by Kelly

How is it that I have never heard of Andrew Vachss? He’s an accomplished author with well over 20 books to his name! On Amazon, reviewers heap praise all over his Burke series, a collection of 18 books about a private eye who avenges abused children.

Ah…but that’s it. He’s classified as a “mystery/thriller” writer. His books appear on the shelves along with Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva and Michael Crichton. I don’t spend much time in that part of the bookstore.

But perhaps maybe I should. Who knows which of these authors is nursing a quiet love of haiku? Turns out, Andrew Vachss is.

His newest novel is called Haiku. It’s a stand-alone work, having nothing to do with his long-running series.

In it, a group of homeless men band together on the streets of LA.

The unofficial leader of the group is a man called Ho. Ho, an elderly Japanese man, walked away his comfy life as a highly respected and admired martial arts master after a piece of advice he offered a student ended in her murder.

Ho can not come to terms with his role in her death. Thinking back on the moment she asked for advice, he believes he was dismissive of her request, that he spoke to her with an air of arrogance born from his inflated title.

Because of this, he leaves everything behind to pursue a life without any trappings in hopes that someday he’ll be able to write one solitary haiku that reflects his true spirit.

Before he can do that, however, he must survive on the streets. To do that, he needs friends. Enter the rest of the characters in this book. Each has his own demons and all are far from perfect. Together, though, they are able to pool their resources to save one of their own.

The book is not filled with haiku. Instead, it is the idea of being able to write one perfect haiku that pulls the main character through to the end.

The book wasn’t as tension-filled and suspenseful as I expected a “thriller” to be. It was much more contemplative. There was an active plot, a real problem that needed fixing, but there was also a strange sub-plot that got a lot of attention up front but then never amounted to much. Yet, overall, I enjoyed the story, and walked away curious about the author’s other works.

Which is how I ended up at the Andrew Vachss web site, which is where I found a page of his own haiku. This one, in particular, seemed fitting of a mystery writer:

When winter vanished

I searched, only to find you

Missing and presumed

If you check out the rest of Andrew Vachss’s haiku, I suggest you click on the last two. Each of them links to a accompanying cartoon.

Haiku By Two welcomes a new guest haiku’er:
Eileen Beha.

Beha is the author of a newly released middle grade novel called Tango.

It’s the story of a pampered Yorkie from NYC, who is named Tango. Tango gets separated from his owner during a vacation on Prince Edward Island, and the book follows this scrappy little dog as he tries to find his way back home.

Over the next five days, however, Beha will ditch doggie tales for garden tales. Her haiku all depict scenes from her own backyard.

About the haiku writing process, Beha had this to say:

Although I write poetry, “My Backyard Haiku” are the first haiku I’ve ever written.

At first, I struggled mightily because I didn’t understand the conventions of the haiku form; I thought of haiku as being a poem with less words.

Once I learned that “awareness in the moment” was critical, and, that this “Aha” moment often occurs in the natural world, I threw away all the words I’d been arranging and rearranging into 17 syllables and went out to my backyard.

Over a period of a week or two, I forced myself to describe what I was seeing. Then I stilled myself, trying to be open to any kind of feeling or insights that my brief experience invoked.

Arranging and rearranging words into 17 syllables in a 5 - 7 - 5 pattern was still challenging, but at least I had a subject — a single glimpse of meaning that I was attempting to communicate.

I now realize not only how difficult writing haiku is, but also how practicing this miniature art form could enhance my writing of literature for children.

by Kelly

Ever curious to learn about the world of haiku, I contacted author Michael J. Rosen.

I wanted to ask him some questions about his most recent book, The Cuckoo’s Haiku. It’s a book that combines birdwatching, haiku and watercolors.

Here is what he had to say . . .

What do birdwatching and haiku have in common?

They’re both arts of the ephemeral. The fleeting. The caught glimpse from which so much else must be inferred.

If a warbler lingers for a few minutes in my burr oak tree while on its migration path, I have to act quickly. I have to see the bird. Grab my binoculars. Rush outside with my field guide. Hope the bird is still there.

And then I have to try to discern those telltale markings that differentiate that bird from other warblers. Are there eye rings, wing bars, darker outer feathers, a rusty bib, a black cap? From those details, I can, sometimes, make an identification.

In haiku, as in all poetry, there’s the desire for similar extrapolation: what can this image or metaphor reveal? What will this detail suggest about the wider world?

