Although the broader community of poets shares them as common property, the traditional season words of haiku allow for a remarkable range of expression. They can be used to create seasonal feeling, evoke humor, lodge a protest, or explore the inner recesses of our emotional lives—to name only a few possibilities. The winning and honorable mention haiku for last month’s challenge covered an unusually broad spectrum of meanings and emotions, using just 17 syllables and the words “autumn sun.”

• Marcia Burton finds a melancholy beauty in the sunlight “filtering through the nursery” where a baby is falling asleep.
• Nancy Winkler’s humorous image of a low sun giving her “the side-eye” captures the shortness of an autumn afternoon.
  
• Jill Johnson goes for broke in her desperation to get the sun back on a dismal fall day—“no questions asked.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the November challenge here.

***

Fall Season Word: Autumn Sun

WINNER:

soothing the baby
the autumn sun filtering
through the nursery

— Marcia Burton

Our first impression of a good haiku is often that it touches us in some palpable way. That it is beautiful, poignant, or bittersweet—sometimes all of these at once. Because haiku are so short, they naturally invite a second or third reading, and this is where it gets interesting. Nearly always there is some further dimension to a poem.

An infant has been put down for a nap in the late afternoon. The nursery is dim, lit only by the sun filtering through the drapes. The baby cries briefly on being placed in the crib, but soon grows quiet, soothed by the warm light slanting across the walls and ceiling.

Most readers can grasp that much after a single reading. A good haiku presents an image that unfolds easily in the imagination. That image offers a point of entry into the world of a haiku, much like opening the door into a room.

Beyond that doorway another, much larger world appears, as the 17 syllables are shown to contain more than 17 syllables of meaning. In that more spacious world, words take on additional, sometimes unexpected meanings.

The term “self-soothing” was developed by child psychiatrists during the 1970s to describe how babies learn to calm themselves down and go to sleep on their own, unassisted by a caregiver. In recent decades it has come to refer to behaviors used by individuals of any age to self-regulate their emotional state. As such, it has been the subject of widespread cultural debate.

Questions arise about the need for constant emotional self-regulation in negotiating the complexities of end-stage capitalism—from the cradle to the grave. Why must we acclimate ourselves to loneliness and alienation, anxiety, overwork, and stress?

The poem presents none of these concerns on the surface. The scene is peaceful, beautiful, even wholesome. And then, there is the autumn sun itself, a consoling presence reminding us of our most intimate point of connection. There is no alienation in Nature—where everything belongs, no one is forsaken, and nothing exists alone.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

passing by quickly
while giving me the side-eye
aloof autumn sun

— Nancy Winkler

Missing: Autumn Sun.
100 dollar reward.
Gold. No questions asked.

— Jill Johnson

♦

You can find more on October’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Autumn sun”

whatever I think
the autumn sun only cares
about my shadow

As I was walking along, thinking deeply about something, the autumn sun inscribed a shadow at my feet. But that was the extent of its interest in me. It didn’t care what was inside of that outline.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “autumn sun.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “autumn sun.”

Haiku Tip: Master the Turn of Thought—In English!

Japanese and English language haiku are not the same. Their form is similar, and both use season words to explore human experience in the context of the natural world. But the techniques they use to express poetic meaning are very different.

A Japanese haiku usually consists of two images: one seasonal, the other not. As those images “rub up against” one another, a spark of meaning jumps between them, kindling the reader’s imagination. But that meaning must be inferred from the pairing of images. It is rarely made explicit. 

For a haiku to work in English, it must use the techniques of English language poetry, including metaphor and simile, rhyme, personification, allegory, and more. In practice, this means relaxing our notion of what a haiku ought to be. A haiku in English is “whatever you can get away with” in 17 syllables—with the added caveat that it include a season word.

To better understand the difference between Japanese and English language haiku, let’s look at one of the earliest examples of the latter. Published by Ezra Pound in the April 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, it is considered a quintessential text of Imagism, the earliest modernist movement in English literature.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Despite its lineation, this is a formal haiku plain and simple. The Japanese translations Pound had read were typically rendered in two lines with a pause after the first five or first twelve syllables. His haiku follows a 5-7-7 rhythm (The apparition / of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough), which was a common variation on 5-7-5 during Basho’s day.

“In a Station of the Metro” was the first haiku of note to be published in English, but it wouldn’t feel like a haiku to a Japanese reader. It’s not so much the title, which Japanese haiku lack, but the use of an explicit comparison between the faces and the blossoms.

A Japanese version, written in Tokyo rather than Paris, might have read as follows:

faces in the crowd
the petals at the station
on a wet, black bough

The slant rhyme of Pound’s original wouldn’t come through in Japanese, nor would the sense of the poet having entered an altered state of awareness. But if hana (“cherry blossom”) were used in place of petal, the effect would at least be similar. And yet, the Japanese-style version has none of the power of the original. Had Pound published this “haiku” in 1913, no one would remember it today.

A note on autumn sun: Season word editor Becka Chester writes: “As the autumn season catches its stride in October, the character of daylight changes. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun hits the earth at a more pronounced angle. Diffused over a greater swath of the earth, the light seems softer, less harsh, more golden. Plants and animals have a direct biological and chemical response to this changing light. As the sun’s energy hits the earth at an ever-increasing angle, the phytochrome in plants triggers a slowdown in their chlorophyll production causing the leaves to change color. In humans and other vertebrates, the diminishing light causes an increase in melatonin production, altering their circadian rhythms. So the change is light is felt everywhere—even inside of our bodies.”

