. Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Margaret!

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

I came to haiku during a six-week “Introduction to Poetry” adult-learning class offered by a local middle school teacher who devoted one of the sessions to haiku. She introduced haiku as a three-line poem, commonly broken in a 5-7-5 syllable count. She de-emphasized the syllable count and suggested we focus instead on seasonal images from nature to evoke a moment in time. She gave us examples of wonderful haiku, some that followed the 17-syllable count and others that didn’t. Then she sat us around a table with a vase of flowers, a bowl of oranges, and other interesting objects to contemplate while we wrote haiku. In the beginning, the analytical side of my mind really took to syllable-counting, but in the long run it was the beauty and power of juxtaposed imagery that bound me to haiku.

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

I was lucky to find an established haiku group in my town that included two acknowledged masters of the form—Christopher Herold and Karma Tenzing Wangchuk—as well as fifteen or so other haiku enthusiasts, each more experienced with the form than I was. The group’s feedback sessions were kind, supportive, detailed, and unsparing. I wrote a lot, learned a lot, and made new friends.

How do you approach reading haiku?

I like to read both new and vintage haiku for pleasure and inspiration. For example, I subscribe to Kingfisher, a haiku journal founded by Tanya McDonald in 2020. Each issue is packed with brand new haiku from all around the world. I feel as if I’m seeing the cutting edge of the form as it grows and evolves into new life. Patricia Donegan’s book haiku mind offers 108 poems, some written long ago, others in recent decades, each accompanied by Donegan’s insightful spiritual reflections. The compilation Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years provides over 200 poems by accomplished poets, some who wrote when the form was first adopted by English speakers, others into the early 21st century. So many other wonderful journals and anthologies are out there waiting for new eyes! Read until you find one haiku that pulls you in and moves your heart. Then read it again and ask yourself, “How did they do that?”

I love the phrase “vintage haiku.” I just may borrow that. What other suggestions and advice would you give to those starting out with haiku?

First advice: Learn the basics of the form, then write a lot of haiku. Quantity is more important than quality. When I first started, I was floored by the scores of published and honored poems written by my mentors, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk and Christopher Herold. Comparing their volumes of published works to my few stumbling attempts made me wonder if I could ever write even one poem worth reading. Then they explained that they’d each written thousands of poems, over many years, and that most weren’t that great. Maybe one in a hundred might get published, even fewer might win a prize. Eventually I was convinced that I’d learn more by writing a haiku a day for months, than by writing a single haiku and fiddling with it day after day until it was “perfect” in my own eyes. (I’m still sometimes guilty of the latter, and ever more certain that the former is better practice.)

Second: Find a good feedback group or partner who will share poems with you. Then regularly give each other kind, supportive, detailed, and unsparing feedback on the poems you write.

Third: Read and learn as much as you can about the form, then keep writing, and you will find your own distinct haiku voice. I got a lot of good from primers such as William J. Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku and Scott Mason’s The Wonder Code: Discover the Way of Haiku and See the World with New Eyes [Note: You can read Scott’s book for free in our digital library here.] You’ll find exercises in the primers that help you achieve your haiku-a-day goal.

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

Collaborative forms of haiku writing! What a revelation! The haiku form developed out of after-dinner party games of writing linked verse all around a table, with the sake flowing all the way. Renku, rengay, tanka, and somanka are all haiku-related forms that can be written in collaboration with one or more partners—another good reason to get in a haiku group with experienced members who can start the collaborations rolling.

What are your favorite haiku that you have written? Can you share a story behind one of them?

I was visiting my nephew’s house after the birth of his second son, holding the baby in my arms, and holding the baby’s foot in my hand. (Is there anything more wonderful in the world than a baby’s foot?) It had been a rough spring, in both weather and politics, and from that moment came this poem:

March gusts
I hold the baby’s foot
for ballast

I like the poem for the memory of little Conlon’s warm foot in my hand, and confess that I also like it for winning an award! I don’t enter many haiku contests, and when I do rarely attain even Honorable Mention. So it was a big shock when “March gusts” was awarded First Place in the 2018 Porad Awards, a competition I’d entered because the Porad Awards are sponsored by Haiku Northwest, the nearest haiku group to me that’s affiliated with the Haiku Society of America. (If you live in the US, the Haiku Society of America can point you toward your nearest group, too.)

I recently started reading your book, Haiku––The Sacred Art. What inspired you to write this book, and how has your life changed because of it? As a lay preacher and worship leader, how do your spiritual practices inform your poetry?

Not long after that adult learning class that introduced me to haiku, I wrote a book of brief seasonal meditations called Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment. The book’s meditations follow the Christian liturgical calendar and nature’s seasonal calendar, from Advent in winter through Pentecost season, ending in late autumn. In one of the meditations, I introduced haiku as a spiritual practice of mindfulness, describing the form in much the same way I first learned it in the adult education class. After Sacred Attention came out, my publisher suggested that I write a book focused entirely on haiku as a spiritual practice. I naively agreed, signing a contract that called for a complete manuscript in six months.

Within two weeks of research, I knew I was in way over my head. Haiku is like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole – once you fall in, it’s a drop into a vast, mysterious, fabulous world. Six months didn’t feel like anywhere near enough time to write a book that introduces haiku as a spiritual practice. Along with the research, I also needed to develop a few credentials, such as actual publications of my own haiku in reputable journals. My early submissions called forth cookie cutter rejections at a steady and leisurely pace.

I needed help, and fast. That’s when I found the Port Townsend Haiku Group and my mentors Christopher and Tenzing, each far more qualified than I was to write a book on haiku as a spiritual practice. And each generous to a fault when I explained my situation. Christopher offered free use of his wide and deep haiku library, and Tenzing gave insightful feedback and tender wisdom, drawn from long Buddhist practice intertwined with prolific haiku writing.

At the end of six months, I had the manuscript that became Haiku – The Sacred Art, along with a few decent publications of my own haiku to mention on the book jacket.

How did writing the book change my life? First off, it taught me how to write haiku, and how to write about writing haiku. In the process, it helped me develop a practice of mindfulness that serves everything I do, from sweeping the sidewalk to writing a thank you note, and from preaching to prayer.

More than publications or prizes, when it comes to haiku, it’s the practice of mindfulness and creative work in community that matters. My book includes lots of haiku examples, some of them elegant poems written by masters of the form, others first efforts by retreat or workshop participants groping for words to express what’s inside them and trying to get out. Each poem offers its own nugget of the human condition.

The practice of writing haiku involves opening your mind and heart, paying close attention to whatever the world offers, and writing the next word.

Margaret D. McGee‘s books include Stumbling Toward God, Sacred Attention, and Haiku – The Sacred Art, as well as numerous user guides and other technical pieces written for software companies over the years. Her short work has appeared in such publications as Creative Writing Demystified, Kingfisher, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, bottle rockets, Englewood Review of Books, and Modern Haiku. She is a licensed lay preacher and worship leader in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia. Her liturgical prayers and skits have been used by faith communities across the United States.