Tag Archives: haiku

It’s a Haibun

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Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare’s Monkey

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Little Egret

An answer I made to Tootlepedal in the comments about writing a lot and letting blind chance sift through it for the good bits reminded me of this poem.

As I was about to press the Publish button, it struck me that I may have posted it before as it seemed familiar. The trouble is that a lot of them seem familiar because they spent so much time inside my head.

Anyway, it seems I did post it before. Sorry if it seems repetitious. I note from reading the version in the other post that it has a different haiku in each place. The one in the other post was the one it was originally written with, the one here is how I sent it. Sometimes I make last minute alterations, and sometimes I don’t make sure all the versions are consistent.

I now think that the unused haiku is better than the one I eventually submitted. At the time, I obviously thought that the other version was an improvement. It was published, so it must have done the job.

Shakespeare’s Monkey
Another rejection. My words have, again, forked no lightning. This is driven home by the fact that I borrow the words of Dylan Thomas to describe my situation. However, I am convinced that if I write enough, I will eventually produce a sonnet of enduring excellence or a haibun that brings tears to the eyes of an editor. Tears of joy, that is. They like you to be clear about such things.

new poems—
the favourites I have not
yet read

First published Blithe Spirit November 2022

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

The pictures are Egrets because they are quite poetic birds, and I have no pictures of monkeys.

Haiku – an explanation

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Welcome to an explanation of Japanese poetry. I am writing it because I have been asked, not because I am filled with zeal to show off my knowledge, and by the end of the explanation I feel I can guarantee that nothing will be any clearer than when I started. This is the nature of Japanese poetry and the mist that surrounds it. In the UK we are still debating if poetry should rhyme, in America (the home of complexity) they are debating concepts which require at least two degrees before you can even start to understand the vocabulary they use. Look at most of the poet bios in an American haiku/Haibun magazine and you will see what I mean – degrees, stellar careers and huge numbers of publications are the norm.

However, I was asked, I have had a go and this is the result. This is just the haiku explanation. Haibun and tanka will be next.

A haiku is a poem of three lines with syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern. Everybody knows that and it is there multiple times on the internet. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. It never was particularly accurate, and it hasn’t been representative of actual published haiku for years. Classic haiku writers didn’t always write in this format and the word syllable is wrong in this context.

The word which the Japanese use for a sound unit is “on” and it is much more, or less, than a syllable. The word “haibun”, to take information from Wiki, is four “on” rather than our two syllables and “on” is actually two “on” rather than one syllable. That is simple compared to the next fact – the word “kyo”, which is clearly two syllables in English, is one “on” in Japanese.

And that, when added to various opinions and translations, is why there is confusion.

The seventeen syllable model is alive and well in junior schools and various other places which need a quick fix for poetry writing classes. However, it is now generally accepted that if you are writing in English, 12 syllables are about right. It is considered desirable to write a poem that can be read in one breath, if you want a more aesthetic way of looking at things. I’m not sure about other languages, but I’m sure they all have definitions of varying subtlety.

That is the easy bit.

There are more rules than syllables, which is where I always get lost. In no particular order – haiku should be about nature, they should have a season word, they should be in two parts, they should be separated by a cutting word. There should be no repetition, rhyme, title or other poetic device. They should feature only concrete images. They shouldn’t be single sentences, shouldn’t be sarcastic and should involve “haiku aesthetics” – there are whole articles about aesthetics. It includes age, impermanence, being broken, being unknowable and other similar things.

If they don’t include this sort of thing they may be senryu, which are similar but without much of the baggage. They have extras in the form of human nature, sarcasm and even crudity.

Alternatively, it could just be a bad poem or a greeting card verse. And just to add another layer of mystery and complexity I will add some links in a moment. They are for reputable haiku magazines (you can tell they are reputable because they have been rejecting me for years) and here you will find poetry of exquisite quality which disobeys many of the rules I have just discussed.

Perhaps I’m not the best man to ask about this . . .

Heron’s Nest

Wales Haiku Journal (who used to accept some of my haiku but stopped when editors changed).

Cattails (who accept tanka, tanka prose and Haibun from me. I tried haiku but failed and gave up.)

Goose poem – Anderby Creek

More Rejection

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I had another rejection this morning. That’s two this month, though as it was a month of pushing the boundaries it’s not a surprise. I had four earlier in the year (three of which were actually competition entries). Over the years I have not had much luck with competitions – I’ve been commended twice, which is better than  nothing, but not great when you consider the cost of entry fees. As I said before, I have learned to cope with rejection over the years. I’m still no farter on with my thinking about the direction to take and the effort to put in.