So I mean to write about birds, sure, but also about the birdwatcher, about the world we share with birds, which is subject to so many other forces.

You live on a farm in a rural Ohio. Are all the haiku in this book about birds you commonly see in your own backyard?

I will admit, I’ve never seen a cuckoo. They’re elusive!

But all the other birds in the book are ones I see regularly here in Ohio. And I deliberately chose birds that had wide distribution. Birds that readers would know about.

Part of my interest in doing this work is to stop us in our tracks, to make us re-see, see more clearly.

George Abbe once wrote that poets are like most people, only more so.

If I were to sum up the impulse behind these haiku, it would be to be a person among birds and nature…only more so. To share my binoculars with you…and the poem, in the same way.

Many of the haiku in Cuckoo’s Haiku paint vivid word pictures of a bird in action. Did you find that you were paying greater attention to birds while you were working on this book?

My interest in birds spans some thirty years. There are times where I remember myself reading more…deliberately venturing into the woods with binoculars and field guide in hand. But, I have to say, now I’m more interested in the whole ecosystem, how the seasons affect this farm and all its occupants.

Here’s a word I learned recently: phenology. It’s what occurs at any given point in each season in a given place: when do the hummingbirds return, the wild apple trees drop their blossoms, the bluegill in the pond begin to lay their eggs in the mud craters they create?

So, I’ve sort of lost some of the knowledge I had about actual species in exchange for these more abstract or overall observations.

Of course, writing The Cuckoo’s Haiku was another chance to research these common birds, specifically looking for those amazing and curious facts that would renew interest in even the most familiar birds.

For instance, the fact that doves are unique among birds in their ability to drink water without tipping their heads up so that gravity can draw the water down their throats.

The fact that mockingbirds always sing in triplets, repeating their phrases three times before moving onto another “song.”

The natural history is a significant part of my engagement with the language as well; it often suggests a poem, or, at least, another meaning to a seemingly simple description.

It seems that you’re also quite a dog lover. What’s next? A book of dog haiku?

Funny you should say that, Kelly!

Yes, I’m a huge dog person. I’ve always lived with dogs. I’ve rescued a number of dogs and cats…and written or edited several books about the companion animals that share our lives.

And, yes, in fact. Mary Azarian is creating illustrations even now for a book that Candlewick is planning to publish in 2011. Some 24 breeds of dogs about which I’ve written haiku.

And, if I have my way(!), I hope to do books on a world of other creatures. Haiku, at least as I try to practice it, offers me a wonderful form against which my creativity can find enough friction to make some sparks.

I think haiku, as practiced in English, has a great deal of energy when it exceeds the mere 5/7/5 syllabic orientation. It’s a form that’s too venerable and profound to merely require breaking lines like dropping a pound of spaghetti into boiling water.

by Alison

Last week I posted a review of Haiku Mama by Kari Anne Roy. It was a glowing review. I was so completely won over by this book that I found it hard not to gush about it.

Now I’m completely taken with its author. I sent her some questions and she sent back some answers that had me laughing at my computer screen. This woman is hilarious.

I’ve never used this expression before but . . . I heart Haiku Mama.

Which came first — motherhood or haiku?

Haiku came first! I think it was fifth grade when we learned the whole 5-7-5 routine and I loved the challenge. But I promptly forgot about it for, oh, a zillion years.

Then, while I was working as a marketing copywriter at a dotcom in the late nineties, I found myself in a cube of cubicles (”cube of cubicles” 5 syllables!).

In the middle of our cube we shared a whiteboard. No one ever used it, so I started writing a Haiku of the Day.

Mostly the haiku made fun of the brass. But they also made fun of work in general. Sometimes they made fun of individual people. I got laid off from that job.

Once I was laid off I kept up with my former co-workers by emailing out a Haiku of the Day to them. Then, as I got pregnant, got a new job, etc., the haiku became more about what was going on in my life.

Eventually, I stopped sending out the email and started my blog. By that time, the haiku were almost exclusively about my son, and the blog became more than just little poems. (Though the little poems are still a big part.)

Why do haiku and motherhood go so well together?

As a mom, I always want to record the things my kids do - I think every mom does. But there’s just no time.

I was terrible about keeping up with my oldest son’s baby book, and my daughter and youngest son don’t even have one. But they do have haiku. All of them.