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (October 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Daisaku Ikeda, Buddhist philosopher and president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), died from natural causes at his home in Shinjuku City, Tokyo, on the evening of November 15. He was 95.

Born in Tokyo to a family of seaweed farmers on January 2, 1928, Ikeda emerged from World War II with a firm resolve to work for peace. He became a member of the Soka Gakkai in 1947 after attending a talk by its second president, Josei Toda, whose revolutionary approach to Nichiren Buddhism had been forged during his imprisonment by the Japanese military government for resisting the war.

Inspired by Toda, Ikeda became a tireless advocate for nonviolence, mounting an international movement to eradicate nuclear weapons. He succeeded Toda as president of the Japanese Soka Gakkai in 1960, and became the president of the Soka Gakkai International in 1975. At the time of his death, the SGI had spread to 192 countries around the globe, with a combined membership of more than 12 million, making it the largest Buddhist lay movement in history.

The Soka Gakkai (“Value Creation Society”) began as a student-centered educational movement in the 1920s under the guidance of founding President Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Makiguchi converted to Nichiren Buddhism in 1928, grounding his educational theory in the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. Imprisoned by the government along with his protégé Jose Toda in 1943, he was subject to harsh interrogation and died as a result of malnutrition the following year.

Daisaku Ikeda’s approach to Buddhism combined the optimism of Makiguchi’s Value Creating educational theory with Toda’s unshakable confidence in the power of chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” (the title of the Lotus Sutra) to transform any situation. He founded four-year universities in Japan and America, published dialogues with philosophers, scientists, and civil rights activists, and supported humanitarian and social justice causes throughout the world.

A TIME magazine article written in 1975 hailed Ikeda as “The Super Missionary” and claimed, “His most consuming passion is the creation of an international people-to-people crusade against war.” Its authors clearly believed that his passion for peace had inherently political overtones, given that, at the height of the Cold War, he had made in-person appeals to Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Even as a private citizen, Ikeda had worked to establish diplomatic relations where the efforts of governments had failed—a goal he described as a “great desire” for the happiness of all humankind.

Daisaku Ikeda leaves behind hundreds of published works, including scholarly books on Buddhism and The Human Revolution, his twelve-volume novel recounting the history of the Soka Gakkai. He is survived by his wife, Kaneko, and his sons, Hiromasa and Takahiro.

The post Daisaku Ikeda, President of the Soka Gakkai International, Dies at 95 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A season word is a repository for cultural memory as such memory relates to the changing seasons. Each word has a range of associations within that collective memory, but one of those associations is usually dominant. Because it vanishes by midmorning, the most common theme for “dew” is the passage of time. The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge each explored that theme—some with heartbreak, some with humor, and some with a mixture of both.

• Valerie Rosenfeld addresses one of the oldest themes in poetry—the way life vanishes at death, seemingly without a trace.
• Gregory Tullock’s dew finds it expedient to practice nonattachment, given that it lives for “only one morning.”
  
• Nancy Winkler offers a satirical apology to leftover dewdrops for causing them to “miss the Rapture.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the October challenge here.

***

Fall Season Word: Dew

WINNER:

only morning dew
when I come to visit you
but no headstone yet

— Valerie Rosenfeld

In the five decades since I discovered haiku, I have returned to one lesson more often than any other: less is more. But “less” doesn’t mean fewer words or syllables. The point of haiku is not to strip language down to its bare essentials, but to use language to show how full one moment of life can be.

Our winning haiku for the September Tricycle Haiku Challenge employs a classical “hinge” in the final line. Only then does the door of the poem swing open to reveal the scene: a cemetery in the early morning, with the dew still wet on the grass.

A gravestone is more than a marker or a memorial. It serves as a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead—the place we go to pay our respects, to offer flowers or prayers, or perhaps to converse with the dead. But what if the grave is so fresh that no stone has been set in place? Where is the portal then?

One of the oldest genres in Western poetry is a formal lament where each stanza begins with the words “Where are they now?” One can still find those Latin words, Ubi sunt, inscribed on gravestones in older cemeteries. For thousands of years poets have been asking, “Where are they now—the powerful, the beloved, the beautiful, or the wise?” But the question is always rhetorical. The answer is the grave.

Except when it’s not.

The brilliance of last month’s winning haiku lies in its simple, understated refutation of that age-old assumption. Where are they now? The answer is morning dew.

That image strikes a balance between beauty and heartbreak. Standing at the grave, the poet notices the small drops clinging to the grass blades surrounding the fresh dirt. There is no sign of the beloved’s presence apart from these. And yet, in their tiny bodies catching the morning light, is there not also something eternally present and made new?

On the one hand, there is “no headstone yet.” On the other, that stone, once set in place, will eventually wear away. The dewdrops are forever. Such thoughts are unavoidable for the haiku poet who celebrates the endless return of the seasons on their circular journey through time.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

only one morning
the dew refuses to cling
to any future

— Gregory Tullock

an apology
to dew drops trapped in my shoes
missing the Rapture

— Nancy Winkler

♦

You can find more on September’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Dew”

to a blade of grass
the dew has attached itself
using just water

Dewdrops were clinging to an upright grass blade. But, somehow, they didn’t slide down. I found it remarkable that the dew could form such a strong bond using only water.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “dew.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

* REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “dew.”

Haiku Tip: Raise the Bar for Zen Poetry!