I know I should be concentrating on writing haiku until I get better at them but I have two problems here. One is that I don’t actually know what “better” is. A lot of haiku I read don’t seem any better than mine, and in many cases feature things which, according to the various “guidelines” shouldn’t be in haiku (remember they very small poems with very large mounts of rules.) An editor i was in correspondence with recently told me that when they started writing haiku they decided which rules they were going to adopt and just kept plugging away. I might do that. Or I might just relegate haiku to something I do to fill in time on a slow month.

The other problem is that I like being published (though it’s not the driving force it used to be) and I’m lazy. I may as well write what I enjoy and what I’m good at. If I were being paid for poetry that’s definitely what I would do.

However, I don’t need to make a decision yet.

This morning I printed out four poems which I am sending to a magazine that sticks to the old-fashioned ways, including submissions by post. After printing and before sending off, I looked at them and realised the top one was a long way from “finished”. The second one was so bad it immediately provoked me into making notes on it. I didn’t follow up, as I had to get to work, but it was an interesting lesson. I suspect that reading words printed on paper, instead of on a screen,  triggers a new set of critical thoughts. Tomorrow I will set to revising. I may have to start printing everything out in future.

Now it’s time to get some work done and go to bed. I have a blood test at 7am so I need to get some sleep.

My Orange Parker Pen

Thoughts on Haiku, Haibun, Tanka and Poems

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The haiku that had been short-listed have now all been turned down. It wasn’t really a surprise as my haiku don’t generally find favour with editors, and certainly not the magazine that had shortlisted these. Simply being short-listed was ana advance on previous attempts.

In a way I feel guilty that I don’t feel worse about it. I haven’t been turned down since April and it should be a shock and a disappointment. Fortunately I have become hardened to such things. This is, I suspect, both good and bad.

It’s good because I no longer feel demotivated by rejection. In this case it’s been modified by being short-listed and by having some helpful comments from one of the editors.

On the other hand, if I am to make progress I really should care about rejection and use it to spur me on to something better.

This part of another train of thought too. I spend time on haiku because I want to write better haiku as it will mean I am writing better haibun. On the other hand, in the time I take to write 10 haiku, knowing that I will generally have them rejected, I can write ten tanka or a haibun/tanka prose. The chances are that I will get at least two out of ten tanka published and one or two out of every batch of three haibun I write will be published too.

Should I concentrate on what is successful? Or should I concentrate on what I find difficult?

Then we have the free verse. It takes me longer to write and it’s quite competitive. I’ve just been told I’ve been longlisted by a magazine that had 2,079 submissions and will be publishing around 24-25 poems. That sort of thing is about average. Several magazines tell you they only publish between 1 and 10% of the submissions they receive. So far I’m not downhearted. I’ve done it before and there’s a chance I can do it again.

Positive thinking.

I started with a descending scale of fruit. Figs are a poetic fruit. Blackberries are a useful shorthand for autumn. And plums are dangerously close to innuendo.

A Tale, Told by an Idiot

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Do you remember a few days ago when I said ” from today I am going to set targets and become a writing machine”. Well I did. I set up my poem factory and set to work. I also found a few places to make more submissions and decided to target haiku. As a result, I had an acceptance today.

It’s part of the power of positive thinking. I was going to get rid of some books last week. They are mainly old sales and marketing books passed on by my Dad, but with some motivational books too.. Many of them are actually still relevant as good sales technique and positive thinking never goes out of fashion. There’s no mystique about it despite all the stuff that’s written. To make sales you ask the decision-maker for the order. To achieve success through positive thinking you do something, and you do it now.

That’s what I did – I wrote poems, I showed them to an editor and one was selected.

No jargon, no mystique, no spirituality, despite the reams of rubbish written on the subject. Just plain common sense.

The poem factory is a similar no nonsense set-up. It is anathema to all the proper, spiritual poets out there. They believe (and this is particularly true with haiku) that you should experience “a moment” and compose the poem there and then. Good on them. I’ve done it sometimes, but it’s not common.

Poems which are stitched together from memory or manufactured from two moments or, heaven forbid, simply made up, are known. scornfully. as desk-ku. It’s becoming slightly more common to admit to them now, but there’s still some snobbery on the subject. Even the old masters did them, but the myth of the haiku moment persists.

Anyway, I write a list of ideas or prompts, or open up  file of old photos, or even open a book of poetry and mine it for ideas. As T S Eliot said  “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” I am, I feel, perfectly capable of taking an idea from a poem without copying the idea or the wording of the poem.

This is one I took from life, rather than nature.

