New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners-Michael Nickels-Wisdom

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Michael Nickels-Wisdom. Michael is a widely-published and anthologized intuitive haiku poet, with publications in Red Moon Press’ A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (2021) and Modern Haiku Press’ Haiku 21.2: An anthology of contemporary English-language haiku (2025) and Haiku 2025: 100 notable ku from 2024. Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Michael!

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

From late teenhood into early adulthood, I found in myself the need to write poetry, but apart from a couple of initial publications, had no overall organization about it. By 1990 I was working in a public library as a library technician and doing college coursework in library science. One course was a practicum, so I chose to rewrite the weeding manual for the library where I worked, then actually do the weeding. In the 800s of the nonfiction collection, I came across Harold G. Henderson’s 1957 book, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems And Poets from Basho to Shiki, checked it out, and began reading. Haiku quickly became a major direction for my writing.

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

I have never had nor wanted a haiku mentor. I had a long independent learning curve, read and studied voraciously, showed my work to Lee Gurga and then Charlie Trumbull, and began to participate in Chiku, an informal haiku writing group in the Chicago metropolitan area. Along the way, I was strongly influenced by William J. Higginson’s and Penny Harter’s The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English, Makoto Ueda’s Modern Japanese Haiku: An Anthology, Nakatsuka Ippekiro’s Cape Jasmine and Pomegranates: the free-meter haiku of Ippekiro, and an assortment of other books. More than anything else, the poems in these books acted for me as important models.

How do you approach reading haiku?

I don’t believe that human objectivity is possible. So when I read haiku, I don’t read with a universal aesthetic in mind. For me there is no objective worst to best scale of measurement in haiku. Instead, I focus on what I call “proximity,” my particular reader response, the degree of closeness to or felt strength of the reading experience. That is what is alive to me.

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

I can write anywhere, and that’s by design and necessity. I carry a pocket notebook at all times. There’s the Notes application in my phone. And I have small pads of paper and pens beside my desk, living room chair, and bed. In daily life, ordinary things . . . happen to me, spontaneously, as associative bursts of vision. I keep what I call “The Treehouse Associative Workbook,” in which each poem or potential poem gets a physical worksheet on which I can play freely with the words, notes, phrases, lines. Nothing is final, not even “completed” or published haiku. Everything is constant improvisation, depending only on how I feel about it. My other major practice is to pay attention to my unconscious by watching the content of my liminal sleep states, most often the hypnopompic state (when moving from sleep to waking). I set an alarm for a normal time to awaken, and when it sounds, when I begin to come out of sleep, I snooze the alarm for, say, a five minute period, and I repeat it for a while. This keeps me in liminal sleep, and let me tell you, it’s magical. It gives me sudden new insights, helps me run rehearsals and solve problems in waking life, and presents novel associations. I’ve even written award-winning poems that have come from this practice.

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

Here’s one . . .

koi pond–
red leaf at the bottom
of the atmosphere

– A New Resonance 12: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku,

Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2021, p. 103

Our Chiku group was conducting a ginko (a walk with the purpose of composing haiku) at Anderson Japanese Gardens, in Rockford, Illinois. This haiku happened complete and sudden. I looked into the pond and saw the koi. I looked back over my shoulder at a Japanese red maple that had fully turned, and at the sky above and behind it. And I felt a back-and-forth shift in scale, feeling anew my human-sized place in the world.

You’ve said that intuition is important for haiku composition. How can haiku poets cultivate their intuition?

I’ve mentioned liminal sleep practices. But to offer something more, I want to recommend two books and a lecture that have helped me in detail in this way. First, Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein’s Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, which will give you details about how you can usefully plumb your imagination. Michele is also well-known as a haiku poet. And cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar’s Mindwandering: How it can improve your mood and boost your creativity, an explanation of how mood, state of mind, and the habit of “associative thinking” affect each of us, with practical tips. Better even than Bar’s book is his lecture from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Mindwandering – with Moshe Bar, which you can find here. Key in these resources is the idea that a broad, associative thinking style will help you to form interesting trains of thought; keep you out of tight little swirls of the same thoughts over and over; and enable you to form mental models that can then become poems.

You’ve said that your speculative haiku often reflect anomalous experiences. What does the phrase “anomalous experiences” mean to you, and how does it apply to your life and/or to your writing?

As a writer, I’ve been concerned to know the shape of this island of reality we call human life, and that means finding its shores, its edges. So since 2011 I’ve undertaken my own personal inquiry into the nature of ordinary people’s lived “anomalous” or extraordinary experiences that a great number of people, particularly in Western societies, are unwilling to consider. They include taboo subjects like apparitional phenomena, UFO/UAP/alien abduction, unofficially acknowledged animals, psychic phenomena, cosmological “glitches in the matrix,” and altered states of consciousness. To study such experiences presents an impasse. On one hand, they seem incompatible with the scientific method. Yet on the other, an awful lot of people in all times and places seem to experience them. How to proceed, if not scientifically? For me, I proceed from the direction of the humanities, as a writer, having set aside questions about proof, disproof, and veracity. This is something the imagination can profitably do. And out of this I form characters, settings, behaviors . . . thought experiments, mental models, many of them poems. This is a different tack from the usual orientation of speculative poets who write from an explicity fictional perspective. I mean to recognize speculative poetry as an indeterminate space between fiction and nonfiction.

You worked in a public library setting for 38 years. In what ways can public libraries benefit haiku poets? What are some of the offerings they may have that poets might not consider?

First off, there may very well be haiku books in the stacks of any public library. (If there are, check them out and bring them home for a bit. You’ll be insuring that it won’t soon be weeded from the collection.) And many libraries belong to regional consortia and can then interlibrary loan for you any haiku book from any library in its consortium. Reference librarians are available to field your questions. The Internet is right there for you for free. Local writers’ groups sometimes have regular meetings in libraries’ meeting rooms. Libraries sometimes host poetry readings.  And if you need to do a print run, nowhere is cheaper and more detailed than a good library photocopier. And read widely, not just in haiku or poetry; it will fuel your composition. Please support your local library, especially in these difficult times.

What haiku-related project are you currently working on that brings you joy? What do you like about it?

I’m very excited by the zine world, which is new to me as a distinct culture. A zine, if readers have never hear the term before, is a small do-it-yourself, low-tech, self-published, small-circulation booklet, typically made with printer paper and then photocopied. Though zines have been around for decades, they are undergoing a resurgence due to people’s desire to counteract the dominance of digital culture. Currently I’m working on five haiku zine projects, with a list of ideas for others in the not-distant future.

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

Well, you’ll have to start somewhere. Don’t feel overwhelmed by that. Pick a place, but don’t treat the haiku or technical details as formally absolute. I started with Henderson, and his translations from the Japanese were three-line, 5/7/5 [syllables], staggered on the page, and end-rhymed, but I had to experience that and then move on to what I felt was more appropriate for me. And that kind of moving on is really important. I like biological metaphors for describing variations of poetic form. For me, haiku is a genus, and the variations are species. And haiku are “polythetic,” not “monothetic”. That is, there is a set of characteristics for haiku as a whole, but not all of those characteristics appear in specific haiku. So be flexible, and allow for others’ flexibilities.