I was born, grew up and have always lived in Japan, but I've never read a haiku book until I read 'Tenement Landscapes' by Paul David Mena and 'Moyayama' by Alexey V. Andreyev. For me, reading English haiku is a pleasant revelation. Why? I found Paul's and Alexey's haiku to be surely haiku. They reveal the deep haiku mind, but at the same time,they present a very contemporary and openminded view. So I was greatly moved by them.

Sometimes, things arriving from outside of a tradition can give more essence to traditions and open a window on still more creativity.

Here are two essays about English haiku, one was written by a person who enjoys herself with English haiku in her life, and the other was written by an English language haiku specialist. Please enjoy their writings.

When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time outdoors with my father. We hiked, we camped, we fished ... all those things that a father and child should do together. For my twelfth birthday, my father bought me a field guide entitled "Trees, Shrubs, and Flowers in British Columbia" (or something like that). On all of our subsequent outings, I took my book with me; my goal was to find and identify as many of the flowers, shrubs, and trees as I could.

That book and those outings with my father started me on a lifelong quest for nature. When I first found haiku, I realised that the form offered me another avenue by which I might discover nature. Instead of looking under Douglas fir trees for the elusive trillium blossoms, I now find myself watching an earwig burrow deep into the summer rose in my garden. Instead of trying to decide whether a particular tree was balsam or hemlock, I now find myself watching the shadows of grasshoppers leap across my path.

early morning chill
an earwig burrows deep
inside the rose

Indian summer
the shadow of a grasshopper
leaps behind me

For me, haiku has become a way of looking at the world around me and reminds me to look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. Writing haiku offers the poet an opportunity to share that extraordinary beauty of nature with each and every reader.

This essay is quoted from 'Contemporary Haiku: Origins and New Directions' by A.C. Missias.
(the full text: http://mail.med.upenn.edu/~missias/Acorn.html)

Haiku is more than a form of poetry; it is a way of seeing the world. Each haiku captures a moment of experience; an instant when the ordinary suddenly reveals its inner nature and makes us take a second look at the event, at human nature, at life. It can be as elevated as the ringing of a temple bell, or as simple as sunlight catching a bit of silverware on your table; as isolated as a mountain top, or as crowded as a subway car; revelling in beauty or acknowledging the ugly. What unifies the semoments is the way they make us pause and take notice, the way we are still recalling them hours later, the feeling of having had a momentary insight transcending the ordinary, or a glimpse into the very essence of ordinariness itself.

Such an experience, referred to as the "aha moment," is the central root of a haiku. The act of writing a haiku is an attempt to capture that moment so that others (or we ourselves)can re-experience it and its associated insight. This means picking out of memory the elements of the scene that made it vivid, and expressing them as directly as possible -- that is, the goal is to recreate the moment for the reader, not explain it to them (this is sometimes called the "show, don't tell" rule).

(an omission)

So where does this leave us? Haiku is a flexible form for brief, vivid capture of single moments of time, the writing of which allows one to both share those "aha moments" with others and to become more open to them oneself. So jump on in, give it a try! Read good translations of the haiku masters, compilations of contemporary writers, and journals offering a range of tiny gems. Open yourself to the world around you, to the inputs from all five senses, to the details of existence. Try to write poems which are simple and direct; which appear to portray an objective scene, but which have unspoken depths of insight and meaning. It's not an easy task, but one which offers a wealth of satisfaction in both the striving and the accomplishment. I wish you much great pleasure in reading and writing haiku, and many moments of insight to alter your way of looking at the everyday world.

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A.C. Missias lives in Philadelphia, doing biology(neuroscience) by day, editing the journal Acorn by night. Also, along the way, writing a fair amount of poetry and haiku on the Internet, as a member of several mailing lists.