Contributor Interviews

Meet Lew Watts

12/28/2022

A very warm welcome from the whiptail team. Tell us a little about yourself - your family, your hobbies, your dreams, or anything else you want the readers to know about you, apart from being a haiku poet.

First, many thanks for inviting me—it’s an honor. I was born and bred in Wales, but now live with my wife, Roxanne, in Chicago. How I got there is a long story that includes living in several countries before moving to the US in 2002. I retired early in 2010, and since then I’ve been living my own kind of dream—writing, sitting on boards that I like, supporting various non-profits. Passions? Apart from family (we have two sons and three grandchildren), I would say fly fishing (anytime, anywhere), rugby, and gin martinis.

What is something that people don't know about your poetry or poetry practice, process, or inspiration that you'd like to share?

In Wales, school days start with Assembly in which a hymn is sung and a poem is read. That’s where I first heard Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” at seven years of age, and that is where my love of poetry started. I have a PhD in geology and worked for many years in the oil & gas industry, eventually as an executive. Now, oil & gas isn’t exactly known for its poets (nor its Democrats), yet I wrote and published poetry throughout. This was long-form poetry, both metered and free verse, and since it was published in hard-copy journals (mainly in Europe), none of my peers or staff ever saw it—and I never told them. When my first collection came out in 2011, I was forced to “come out” as a poet. My haibun “Unmasked,” first published in Frogpond last year, describes the event.

What made you decide to try out haiku and/or tanka in one line versus their more popular enjambed formats? How does it feel different to you?

I rarely try to write one-line haiku—they just happen sometimes. But their frequency has increased in the last years through a strange quirk. I am currently working with the last copy of a beloved notebook (it is now out of print) and so, to save space, I started writing my drafts in one-line form, initially showing the line breaks as hashes. I always let my drafts sit awhile before either dumping them or transposing to a (draft) Word file, which is where I decide on structure. It’s amazing to me how frequently the one-line form survives, though it almost always needs pruning from my originally intended three-line version. The only time I try to write one-liners is if I’m seeking to complete a sequence, such as “Emergence” in whiptail 4. It’s then a matter of “sitting” with the existing haiku until one or more poems surface, hopefully, with similar balance and feel.

Many poets still struggle with the dilemma of whether a particular poem will work better as a one-line poem than the enjambed form and vice-versa. What is the deciding factor in your practice?

I’m going to generalize here (though I can already think of exceptions!). To my ear, a haiku that includes a strong cut, across which two images are juxtaposed, seems to work better with more than one line—usually, the cut can then occur at the end of one of the lines. But if the cut is softer (or even absent) so that the contrast occurs through a form of disjunction, then I usually lean toward trying a one-line version first. To me, great one-line haiku seem to shimmer. Unlike the “aha” moment of three-liners with a cut, their effect is more subtle—a quizzical, eye-opening shift that emerges as the disjunction unfolds. That is what I would like to achieve.

It would be a great help to our readers if you could walk us through your writing process from the conception to the eventual birth of a one-line poem. You are most welcome to take a one-line poem or two of yours to discuss, regarding how it came to be and/or process.

Do you have any tips for aspiring poets of one-line forms?

I rarely write haiku “in the moment” of an experience. Instead, an experience often triggers the memory of a moment, which I then write. This is what happened with this one-liner that was first published in Wales Haiku Journal, and was shortlisted for a Touchstone Award in 2021:

conger eel thrashing in the creel this hunger

This is actually a pandemic haiku, and my “experience” was a sense of irrational anger at being held captive at home. The “moment” was from my youth when I caught a conger eel and decided to keep it to eat. Cycling home, I could literally feel this eel thrashing away in the creel, and it continued like that for several hours. The haiku appeared almost fully formed, and I remember staring at it for a long time because something bothered me—particularly that I had ended it with “with anger.” This implied that the anger was that of the eel, whereas in truth it was I who was feeling angry. I wanted to convey/imply this without personalizing, and hopefully also creating a kind of disjunction. And so, I changed the last words to “this anger”—that way, there was ambiguity over who, precisely, was angry. But that’s when I noticed the internal rhyme of “eel” and “creel” (yes, I can be a bit slow sometimes . . .). The next morning, I got up and changed the last word to “hunger”—my hunger for the eel, the hunger for escape, the hunger for violence—which then provided a capping rhyme with the first word, “conger.” By book-ending the single line with an off-rhyme, the haiku is then able to pivot around the violent word “thrashing” that, I hope, sets up the disjunction of the final phrase.

As for advice, read, read, read! Oh, and maybe get a beloved, almost full, notebook.

Lew Watts is the haibun co-editor of Frogpond. His haibun collection Tick-Tock (Snapshot Press, 2019) received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards, and a further Snapshot Press book of haiku and haibun is forthcoming. His other publications include the novel Marcel Malone and the poetry collection Lessons for Tangueros. He lives in Chicago.

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Meet Pippa Phillips

12/28/2022

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A very warm welcome from the whiptail team. Tell us a little about yourself - your family, your hobbies, your dreams, or anything else you want readers to know about you, apart from being a haiku poet.

I grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, so I have always had an affinity for the ocean, particularly in the winter. The beach is at its most beautiful when it’s covered with snow. My friends and I spent many winter nights crowded around a beach bonfire and daring each other to swim.

After my nuclear family ended with the passing of my mother when I was 22, I spent my twenties traveling and teaching in Asia. I returned Stateside to study philosophy, but unfortunately, my story was like so many of the women-in-philosophy horror stories that I read as I prepared to re-enter academia. The sexism, racism, and elitism endemic to the field did not sit well with me, and I believe the United States university system has become a mechanism of class disenfranchisement. I decided to leave the field.