I have dustier piles – trust me on this

a pile of books
the dust settles on my
good intentions

(First Published in Failed Haiku – forgot the date.)

This one is from nature, and done in the moment, but it doesn’t really convey the misty morning and the salty wind as we walked and watched seals.

Sea Buckthorn. I promise you there were goldfinches too, but I couldn’t get a good shot.

goldfinches
calling from the sea buckthorn
bright berries

(First Published in Presence 71)

This one was completely made up, but all the bits were true. Robins sing, blackthorn blooms early in the year and at the time, during Covid, we were forced to queue outside shops. I wrote it after queuing for a shop. I needed some props so I added the bird, the song and the blackthorn. Does it make me a bad man?

a robin
sings from the blackthorn
—we queue for the shop

(First published Wales Haiku Journal Spring 2021) 

Robin - singing

Robin – singing. OK, it’s in holly, but give me a break.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth, William Shakespeare).

I may start stealing from Shakespeare next. Let’s face it, he stole all the time.

Just Eight Posts Left

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That’s right, I just have eight posts to go before my 3,000th. Or, as I’m writing this, I should, more accurately, say seven to go. It’s like the “sleeps” system of counting down to Christmas. Or even counting down to a Coronation. It is currently 11.00pm on Friday, so to say there is a day until the Coronation is not really true, or helpful. However, it is just one sleep until the Coronation. and though it still  isn’t very precise, it is accurate.

The other thing about posts is that anything can be a post. Even a single picture can be a post. I suppose a single word could be a post if I wanted. I know that a single line can be a poem, it’s called a monostich. I bought a book of monostich poems for my Kindle. They are very short and almost entirely rubbish. What was I thinking of? At the time, in a fit of enthusiasm after reading an article, I was thinking that one disjointed line could be a poem. I’m now not sure that, in general, it can. And even if it can, I’m not sure that it’s possible to maintain that quality through an entire collection.

It’s a bit like haiku. You can’t just put three lines together and call it a haiku, because there is a bit more to it than that. I’d define it as soul. The Japanese also have a word for it. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten it. They have so many words for things and my memory is going rapidly downhill. So, a haiku is three short lines and a little soul. Hard to explain, but easy to experience when you read a good one. Unfortunately, a lot of haiku aren’t that good. My best ones are merely good enough to scrape into a middling sort of magazine, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever written a decent haiku.

Just one more thought and I will go for tonight. I wrote a tanka prose a couple of months ago, which was accepted and published, though I did rework the tanka, as the editor thought it was perilously close to the sentimentality of a greetings card verse. I can’t remember how he put it, but the words “greetings card verse” were definitely part of it. I thought I was being profound.

The difference between a tanka and a greetings card verse is, as far as I can see, very small, apart from the fact you can get money for writing greetings cards.

Old Oaks of Sherwood Forest

Some Haiku

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I’m always a bit worried about posting poetry because it’s not really a poetry blog. It seems a little unfair to force people to read poetry if they haven’t signed up for it, particularly as people feel obliged to be nice. That’s why I rarely post poetry that hasn’t been published elsewhere first. At least that way, it has been filtered by a proper editor and should be OK.

However, a while ago I did say that I would post a few, so here are a few haiku and senryu to start.

Three lines and a web of rules/definitions/restrictions don’t really suit me. I’d love to be a competent writer of haiku, but I’m locked in a circular system with them. I find them difficult so I don’t write many, and because I don’t write many I don’t improve. It’s also why I struggle with haibun too, as I can write the prose, but can’t nail the haiku. They are, as I say in an unpublished essay on writing haiku, slippery. Give me a tanka, with five lines and freedom from restrictions and I find it a lot easier. The same goes for Tanka Prose, the clumsy name for the Haibun equivalent that uses a tanka in place of the haibun.

I suppose if I were a serious poet, I would accept the challenge of haiku but I actually write for the pleasure of seeing words do things, not because I like difficulty.

Here are a few with a vaguely Christmas/Winter theme. The first has been adapted from a senryu that originally had the first line “Birthday” but it still works.

Christmas
bright paper packages
-the disappointment of socks

Failed Haiku April 2022

melting snow
rooks stalk
the dappled field

Presence Issue 69

a robin
sings from the blackthorn
—we queue for the shop

Wales Haiku Journal Spring  2021

lighter nights
the bus passenger smiles
on his way home

Presence Issue 72

I put them in two columns to make the layout slightly more interesting, but it has the effect of altering the formatting for the ones that  are in the second row. Many people do centre their poems so I think I can get away with it. I tried using three columns but that involves right hand justification and that definitely looks odd. I’m sure there’s another way to do it but I’m not sure I have the spare thought capacity to devote to it at the moment. I have ten poems to submit before in the next 38 hours and they aren’t cooperating.

