Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

crete for readers to grasp. Those three lines don’t make a haiku
(Francine put it more tactfully). When the penny dropped, I
felt as if until then I had been viewing haiku through a blurry
glass door. Suddenly the glass disappeared and I was through
the open doorway. Always generous, Francine sent me a list of
journals, including the submission guidelines for each. A couple
of months later, I received my very first haiku acceptance.
while I sit musing
a small spider on this page
hurries over words
It wasn’t long before I gratefully embraced concision with a
slight lean toward minimalism; I had not quite, however, given
up talking to animals.
butterfly, Madame Spider—
you can’t fool me I have removed
I knew you when the damn broomstraw
Yet a poem with prescribed, carefully counted syllables and
plenty of capital letters and punctuation became my first contest
success, winning first place in the 1998 Alabama Sakura
Haiku Competition.
A full moonlight kiss,
The shape of a gliding owl
Moves through our shadow.
I soon knew that the only kind of haiku I wanted to write were
those grounded in reality, coming from my personal experiences.
For me, there’s no point in writing made-up haiku.
When I want to let my imagination soar, I turn to other genres.
That same year a fellow poet culled a list of what he considered
my best poems and urged me to submit them to Modern
Haiku. I did, and dear Robert Spiess accepted six for the
summer issue. That was the first journal I ever held in my
hands that had my name and my haiku in it. Of those six,
these two with coincidental “lappings” remain my favorites.
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