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Did you yourself find a challenge in writing every day? How did this differ from your usual writing routine?
I've been trying to write a haiku daily for many years. I used to make myself catch up if I missed a few days, but stopped doing that because sometimes you have to live your life before you can write about it. The same is true for NaHaiWriMo, and I hope no one felt guilty if they missed a day. In my year-long writing habit, if I miss a few days, I usually catch up eventually, by accident if not design! So the daily habit of NaHaiWriMo was how I usually write haiku anyway, although I did try to give it special focus during February. What was different was providing the prompts and writing in response to many of them. I tried to keep nearly all of them objective, to promote the objective focus where I think the best haiku always start (subjective elements can be wonderful, especially in the hands of a skilled haiku poet, but usually only if at least some part of the poem is grounded in an objective image). Yes, some days it was a challenge to write, but that's always been true, even if you do have a daily haiku habit. I also wrote a lot of my neon buddha poems during the month, too. They're not necessarily haiku, but they were a vital part of my haiku habit during February.
What inspired you to start doing themes/prompts?
I originally had no intention of offering prompts at all, but on the very first day someone suggested that I do so, and so I thought, why not. I wish I could remember who suggested this, or possibly look it up on the page's history, but displaying all the past postings is very time consuming, especially when there were so many. My first prompt was "hands."
I believe all haiku are written from memory (even if that memory is very recent, like a few second ago) — or, as Wordsworth defined poetry, "powerful emotion recollected in tranquility." I believe a good prompt can trigger a memory, and one can write a strong haiku as a result (it's not the recency of a memory that matters, but its vibrancy). It's also in the Japanese tradition to write haiku for a kukai in response to prompts (usually assigned season words), and also important to the renga and renku tradition in Japan to write spontaneously and responsively to previous verses. These are skills that I think all haiku poets can benefit from if they develop them, and I believe this skill extends to writing spontaneously in response to personal experience. You can kill the freshness of the inspiration if you rework the poem too much, or get too far (emotionally, not temporally) from the poem's initial inspiration (or "triggering town," as Richard Hugo called it), but I wanted the prompts to get people going. So I hoped the prompts would act as a catalyst for people, to supplement their own haiku habit for each day. I always considered each prompt to be optional. Poets could respond if they felt inspired, but no problem if they didn't. It turns out that many people did follow the prompts, and expressed appreciation for them. A happy accident — certainly nothing I had planned!
What do you hope people got out of this experience?
One especially rewarding outcome of the NaHaiWriMo experience, and the community it created, was that people didn't want it to stop when February ended. I asked Alan Summers if he would be willing to offer prompts through the month of March, and I was pleased when he agreed to take on that task, and I'd like to recruit new prompters for future months, too, as long as interest continues. According to the Facebook statistics, participation dropped off a little bit in March, but only a little. A surprising result, though, has been that the number of Likes for the site steadily increased, even in March, despite the fact that a few people didn't continue their active participation. The prompts continue to be helpful, I think, in engaging the community that developed. I tried to extend this community by encouraging people to join the Haiku Society of America or other organizations, check out the discussion forum at the Haiku Foundation site, enter contests, subscribe to journals, and more. I hope some people have taken advantage of these opportunities to become more deeply involved. Haiku is, after all, a wonderful community.
I can tell you one thing I particularly enjoyed, and that was connecting with dozens of new haiku writers around the world. For example, I had a nice email exchange with Annie Juhl, a haiku poet in Denmark who I discovered was a fan of kayaking. Although relatively new to haiku, she obviously had a knack for it, so it was pleasing to see her post her poems (even though English, I believe, is not her native language). She said she saw that a friend had Liked the NaHaiWriMo page, checked it out herself, and got hooked. I'm glad to have made a number of new Facebook friends as a result of NaHaiWriMo, and I'm sure I'm not alone in gaining that wonderful benefit. What's more, it's a community that stretches worldwide, even while most poems posted were in English (even though sometimes not the poet's first language).
