Bruce England - Three Questions

Bruce England is our guest today for a round of Haiku - Three Questions. He writes:

I live in Santa Clara and work as a Librarian in San Jose, California. My embrace of (and commitment to) haiku has been a long, drawn-out affair. I became aware of haiku in 1962 through one of those Peter Pauper books. I started writing haiku seriously in 1984. I published a chapbook, Shorelines, with my friend Tony Mariano in 1998. My publishing career otherwise remained at a low-level until 2008. Other interests include haiku theory and haiku practice. In the last few years I also began writing and publishing tanka. My fever for these forms might cool within the next sixteen years.

---

1) Why do you write haiku?

A haiku is like a short diary entry. Accumulate hundreds and possibly thousands over the years, and you have your life and your world, as lived and imagined, in telegram form.

There is a certain satisfying work and surprise in writing haiku. You can wrestle an initial raw haiku into a worthy form. Sometimes, you can literally yank a haiku out of your head and onto a piece of paper through your hand.

On paper
a startled haiku
still wet

My goal is to write haiku that covers the ground around and between realism and magical realism. I want to remain somewhere in the public realm, even if minimally. I don’t want to veer off into the too, too private abyss of surrealism and abstract symbolism. Beyond a certain point, words and meanings become blank, white stones.

My stones
and your stones don’t speak
to each other

One extreme position tends to lead to its extreme opposite position. A certain amount of novelty and risk over time is always wanted and needed. Some English haiku writers are heading off into a long infatuation with gendai haiku. They are following after the Japanese again, and the Japanese have probably moved on elsewhere. So what. There's a momentum to this desire to do something different, so it sort of has to happen. But be prepared; it will get weird.

2) What other poetic forms do you enjoy?

I can best answer this by naming some poets and books I enjoy: Juan Ramón Jiménez; Theodore Roethke; Technicians of the Sacred; Eskimo Poems from Canada and Greenland; News of the Universe; Rumi; Han-Shan; and various translations of the Tao Te Ching. Also, there are individual Zen and non-Zen poems in books and anthologies too numerous to mention.

3) Of the many wonderful haiku you’ve written, what do you consider to be your top three?

As I walk
stones leap into butterflies
land back into stones

Frogpond, 33.1, Winter 2010



How quietly
the roses wither –
no screaming here

Mu, Online Issue 1, February 2011




Standing naked
in a blizzard and thankful
for my cup of tea

Haiku Now!, 2011 Noteworthy Mention in Innovative Category

---

If you are enjoying this series and have not contributed, please consider sharing your response - whether it be for haibun, haiku or tanka - to the three little questions that Bruce answered. You must be a published poet to participate.