Presenting more than two hundred of the greatest haiku ever written about the game.
One of the most unusual baseball books of the 2007 season, this remarkable new collection, which includes poems from both America and Japan, captures perfectly the thrill of baseball—a double play, a game of catch, or the hushed pause as a pitcher looks in before hurling his pitch. Like haiku, the game is concerned with the nature of the seasons: joyous in the spring, thrilling in summer's heat, ripening with the descent of fall, and remembered fondly in winter. Featuring the work of Jack Kerouac, the king of the Beat writers, who penned the first American baseball haiku, and Alan Pizzarelli, a major American haiku poet, the collection also includes Masaoka Shiki, one of the four great pillars of Japanese haiku, who fell in love with baseball when he was a student in Tokyo. Baseball Haiku, a literary and baseball treasure, will make a marvelous gift for the baseball fan in your family.
I was born in Biddeford, Maine, in 1931 and grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. After graduating from the University of New Hampshire in June of 1957 (having served three years in the United States Air Force between my freshman and sophomore years) I worked for several months as a cub reporter for the Concord Monitor in Concord, New Hampshire. While covering the police beat and writing Sunday features for the paper, I was also trying to write poetry. One day, at a local newsstand, I picked up a copy of the second issue of the Evergreen Review featuring the poetry and prose of the San Francisco "Rennaisance." I was so impressed by the works of such writers as Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Jack Kerouac that I decided to go west and see and hear this phenomenon at first hand. Quitting my job, I moved to the West Coast in the spring of 1958 and lived for the next six or seven months in a small residential hotel, the Sunny Hotel, on Bush Street, just around the corner from the Dragon Gate entrance to San Francisco's Chinatown, where Grant Avenue leads to North Beach.
After meeting the poet George Stanley in The Place, a bar in North Beach where poets hung out, I was invited to attend the regular poets' gatherings presided over by Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer that were at that time being held in Stanley's house on Telegraph Hill. It was at one of these meetings that I first heard about a kind of poetry that would influence me for the rest of my life: Gary Snyder, just back from his first stay in Japan, mentioned haiku during a discussion he was having with another poet, Harold Dull, about short poems.
To learn more, I went to the main branch of the San Francisco public library, where I began what was to be a lifelong study of the Japanese haiku masters, starting with the translations of R. H. Blyth, Harold G. Henderson, and Kenneth Yasuda. I returned to New England later that year and by early 1959 was writing my own haiku in a small cottage in Wells Beach, Maine. That summer I got a job reading my haiku, along with translations of Japanese haiku, at the Cafe Zen in nearby Ogunquit. In the fall I moved to Boston where I gave readings of haiku and other poetry in Beat coffee houses. I was the "house poet" at the Salamander and later at the Alhambra, where I read with a jazz trio.
The following summer I was reading nights in a bar in Provincetown, Mass., while working days on a fishing trawler. In the winter of '60-'61 I became part of the poetry reading scene--along with such poets as Robert Kelly, Jackson Mac Low, and Diane Wakoski--at the Tenth Street Coffee House in New York City, a precursor of the now well-known Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. I began printing my haiku on a small handpress and carried copies of my first chapbook, Sun in Skull (1961), on a cross-country hitching and hiking trip I took in the summer of 1961, selling them for a dollar each or exchanging them for food. Going from Maine to Seattle, I stopped off for a week or two to hike in Glacier National Park, where I saw grizzly bears and other wildlife while alone on the trail. I lived for several months in Seattle and while there went hiking in the Olympic Rain Forest.
For the rest of the sixties, I lived in New York City continuing to write and publish my poetry books under the Chant Press imprint, unaware of the growing number of other poets writing haiku. I married in 1962, had a son, Dirk, in 1965 and separated from my wife about a year later. We were divorced in 1971. During this time I was going to night school at NYU while working at Newsweek as an operations technician in the editorial makeup department. (I would work there for more than 25 years.)
