Bird Music

Around 2009, the Brazilian composer Jarbas Agnelli saw a photograph by Paulo Pinto of numerous crows perched on five telephone wires, thinking to himself that they looked like a musical score. We’ve all had this experience of seeing birds on wires and noticing how they seem to be like musical notes, and some of us have written haiku about this perception. In Agnelli’s case, he wrote music based on the position of the birds, and you can hear his composition on YouTube, or see the original shorter version. Another composer, identified as Kaleidosound from South Africa, has produced music based on a different photo. See also Agnelli’s 2009 TEDx talk about his experience, with a longer version of the song, performed live. In his talk, Agnelli says, “the lesson learned was that it is possible to see poetry anywhere.”

Fortunately for Agnelli, there were enough birds on the wires to generate more than just a few notes of a composition, but often we might see only two or three birds yet still imagine them to look like musical notes. And so, as a result, over many decades, haiku poets have produced numerous poems on this subject, to the point (very quickly) of making it seem tired and clichéd—often devoid of fresh seeing. Fortunately, there are some exceptions that add fresh nuances to this common perception. The following are examples of what I’ll call “bird-music” haiku, starting with the earliest examples I’ve collected (with thanks to Charles Trumbull for his help in finding several of these, especially some of the earliest ones). In Pisa, even Ezra Pound saw birds on wires as being like musical notes on a stave. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are even earlier Japanese examples of haiku on this theme, but they wouldn’t be older than the invention of telephone or telegraph wires themselves, or of Japan’s awareness of the Western musical staff. Although such poems surely exist in Japanese (and other languages), for now, here are examples written in English, with my commentary.

Swallows on hot wire
     telegraph dots and dashes
          travel-music score.

Ga-Go (Travis S. Frosig)
American Haiku 2:2, 1964, page 59

We might be generous to this haiku, given that it was published in 1964, thus very early in the history of English-language haiku, but it has many problems that would keep it from being published today (or even a decade after its original appearance). But for the sake of this article, I mostly want to look past any such weaknesses in this poem and several other poems to come. The basic idea is still present that the birds seem to be like a musical score, but with the additional perception of telegraph dots and dashes. The poet imagines Morse code being transmitted on those wires, which might have been more common in 1964 than it is today, although I suspect that even in 1964 telegrams and Morse code were rarely sent when the telephone was already very common. An aside is that the brevity of telegrams (because one had to pay by the word) may have been an influence on Western haiku, creating a sort of receptivity to such brevity and the recipient’s engagement in reading between the lines.

Autumn symphony:
     swallows on telegraph wires
          unrehearsed music.

Catherine Neil Paton
Borrowed Water, by the Los Altos Writers Roundtable
Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1966, page 73

It’s interesting to note the variety of birds mentioned in the haiku on this theme—here’s a second one on swallows. Other birds to come in the following poems are sparrows, mockingbirds, starlings, blackbirds, pigeons, crows, grackles, and both generic “birds” and implied birds.

Spring chants her folk song—
     a branch strums the barbed wire fence,
          fingered by sparrows.

Magdalene M. Douglas
American Haiku 5:1, 1967, page 30

We switch from swallows to sparrows in this poem, and from telephone wires to fence wires. In contrast, the next poem doesn’t identify the birds at all, referring to them only metaphorically as “blue-black quarter notes.”

Blue-black quarter notes
suddenly fly from their staves . . .
bare telegraph wires.

Jess Perlman
Haiku Magazine 3:1+3, Summer/Fall 1969, page 43

Here the image of musical notes “flying away” brings something new to this image, but should haiku even make such interpretations? Is this perception therefore not the thing itself, but reduced to a metaphor, where the poet’s interpretation is doing all the reader’s work?

Musical Score

Like crotchets on a stave, the swallows write
Their song along the wires where they alight.

Hō-ō (Harold Stewart)
A Chime of Windbells Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969, page 39

Harold Stewart’s books usually featured two-line rhyming haiku translations with titles, and he extended this arrangement into his own poems, as we see here. Haiku do not have titles in Japanese (at most, occasional “headnotes,” but their function differs from titles). And end rhyme is typically problematic in haiku, drawing attention to words instead of images, and too often creating a ponderous and forced feeling in the poem’s cadence, as we see here—feeling more like Western poetry than Japanese haiku.

     Already swallows
marking telephone wires
   with notes of autumn.

Herta Rosenblatt
Modern Haiku 2:4, Autumn 1971, page 31

A touch of freshness here is the idea that the birds are notes of autumn. The word “already” suggests, too, that the birds must be early in their migration.

Mockingbird on wire
     while I was not attentive
          left without a note

Tom Bilicke
Frogpond 11:2, May 1988, page 40

The wordplay on “note” is pleasing—meaning notification as well as musical notes. That lack of notification feels like a mocking of sorts, fitting for a mockingbird.

three-string banjo
songs of starlings
on telephone wires

Jane Reichhold
A Dictionary of Haiku, Gualala, California: AHA Books, 1992

This is perhaps one of the least clichéd examples, because the wires are interpreted as being like a banjo rather than a musical staff. The “banjo,” however, is not literal but purely metaphorical.

scores of birds
on a staff of wires
―autumn symphony

Rengé / David Priebe
Brussels Sprout 10:3, September 1993, page 4

Charles Trumbull quoted this poem in his essay, “Meaning in Haiku,” in Frogpond 35:3, 2012. In his comments, Trumbull said, “This is clever use of language—the puns on ‘scores’ and ‘staff’—but in the end the poet spoon-feeds meaning to us, and thereby kills the haiku” (98). This a too-common problem with many of these haiku, a problem entirely in addition to the tired tendency of the image itself.

