New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners – Melissa Allen

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Melissa Allen. She is the current editor of Password: the journal of very short poetry and a former editor of past journals Bones and Haibun Today. Her writing has appeared in publications worldwide. Two of her haiku were shortlisted for the Touchstone Awards, with a third haiku winning this award in 2012. Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Melissa!

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

I suppose that, like most people, I picked up in my childhood the popular (mis)conception of haiku as a three-line, 17-syllable nature poem. I remember writing a few haiku in a high school English class when we were assigned to write poems in a number of set forms such as sonnet and villanelle. I even had one of these published in our high school’s literary magazine, so I suppose this is my first published haiku (1986), being revealed for the first time to the worldwide haiku community:

I wish you’d come see
The cat. She no longer sleeps
On the guest room bed.

Needless to say it’s unlikely this would get published in any self-respecting haiku journal these days (or those days), but I do think I recognize in it the influence of J.D. Salinger, of whom I was a devotee in high school and who wrote about haiku, and even included haiku of his own, in some of his stories.

I didn’t seriously start to write haiku, though, until the spring of 2010, when I was at loose ends, wanted to encourage in myself a daily writing habit, and decided to go about this by starting a blog (blogs were very big then) and posting daily. I knew I wouldn’t actually manage a daily post unless what I posted could be extremely short, and the shortest type of writing I knew about was a haiku, so I decided, with virtually no haiku-writing experience and giving almost no thought to the matter, that this would be a haiku blog. By that time I had somehow picked up the information that haiku didn’t absolutely have to be 17 syllables, but that was about all I knew about haiku on the day I started posting.

However, since I was, as I say, at loose ends, and since I have a slightly obsessive personality, I quickly began spending several hours a day reading and writing haiku and about haiku. Even then there was a lot of haiku and haiku-related information on the internet (and now, of course, there’s exponentially more), so it was fairly easy for an obsessive person to quickly pick up a good basic understanding of the current state of English-language haiku. Pretty soon (like within a few weeks) I wasn’t just posting haiku, I was posting lengthy essays and meditations about haiku, and had gathered a whole community around the blog and was learning even more from that community and from the larger haiku community that I found myself in. It was an immersive and exciting experience, which I highly recommend to anyone who happens to find themselves with absolutely nothing else to do for a prolonged period.

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

I was extremely lucky to be able to attract a community of haikuists around my blog early on, to share ideas and feedback with. I was also extremely lucky to find myself in southern Wisconsin, where, unbeknownst to me at first, a community already existed around the “cradle of American haiku” that had given rise in the sixties to the first English-language haiku journal, American Haiku. A few months after I started writing haiku, I saw a small notice in my local newspaper (remember those?) for the second-ever biannual Cradle of American Haiku conference, to be held in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, an hour from my house. I had no idea what this “cradle” thing was referring to, but it sounded great to me, so I went.

It turned out that this conference had been organized by the wonderful Gayle Bull (now deceased), who with her late husband James had been one of the editors of American Haiku, so here I was plunged all at once into what seemed like the American haiku epicenter. It was life-changing to meet dozens of other poets, most from the upper Midwest, who were active and enthusiastic participants in the current English-language haiku community. I had never met another haiku poet in the flesh, and I was overwhelmed to find so many of them so nearby, and so welcoming and informative. Over the years many of these people have become my friends and colleagues and we have spent many hours together discussing and workshopping haiku. I don’t know if I’d say that I have any particular haiku mentor, but the haiku community in general is warm and generous and has so much insight and wisdom to share that I would definitely advise anyone new to haiku to find a haiku group or haiku conference to meet up with. Online connections are also great, but sometimes it’s really invaluable to meet people in person.