I got an M.A. in English Literature from NYU in 1968. As part of my work there, I did a paper on James Thomson's The Seasons, demonstrating how revolutionary this work was in depicting nature for itself, directly and simply, instead of using it as a metaphor for something else, and pointing out how it later influenced the Romantics, especially Keats and Wordsworth. I began to see that nature writing in English, including the work of such American writers as Thoreau and John Muir, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, had things in common with the works of the great Japanese haiku masters. These writers, especially Williams, along with some other modern writers, including Ezra Pound with his call for clarity and his emphasis on the importance of the image in poetry, led the way in preparing the ground for an American haiku to take root. But it took the great translators, R. H. Blyth and Harold G. Henderson, to provide the seeds so haiku could actually flower in America, beginning with the pioneer masters of American haiku such as John Wills, James Hackett, Nick Virgilio, and Jack Kerouac.
I learned about the Haiku Society of America and the world of the haiku magazines in the winter of 1971 in New York City. I became friends with William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil, and Alan Pizzarelli, who were very active in the society. They helped me catch up on the history of the haiku movement in America and helped guide me to a deeper understanding of haiku. I also met several times with Harold G. Henderson, whose An Introduction to Haiku inspired many of the poets in the English-language haiku movement. I got together with him at his home on the upper East side. I remember that though Henderson was fighting cancer at the time, he was a cheerful and enthusiastic host, delighting to talk about haiku and to join his visitor in raising a glass of scotch to the memory of Basho. Professor Henderson was co-founder of the Haiku Society with Leroy Kanterman, editor of Haiku West, whom I also met at this time. Henderson died in 1974.
My association with the society was very close for many years. While its president, in 1978, the society's magazine, Frogpond, began publication. The same year I worked with the vice president, Yasko Karaki, and Professor Kazuo Sato, of the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, to bring haiku poet Sumio Mori and haiku critic Kenkichi Yamamoto from Japan to speak on haiku in New York City. The HSA co-sponsored the event with Japan Society and Japan Air Lines. It was probably the first time such important figures in Japanese haiku spoke publicly about haiku in the United States.
Earlier, sometime in 1972, I got the idea of putting together an anthology of all the best haiku that had been written in English. I wanted such a book for myself--and was sure others would want it as well. I went to Doubleday with a completed manuscript. The editor I talked to had recently been approached by two other poets, each presenting the same idea, but without having a manuscript ready. This editor realized something important was going on and The Haiku Anthology was published in 1974. A much-enlarged, revised edition was published in 1986 by Simon & Schuster and a completely revised and expanded third edition came out in 1999 from W. W. Norton.
In 1974 I moved from NYC to East Orange, New Jersey, to be more "out in the country," and to be closer to Virgil, Higginson and Pizzarelli, all of whom lived in northern New Jersey. I lived there three years in the top floor of an old family home with a tulip tree towering over the house and a gnarled old cherry tree in the back yard next to a garden with a large bed of peonies. I then moved to Holmes, New York, where I had a cabin on a small lake called Lake Dutchess. Canada geese nested on the lake and mountain laurel grew along its shores. Fish, turtles, and frogs swam in the water. There were wide stretches of woods behind the cabin, with ravines and ridges and great glacial rocks scattered here and there. I wrote some of my most nature-oriented haiku while living there. After about three years at the lake, I moved back to NYC, where I've lived ever since.
In 1982 I married Leonia "Leigh" Larrecq, who worked for NYC's Human Resources Administration. I retired at the end of 1988 from my job at Newsweek. Since then I have devoted myself to haiku and related activities. I was invited to Japan for a week in 1989 for a press conference to announce the winners of the 1988-89 Japan Air Lines English Haiku Contest, which I helped judge, and again in 1990 as the United State's representative to the International Haiku Symposium in Matsuyama.
The Symposium was a part of the Fifth National Cultural Festival. The festivals are presented each year in a different prefecture. 1990 was Ehime's turn. The haiku events were collectively called "The Spirit of Haiku Throughout the World" and included a "Memorial Lecture" by Donald Keene, the presentation of "The International Haiku Contest" prizes, and a panel discussion on international haiku moderated by Kazuo Sato. This last was the "symposium." The panel consisted of myself, representing the United States, Margaraet Borscharper from Germany, Alain Kervern from France, Shu Jitsu from China, Sono Uchida, who from his experience in Italy as ambassador to the Vatican was able to substitute for the absent panelist (Carla Vasio) from that country, and Tohta Kaneko who represented Japan. The winning poems in the contest and the discussion of the panelists was later published as a booklet.
