The THF Archives: James W. Hackett

One of the missions of The Haiku Foundation is “to preserve our first century of practice,” and this takes many forms. The most obvious, of course, is our nonpareil library of English-language haiku books, totaling more than 5000 titles, accompanied by that number of journal issues from the earliest days of haiku publishing to the present. Another element, though, is our sizeable and growing archival holdings. One of our most important collections is that of the early ELH pioneer James W. Hackett. Christopher Thorsen, Hackett’s Literary Executor (who has maintained the site that the poet created near the end of his life which he will hand on to the Foundation in due time) has bequeathed more than 20 boxes of the poet’s books, journals, correspondence, photographs, ephemera and paraphernalia to the Foundation. He writes:

JW Hackett was a Zen Lion, an original Haiku master known by Harold Henderson as “. . . the first poet to write real haiku in English.” Jim was a fierce protector of Haiku’s lineage as a Zen art. His mentor, R. H. Blyth, transmitted Rinzai Zen to Jim through their long running letter correspondence, and Jim held zazen at the center of his life and art. Jim felt that some translators, early proponents and poets had missed the point. He defined Haiku not as the mimicking of a Japanese syllabic structure, but held, rather, that before the brief Haiku Poem came the Haiku Moment, that moment of awakened presence in deep nature or everyday life in which the poet becomes one with what’s arising.

My thanks to The Haiku Foundation for honoring Jim with this opportunity to share HackettHaiku.com with you, the website Jim authored before his passing. The site is a collection of his literary works, including all his Haiku as well as many consummately written essays and Western forms of nature poetry, and if you’re listening, some fierce cultural commentary. Ultimately, however, James Hackett committed his life to the practice of present awareness and to The Way of Haiku as Zen Art, an expression of the poet’s interpenetration with The Eternal Now.

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