Haiku Reflections

Watching a water strider, the poet notices that the small creature is always moving, because it requires a lot of effort to remain in one place on the surface of a summer stream. Haiku is the art of saying something while appearing to say almost nothing. The trick of it is to let some offhand observation of the natural world do the heavy lifting. On its surface, the poem seems to be just about the water strider. But what if the last line read “nine to five each day”? That would make it more obvious that the poem was about—the burdensomeness of life under late-stage capitalism perhaps. But in so doing, its range of surplus meaning and emotion would be restricted. While leaving that meaning in place as a possibility, the season word conveys so much more. “The effort required” could be emotional, financial, medical, relational, ecological, etc., depending on what each reader brings to the poem. A fine haiku that (1) knows just how much to give the reader, and (2) shows the importance of using season words to open up the meanings we wish to convey, rather than narrowing them down.
—Clark Strand