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

I almost always write on my laptop, in a single Scrivener file that I opened the day in 2010 when I began writing haiku, so nearly every haiku I’ve ever written is in it. (Yes, it is backed up!) The writing technique I’ve found most helpful is to take advantage of hypnagogia—the state between waking and sleep, when your brain is both open to the insights of the subconscious and has access to the knowledge and the editorial capacity of the waking brain. If I sit on my couch with my laptop on my lap in the evening when I’m sleepy, I usually start to drowse off, and then the computer begins to topple and I wake up to recover it . . . and all the while I’m letting an intention to write haiku pass through my brain, as I transition rapidly and repeatedly between asleep and awake. This produces far better haiku than if I write when wide awake and alert, when my expectations for myself are higher and my anxiety levels also correspondingly higher. I think that to write good haiku you need to both have a high level of knowledge of haiku history and haiku technique, and also be able to mostly put that knowledge out of your mind and tap in to a deeper, more intuitive vision of the world and a more idiosyncratic, childlike use of language.

That being said, nearly every haiku I write is (by my own standards) not especially good and is never seen by any other human being!

(Note from Julie: I found it interesting that Michael Nickels-Wisdom employs a similar method of writing haiku. You can read his Advice for Beginners interview here.)

How do you approach reading haiku?

I approach reading haiku by reading a lot of it. I read many different types of journals, both print and online, both current and historical/defunct. I read yearly anthologies like the Red Moon Anthology and the Haiku 20xx series edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, and I continue to read and re-read anthologies like Blyth’s four-volume Haiku, the various editions of Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, Gurga and Metz’s Haiku 21 and Haiku 21.2, and the Norton anthology Haiku in English. I also have an extensive collection of haiku collections by individual writers that I continue to add to and to re-read. I also keep several notebooks in which I transcribe favorite haiku or haiku that have struck me for whatever reason, and I look these over periodically. Some of them are sorted thematically, which gets me thinking about how, for instance, different writers have approached haiku about spiders, or rivers, or whatever the subject might be. The hill I’m very willing to die on is that if you don’t have an extensive understanding of what haiku is (all the different kinds of it) and what it has been, of which haiku work for you and which don’t and why, your haiku will not be as good as they could be.

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

As I’ve said, reading lots and lots of haiku from all over the spectrum of haiku is essential to helping you get a sense of how haiku work and develop your own style. I also highly recommend that people relax about “the rules” of haiku, since I often see beginners so anxious about writing haiku “the right way” or whether they’re “allowed” to do this or that that they either end up with writer’s block or write very stiff, conventional, clichéd verses. If you read a lot of haiku, you will end up with an instinctive understanding of the kinds of approaches that work and do not work, so though I think it’s fine, probably necessary, to read basic how-to books and keep in mind the general principles they discuss, I would also try to identify whether, how, and where individual authors or haiku you love flout those principles or break the rules and why it works. Ultimately what we’re trying to do here is create literature, not follow a classroom assignment (in my experience, haiku writers were often excellent students who are still anxious about getting good grades), so do what works for you.

The other thing I would advise (which might seem like it contradicts the first part of my advice) is to get lots of feedback from other writers, preferably much more experienced writers and a large variety of them. This will help to add to your understanding of what works in haiku writing, since more experienced writers will be able to point out when, for example, you’ve written something that fifty other writers have written before you, or when you’ve said something that made sense in your head but doesn’t translate to anyone else’s. There will definitely be writers and editors who don’t understand your vision just because you have very different minds and tastes and not necessarily because there’s anything wrong with your writing, but that’s where soliciting a wide variety of opinions comes in. If nothing else, try submitting your work to journals whose work seems to reflect your own taste in haiku. It might take a while to see an acceptance, so this is where cultivating patience, humility, and a sense of humor—which are virtues in haiku writing (and in most other things) anyhow—comes in.

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

When I assembled a list of potential candidates for this answer, I read them over and could see that my haiku often have a tone of wistfulness or nostalgia or even sorrow that is embodied in some physical object or phenomenon:

spring rain backwards until the beginning

particles decaying at the speed of lilac

radiation leak moonlight on the fuel rods

autumn sky
only one of us
deciduous

turn the record over and start snowing

crawling back
into Plato’s cave
winter dusk

after blossoming back in the holster

I think I rarely have stories behind my haiku because they tend to reflect something I’m feeling rather than recount something I saw or experienced. Maybe because I often write when I’m half asleep, my haiku are often more like retellings of dreams, where the images reflect something you’re trying to work through in waking life but aren’t necessarily part of your waking life.

