In honor of National Poetry Month

Though the first edition of The Haiku Year was published in 1998, I didn’t know about it until the second edition came out in April 2004— twenty years ago this month. Created by writer, musician, etc. Tom Gilroy, who explains its roots in his foreword, The Haiku Year combined the concept of daily writing practice with the desire of some friends to stay in touch. The book’s page on Gilroy’s website explains:

This project was never intended to be a book. It started amidst an REM/Grant Lee Buffalo tour as a year-long creative practice between a group of friends. We all committed to snail-mailing each other one haiku a week for a year, no matter where we were. 

Though I didn’t know Gilroy’s name before coming across this book, other contributors’ names I did. As an ’80s / ’90s kid, I knew Michael Stipe and Grant Lee Phillips through their music. And then there’s Steve Earle, who wrote an introduction; his Transcendental Blues had fallen into my hands a few years before the book did. Of course, the publisher Soft Skull Press was one I had known about via Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth. This eclectic array would have been reason enough to pay attention . . . 

Yet, by the time I encountered The Haiku Year, I had been writing these compact little poems for years.  The form was a throwback to our elementary school days: five, seven, five, and all about Nature. (Steve Earle actually mentions that in his introduction.) It also seemed that the form lived on in random manifestations, like when some teenage friend would dash one off out of the blue. In college in the ’90s, when I started reading the Beat writers – both Earle and Gilroy mention them, too – I feel like some vague predilection took root and became actual practice. Later, in 2003, when I started teaching creative writing, I quickly added a daily haiku to our classwork. (That tradition held for years, and we published some of the better ones on a homemade website called hy-coo.com.) So, by the time that second edition came out in April 2004, me and haiku had been traveling companions for some time—so much so that my wife had a little table at my thirtieth birthday, later in 2004, where people could write them for me for a change!

By now, in 2024, I’ve probably been scribbling down haiku for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years, and having this little volume has played a role in how I’ve regarded what is now a longtime practice. I still listen to these musicians, and I still pull out my copy of the book and thumb through it sometimes. Among the poems, there are pages with seemingly random images interspersed, while the contributors’ names are relegated to an index in the back. My favorite, which I can’t attribute using the index, is still: “you didn’t know / you liked it / ’til I did it.” There are some whose sentiment transcends the decades, like “While you talk / about yourself / I’ll daydream.” Then again, one of the more dated ones reads, “Midwesterners / intimidated by / ten variations of coffee.” Overall, they’re a mixed bag, but are well worth a Throwback Thursday mention, here on this twentieth anniversary.

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