Dewdrops have a long history in Japanese literature—especially in haiku poetry. Basho smiled at the sight of a mushroom covered in dew, still young and in its prime; Buson found dewdrops glistening at the tip of each bramble thorn; and Issa mourned the death of his infant daughter with a haiku that nearly every Japanese person now knows by heart:

the things of this world
are like dewdrops…yes, like dew—
and yet…and yet…

The most celebrated modern dewdrop haiku was written by Kawabata Bosha (1897–1941).

like a diamond
drop of dew sitting alone
on top of a stone

A Zen Buddhist monk who devoted himself to the intense observation of nature, according to the translator Makoto Ueda, “Bosha never tired of watching cats, butterflies, spiders and dewdrops; and, as he watched them closely, he sensed the workings of a superhuman will that made them behave as they did.”

In selecting material for his 2018 anthology Well-Versed: Exploring Modern Japanese Haiku, Ozawa Minoru chose Bosha’s dewdrop haiku as his most representative poem. He writes:

Dew of course is made of water, but here it is perceived as being as hard as a diamond, as the Zen priest Dogen (1200–1253) said of the Buddha dharma: “Frozen, it becomes harder than diamonds, who could break it?”

Ozawa cites a modern critic who suggested that Bosha had absorbed Dogen’s way of thinking, only to step beyond it. Anyone can see that ice is hard. To understand the indestructibility of a dewdrop requires a more ecologically-grounded perspective on the world. Perhaps Bosha was thinking of Basho’s advice to his own disciples: “Do not seek after the sages of the past. Seek what they sought.”

A note on dew: In his book Haiku World, William J. Higginson writes, “Autumn dew presages winter frost, and [signifies] the fleetingness of this life since it is usually gone by midmorning.” Season word editor Becka Chester offers a more naturalistic description of the theme: “Dew is like rain because both are formed by condensing water. As vapor cools in autumn’s night air, it slows down and its molecules collect across cool objects, such as foliage. In the morning, after a cool autumn night, we often find dew sprinkled lightly across grass, tree leaves, and other objects outdoors. If we’re lucky, we can find it suspended like tiny pearls in a spider’s web.”

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (September 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Although written texts are venerated by all major spiritual traditions, literacy itself may be at the bottom of our current ecological crisis. Beginning roughly 5,500 years ago, the movement from oral to written culture led human beings to adopt increasingly abstract, disembodied ways of thinking that reinforced their feelings of separation from nature.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the problem clearly in 1974. In Myth and Meaning, he observed that the difference between societies with writing and those without written language was that the former wrote almost entirely about themselves, while the latter, so-called “primitive” people, had a vast oral lore about plants and animals, landscape and weather, and all other aspects of the natural world.

Preliterate cultures were not anthropocentric. In fact, the earliest cave art—from Lascaux to Chauvet—is almost entirely devoid of human forms. The first “sutras” were not texts at all, but the closely observed, lovingly rendered shapes of mammoths and woolly rhinos, lions, bison, and bears. 

The best-of-season haiku for Winter 2023 invites us to reenter a world in which wisdom, though bypassing the inherently anthropocentric filter of written language, is once more rooted in our direct, sensual experience of the world around us. At home in his native Stockholm, the poet watches snowflakes falling ceaselessly outside his window. The very silence of that falling seems to demand that he enter more deeply into communion with them, listening with the eye rather than the ear.

In some schools of Buddhism, a sutra is seen as more than a sacred text. For instance, the Lotus Sutra is regarded by Nichiren Buddhists as “the Entity of the Mystic Law.” Those who chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of that sutra, unite with a universal life force that animates all things from within. Even the weather.

The poet could have described his snowflakes in terms of writing, given that he compares them to a sutra. But he makes a special point of not doing that. The snowflakes are reciting the sutra. More than that, they are the sutra. 

It is a remarkably simple poem. As the snowflakes fall, covering the city on a winter day, the poet imagines them ceaselessly reciting the sutra of themselves. Or maybe he doesn’t imagine that. Maybe he witnesses it—and, in so doing, unites with the Snowflakes of the Mystic Law.

It is worth noting the poet’s artistry in the second line of the haiku: “it keeps reciting itself.” The season word suggests a feeling of delicate, soundless beauty. And yet, taken as a whole, the poem conveys a feeling of tremendous cumulative power. The “snowflake sutra” is a storm.  

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post The Snowflake Sutra appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Toward the end of his life, the Japanese poet Kaneko Tota (1919–2018) wrote: “In today’s world of haiku, it seems to me that old-fashioned labels such as new or old generations or traditional or modern styles are disappearing, and that a new criterion of classification has emerged instead—that is, animists or non-animists. In my opinion, genuine haiku poets will eventually find themselves animists.” The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge reveal a world where everything we see is playfully sentient and alive.

• Michael Flanagan explores a liminal space where the myriad beings of the natural world are always “greeting” one another. 
• Kathy Fusho Nolan’s ducks “have worked enough to relax” for the remainder of a summer afternoon.
  
• Kelly Shaw finds a dynamic lifeforce in the jumble of sandy footprints next to the “blue eternity” of the sea.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the September challenge here.

***

Summer Season Word: Summer Afternoon

WINNER:

summer afternoon
the silhouette of my chair
runs to greet the oak

— Michael Flanagan

A good haiku is like a magic trick that leaves us wondering how the rabbit got into the hat. How could the poet pull so much nuance and emotion out of a 17-syllable poem?