My departure coincided with the pandemic, so I turned all the energy I had devoted to philosophy to learning about Japanese micropoetry. Although I’d always loved Japanese literature, I’d never been particularly interested in haiku. I preferred tanka poets like Akiko Yosano and Machi Tawara, or free verse poets like Chuuya Nakahara. It wasn’t until I saw the poetry that Orrin Prejean was writing, that I understood what was possible in English language haiku. Bill Waters was my first mentor in this period, and did so much to point me to the right sources and haiku journals of note.

Are you active on social media? How do you think social media affects the writing process?

Social media is what brought haiku to my attention and most of my haiku network comes from social media. Annette Chaney, a Twitter friend, brought Seabeck to my attention, and it was the first conference I attended. I work closely with Lafcadio, who began her haiku journey around the same time I did. I depend on Alex Fyffe to keep me abreast of the amazing work the current generation of Japanese poets are putting out there. My mentors—Bill Waters and John McManus—are both people I met through social media. Jonathan Roman, with whom I often collaborate, played a huge role in helping me understand the lay of the land and the progress in my craft. I use Twitter frequently for workshopping purposes as well as for prompts to inspire me, and I have a separate account for haiku-specific prompts. I use IG for my art and to keep track of a scrapbook I’m making for my published poetry. Very recently, I’ve turned to TikTok to make poem videos and to recommend haiku chapbooks. For the most part, poetry-centric social media is not the toxic place many think of when they bemoan the state of social media.

What made you decide to try out haiku and/or tanka in one line versus their more popular enjambed formats? How does it feel different to you?

I probably started to write monoku before I really came to my understanding of it—I tend to learn by doing. At first, I would see if the poem I was composing worked as a one-liner, and it almost never did, since I was used to writing in the three-line structure. Alan Summer’s “Travelling the Single Line of Haiku” was very helpful, and eventually, I developed a feel for it—a monoku has a very different feel in my head, a sort of breathless breath. It’s also nice to identify a poem as a monoku or monostitch and avoid the whole 5-7-5 debate. I think these days I write more monoku than haiku. That said, I still have much to learn and struggle with—single-line tanka remains elusive to me.

Many poets still struggle with the dilemma of whether a particular poem will work better as a one-line poem than the enjambed form and vice-versa. What is the deciding factor in your practice?

Lineation tends to create a preferred parsing for the reader. This allows the poet to employ and draw attention to pivot lines (or lines which equally complement the first and last line), or to create or underscore a surprising last line. It is also a form in which the juxtaposition of two elements is visually and audibly clear. When I first began to write haiku, I studied a few hundred poems taken from various journals of standing in order to study their syntactic structure. Most three-line poems I studied had the following two structures:

phrase--
nominal

or

nominal--
phrase

Although I still write in this structure, I began looking for different syntactic forms, especially in avoiding nominals and incorporating more verbs (I realize this goes against the grain of traditional English language haiku aesthetics). I noticed that monoku tends to have a more versatile syntactic structure. Many monoku lack a clear grammatical disjunction, which allows for a subtler exercise and understanding of juxtaposition. It is possible for a monoku to be an entire phrase, or even a sentence. A monoku better allows multiple parsings to stand on a par, or to let a poem percolate in its ambiguity. For instance, in the following poem, it seems to me that any attempt to lineate would be awkward or heavy-handed, as I break the reader’s expectation not in the last line, but at two separate junctures in the poem:

dawn breaking a window into song

whiptail issue 1, November 2021

It would be a great help to our readers if you could walk us through your writing process from the conception to the eventual birth of a one-line poem.

I think any haikuist will tell you that sometimes a poem just comes to you in its full form, and you just know it’s right and it needs no editing. However, I do have a few tricks.

First, I always carry a notebook on me in order to jot down phrases or words that stick with me. I transfer these to index cards. When I am in the mood to write, I’ll take out my box of cards and spread them out. Sometimes seeing two or three of the cards together creates a poem. Sometimes I’ll take them out if I’m trying to write in response to a prompt. I also use tarot cards a lot if I’m stumped. I’ll pick out 1-3 cards or do a Celtic Cross reading to see if it knocks anything loose.

I also use English language corpuses, like the Corpus of Colloquial American English. You can input words and generate lists of sentences in which a word or phrase is used—this helps me to avoid the more common or cliched ways of using words or phrases, but it can also inspire me. Another tool I use specifically for monoku is a phrasal verb dictionary. A phrasal verb is a verb and preposition combination which creates a distinct meaning—such as “break into” in my monoku above. Because the verb component of a phrasal verb nearly always has a different meaning than the phrasal verb itself, you have an immediate ambiguity to play with. For instance, in my “dawn” poem, I had three separate meanings to play with, only one of which came from the phrasal verb. Notably, “break into” itself is ambiguous: you can break into a run, into song, or into a building.

All that aside, the most important thing is that you let your poem tell you what it wants to be. People get married to an idea of what they want their poem to be and have a hard time letting it leave the nest. They want to fit in too much, or they’re enamored of some word or phrase, or they want their reader to interpret the poem in a specific way. Often, you have to let go of what’s precious to produce something precious.

Pippa Phillips (she/ her) is a peripatetic poet and artist who is working on her second novel. Having grown up on the ocean, she lives too far from it now. She is interested in the entanglement of the aesthetic and the ethical. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in numerous journals, and she currently reviews books for Frogpond.

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