Meet Deborah A. Bennett

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.

In a family of artists, I took for granted that I would grow up to make art. Music, dance, drama, art, and literature were a part of our everyday lives.


How do you think social media affects the writing process? 

Social media can be inspirational. Poems also come from walks in the woods, days of reading by a window, or listening to jazz and classical music. 


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 was inspired to write free-verse haiku by reading the poems of Santoka Taneda. His precise, spare, and elegant writing sounded so close to the silence I wanted in my own writing. 


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? 

Though I don't always accomplish it, I think all my poems want to be one-line. Nine to eleven syllables sound very right to my ear.


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

My poems begin with a morning walk, they begin with a silence I take to my journal, where I fill the page, then try to edit away everything that is not the poem - nine to eleven syllables closer to that silence I found walking through a meadow at dawn.

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Deborah A. Bennett is an English-language haiku poet whose poems have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies in the US and abroad. ​