I'll be writing about some good new books I've been checking out over the next few weeks. Let's get started:

A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg

Sleeping under the trees on Yoshino mountain
The spring breeze wearing Cherry blossom petals.

---

the Spring wind
scattering blossoms
I saw it in a dream
but when I awoke the sound
was still rustling in my breast

-- Saigyo

"I feel that I am equal to each grass blade and pebble and believe it is possible to be happy though human and grow up. Paul Reps

Paul Reps was born in Cedar City, Iowa on September 15, 1895. A man that always felt there were too many words used to describe anything he was a master of minimalist haiku, Zen Buddhism, and swift sumi-e brush painting. Reps can truly be called the father of Buddhism and haiku in America. He never was caught up in tradition, breaking all that are now considered the haiku rules and, although he respected his teachers, he forged new paths. Always, in his wide travels, Paul was accompanied by his humor, wit and independent spirit. As Paul would say, If not fun, leave undone.

I thought this list might help others improve their craft. These are the essential elements of haiku as advocated by The Heron's Nest (from editor Ferris Gilli):

Concrete imagery
Focus
Conciseness (clarity, brevity)
Effective juxtaposition
Resonance
Immediacy
Natural syntax
Common language
Balance of humanity and nature
Sense of mood
Sense of season; kigo
A clear caesura between the two parts of the haiku
(A poem that consists of only a single, complete sentence usually fails as haiku.)

Haiku. What is it about this small poem that makes people all over the world want to read and write them? Nick Virgilio, one of America's first major haiku poets, once said in an interview that he wrote haiku "to get in touch with the real." And the Haiku Society of America has called haiku a "poem in which Nature is linked to human nature." We all want to know what is real and to feel at one with the natural world. Haiku helps us to experience the everyday things around us vividly and directly, so we see them as they really are, as bright and fresh as they were when we first saw them as children. Haiku is basically about living with intense awareness, having an openness to the existence around us. A kind of openness that involves seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

Not so long ago, in 1991, when the first Haiku North America conference was being held at Las Positas College outside of San Francisco, another major figure of American haiku, J. W. Hackett, and his wife Pat, invited four of the attending poets to their garden home on a hill in the Santa Cruz mountains. Christopher Herold, one of those poets, wrote a haiku, included in this anthology, about that experience:

returning quail
call to us from the moment
of which he speaks

1644
Born in Ueno, 30 miles southeast of Kyoto

1656
Enters into the service a local feudal lord; begins composing haikai

1666
Left the feudal family and disappeared for five years, taking on the name Sobo

1667-71
His worked appeared in numerous anthologies; many believe he was in Kyoto studying poetry and Zen

1672
Published "The Seashell Game", which was the record of a haiku contest he supervised

1675
Began taking on students

1676

The image of the traveling monk-poet, going from village to village and spending endless hours alone in the mountains composing poetry, has been common in the East for hundreds of years. This image was later popularized in the West by such writers as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth. The Japanese poet Saigyo was the embodiment of that image.

Of the three master haiku poets, Issa is perhaps the most beloved. He has been characterized as an ancient Whitman or Neruda or Burns. His poetry can be lively and humorous, pious and honest, or sarcastic and full of rage. He wrote thousands of poems in his life, and many on subjects such as ticks, fleas, frogs and lice.

Following Basho, the next master haiku poet of ancient Japan was Yosa Buson. Buson, however, was much more than a master haiku poet; he also was a distinguished painter. And in his haiku, this comes across through a visual intensity and a love for color.

A tethered horse,
snow
in both stirrups

Field of bright mustard
the moon in the east,
the sun in the west