A little 5-7-5 verse can be jotted down anywhere, on anything. I have sticky notes and scraps of paper and notebooks full of little haiku about the kids.

A lot of them (haiku, not kids) are just created on the spot while I’m blogging. After a while, you just sort of train yourself to think in 5-7-5, I guess. It’s a very organized way of writing for a very disorganized way of life.

Your haiku are really, really funny. Were you funny before motherhood, or did motherhood make you funnier?

Motherhood HAS to make you funnier, doesn’t it?

The things these kids say tickle me everyday. When he was 4, my oldest son once asked me - very accusingly - why I didn’t name him Power Pole.

My daughter - who is 2 - seems to have inherited my penchant for potty humor. “Where did you find that marble?” I’ll ask her. “From my butt!” she says. The scary thing is that I don’t know if she’s kidding or not.

When I was growing up, and through college and beyond, I was not the popular, shiny-haired girl. I was the triangle-haired, gigantic-glasses-wearing girl. I learned pretty quickly that if you make fun of yourself before other people can, it surprises them and they either leave you alone or find you silly and charming. Not to say I’m charming. I don’t know if poop haiku can really make someone charming.

You’ve got three kids, a 6 year-old, a 2 year-old and a baby. When do you find the time to write haiku?

Mostly, I ignore the kids.

No no no.

I just write when I can. For me, writing is kind of an affliction. If I’m not doing it, I feel terrible. It is a driving force, like eating and sleeping. I may have to leave the dirty dishes in the sink overnight, or forget I own an iron, but I will write. I will always write.

Haiku Mama was published in 2006 and you’re still writing mama haiku and publishing it on your blog. What keeps you writing haiku?

I keep having all these damn kids.

Again. I jest. Sort of.

Writing haiku has just become a way of thinking for me. It keeps my brain spry, it’s fast, and it can be really funny.

Plus, technology keeps offering me way to harass more and more people with my little poems.First with blogging, and now I’m testing out an experiment on Twitter.

I didn’t intend to write all my tweets in haiku. But now I’m trying to. It’s a great format for it. So anyone out there who wants to see if I can stick with it . . . follow me at @haikumama or

http://twitter.com/haikumama.

So far, it’s been easier to keep up with the haiku on my blog, but why not tweet, too? Any excuse, really, to avoid cleaning the kitchen.

haiku way of life

poop, snot and tantrums won’t stop

so I won’t either

Find Haiku Mama on Amazon:
Haiku Mama: (because 17 syllables is all you have time to read)

by Kelly

Just the other day, right here on Haiku By Two, I published a review of a book called Dog-Ku. It’s a collection of haiku written from a dog’s point of view.

Well, actually, it’s written from several dogs’ point of view. But there are two dog voices that outweigh all the others. Those voices belong to Zac, a black Lab-Rhodesian Ridgeback, and E.D., a German Shepherd-Lab mix.

Zac and E.D. call Steve D. Marsh their human being. Through him, they channeled their haiku from their doggy brains to English letters we can read.

I caught up with Mr. Marsh via email to ask him a few questions about what it’s like to live with such talented dogs.

Was it hard to get inside your dogs’ heads?

No, in fact, as I confess in the book’s introduction, they first got inside my mind.

I think it was a kind of ESP. Extra Species Perception.

Do your dogs always think in haiku?

No, in fact, my dogs don’t always think.

Once, Zac got so excited at the unexpected appearance of his sisters at the park that he bounded and dragged me face first through a 30-foot mud puddle.

I did plenty of thinking after that, but most of what I was thinking you can’t put on your web site!

In what ways in haiku particularly suitable for expressing a dog’s point of view?

Simple, honest, direct. Could a dog be anything else?

Haiku is short, to the point, often wise, funny, insightful. All dog.

Do you view your dogs differently now?

Not really. I think I must have been a dog in a previous life. There seems to be plenty of dogness left over.

Have you ever noticed that the percentage of bad dogs is a lot smaller than the percentage of bad people? Maybe I just hang around with the wrong kind of politicians, but that’s what I’ve seen.

Have your dogs written any new haiku lately?

Absolutely. Come on over to www.dog-ku.com and see the latest.

In fact, feel free to leave a haiku of your own for Zac and E.D. to enjoy.

Find Dog-Ku on Amazon:
Dog-ku: Very Clever Haikus Cleverly Written by Very Clever Dogs