The length of a summer afternoon. The heat of the sun. The relaxed, somewhat drowsy torpor that sets in as the day goes on. The poet hasn’t mentioned any of these directly. Nevertheless, he implies them through figurative language: the silhouette of my chair runs to greet the oak.

It takes a moment to realize that the “silhouette” is a shadow. Skewed by the slant of the afternoon sun, it covers the distance between the chair and the oak. The acceleration of time implied by “run” provides the haiku humor of the poem.

Has the poet dozed off in the heat, waking to find that the day is nearly over? The suddenness of that perception might account for the “quickness” of the shadow. But there is a deeper magic at work.

We humans are busy, headstrong creatures, ruled by purposeful, productive activity that often distracts us from what is happening in the natural world. A summer afternoon when it is too hot to do anything but lounge in a lawn chair opens doors of perception that we normally keep shut.

The Japanese haiku master Takahama Kyoshi believed that the true purpose of haiku was son-mon, or “greeting.” According to his granddaughter, Teiko Inabata, Kyoshi believed that “haiku poets can have son-mon with any being in nature from pebbles to mountains, rivers, clouds in the sky.” But to have that experience requires that they enter a realm where, not just human begins, but all beings are constantly greeting and interacting with one another.

Drowsing in his lawn chair on a summer afternoon, the poet falls into a liminal state where, as the Lankavatara Sutra puts it, “things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.” There are no objects in that realm, only subjects. And everything—even a shadow—is alive.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The ducks on the dock
Have worked enough to relax —
Summer afternoon

— Kathy Fusho Nolan

a ruckus of sand
next to blue eternity
summer afternoon

— Kelly Shaw

♦

You can find more on August’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “summer afternoon”

it can lift a cloud
but it cannot lift a stone
summer afternoon

According to the National Weather Service, a fair-weather cumulus cloud weighs on average around 1.4 billion pounds. Picking up a beach pebble, I was struck by the obvious paradox: the sky that could lift a cloud was powerless to lift a stone.

That thought seemed consistent with the feeling of lassitude brought on by the heat, so I chose the season word “summer afternoon” for the last line, rather than the more obvious choice of “summer sky.”

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “summer afternoon.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “summer afternoon.”

Haiku Tip: Enjoy The Challenge of Working In a Fixed Form!

Working in a fixed poetic form like haiku offers unique challenges and rewards. The challenges are enough to keep people interested in haiku for decades on end. The rewards are such that even poets who mostly write longer free verse poetry find that the satisfaction of crafting a successful poem in 5-7-5 syllables keeps them coming back for more.

One of the greatest challenges of working in the haiku form is that, because of the season word, one always has FEWER than seventeen syllables of freedom. With a word like “summer afternoon,” the first or last line of your haiku has already been written, and so it remains only to decide what to do with the other two.

Because there are so many five-syllable season words in the vocabulary of traditional haiku, this is an issue that Japanese poets run into all the time. But you won’t find Japanese haiku poets complaining about five-syllable season words like semi no koe (“locust cry”). They know from the start that the challenge is to find a meaningful juxtaposition for that image.

If I had one piece of advice to offer for this month’s challenge, it would be this. Take a sheet of paper and write the words “summer afternoon” at the top. Then experiment with ten to twenty different beginnings or endings of a haiku using those five syllables. You may even find a way to sandwich them into the middle line and still come up with an effective haiku. The trick is to be persistent, but also playful. If you tire of this exercise after five or ten minutes, set your “haiku scratchpad” to one side and come back to it later.

If you keep at it, I can guarantee that you will eventually zero in on one or two really good ideas. When that happens, take out a fresh sheet of paper and write your best version of that poem at the top. Continue playing with it until the syllables line up to express the thought or feeling you were after.

A note on summer afternoons: In his book Haiku World, William J. Higginson writes that summer afternoons relate to the “general slowing of activity” during the hottest months of the year. It belongs to a category called “the season,” which includes words descriptive of the general climate, qualities of light, and the length or shortness of the day. In haiku poetry, summer afternoons suggest a feeling of drowsiness, torpor, boredom, or the pleasant feeling of not having much to do but relax and enjoy the day.

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (August 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Season words like “lotus” can be difficult to write about because they also function as religious symbols. A word with that much weight can capsize the 17-syllable vessel of a haiku. The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge took a playful approach to the seasonal theme, working with the lotus as a symbol of the enlightened mind, but without becoming overwhelmed by that idea.

• Marcia Burton finds in the lotus symbol imprinted on her yoga mat a much-needed serenity in the midst of daily life.
• Nancy Winkler’s pure white flower displays a wisdom that, ironically, could only be found in the murky depths. 
  
• Lorraine A. Padden contrasts the unscathed beauty of the lotus with Orpheus, a mythical hero whose journey through the underworld left him broken and alone.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the August challenge here.

Summer Season Word: Lotus

WINNER:

on the yoga mat
lotus flower opening
and closing again

— Marcia Burton

Haiku are inherently playful—after all, the word means literally “humorous verse.” But that doesn’t mean that haiku are light on meaning or lacking in nuance. There are many levels of play.

The following verse, which was also submitted by this month’s winning poet, plays off the notion of the lotus as a symbol of the enlightened mind.

keeping her shirt clean
despite playing in the mud
a lotus flower

Religious symbolism tends to be ponderous or heavy-handed, for which reason a haiku poet will usually find some way to lighten it up—as when Issa describes a swallow flying out of the nostril of the giant bronze Buddha at Kamakura.

