Over the last few years I’ve had occasion to hold a half dozen haiku contests or so, and every time I do I find myself astonished by the incredible variety of approaches to the form. We’re all introduced to the laws of haiku in grade school, so I doubt they need restating here, simple as they are. And yet, as you’ll see in this folio, there are about as many different ways to write haiku as there are people doing it. For centuries poets have bent or broken the accepted mold, finding ways to innovate using just a handful of words. How is it that so much is possible within such a tiny, prescribed space? What exactly is haiku, if not merely a set of rules?
To my mind, haiku is a living form rooted in and responding to, though not bound by, tradition. It is more a philosophy of transformation than it is constraints upon a poem, asking: how can one thing become another, or many something others, with the least possible movement? Haiku is a slight of hand free from deception, a maneuver usually accomplished by setting expectations, then pivoting to reveal something beyond those expectations. The turn, the pivot, the reveal; this, for me, is the most wonderful and essential part. A good haiku blooms before your eyes. Ideally, the more you meditate on it, the more the poem opens upon layers of meaning. Readers need not bring anything to haiku except patience and a willingness to be surprised. The poet’s job, then, is to reward this patience, to embed transformative action in an otherwise peaceful reverie. For this reason, I feel haiku need not a title, exposition, or any interpretive scaffolding whatsoever. It unfolds from within.
Well, that’s not entirely fair of me to say — many of the poems selected here rely on a familiarity with the basic rules of haiku, if only to challenge or subvert them. In these cases, I argue transformation is enacted on the form itself, widening the scope of what haiku is capable of doing. Contemporary haiku has therefore become quite nebulous, absorbing influences and mutating into something delightful and unpredictable. I’d like to think even the traditional masters of haiku would look upon these poems and smile. For a form that thrives in constraint and concision, dogmatism is the only real error, and so I doubt we’ll ever find the limits of what can be said in haiku. I hope you will enjoy this small selection of contemporary offerings, and if they don’t happen to qualify as haiku for you, that’s alright! Just don’t DM me about it (I can in fact count syllables).
