Trying to write haiku, especially when it’s new to you (and even if it’s not), can feel like trying to capture the beauty and magnitude of a landscape in a photograph. Our cameras can only capture so much to the left and right, only so much of what’s above, below, and behind. The magnitude we feel and seek to capture gets lost in the limits of the photo.
Likewise, trying to capture the magnitude of a moment in seventeen syllables or less can both overwhelm us and leave us feeling underwhelmed. We finally get something on the page. Only, we’re disappointed by the end results. We see the image, but don’t feel what made us want to capture it in the first place.
The whole process can leave us lost and disoriented. But, with a little reframing, we can see a way forward.
From 1973 to 1976, Nancy Holt built an art installation in northwestern Utah called Sun Tunnels. Pictured above, here’s a description of it from the Holt/Smithson Foundation:
In a remote valley of Utah’s Great Basin Desert, Holt’s massive Sun Tunnels looms along the horizon, visible from over a mile away. The four concrete structures are arranged in a cross formation, positioned precisely to frame the sun as it rises and sets during the summer and winter solstices. Small holes are configured in the concrete to cast projections of constellations along the tunnels’ interior; Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn materialize out of sunlight, their patterns illuminated upon the viewer inside. With Sun Tunnels, Holt brings the cosmos down to the earth and into the realm of human experience.1
In 1977, Holt wrote in Artforum what she intended with Sun Tunnels,
I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale. I had no desire to make a megalithic monument. The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points. The view blurs out rather than sharpens. Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus.2
This is a helpful way to think about your haiku when you write because this is what haiku do. A haiku brings into focus a singular moment (among a plethora of moments) caught in a poet’s attention. It sharpens our often blurry view of the world. Haiku bring the vast spaces we live in—even if they’re crowded with other people, plants, animals, and things—down to a human scale.
A good haiku doesn’t try to give the reader a full picture with all the details. Rather, it is the equivalent of taking a photo of a certain leaf in a forest full of leaves. Like Sun Tunnels, haiku frame only part of the landscape and block out the rest. This brings the moment they capture into focus.
Take, for example, this haiku by Alan Pizzarelli.
in the stream a shopping cart fills with leaves
With each line, Pizzarelli narrows our focus. There are so many things we could see at this moment about the stream. He tells us to look into it.
We could see any number of things in the stream: fish, rocks, vegetation, water. He points us to the thing that’s not supposed to be there—the thing that sticks out (maybe quite literally sticking half out of the water).
Again, we could notice any number of things about this shopping cart. Maybe it’s rusty; maybe it’s moving slowly downstream. Perhaps it’s half-buried in the bed of the stream. But Pizzarelli points us inside the cart. There, we find out how this stream goes shopping (or maybe cleans itself?).
In that same piece in Artform, Holt wrote the following about another art installation she made:
In 1972 I made Missoula Ranch Locators in Montana in a very different kind of Western landscape—very expansive, but greener and more “scenic” than the desert. The site is right for the work; different things can be seen through each of the eight Locators—a mountain, a tree, a flat plain, a ranch house, etc. Through the work, the place is seen in a different way. The work becomes a human focal point, and in that respect it brings the vast landscape back to human proportion and makes the viewer the center of things.3
The present tense action of the verb in Pizzarelli’s haiku brings us into the moment beside the stream. Suddenly, we realize that the poet is not even there. Pizzarelli’s poem narrows our focus so much that the poet is not even in the frame. But there is a human there: the reader. It’s you and me. We are the ones looking into the stream to see it fill a shopping cart with leaves.
When writing haiku, keep in mind that they don’t attempt to offer an ethereal or ineffable perspective on the world. Haiku are inherently human. And so, they offer a decidedly human perspective.
Haiku offer a human perspective through simple, concrete, and direct expression of what is caught in the senses, what you hear, see, smell, touch, and taste. And they do so by zooming in on commonplace events and everyday occurrences of life.
Holt wrote of Sun Tunnels, “Once inside the tunnels, the work encloses—surrounds—and there is a framing of the landscape through the ends of the tunnels and through the holes.”4 Haiku frame for us a particular moment at a particular time that caused a poet to pause and take notice. The poet shares what got caught in their senses and narrows the focus by sharing only those things. They don’t express emotions. Instead, they give us the facts of that moment and through those facts make us feel what they felt. Haiku give us "visual reference points" that frame life’s blurry landscape, bringing it into focus and helping us experience, ponder, and make sense of what’s around us.
I’ll leave you with this apt haiku by John Crook
summer solstice— the sun reaches a new place on the fridge
I enjoyed this longer discussion of haiku. I think haiku are at their most powerful when they capture a moment with a story arc. Your example of Alan Pizzarelli's is one of my favorite poems. There's an entire story in the small slice of life. When I feel stuck I sometimes will decide to write ten haiku about something. The allows me to be less precious about each poem and often I end up taking words or lines from two or more poems to get something usable.