Here the poet compares the lotus to a young girl frolicking in the mud who, nevertheless, somehow manages to keep her shirt immaculately clean. The image is delightful, if not mildly satirical. Without a sense of humor, the quest for enlightenment can devolve into a punishing, joyless affair.

All that being said, this month’s winning poem employed a deeper, simpler style of play.

There are no real lotuses in the poet’s life—no actual flowers growing from the muddy bed of a nearby lake or pond. The only lotus she can think of is the logo emblazoned on her yoga mat, its weekly “blossoming” confined to the length of a class. She unrolls the mat, and the flower opens. At the end of the class, it closes again.

To find a lotus “opening and closing” on a yoga mat is the essence of haiku humor. It is the poet’s way of acknowledging that her life has too little space for contemplation—and, at the same time, expressing gratitude for the single hour of serenity she can find in the midst of an otherwise stressful week.

This is playful, too, no doubt. But it is play of another order. I read this poem as a subtle but honest commentary on the challenges of spiritual practice in modern life.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

what the lotus found
in the dark watery depths
is on full display

— Nancy Winkler

another lotus
unlike the poor Orpheus
arises unscathed

— Lorraine A. Padden

♦

You can find more on July’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “lotus”

there must be something
living in the dark water
that eats lotuses

I saw white lotus flowers floating atop a pond on my visit to a Buddhist temple. I asked a monk what became of them when their season was over, but he didn’t know. “They just disappear,” he said.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “lotus.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

* REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “lotus.”

Haiku Tip: Return To The Spirit Of Play!

Haiku evolved from a popular game in which poets took turns adding “capping verses” to one another’s poems. By the 17th century, this game had become a series of weekly contests held throughout Japan. A referee would issue a “challenge verse” of 7-7 syllables and participants from all walks of life would submit 5-7-5 syllable “caps,” hoping to be selected as the winner.

These 17-syllable verses ran such a broad gamut that it is hard to categorize them today. They could be sublime, profound, witty, funny, dirty, or even scandalous. At the turn of the 20th century, the literary reformer Masaoka Shiki abandoned this freewheeling approach to haiku in the effort to establish it as a serious artform.

Shiki and his followers advocated “objective description,” producing haiku that were grounded in concrete images drawn from nature. Many of these poems are considered masterpieces today. But they were rarely playful. By the mid-20th century, poets had begun to rebel, reintroducing elements of haiku that had been suppressed by the Shiki School.

Haiku has rebounded since then. We live in an age of short-form digital communication that encourages spontaneity, diversity, and freedom of self-expression—values that are reshaping haiku for the 21st-century. Ironically, today’s haiku are closer in spirit to the type of haiku that Shiki rejected.

Humor, melancholy, joy, grief, provocation, celebration, satire, longing, revulsion, philosophical musing—there are no limits on what can be communicated in 5-7-5. At its most basic, a haiku is whatever you can get away with in 17 syllables. This is the only rule that holds true across the entire history of haiku.

—from #5 in the series Haiku in English: 17 Essential Points, by Clark Strand & Susan Polizzotto

A note on lotuses: The lotus is a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, because its roots grow from the mud of a lake or river bottom, but the flower that opens atop the water is a spotless pink or white. Lotus seeds can lie dormant for years in silt or dry mud before germinating during a flood. The oldest seeds to germinate through rehydration were 1,300 years old.

There is something transcendent about the lotus in Buddhist literature, even though it remains firmly attached to this world. But the word can be used in other ways. In the poem below it expresses the “Other Power” doctrine of Pure Land Buddhism, which states that sentient beings cannot attain Buddhahood through their own effort.

the lotus rises
but it’s the water that does
the heavy lifting

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (July 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is unlikely that any English language haiku journal would agree to publish this winning poem. It lacks the earmarks of haiku as a form of literature derivative of Japanese poetry. The poet has chosen the haiku form to express her thoughts about life, but in terms of technique, she has thrown her lot in with Emily Dickinson rather than with Basho. This is haiku as American poetry.

The poem breaks some of the most widely observed conventions of the form. The first line offers an abstraction, rather than establishing a concrete image. The second makes broad generalizations about human life. Only in the third line do we find out what the poem is about. Even then, the season word is used metaphorically. There are no actual dragonflies.

When asked to comment on her inspiration, the poet wrote:

I remembered catching dragonflies as a child and marveling at their sleek, shiny bodies, which although somewhat bendable, were also strong as steel. A haiku formed in my mind as I thought about human life, which is also long (about 80 years on average) and narrow (increasingly disconnected from the rest of nature). Like a tiny metal dart that gets thrown, flying in a straight line for almost a century until we reach the end. A dart that gets to fly through an abyss of loneliness.

Her remarks account for the emotional power of the poem, but not for the paradox of its central image. For if a human life is long, a dragonfly is not. Its length seems long only in relation to its width. “A problem of shape,” she calls it. The life of a modern Homo sapiens is too long for its width, too narrow for its length.

What makes the poem not simply a good modern haiku but a masterpiece of short-form English language poetry is how succinctly it expresses one of our deepest frustrations as a species. In doubling the human life expectancy since the turn of the 19th century, we have stretched it thinner. We live longer on average, but the range of our experience as it relates to the natural world is narrower than ever before. The result is an “abyss of loneliness” we must fly through from one end of life to the other.

I wrote that there were no actual dragonflies in the poem. But that is not quite true. As in Dickinson’s poetry, the symbol is sometimes more real than the thing itself.

