Meet Roland Packer

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 Hamilton, Ontario with my wife of 43 years, Louise. Since the mid-70s, I've worked as a professional musician juggling various roles: church organist and choir director; hammered dulcimer player in a folk duo; and as a piano and music theory instructor. I'm semi-retired now—just a few online theory students - so I have  more time for writing music and haiku.


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 aware of different approaches to haiku form (one, two, and four-line, concrete, and even the related one-word poem) early in my writing and experimented with many of them. One-line haiku initially had the “rapid-read” that caught my attention at first. Other poetic opportunities became apparent after writing a few: ambiguous breaks, pivot words, more varied symmetric and asymmetric phrase/fragment arrangements, and so on.


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 don't usually set out to write a one-line haiku. I let the content suggest what form is the most effective.


It would be a great help to our readers if you could walk us through your writing process from 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 how it came to be and/or process.

Here is an original haiku start and the revisions to make it a one-line poem.

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1) first draft:

the stars
as they were . . .
spring night

A minimalist 3-line (short-long-short) with a seasonal stock expression as the third line. Cosmic time expressed—the stars as they were in the past due to the speed of light.


2) a try as a one-line:

the stars as we were summer night

A more rapid-read and the comparison of cosmic time to the human past is starting to develop.


3) next draft:

as we were starry night

The elimination of a haiku stock expression.


4) final:

as they were as we are starry night

“They” refers to both our ancestors as well as the stars, juxtaposing human life span against cosmic time with chant-like symmetrical phrasing.

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Roland Packer (he/him) has been writing haiku since the early 80s. He was one of the featured poets in A New Resonance 6 (Red Moon Press, 2009) and has a mini chapbook, Wayfarers (Phafours Press, 2017).