A Prose Craft Essay by Phil Wetjen
HAIKU PRACTICE FOR PROSE WRITERS
A few months back, I decided to create a haiku journal. I’m a prose writer, so I did it not so much because I wanted to write great haiku poems themselves (though one can always hope), but to enhance my abilities in word selection.
About three years ago, I retired after a long career in IT and embarked upon a writing campaign. Since then, there have been a few modest successes—essays published here and there, plus two short stories, and a few self-published books. I was having fun.
But then this past winter, with all those Olympians chanting faster, higher, stronger, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to tune my own writing skills.
But why haiku?
My first exposure to haiku was late spring of my senior year in high school. Just days from graduation, a teacher sent our class outside to soak up inspiration and write a haiku or two. I wish I still had a copy of what I wrote, although I’m certain it was God-awful. Even then I knew I was a prose guy. And if I hadn’t been before, wrestling with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” earlier that year confirmed my direction. Poetry was destined to be my personal albatross.
However, as I began to immerse myself in haiku earlier this year, it did occur to me that I was at least qualified to read haiku, even if I wasn’t up to writing one.
My first novel was an American-on-the-road story. Prior to writing, I reread stories that tell the tale of travelers, especially those that involve pairs of road warriors. I reopened Don Quixote, On the Road, and Le Grand Meaulnes, along with Huckleberry Finn. And based on my years teaching English in Japan back in the 1990s, I even ventured as far afield as The Narrow Road to a Far Province, Matsuo Basho’s haiku chronicle of traveling through northern Japan in 1689.
Drafting my manuscript, I decided to present haiku from Matsuo Basho’s classic at the end of each chapter, hoping the selected three lines would echo the imagery in the preceding chapter. Only my reading public can assess if I was successful (and I want to personally express gratitude to all nine of them right now!).
Perhaps, having been exposed to beautifully written haiku, I by then believed I could at least recognize whether any of my own haiku efforts were worthy or not. I decided to take the plunge. And quickly realized that the shorter the format, the more difficult the writing process, bringing to mind the statement attributed to Mark Twain: “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
After a few weeks of effort, I began to enjoy the haiku process. The challenge of fitting meaningful words and phrases into the required 5-7-5 syllable pattern was tricky, but not insurmountable. On a few occasions a rather serendipitous search for synonyms. On most forays, I would have what I deemed acceptable composition in two lines, but suitable words and phrasing for the third line eluded me. I would then enter what I had in the journal—and sometimes captured the sought-for expression on a subsequent day, as I was launching into a new poem.
My quest for haiku became a daily process, initiated on my afternoon walk around the neighborhood. Yes, the inspiration I was ordered to find back in high school was indeed out there; it just took me a few decades to find it. I live in a suburban area that was, until recently, farmland, so there is plenty of nature to observe. If you want haiku with deer, crows, cardinals and bluejays among abandoned orchards, I’ve got a few for you. My haiku efforts usually take place in the half hour immediately after the walk; the rest of the workday is devoted to prose work—either writing or research.
Along the way, although I continued to believe haiku might help in my efforts in word selection, I soon discovered it’s not the ideal medium for expressing dialogue:
Encountering my
Neighbor each day on my walk
Brief nods in the cold
And despite making haiku a part of my daily routine, it appears it never did lessen my irreverence for poetry:
Shakespeare is made of
Iambic pentameter
By kilometer…
For better or worse, I now have seventy-seven haiku completed—the product of at least seventy-seven days of facing the elements. And, as in writing, some of the daily walks were more daunting than others. But now I maintain a haiku journal on my website, posting my attempts and crossing my fingers. When I tell people about my writing and the website and the haiku journal, I hurry to add, “But for God’s sake don’t read them!” Apparently, I want the sophisticated image of being a haiku writer without anyone reading them and possibly judging their quality.
So, is the haiku journal exercise helping my prose writing? Yes. While I thought my word selection in prose was good pre-haiku writing, the self-enforced discipline of choosing the best word, line after economically proscribed line, on a regular basis, does seem to immerse me deeper in the rhythm of writing.
The benefits from my haiku writing extend beyond word selection. The work of many prose writers I admire can only be described as lyrical. My own objective when writing is to weave imagery and fluidity into a piece of prose. In essence, to convert the rhythm and images that a good haiku contains into an evocative prose passage.
In my third novel, I composed a paragraph that deliberately invokes the feeling of haiku. The paragraph was a pivotal interlude in the story, and I wanted to portray the scene’s imagery, in concert with the narrator’s emotions:
“As the fall season deepened, the days began chilly and misty, and by late morning erupted into almost achingly bright sunshine and blue skies. The tree-lined streets of the city turned into corridors of yellow-leafed branches over the busy roadways. Autumn was Emmett’s favorite season, and he found his longing for Doreen’s affections intensifying with the passing days.”
The setting for this scene is Zhengzhou, China, which I’d visited several years before, but in my mind, the ambiance came from my strolls along the bike trails of the Philadelphia suburbs. Later on in the story, Emmett falls into a dream. Here was another scene in which the imagery was as important as the narrator’s thoughts. I wanted the setting to emerge as another character in the story:
“The path was now shifting to the left in a gentle curve just as a small stream appeared on their right. He looked down into the water, and could see flat, polished stones beneath the surface. The gurgle of the water passing over them was just audible above the sound of their footsteps.”
For me, both passages reflect both the kind of feelings I encounter on my haiku pre-writing walks, as well as the rhythm and imagery I strive for when composing a haiku. Although they far exceed haiku in number of syllables, both scenes are described in three sentences, each portraying a phase of the imagery. Haiku composition forces a writer to think in terms of three clauses; those structural requirements have filtered into my prose.
I continue to maintain my haiku journal, although perhaps with a greater emphasis on its journal aspect. Still, I adhere to the haiku form. As I read through poems composed over the last months, I find they are a series of snapshots in time, reflecting the season, the day’s weather, and that moment’s outlook. My daily haiku effort centers me and gives me a change of focus from whatever writing or research I’m currently immersed in. As I emerge from the haiku moment, I’m invariably refreshed and open to paths that had not occurred to me before.
Beyond word selection and imagery, perhaps the greatest factor in my assessment of the impact of haiku in my prose writing is that my journey has reminded me that am a writer all day, not only when I settle into my keyboard or pen. My haiku efforts enhance my awareness and appreciation of the natural world that truly belongs in my writing.
Phil Wetjen’s fiction has appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review. His non-fiction work has been published in the North Meridian Review, Critical Asian Studies and Beatdom. He studied economics at Binghamton University.