Dragonflies are elusive creatures. Difficult to follow as they veer unpredictably, they can flash out of nowhere and vanish just as easily, only to reappear where least expected. Dragonflies have been known to cross oceans in their migrations, and they have journeyed over vast expanses of geological time as well. The earliest fossils of dragonfly-like insects are 325 million years old.

And so, hidden in the poet’s use of the season word is a nod, not only to the evanescent beauty of these small creatures, but also to their vitality and extreme durability over time. If “the human life” really is like a dragonfly, the world may not be done with us quite yet.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post A Problem of Shape appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To go barefoot is to return to our original nature. That is why divine incarnations like Buddha or the Virgin Mary are nearly always depicted without shoes. Through bare feet we draw wisdom, vitality, and spiritual sustenance from below, like the tree that can reach to the heavens because its roots are anchored in the soil. Each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge found unexpected depth in this simplest, most primal of gestures: removing our shoes to experience our sacred connection with the earth.

• Jackie Chou uses a surprising juxtaposition to state the core truth of Mahayana Buddhism: that samsara and nirvana are one.
• Thomas McCrossan discovers the rhythm of life itself in his sandy footprints filling up with sea water only to wash away.
• Marcia Burton experiences a sudden intimacy when she accidentally brushes elbows with her barefoot companion.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the July challenge here.

***

Summer Season Word: Barefoot

WINNER:

barefoot on the sand
pain from the splinter lingers
after it’s been pulled

— Jackie Chou

Haiku is the art of juxtaposition—the placing of two images side by side so that they inform one another in a surprising way. There are other techniques for producing what Bashō called “surplus meaning,” but juxtaposition is the most common. A good haiku pairs two elements that, taken together, add up to more than the sum of their parts.

On a trip to the shore, the poet has put the endless details and demands of daily living behind her to take a barefoot stroll on the sand. To go barefoot at the beach is to come back to our most primal connection. To meet life on its simplest terms. 

The relief in such moments is palpable. The white noise from the surf washes over us as our minds relax into the rhythm of walking. We begin to think with our feet. To introduce the lingering pain from a splinter into such an idyllic scene feels intrusive at first—until we realize that the poet has said something profound.

In his Winter 2020 article for Tricycle, “What’s in a Word? Dukkha,” Andrew Olendzki explains that the First Noble Truth of Buddhism (usually translated as “Life is suffering”) doesn’t mean what most people think:

This central term [dukkha: “suffering”] is best understood alongside the related word sukha. The prefix su- generally means “good, easy, and conducive to well-being,” and the prefix du- correspondingly means “bad, difficult, and inclining toward illness or harm.” On the most basic level, then, sukha means pleasant while dukkha means unpleasant.

Dukkha is much lighter in concept than suffering, which is derived from the Latin “to hold up under.” In Buddhism, one doesn’t hold up under suffering so much as one wanders through it. That samsaric wandering is the subject of the poem.

On her way to the beach, the poet slips off her sandals . . . and immediately gets a splinter. This is how civilization works: it reduces the abrasions of life, but it can’t eliminate them. Beneath our clothes, inside of our shoes, we are all naked. Take away those protections, if for only a moment, and we are facing the pointy end of some stick.

The poet stops to remove the splinter, then continues on to the shoreline. The wound stings because of the saltwater, but the surf is the best thing for it. The water that causes her pain is also the cure for it.

The juxtaposition has too many layers to touch on all of them here. There is the movement from pleasure to pain/pain to pleasure that inspired early Buddhists to compare samsara to an ocean with rising and falling waves. And there is the splinter itself: a symbol in miniature for sickness, old age, and death. Not an accident so much as a simple fact of life.

Below these is a final layer which expresses the essence of the poem. Mahayana Buddhism ultimately teaches that samsara and nirvana are one. There is no escape from this world because there doesn’t need to be an escape. “This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,” says the Zen master Hakuin. “This very body is the body of the Buddha.”

That the poet has managed to say all of this with a splinter is the “haiku humor” of the poem. The tone is detached, but not indifferent. Somewhere behind the words themselves is the lightest trace of a smile. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

this constant heartbeat
barefoot thumps left in sand
fill up wash away

— Thomas McCrossan

accidentally
we brush each other’s elbows
barefoot at the lake

— Marcia Burton

♦

You can find more on June’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “barefoot”

when we step outside
we call it going barefoot
though nothing has changed

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “barefoot.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word and try to stay close to that.

REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “barefoot.”

Haiku Tip: Get Yourself Free!

In Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson devotes only one sentence to the season word barefoot: “What better symbol of summer than feet’s freedom from shoes and socks?”

At first glance, that might seem enough. In climates where shoes and socks are necessary much of the year, the summer weather can bring a feeling of liberation. But season words are complex entities with long histories.

The English travel writer Bruce Chatwin explored the design and function of the human foot in his book The Songlines. Our ancestors were made for yearly migrations, Chatwin concluded—journeys made barefoot because bare feet were evolutionarily designed for them over millions and millions of years.

For modern people, the feeling of ease that comes from going barefoot in summer is, therefore, more than freedom of not having to wear socks and shoes. Is it not, in some sense, also the freedom of returning to our evolutionary roots?

In The Vegetable Root Discourse, the recorded sayings of the 16th-century Chinese sage Hong Zicheng, we find the marriage of Higginson’s and Chatwin’s point of view:

When in the mood, I take off my shoes and walk barefooted through the sweet-smelling grasses of the fields, wild birds without fear accompanying me. My heart at one with nature, I loosen my shirt as I sit absorbed beneath falling petals, while the clouds silently enfold me as if wishing to keep me there.