Robin of Sherwood

What is a Haibun?

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I was asked recently, in the comments, for a definition of a haibun. The quick answer is that it’s some prose with a haiku. As answers go, that’s accurate, but not particularly useful.

It’s likely, if you look back at old poems, that it doesn’t actually have to have a haiku. However, try convincing an editor of that.

A haiku is a very short poem that, over the years, has attracted a lot of rules. In Japanese it has 17 “on”, which are sound units. They are not the same as syllables, though they were originally treated as if they were. In Japanese “haiku” has three “on”., but only two syllables in English. Originally we were told to write haiku in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. If you check on the internet, you will still be told that. This is wrong.

We are now allowed to use lines of different length and told that 13 syllables is probably about right. We aren’t supposed to include ourselves or poetic devices in haiku and they are supposed to have a season word, talk of nature and a cutting word to differentiate the two parts of the haiku. They like to have two parts – one being what you saw and the other (usually the last line), something that acts as as a contrast. If they talk of human nature, they are senryu, but for haibun purposes they are much the same. They also have simplicity and various sad, wistful feelings attached to them. As I say, short poem, a lot of rules.

Strangely, a lot of the “rules” started off as guidelines and, in the minds of various editors, become rules.

My Orange Parker Pen

Then you get the prose. It should be terse and haiku-like, because it then mirrors the haiku. Or if you read another well-respected poet, it should be different in style from a haiku, as the same style will make it boring.

The haiku should be different from the subject matter, and should “link and shift”. Or, according to another well-known haibun writer, that’s not correct. and is based on a misunderstanding. No, I can’t explain “link and shift” properly. And considering the experience of all the poets and their different views, I can’t tell you exactly what a haibun is either,

Tanka prose is slightly easier to understand. It’s a tanka (five line poem) and prose. There are fewer rules and less discussion about tanka prose, so it’s easier to write. You can concentrate on the writing instead of worrying about hitting the targets imposed by various, contradictory, rules.

Finally, the poem and prose can be placed in different ways. This can be poem and prose or prose and poem. It can also be prose, poem, prose or poem, prose, poem. Or other ways. As usual, there are Japanese words for all these things. And, as usual, I can’t remember them.

That’s a vey short, simple and not exactly neutral explanation. I’ll post a few poems and links over the next few days.

Orange Parker Pen

Day 135

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The morning is now over and I have spent it having a lie in, eating porridge, repairing a strimmer, catching up on reading and . . . er . . . that’s it. I am currently writing the first few lines of the blog whilst waiting for the kettle to boil (having received shouted instructions from the garden.

It has just boiled, so I will do as I am told and hope to be back with you soon.

Farmer Ted, the knitted bear assistant

Later . . .

I read some of the Haiku Society of America mentorship booklet, which I found hard going. It’s more or less a writer bio followed by three haiku and with a few kind words about the mentorship scheme.

Or, if you look it up on Google, it may be the Human Slaughter Association Mentorship programme. I have a limited capacity for reading haiku (though it is less limited than my capacity for reading them), and don’t like video conferencing or workshops, so you will be more likely to see me discussing humane slaughter than haiku. I confess, and have never hidden the fact, that I am not a fan of haiku and only write them because I need them for haibun.

After a few pages of that, I decided to have a go at Ribbons, which is the magazine of the Tanka Society of America. I joined last week and they have already sent me a magazine. Even better, it is full of tanka.

There are some magazines I read that just feel like home, and others that don’t feel comfortable. Ribbons is comfortable, as is The Haibun Journal. There’s nothing much to see on that last link, as they don’t do anything online. I merely add the link to prove it exists.

While I’m talking about magazines and societies, I should mention that there are other good magazines, and that my definition of bad magazines is based on my own personal view rather than a proper procedure. I find it so much quicker just to form an unreasoning prejudice rather than a balanced view.

I will also say that I don’t like the process that the societies all seem to adopt, of running memberships from Christmas to Christmas. It’s a bad time of year to extract money from people and when they all do it at the same time it forces a decision on some people. Well, on me. I know there are reasons for this, but you would think that at least one would do it differently, just to make it more convenient for members. I suppose when the rest of your members are highly paid and successful (as all the writer bios indicate) nobody else ever finds themselves short of money.

Gatekeeper butterfly

I decided just to add random feelgood photos to this one. The top one may, in hindsight, fulfil that purpose for vegans.