My most memorable experiences on the 1989 trip were visits with Kazuo Sato to the homes of haiku poets Sumio Mori and Tenko Kawasaki and a walk through the grounds at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo where the 47 ronin are buried. On my trip the following year, I spent a week in Matsuyama where I met several haiku poets. One day, climbing alone to the top of the high hill behind the Ishite-ji Temple for a sunset view of the whole city, I saw off in the distance Matsuyama Castle glittering in the evening light. As the sun went down a bell-cricket sang in the grass nearby. I also searched out Hekigodo's grave on the outskirts of the city, to pay my respects to one of Shiki's most innovative disciples, visited Santoka's last home (the Isso-an), Shiki's house (the Shiki-do), and the Shiki Memorial Museum, the largest and most beautiful museum devoted to haiku in the world. I then spent two weeks with Tadashi Kondo and his family in Atsugi, not far from Tokyo. Kondo and his wife, Kris, took me to see the sunrise on Mount Fuji, to a pachinko parlor, and to a formal renku party at Gichuji Temple in Otsu, Matsuo Basho's burial place near the shores of Lake Biwa. With Tadashi I went to the Rakushisha (Hut of Fallen Persimmons) in Kyoto where Basho once lived and hiked along the Kiyotaki River where I payed my respects to Basho at a memorial haiku stone marking the spot where the poet had been inspired to write one of his best-known haiku: Kiyotaki River/ falling into the rapids/ blue pine needles.
I have attended several haiku festivals hosted by Haiku Canada. At the one at Aylmer in the spring of 1991, I was the featured poet. From 1990 to 2001 I visited with poets in three of the most active of the new haiku groups springing up all over the United States: the Boston Haiku Society, The Haiku Poets of Northern California, and The Nick Virgilio Haiku Association in Camden, New Jersey. I was impressed with how many of these poets are young and full of energetic enthusiasm for haiku. Over the years I have known through correspondence and personal contact some of the most important figures in the English-language haiku movement: Michael McClintock, John Wills, Rod Willmot, George Swede, L. A. (Agnes) Davidson, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, Marlene Mountain, Nick Virgilio, Hiroaki Sato, Alexis Rotella, Michael Dylan Welch, Lee Gurga and many others. In 1991 while attending the first Haiku North America Conference in California, I met J. W. Hackett, one of the great pioneers of American haiku, at his home in the Santa Cruz mountains.
With a number of other members of the Haiku Society of America, I worked several years on a book for the society called A Haiku Path. A history of the society's activities and a source book on the subject of English-language haiku, it was published in 1994.
In 2002 I was invited to Matsuyama to recieve the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Prize. Among the gifts I recieved with this award was a porcelain medal whose design included the image of crossed baseball bats and a baseball. This was to represent Shiki's love for the game. While I was there (for about a week) Nanae Tamura a haiku poet and translator of Shiki was my interpreter and guide. During my stay she showed me around the city. The tour included a fairly strenuous hike up a small mountain (or large hill; not the one with Matsuyama Castle on top). While at the top viewing the city and the panorama surrounding it, which includes orange groves, palm trees and distant forested mountains in several directions with the nearby sea in another, we discussed not only haiku, nature, and Matsuyama, but also the subject of baseball. Nanae Tamura is the mother of two sons who grew up playing baseball and is fond of the game herself. I told her that I had been involved in the publication of two chapbooks of baseball haiku just two years earlier: Past Time, an anthology containing one baseball haiku each by thirty-one poets, and Play Ball, a collection of my own baseball haiku. They were both published by Red Moon Press in beautifully designed editions by Jim Kacian using vintage baseball photos as backdrops to the poems. [After the first printing, somehow the plates were lost and so the books became limited editions.]
Later on, while riding one of the delightful vintage streetcars in downtown Matsuyama, I mentioned to Nanae that I had been reading Masaoka Shiki's haiku and tanka on baseball and expressed to her my desire to do a major collection of the best baseball haiku I could find by both American and Japanese haiku poets, but that I needed a Japanese co-editor to help me with the Japanese section. As Nanae herself has recounted in an article in HI, the magazine of The Haiku International Association, she was so happy and surprised to hear this that we missed our stop. She at once agreed to be my co-editor and our book Baseball Haiku was published by W. W. Norton in 2007.
