Suddenly Haiku
The simple poem, both Buddhist and populist, bears its renown well
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 12/26/2000
It seems a safe bet that the Japanese Zen Buddhist monks who developed the art of haiku were not anticipating poems about Kathie Lee Gifford.
No, those 17th-century monks had nobler goals; they were all about capturing moments in time, expressing thoughts about nature, being Zen. But things that last for centuries tend to evolve. So perhaps it was inevitable that this haiku appeared last summer in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
Kathie Lee Gifford
shed tears, weight and bra and still
Left the show in style
It was the winning submission to the newspaper's ''Kathie Lee Haiku Challenge,'' which was not unlike the election haiku contest that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or the Detroit News's recent clarion call for haiku about Michigan. Haiku is everywhere these days, in newspapers and goofy gift books (''Haikus for Jews'') and New Yorker cartoons, not to mention all over the Internet, where Web sites devoted to haiku tackle everything from dead presidents to the cast of ''Survivor.'' We might be busy these days, and anti-intellectual, and glued to our TV sets, but we're managing to write lots of these little poems with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.
To some poets, this is good news. To some, it's disheartening.
''They take it rather lightly, rather than see it as a serious art form,'' says Raffael De Gruttola, president of the Boston Haiku Society and treasurer of the Haiku Society of America.
De Gruttola takes his haiku seriously. He meets monthly with the 15 members of the Boston Haiku Society, to share original verse. He's planning a North American haiku conference in Boston this summer. He understands haiku, real haiku, that has references to seasons and groundings in time, and doesn't have to fit that rigid 17-syllable rule.
Sure, haiku can merge with modern life, De Gruttola says. It's been woven into the writings of Jack Kerouac, appropriated by jazz musicians, even worked, with good effect, in books like ''101 Corporate Haiku,'' in which author William Warriner juxtaposes nature and the boardroom:
The ponderous ice
of glaciers flows faster than my corporation
But not every new poem, De Gruttola points out, fits into the haiku spirit. A purist might not approve, for example, of this Michigan haiku, submitted to the Detroit News:
Golf golf golf golf golf
Hoo boy do we got great golf
Yes Michigan golf
Yep, these days, any schmo who can count to seven thinks he's a poet. (And some of them, based on newspaper and Internet submissions, can't even count to seven.) But is there merit, even literary merit, to a stupid haiku? Sure, says Lowell poet Jack McCarthy. Because ... well, because anyone who can count to seven can think he's a poet.
''You have a right to call it poetry, automatically, if you put it in that form,'' he says.
McCarthy, a veteran poetry slammer whom the Phoenix has named Boston's ''best stand-up poet,'' believes there's an appetite for verse out there - but that you're not going to hook many people with a four-page epic. People are afraid of rhyme and meter, he says. They might run screaming at the mention of a sonnet. But nobody's really afraid of haiku.
''It's bait,'' McCarthy says. ''Haiku is the bait. Poetry is the hook.''
It could even be the launching pad for a literary life, which is the way Michael Sheinbaum likes to think of it. The 33-year-old software developer from King of Prussia, Pa., always wanted to be a writer, but never thought he had the discipline. So in October 1996, he made a resolution. He would start small, writing one haiku per day, leading up to the Clinton-Dole election. He did it, and posted them on the Web.
''It became easy,'' he says. ''Even addictive.''
And people started paying attention to his site, Haiku Headline of the Day, which expanded into a political humor Webzine. Sheinbaum has broadened his writing, too, into limericks and even essays, and he wants to develop a big news-to-poetry site. But he credits haiku with giving him his start.
Haiku success came even more quickly to Thomas Nord, 34, a feature writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, who always harbored ambitions of starting a 'zine to amuse himself and his friends. So one day in early fall, he asked himself, ''What is the dumbest thing I can come up with for a Web site?''
That's when he thought of haiku about the presidents.
''It just kind of came to me: `That's really dumb,''' Nord says. So he set up the site, labeled it ''the world's most trusted source for presidential haiku,'' and launched it with a poem about George Washington:
Our first president
Your soul tempered in battle
No one else could serve
Within hours, Nord's friends were sending him haiku. About Grover Cleveland. And William Howard Taft. And then, as word of the Web site spread, he drew submissions from people he didn't know. One Illinois man noticed that Nord was missing 13 presidents and took it upon himself to fill in the gaps. There are haiku about everyone now, though Nord admits to his favorites, such as this one about Abraham Lincoln:
Stand on principle
But never sit with your back
Exposed to the door
People have suggested that Nord branch out - to vice presidential limericks, for example. He's a little reluctant to break with his formula. ''It'll never be as cool or as funny as this,'' he says.
Besides, he has discovered that sometimes, a haiku written on a whim can turn out to be a poem. A really good poem. Take this one, by Nord's brother, about John F. Kennedy:
Top down, Kennedy.
No chance of rain in Dallas.
Goodbye, Camelot
''I think it's kind of poignant,'' Nord says. ''To me, that says a lot.''
Now that's a tribute to haiku.
And that's the upside of the craze, McCarthy says. Good haiku can come from everywhere, and they're readily available if you know where to look for them - or where to listen. McCarthy loves to tell the tale of poet Billy Collins, who walked out of a haiku conference recently and overheard this exchange, which happens to fit perfectly into the classic form:
When he found out, he
was like, `Oh my God,' and I
was like, `Oh my God.'
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 12/26/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
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