by Kelly

I was so excited when I found this book. It’s called The Haiku Year, and according to the back-cover synopsis, it was written by seven friends who promised to write a haiku a day for an entire year and then mail them to each other.

It was 1996 when they made this promise, which was well before the popular dawn of blogs and social media, hence their promise to mail their haiku back and forth as opposed to posting them online.

The concept, though, sounded awfully familiar as it basically matches that of this site, Haiku By Two. Alison and I also made a year-long commitment to each other, the art of haiku and this web site.

However, once I got my hands on a copy of The Haiku Year, I quickly realized that the book and our site differed greatly.

When Alison and I set about planning this site, we consciously chose, even though our little poems would be posted online for the world to see, to write about our personal lives. We wanted to try and tell the story of our individual lives through our haiku. Part of our impetus in starting this site was to keep in touch with each other. Therefore, to keep our friendship blooming, we would need to write from a personal point of view.

The seven friends who made The Haiku Year promise, also committed to write daily haiku about their personal lives. Yet reading the book, I had a very hard time imagining the lives of any one of these friends.

Their haiku are not marked in any way. Four haiku appear on each page and no names are attached.

Many of the haiku are poignant. Several are quite funny. But as I turned page after page after page, I started to get a little bored. I found myself putting the book down and then taking longer and longer and longer before picking it up again. I just wasn’t that into it.

In the end, I think my problem with this book can be traced back to my expectations. I went into The Haiku Year expecting some sort of story line because it was written by seven “friends.” I thought I was going to get the story of a friendship.

But that’s not what this book is. The Haiku Year is not a story. It’s a collection of haiku, an anthology of sorts, and the fact that all these haiku ended up in the same book or placed in the order they are placed doesn’t have much at all to do with their individual meanings. Taken together, these haiku don’t add up to some sort of larger picture. Instead, they are each their very own stand out image.

Knowing that, I was able to go back to The Haiku Year, flip through its pages, and appreciate the haiku found there.

And obviously, other readers have also found value in these haiku. It was named a popular paperback for young adults in 2001 and in 2004, an updated second edition was published.

And now that it is 2009, The Haiku Year has gone online. Its web site invites readers to take The Haiku Year plunge and even has a page where they can post their daily musings.