New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners – Maxianne Berger

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Maxianne Berger. Maxianne writes and edits haiku in English and French, and her work has been published and awarded internationally. She has coedited four anthologies of poetry: two of haiku and two of tanka. The most recent of her five books, You Are Here: Haiku & Senryu, was published in 2025 as part of the Yarrow Haiku Series. Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Maxianne!

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

I began writing free verse and form poems in the 1980s and learned about classical haiku through the Robert Hass translations and the Peter Pauper Press series. I started to write haiku much later when, for new experiences, in 2000, I joined a haiku group led by Angela Leuck and Marco Fraticelli. A few years later, at a Japanese-style kukai in French led by Abigail Friedman, Micheline Beaudry invited me to join le Groupe haïku Montréal which she had founded. Those meetings led to my writing in French as well.

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

Wherever you go, always have a way of logging whatever draws your attention: pen and paper, camera or voice recording apps on your phone. Anything interesting, anything that gives you pause. You needn’t worry about turning these into haiku immediately. You need to have them stored for when you are ready.

Beyond how-to, I suggest reading Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus (2003) not only for the wonderful poems themselves, but more especially for the lucid and informative commentary by Regina Weinreich. Do also read Abigail Friedman’s fascinating The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan (2006) which follows her time there as an American diplomat when she decided to learn haiku, in Japanese, and joined a kukai led by Momoko Kuroda.

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

Montréal has a circus arts college, and a 2020 performance inspired this poem (in Mayfly):

circus
the wriggling contortionist
on Daddy’s lap

Here is another I really like (in Acorn):

pause in raking
the yard-work supervisor
wants to play fetch

I’m a dog person with a cat, so I watch videos to get my fix. I love the joy of dogs being dogs.

What are some of the fun ways that you have used or experienced haiku? I read online of your interest in Oulipo. What do you like most about this literary movement? How has it influenced your haiku?

Constraint-based writing is a major aspect of the French group Oulipo—Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [workshop of potential literature] as well as of the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. A constraint is something that controls possible outcomes. Language itself is a constraint. Choosing to write a poem in a form is a constraint. Haiku is a constraint. Writing with constraints is solving a puzzle. This is a gimme: I love puzzles!

Oulipo was founded by Raymond Queneau as a way out of writer’s block. Constraints have served me the same way. For those I’ve toyed with, I do the best I can to write a haiku (yes, a desk haiku, not an experienced-in-real-life haiku). But . . . at a certain point what is written seems almost “there” as a “real” haiku, if only that d@mn constraint didn’t prevent the use of a better word. So, the constraint is abandoned. Its purpose was to get a haiku going. It’s done its job.

I am not wedded to constraints, but do enjoy playing. One fun approach is book-spine haiku. The gist is in “And They Talk, Too,” written when Failed Haiku put out a call for haibun in 2020.

In 2022, I gave a Zoom workshop, in French, on haïcouvertures (book-spine haiku). I found it very useful for illustrating the notion of a two-line phrase, with many examples of the different grammatical and syntactic ways to make two separate titles work together as a joined unit.

Your book Winnows (Nietzsche’s Brolly, 2016), which tied for 3rd Prize in the 2017 Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards, contains haiku created through erasure of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I find this fascinating. Why did you choose Moby Dick as your source material? What do you enjoy about erasure poetry?

In 2007, the poet Theresa M. Welford put out a call for a proposed cento anthology (each poem a patchwork of lines by different writers). I deluded myself into believing I could create a renku by snipping phrases from Melville, Dickinson and Poe, a foolishness I quickly abandoned. Melville, however, with that rich vocabulary, seemed quite perfect for finding haiku—simply by erasing all the words I didn’t need. I decided against three brief lines of weirdness (a frequent result of erasure). Mine had to be “real” haiku. Jane Reichhold’s Writing and Enjoying Haiku (2002) was my personal “hands-on guide”—fragment/ phrase, observation/ revelation.

Okay. I just said “simply.” A first draft of 136 poems took me 7 years. Angela Leuck then read the manuscript, and whatever left her indifferent, I completely redid—perhaps 25 of them.

And what do I enjoy most about erasure? Beyond its being a puzzle ☺ I would say it’s perfect for juxtaposition because, with erasure, available words are beyond your control, and the end of a poem can be a real leap from the beginning. Consider, say, chapter cxiii: “black horses/ one after the other/ the smell of wind[.]” I probably learned how to write haiku by writing this book.

How do you approach reading haiku?

During my studies in literature, I focused primarily on analysis and approaches to analysis. I apply this knowledge to book reviews for which I read many, many, many haiku. When a poem stuns me, strikes me, leaves me in awe, I look carefully at how it works, or to paraphrase John Ciardi, how does this poem mean? (How Does a Poem Mean; my copy is 1975).

These analytic ways of reading give me insight to apply to my own writing. An example of this is the first poem in Winnows (that radical erasure of Moby Dick). The words, in order, are scattered here and there in chapter 1. I recognized the potential (the “po” of Oulipo!): “drizzly afternoon/ better the fields than the house/ right, grasshopper!” This poem is as much indebted to Issa as it is to Melville.

I enjoyed your haiga in the latest issue of Only Human, and I read in contemporary haibun online that you think of photography as your third language. What drew you to haiga? What do you feel makes a great haiga? What does haiga capture, do you think, that haiku can’t?

Thank you ☺ Isn’t our international haiku community wonderful! Early in the pandemic, Kathabela Wilson invited me to a Zoom gathering of Poets on Site. Keep in mind that we live diagonally across North America from each other. There I reconnected with kris moon kondo who lives in Japan. At Kathabela’s, kris introduced me to haiga, and I was hooked! I love the constraint of link/shift between image and poem, and yes, constraint. The relationship between the two, and I don’t know who I’m quoting—not so far it’s obscure, not so near it’s obvious. That balance is key. The image is another phrase or another fragment, another detail of the whole, juxtaposed just as are the lines of the haiku/ senryu itself. The font, too, can be part of storytelling. Can be. The original version of this photo haiga appeared in Failed Haiku.

You might notice the font, Snap ITC. And don’t those rounded letters resemble little beetles!

Maxianne Berger (born January 26, 1949, Toronto, Ontario, Canada), retired clinical audiologist, poet, and translator. A lyrical poet since 1985, she turned to Japanese genres at the turn of the millennium, and her tanka, haiku, haibun, articles, and book reviews, in both English and French, have been published internationally, in print and online. She has coedited four anthologies, two of haiku and two of tanka. The author of five books; her most recent, You Are Here: Haiku & Senryu, was published in 2025. An explorer of Oulipo constraints for haiku, her 2016 Winnows, an erasure of Moby Dick, was honored with a tie for 3rd Prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards for 2017. Since the pandemic she has concentrated on photo haiga. She has lived in Montréal, Quebec, since the year of her birth.