Writing Haiku

Abstract

As an undergraduate student at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, before I discovered haiku, I was immersed in contemporary poetry Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath and enjoyed studying the modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. However, as a Latin minor, I was also very interested in translating epigrams and reading fragments of Greek lyric poetry. My honours thesis was on Western traditions of the short poem comparing the ability of Greek lyric poetry to convey emotional intensity with the epigram, which more typically conveys witty satire. I became aware of the primary goals of the Western short poem to bring readers to tears or laughter. In my final semester at Ball State I won the student writing award and immediately took my prize money to the bookstore where I bought collections of short poetry, including two anthologies of haiku: The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel, and Modern Japanese Haiku translated and edited by Makoto Ueda. You could say that my understanding of haiku initially "came from" these two books purchased in 1976.