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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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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. Married for over forty years, with two grown children, I came to haiku some twenty-five years ago on a personal dare. In spite of my academic training as an historian, I had turned to writing about creativity with my husband, an historian of science cum scientist. Creativity studies are dominated by psychologists, which we were not. What we were interested in was understanding creative skills and processes from the inside out, subjectively as well as objectively. My husband had his artwork, along with his science, to experience creative behaviors. Though I felt something of an imposter, I thought I might learn how to write haiku and use what I learned in my study of creative imagination. A few books and many articles, essays, workshops and, yes, poems, later, I’m still working on it. I leaven my days with other kinds of arts and crafts, of course—off and on knitting, linoleum block printing, bread baking—all of which, along with haiku, help me make meaning by making things. Are you active on social media? How do you think social media affects the writing process? Not really, not in any consistent manner. Though I have tried NaHiWriMo in the past, I don’t feel all that comfortable posting newly minted haiku online. I suppose that shows my age, but I do appreciate the role that editors play in saving me from my worst solipsisms. On a related note, I do participate in a couple of closed-group kukai that rely on electronic exchange and Zoom—thank god for Zoom. My haiku study group would not have survived the pandemic without it. What is something that people don't know about your poetry or poetry practice, process, or inspiration that you'd like to share? When I think about it (i.e., when I feel a need to shake things up) my approach to haiku practice is to play, play with inspirational prompts, model poems, formats, and the revision of images and phrases I rediscover in my old notebooks. Otherwise, I try to remain open to haiku moments, as well as keep an almost daily appointment with the muse. I once read that if you don’t show up at your desk on a regular basis, how will the muse find you? I’ve taken that to heart, even on days when my mind seems a complete blank. 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? Looking back at my records, I see that my first published monoku appeared in 2007. I distinctly remember trying to wrap my head around the form, with feedback on that initial effort at a haiku conference anonymous critique. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was drawn to the way the monoku of other poets so often mimicked the sudden arcing of a thought within my mind. By 2015 or so I became more aware of what—technically—was working for me to deliver this cognitive sensation: extreme compression of imagery and voice, disjunction/juxtaposition created by a multiplicity of meanings in (usually) a single word, quick shifts in gestalt. These were not three-line haiku laid out in one line, but something quite different. 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? As part of the extreme compression of image and brevity of expression, my first instinct is to look for multiple breaks in the language. To the extent that these open the haiku to alternative interpretations, the game is on. My second instinct is to look for a word (or words) doing double duty—a noun as verb, a verb as adjective, for instance. Often enough, there’s opportunity there for a compressed pivot from one line of thought to another or, more subtly, for an imagistic echo or association that adds to the verbal mix. My third instinct is to look for something uncommon or illogical, yet somehow colloquial, in the arrangement of speech—like the random non-sequitur that unexpectedly throbs with almost meaning. 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. Some of my most recent one-line haiku have come to me nearly whole—possibly because I am on the lookout for certain kinds of compression. In my notebook for June of 2022, after a trip to the Los Angeles chaparral, I went rather quickly from the two phrases “as far as the eye can see” and “the hills gone wild mustard” to “as far as the hills go wild mustard”, which was published later in the year. This monoku features the compression of three thoughts: as far as the hills go / the hills go wild / the hills go [wild with] wild mustard. Similarly, in July of 2021, with a woman’s change of life on my mind, I wrote down the two phrases “a small ache” and “where the moon used to be” and after a bit of verbal fuss, reversed the two to produce “where the moon used to be a small ache”. I spent time wondering “does this monoku need a second image or does it already have two?” The two alternate readings—first, as two phrases (as originally conceived) and second, as one phrase reinterpreting “used to be” not as a designation of place but of existence—seemed compellingly different. That feeling, along with the moon’s associations with menstruation, convinced me that the poem was indeed haiku. I have also reworked poetic ideas that first came to me as three-line haiku into one-line haiku—invariably, because they just didn’t gel for me in the traditional format. In October of 2019, I was generating imagery with memories of a recent trip to Monet’s garden at Giverny. Toying with words and phrases about the light and the lilies, I soon sketched out “waterlilies / changing in the light / in changing light.” A note to the side indicates that I liked “the reciprocal action here,” i.e., that the light changed the lilies and the lilies changed the light. After which, I got hung up on whether the three-line haiku needed more imagery, a reference to color, perhaps, or to reflections of clouds on the water. It wasn’t until later in the month, when I collected haiku from my notebook for what I call “haiku drafts” kept on the computer, that I spontaneously turned the three-line form into “in changing light lilies changing light”, which was picked up for publication a short time later. Experiences like this make me a firm believer in setting aside early drafts for “marination” and creating multiple opportunities for revision in the writing process. One final example, if I may. In my notebook for February of 2021, I find a random entry about the earthy smell of “the gone rain”–I think I came across the use of “gone” as an adjective in a novel and was enamored with (“crazed for” a haiku friend of mine says) the sound of it. About a week later I find the following three-line haiku: “in the faint / scent of a rose / the gone rain”. Later that month, I shared the poem in a kukai, minus the article in the third line. To my mind, I was playing with enjambment, some of which was appreciated in the kukai discussion, some not—at least as far as a three-line haiku was concerned. It was suggested that I consider the one-line form, but I was stubborn. Six submissions and six returns later, I felt compelled to drop the haiku into my stash of “favorite duds.” I didn’t want to let it go in its original form, yet time away allowed a change of heart and mind. A year later, I wrote a one-line version—“faint scent of a rose gone rain”—for the capping haiku in a published haibun, the word “gone” shifting between “rose” and “rain” just as I had always wanted it to do. And the lesson I take is this: due to conventions in how we read haiku, a poet can do things in one line that can’t be readily done in two or three. That, and never give up on an image or phrase you stay crazed for! Given some space to breathe on its own, it will find its true form. Do you have any tips for aspiring poets of one-line forms? Collect one-liners that you absolutely love by other poets. Ask yourself why are you drawn to these poems, what techniques do you admire most? Emulate those techniques in your own work. Be on the lookout for words that lend themselves to double meanings; phrases that lend themselves to sudden shifts in thought. Play with the possibilities. Be patient. And most of all, persist. Michele Root-Bernstein (she/her) mostly devotes herself to haiku and assorted haikai arts. Her poetry appears in journals at home and abroad and her free e-chapbook, Wind Rose, on the Snapshot Press website. Recently book editor of Modern Haiku, she has facilitated the Michigan-based Evergreen Haiku Study Group since 2016. When she isn’t coaxing her cuttlefish muse, she’s researching creative imagination or otherwise turning her face to the sun.  |
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ISSN 2769-5263
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