Your blog, Red Dragonfly, chronicles your journey in the haiku community, beginning on the day you began writing haiku poetry in 2010. You posted regularly for nine years across a wide range of haiku-related topics, and I enjoyed reading your observations. I remember that you occasionally ran calls for submissions on Red Dragonfly (such as this one). In 2024, you founded Password: the journal of very short poetry. From your perspective, how is editing Password different from writing and editing Red Dragonfly? What have you learned along the way about haiku from working within these publications?

Well, although I did, as you say, occasionally invite contributions to special posts of Red Dragonfly, and always enjoyed the process of reading and selection for those posts, that was a relatively minor part of the blog, and wasn’t demanding in an editorial sense—if I remember correctly, it was more of a community building project in which I pretty much “accepted” and published everything that was sent to me.

In contrast, editing Password (and in the past, acting as part of an editorial team for journals like Bones and Haibun Today) does require that I sift through submissions and make decisions about what to publish. I have a particular “vibe” I’m trying to establish with Password—it’s a very personal project for me. The question I’m often asking myself when reading submissions is honestly, “Is this the vibe?” And “the vibe” is not easy to define. Reading the journal is probably the best way to pick up on what I’m trying to give out.

The other difference from what I was doing with Red Dragonfly is that Password is not exclusively a haiku journal—it’s a journal of “very short poetry,” which I define as a poem (of any form or style) of 25 syllables or fewer. Inevitably a lot of what I publish is in fact haiku or haiku-adjacent, but part of my goal with the journal was to try to compare what English-language haiku poets are doing with what other English-language poets more generally do when given a similarly low word limit for their poetry. Do they employ similar techniques to haiku poets, or do they come up with different ways of writing effective very short poetry?

One theory I’m tossing around is that many of the “rules” we’ve come up with for English-language haiku, like the juxtaposition of two images or the avoidance of abstractions, are just techniques for maximizing the effectiveness of the language in the face of what is in effect a situation of extreme scarcity. If you’re working with, say, twelve syllables (by some reckoning the average number of syllables in [today’s] English-language haiku), you need to make those the most evocative, powerful syllables you possibly can—you can’t afford to throw any away on words that don’t conjure up images and associations in the reader’s brain. Thinking of haiku in this way might help writers feel less worried about “rules” and conceptualize haiku as tiny word bombs, in which you need to pack as much information into as small a space as possible. If you can come up with a better way to do this than past haiku poets have, great! But you’re probably going to get farther by learning about and studying what poets have done in the past before breaking your own ground.

Speaking of Password, I enjoyed your recent issue 3.2 from June 2026. One poem in particular caught my eye, and I stopped dead on the page to admire it. You are currently reading for your October issue, with a deadline for submissions of September 30th. What types of poetry are you looking for? Does seasonality factor into your decisions?

I’m always thrilled when people tell me they’ve enjoyed reading Password, so thanks! Besides the 25-syllable limit I discussed above, I’m looking for poetry that evokes the physical world rather than poetry that relies on abstractions; poetry that uses sound and rhythm to back up its meaning; poetry that both demonstrates a familiarity with the history and techniques of English-language poetry and shows a willingness to experiment with its limits; poetry that is sincere but not sentimental or simplistic; poetry that allows for a wide range of interpretations and associations.

Seasonality does not factor into my acceptance decisions; I appreciate and enjoy having issues filled with a wide variety of images, across seasons and the natural and manmade realms, and I take pains to sequence each issue to try to play poems off each other and show different poets reckoning in different ways with the same or similar subjects.

Melissa Allen lives, reads, writes, edits, and explores the outdoors in Madison, Wisconsin. She is the proprietor of the blog Red Dragonfly and the founder and editor of Password: the journal of very short poetry. In the past, she was an editor of the journals Bones and Haibun Today. Her haiku and haibun have been published and anthologized widely.