Many people commented on the page about the benefits they got out of NaHaiWriMo. I could quote dozens of different people, but I'll select one comment from Daphne Purpus, who lives on Vashon Island, Washington (I hope she might get involved in the Haiku Northwest group, since we live not too far from each other — although this isn't why I'm quoting her). On March 9, in a bit of a discussion about how people heard about NaHaiWriMo, Daphne wrote this (I've slightly edited this):
"I've just started writing haiku (mid-January) and as part of that endeavor I googled haiku, found the main [NaHaiWriMo website] with great articles about haiku and learned about the February challenge (on 1/31 actually!), and so I thought what the heck. I'm enjoying this, I'm 65 yrs. old, never done anything like this before, working at building community, so why not be a bit brave and give it a try. Well, after my first post, I was hooked!
What do I like about the site? That's easy. I like the open welcoming spirit that I find here. I love the diversity on every level. I am learning so much from reading all the great haiku and it is exciting to me to see what others do with the same prompt. I make sure I post my own [haiku] first, but then as I look through what others made of the same prompt I am amazed by the richness of the form itself, and I also am getting (I hope) a better feel for the genre. And of course, there are also the nonprompt-generated haiku that I love as well."
These comments warm me! And many other poets expressed similar thoughts, whether new to haiku or seasoned old hands. I never really imagined what others might get out of NaHaiWriMo, except perhaps to learn more about haiku and to gain the haiku habit, but the greatest benefit that surprised me was the community that evolved. It's a particular pleasure, too, to see that it could surely survive and thrive without me!
One other comment I would make is that NaHaiWriMo has demonstrated to me the expressive power of social media. The worldwide connections it has fostered have been remarkable to me, and I'm very grateful for it. I believe various haiku organizations around the world could do more with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter, because these and other social media outlets provide a tremendous way to connect and inspire people. They are great ways to attract a younger audience, and yet they are vital among older haiku poets too. NaHaiWriMo never came close to the viral popularity of some videos on YouTube (and I doubt it ever would), but it still demonstrates how social media can very quickly and powerfully build a superb community — even if by accident (as with NaHaiWriMo).
Whatever happened to make NaHaiWriMo work, I hope that happy accident happened because of a useful core idea. On February 27, I posted the following: "Ki no Tsurayuki's preface of the first imperial waka anthology of 905, the Kokinshu, began by proclaiming that 'Japanese poetry takes as its seed the human heart.' In all our writing, especially in response to the prompts, I hope we can remember to write from the heart (kokoro, in Japanese)." My prompt for the very last day of NaHaiWriMo was to write something from the heart, as deeply as possible. That, really, is the soul of haiku — and, I hope, the soul of NaHaiWriMo.
Any changes you anticipate for next year's NaHaiWriMo? (Assuming there will be another NaHaiWriMo.)
I certainly hope NaHaiWriMo will continue again next February. I would be thrilled if that were the case. I hope it might attract a much greater number of participants, too. It's not the numbers that really matter to me, though, but that people might catch the haiku bug, and get into the haiku habit. I hope haiku could enrich their lives as much as it has mine. That enrichment comes not only from writing and reading the poems themselves, but from sharing them and reveling in the community. Haiku poets come from all walks of life, and it's incredible to meet so many talented and diverse poets through a community like this. So I hope that NaHaiWriMo might grow next February (and in the months of engagement between now and then). But other than that, I hope nothing changes, because the way it is right now is very pleasing indeed. I hope others feel the same way, too.
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haijinx IV:1 (March 2011)
Copyright © 2001-2011 Mark Brooks (haijinx). All rights reserved.
The copyrights of individual poems, articles, translations, and images belong to their individual authors. The editors do not necessarily endorse the opinions of authors, nor do they assume responsibility for factual errors, infringements of copyrights, or omissions in acknowledgements.
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