Meet m. shane pruett

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.

I live in Oregon with my lovely partner, 3 girls (her 2 and my 1), a stinky, leaky zombie chihuahua (truly she shouldn’t still be upright), and 2 two cats, one enormous and one minuscule. I am a biologist by training but now manage data on the abuse of vulnerable populations (young, old, developmentally disabled) for the state of Oregon. I love birds/bird watching, hiking and generally being outside. I play guitar and love a good campfire with friends. I would like to move back into the sciences but maintaining a work-life balance is important so that I have time for my creative endeavors.

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

If not for social media I wouldn’t be the poet I am; it was absolutely foundational. I’ve been writing poetry since high school but not with much intent to publish. I began a Twitter account to post bad “haiku” about my life post-divorce, and the diversity of beers in my new home in the Pacific Northwest (USA). I started to see real haiku poets in my feed and their poems, discussions, and linked articles set me on a path of emulation. At some point, I followed a link to The Haiku Foundation’s website, probably the Haiku Dialogue feature, and started to submit there. I no longer wanted to be a bad haiku poet. The Poetry Pea podcast was starting about the same time and I followed each episode, trying to learn and practice the basics and how to use them in my own writing. With a ton of great feedback and support from the haiku poets I admired and some gentle nudging, I began submitting to journals and was shocked at the level of acceptance I received.  
 

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?
 
Like many haiku poets, I often write lines or fragments that aren’t complete enough in some way to fill out an enjambed haiku. These generally become poetic detritus and are forgotten or forsaken. I often didn’t “get” single-line poems until I started to read some very specific discussion/critique of them. I began trying some of my fragments in this new light and found I liked some of the results. I sought feedback from more established poets and they helped me further develop my approach. For me, one-line poems strip away any excess fat, thereby opening up the space for a reader to step in and connect or to develop their own story. 


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? 
 
It’s certainly not original for me to say, “reading it aloud” but often that is what it comes down to. Where are the pauses? Does one line open up potential readings where enjambment would constrain how a poem is received? Additionally, I look at whether the poem has two distinct parts, lending itself to multiple lines, or whether it feels like one train of thought.


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. 

As with most haiku, it all starts with a moment, an observation, a thought. I capture that, however rough because that is what caught my attention. I might also scratch down any related feelings or tangential thoughts. Then I just start playing with the words and trying to get them to say or emote what I’m feeling. I look for synonyms and how they impact the appearance and feel of the poem. Robin Smith really helped me understand how impactful word order can be. I might have a particular word or phrase I want included but playing around with how that’s presented can open new interpretations and increase the reader’s engagement with the poem. 
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You are most welcome to take a one-line poem or two of yours to discuss how it came to be and/or process.


april song a sparrow softly in the rain



This poem is pretty straightforward in terms of the inspiration. It started out as:



april showers of sparrow song



I was walking on a rainy, April, Oregon day, dreary despite signs of spring. A song sparrow half-heartedly sang a song, looked around, and dropped back to the ground seeming to decide he just wasn’t into it yet. After writing it down, it occurred to me that there weren’t really “showers” of song. What I’d heard was less than a full outpouring. I tried



a sparrow song half-hidden in the rain



I liked the semi-visual sense-switching suggested in this version. I didn’t like that I lost the slight suggestion that it was indeed a song sparrow, and not just a generic sparrow.



song a sparrow hidden in the rain



left me outside of a firm season. Rain is half the year in western Oregon, and while the song itself might suggest spring, it wasn’t quite enough.



april song a sparrow hidden in the rain



was almost what I submitted, but playing around with the words, reading it aloud, and giving it a rest period before making a final decision, I landed on the final version which gave me firm seasonality, the assonance of the repeated S, and a broken syntax that I think slows the reader and (hopefully) draws her in.



april song a sparrow softly in the rain

– Kingfisher #5 May 2022


*


she says she’s leaving each sobralia bloom in just one day

– whiptail journal #4 Aug 2022



Sobralia is a genus of terrestrial, or soil-growing orchids. Each delicate bloom lasts only a day but healthy plants can have new blooms daily during the season if conditions are right. My Sobralia was two feet tall and covered in blooms when my then-wife announced she wanted a divorce. While browsing my notes from those days I found various lines about the short life of each bloom and about the abrupt way my marriage ended. At some point, I juxtaposed the two in a standard tercet format, but it never landed for me. For example,


sobralia bloom--
the wedding vows
she let die
 

The poems seemed too emotional. I came across those attempts after discovering one-line poems, and after trying out various word choices and switching up the order, I found this one to best capture what I wanted to say. I don’t think it lends itself to multiple interpretations, but it does capture the poignancy of loss I felt in those two very different situations. Sometimes our sadness (or joy, or anger, or contentment) compounds over the multiple situations we experience daily. In this case, sticking with the idea garnered me a poem I’m very happy with.



she says she’s leaving each sobralia bloom in just one day

– whiptail journal #4 Aug 2022



Postscript: In the months before I left Florida, my plant produced two pups, small plants growing off the parent with their own roots. I transferred them just before leaving to small travel pots and one of them has survived and is growing happily if slowly in my new home. Maybe someday, new flowers (and a happier poem!).
 

Thanks again for inviting me to participate. I love whiptail journal and the role it is playing in spreading the beauty of one-line poems.

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m. shane pruett (he/him) is a birder/naturalist living in the Pacific Northwest in the USA. He has been published in numerous journals and particularly enjoys using small poems and haibun to tell stories. Shane has been a park ranger, fire fighter, high school teacher, lab manager and data analyst and tries to bring all of those roles into his stories of a life he has enjoyed. He can be found sipping tasty beverages, eating potatoes in all their forms, listening to or playing music with friends, and scratching random thoughts in small notebooks. He still hopes to start a haiku group in Salem, OR.