As a season word, “barefoot” belongs to the human affairs category, which includes summer clothing, customs, holidays, sports, and so forth. As an experience, however, going barefoot calls much older memories to mind. Our feet remember a time when there was no indoors or outdoors—although, granted, there may not have been a word for it then. Who needs a concept like barefoot when there is no such thing as a shoe?

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (June 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The best haiku find something unique or meaningful in the poet’s encounter with the passing seasons. In springtime, as the rains penetrate the roots of flowering plants and trees, the life of the planet begins to stir. Moisture rises up from the ground over the course of a day, giving a hazy tinge to everything, and in the evening blurs the edges of the moon. Each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge found emotional resonance in this purely meteorological phenomenon, demonstrating our deep connection to nature.

• Marcia Burton’s “childless couple” puts their hope in the hazy moon after fertility treatments have failed.
• David Landy discovers a place of refuge and reflection in the “blueness” of the blurry moon.
• Dana Clark-Millar finds consolation in the fact of the spring moon, like her aging eyesight, “being blurry too.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the June challenge here.

***

Spring Season Word: Hazy Moon / Blurry Moon

WINNER:

a childless couple
testing the fertility
of the hazy moon

— Marcia Burton

The Japanese critic Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907-1988) once suggested that the best haiku strike a balance between humor and existential isolation. “Loneliness in life and the comical elements of life are two sides of the same coin,” he wrote.

On a mild spring night, a childless couple is “testing the fertility” of a hazy moon. The euphemism is humorous, the situation is not. It seems that conventional fertility treatments have failed; otherwise, the poet would not have identified the couple as “childless.” Now they are at the mercy of the moon.

According to haiku master Mayuzumi Madoka, the season word “hazy moon” expresses one of the most essential attributes of spring: the way the world “thaws, warms, and grows suffused with softness.” It’s a beautiful image that carries within it the hope for regeneration and renewal. Why, then, is that not the dominant mood of the poem?

The essence of this haiku lies not in the possibility that the couple may, against all odds, conceive a child aided by the hazy moon, but that they may not.

The global fertility rate for humans has fallen by more than half since 1950. The reasons for this decrease are complex, involving factors like advances in gender equality, women’s education, and reproductive rights. In some regions, environmental pollutants may also play a part. But a global trend is no consolation for the couple unable to conceive.

Is there something funny in all of this after all, even something wise? Yamamoto would say there is. For better or worse, human beings are driven by desire, and desire is life force. The couple has not given up, in spite of everything.

I am reminded of the Zen story about the monk pursued by two tigers. One tiger chases him over the edge of a precipice, where he hangs precariously by a vine. The other waits below him, should he decide to let go. As the vine begins to give way, the monk notices a berry hanging right at eye level. With his free hand, he plucks it . . .  and pops it into his mouth.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

After we parted,
I lingered in the blueness
of the blurry moon.

— David Landy

my aging eyesight
finding comfort in the moon
being blurry too

— Dana Clark-Millar

♦

You can find more on May’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Spring season word: “blurry moon” or “hazy moon”

during the blackout
alone in the kitchen, but
for the blurry moon

—Hattori Nami (b. 1947)

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the spring season word “blurry moon” or “hazy moon.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word and try to stay close to that.

REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “blurry moon” or “hazy moon.”

Haiku Tip: Explore the Range of a Season Word

From the beginning, the moon has been a favorite subject for haiku poetry—especially the full moon of autumn and the “hazy” or “blurry” moon of spring. The Japanese haiku master Mayuzumi Madoka writes of the latter:

Meteorologically, the blurring of the moon in spring is explained as a consequence of the approaching low atmospheric pressure. In Japanese poetry blurriness has been regarded as one of the attributes of spring when the world thaws, warms, and grows suffused with softness.

Because of its long history, there are many examples to draw from in exploring the range of this season word.

Basho approached it humorously in 1692:

the cats have finished
making love   hazy moonlight
spreads through the bedroom 

The peacefulness of the moonlight after the caterwauling has ceased suggests a comical parallel to human lovemaking and its aftermath.

Buson used the same season word to craft a comical self-portrait in 1773:

such love for myself
the arm that cradles my head
by the hazy moon

And in 1814, Issa produced a delightful haiku in his unmistakably simple, heart-felt style:

balanced on a pole
I set out in the garden
stands the hazy moon

We find a more modern approach in the early 20th century. Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) was an artist who gave lectures on painting in Europe and the United States. His hazy moon haiku, translated by Janine Beichman, offers a daring treatment of the traditional theme:

The mole at the nape of
her neck spells danger
under the hazy moon

Writing about this haiku, the critic Ozawa Minoru observed wryly that Yumeji, who was famous for his paintings of beautiful women, must have been standing very close to his subject to have noticed a mole at her neckline by the light of a hazy moon.

Finally, our sample haiku for this month’s challenge, written in 2011, uses “blurry moon” to express a uniquely 21st-century emotion called solastalgia—a term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005 to describe the emotional distress felt by people experiencing negative change as a result of environmental or climatological disruption.

during the blackout
alone in the kitchen, but
for the blurry moon

—Hattori Nami (b. 1947)

As reported by the poet in So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms: Haiku from the Year of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami, edited by Mayuzumi Madoka:

On the night of March 11, my town, assaulted by the tsunami, had lost all the life lines, everything left in mud and darkness. Anxious in the continuing aftershocks, I thought to cook rice on a kerosene stove and went into the kitchen and saw a blurry moon was out. That had a soothing effect on my heart.

Hattori was 64 at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, which caused the deaths of nearly 20,000 people and the permanent dislocation of 116,000.

So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms contains 126 haiku written by survivors under Madoka’s guidance as a way of healing from trauma. The poems contain traditional season words, some of which, like “blurry moon,” have been in use since Basho’s day. Which proves that the themes of haiku never go out of fashion. They remain current because poets continue to use them to record their experiences and to express their deepest feelings about life.

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (May 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Because haiku are so short, the most that a poet can do in any given poem is to suggest a “vector of meaning” for the reader to explore. If the vector is too broad, readers won’t know what the poem is about. If it is too narrow, they will quickly exhaust its resources and move on to another haiku. The trick is to invite readers to “linger” inside of a haiku, giving them enough space to wander about, but not so much that they feel lost in it. Each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge suggested a range of meanings for the reader to explore, as if wandering into a garden or a house.

• Mat Osmond’s narcissi invite us to explore the value that things have in themselves, without recourse to human constructs. 
• Nancy Winkler finds a humorous (and possibly satirical) coincidence in the species name ‘narcissus poeticus.’
  
• Jill Johnson finds the flower’s mythical namesake afraid to move, trapped by the stillness of his own reflection.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the May challenge here.

***

Spring Season Word: Narcissus

WINNER:

Not needing to know
what this is for: narcissi
nodding in the rain

–Mat Osmond

In his 1906 novel Kusamakura (“Grass Pillow”), Natsume Soseki summed up the artistic lifestyle in a single sentence: “Putting it as a formula, I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”

Since the novel’s protagonist spends his days wandering through the countryside in search of haiku, it seems likely that Soseki was referring specifically to the poet. The haiku poet lives in a “three-cornered world” from which the angle of utility has been removed. He doesn’t need to know what anything in that world is for—only the value that it has in and for itself.

Last month’s winning haiku is deceptively simple: the poet states that he doesn’t need to know the purpose of the narcissi nodding in the spring rain. He may find them beautiful, but he doesn’t say so. He seems unwilling even to say that. It isn’t clear at first what the poem is even about.

The word “this” is vague to the point of borderlessness. Is he talking about the flowers . . . the moment . . . or all of life itself? Whatever it is, it is bigger than the narcissi. Bigger even than the poet. And yet, the flowers remain the focus of the poem.

The genius of haiku lies in packing big meanings into small spaces. This is accomplished through the use of season words. A poet will zero in on one thing from the natural world as a way of revealing the soul of the cosmos. To William Blake, it meant:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

The poet has captured that experience without using words like Infinity or Eternity. The narcissi nodding their heads in the spring rain are saying “Yes!” . . . to everything, everywhere at once.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

delighted to learn
‘narcissus poeticus’
is its species name

–Nancy Winkler

Narcissus knew this—
if he disturbed the water,
he would be alone.

–Jill Johnson

♦

You can find more on April’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Spring season word: “narcissus”

narcissus blossoms
the bent neck of a people
who cannot look up

I wrote this haiku in April of 2019, after passing six or seven people in a row on Park Avenue—all glued to their phones. I passed a stand of narcissus a few moments later and, noticing their “bent necks,” made the obvious connection.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the spring season word “narcissus.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word and try to stay close to that.

REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “narcissus.”

Haiku Tip: Trace the Subject to Its Origin

Although poets use season words in various ways when writing a haiku, the most time-honored use involves tracing a subject to its origin. This involves knowing the history of the word in question and using that knowledge to create a unique or compelling turn of thought.

Sometimes the origin of a season word is hidden in plain sight. An example would be the daisy, from the Old English dæges ēage (“day’s eye”), because it opens and closes with the sun. A haiku using daisy may or may not allude to the original meaning of the word, but a smart poet will keep that spirit of bright, cheerful optimism in mind.

The following poem, written by Takahama Kyoshi on April 30, 1936, offers a good example:

immediately
after I step on daisies
they get right back up

Daises are spring wildflowers that grow so prolifically that it is sometimes impossible to avoid stepping on them when crossing an open field. The poet makes no allusion to the “opening eye” of the day. Nevertheless, his daisies that “get right back up” after they have been stepped on convey a spirit of resilience and renewal.

Kyoshi was visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon when he wrote his haiku and used the English word for the flower in his Japanese original. And so, added to the essential spirit of the season word is a little nod to the Bard who used the names of so many seasonal flowers in his plays.

Think of it this way: Haiku are shallow, but the season words are deep. If you want to craft a 17-syllable poem with reserves of meaning and nuance, trace the season word back to its origin and capture its spirit in words. 

A note on narcissus: Although potted narcissus are forced to blossom from Christmas through February, true narcissus (called “daffodils” by many) appear outdoors in early spring. Varying in color from white to yellow, with a bent upper stem and a longish corona, or “trumpet,” they grow in full sun or partial shade and sometimes reach a height of two feet. The name originated in ancient Greece, where Nárkissos was a youthful hunter known for his great beauty. He refused the advances of every would-be lover, preferring to gaze at his own reflection in a pool of water. According to one myth, when Narcissus died, the flowers that grew by the water were given his name. Later, Pliny the Elder claimed that the plant had been named for the effect produced by its scent (narkao, “I grow numb”) and not the self-absorbed youth.

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (April 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.