a thousand myriad birds
write a song
on wire

Alan Summers
Brussels Sprout 11:2, May 1994, page 37

Summers has said that this was his first published haiku. What’s interesting here is a focus not just on birds currently seen but possibly all the birds imagined from the past, each of them having their turn writing “songs” on these wires. It seems unlikely that a thousand birds would be seen on telephone wires all at once, so that unlikelihood points to the meaning of past birds (and perhaps future ones) as well as present birds. We can also take “a thousand” and “myriad” to simply mean “many,” which helps to add a present meaning to this poem.

parallel jet trails
form enormous music staff
blackbird notation

Patricia A. Laster
Brussels Sprout 12:3, September 1995, page 25

In this case the “wires” are contrails from passing jets, and the birds are flying below them. Thus the image is more dynamic than birds sitting passively on wires, which may make us wonder what sort of “music” these moving birds represent. This is the third poem of this kind quoted from Brussels Sprout, edited by Francine Porad, in a third successive year. She seemingly had no hesitation in selecting poems with this repeated subject (unless she didn’t remember the prior publications). This therefore seems to be an act of celebrating commonality in repeated subjects rather than resisting it.

       pigeons
on electric wires:
   musical score

Timothy Russell
Point Judith Light, Fall–Winter 1996, page 9

This poem’s structure is image and interpretation. In other poems shared here, the interpretation isn’t quite so direct or blunt, but even in those poems, does the haiku suffer because it contains any kind of interpretation? So often a haiku succeeds when it omits interpretation, creating space for the reader to reach their own conclusion (we are not “spoon-fed” the meaning). In workshops, I frequently say not to write about your emotion (or idea) but instead to write about what caused that feeling (or thought). With most of these bird-music haiku, it seems that the idea is privileged over experience, but that begs the question of whether the interpretive idea can still be considered part of the experience. Indeed, should all “ideas” be omitted from haiku? Surely that would narrow haiku’s range excessively. This is to say that I’m not against bird-music haiku, but it remains difficult to do them freshly.

Telephone wires
busy with little birds:
tinkling notes!

Klaus-Dieter Wirth
Kortheidshalve 8:2, February 1999, page 36

A structure similar to the previous poem occurs here too, with an interpretation in the last line. Usually interpretation is best avoided in haiku, and yet this subject itself is intentionally interpretive. At what point, though, does the interpretation feel too common, too clichéd?

        sparrows forming notes
on the phone lines without words
             for their melodies

Elizabeth Symon
Haiku Headlines #143, 12:11, Feb 2000, page 6

The best haiku of this persuasion give the barest hint of the musical note idea. In contrast, a poem such as this seems to hammer at the idea, leaving less for the reader to do, and thus have less opportunity to engage.

The emerald hour—
power lines suddenly staves,
silhouetted birds
big fat whole notes of hope
on these humming hot wires

Richard Stevenson
A Charm of Finches, Victoria, British Columbia: Ekstasis Editions, 2004, page 16

Here we have a tanka example.  Compare this poem’s reference to “hot wires” to the 1964 poem by Ga-Go (Travis S. Frosig), shared previously, which also refers to hot wires. These wires are alive with electricity, alive with communication.

       cold telephone wires—
bare staves until the crow lands
             one black note

Richard Stevenson
A Flicker at the Fascia. Mississauga, Ontario: Serengeti Press, 2005, page 12

Stevenson repeats even himself, not just with the tanka before this poem but with his later “sick in bed” poem, published in 2014. In this poem, the wires have turned from hot to cold, which seems to be a projection or speculation (as with “hot” wires) rather than a knowable experience—unless the poet has actually touched them.

Nine little swallows,
Like notes on a music staff,
Wait to sing their songs.

Jane Yolen
Count Me a Rhyme: Animal Poems by the Numbers. Honesdale, Pennsylvania, 2006

Yolen is well known as a writer for children. Even famous writers aren’t original all the time, or immune to cliché. One might argue that the idea itself is not clichéd to the children who might be encountering it for the first time through this book, but in another context the notion would seem less effective. A nuance in this poem is that the “songs” are literal bird songs, rather than being imagined songs brought to mind by the visual image of birds on wires being like notes on a musical staff. This poem also uses simile rather than metaphor (as did the Harold Stewart poem previously), which is uncommon among poems of this type.

birds perch on the wires
resembling musical notes.
What tune do they play?

Teri Prentiss and Peter Kendall
Pebbles 19:1, August 2006, page 16

The capitalization and dual attribution appears here as originally published. To say that the birds “resemble” musical notes is another way of employing simile rather than metaphor. Metaphor occurs in the last line where the simile introduced by “resembling” becomes the tune that the birds “play.” Whether these poems employ metaphor or simile, however, they still emphasize the poet’s interpretation rather than experience, if “experience” is understood to be limited to one’s primary senses rather than responses to that sensory reception.

sick in bed—
birds’ silhouettes make whole notes
on the power lines

Richard Stevenson
DailyHaiku, April 5, 2008

Here’s a third example of Stevenson employing the same bird-music motif. Compare with the “emerald hour” tanka from 2004 and the “cold telephone wires” haiku from 2005, presented previously. It may be one thing to avoid writing what others have already written (that is, to avoid tired or clichéd subjects), but it seems even more important to avoid too closely repeating the same trope within one’s own work.

birds perched on high wires
forming
musical notes

John Akasawa Wong
Shell Gathering: Southern California Haiku Study Group 2009 Anthology, Naia, ed., Pasadena: Southern California Haiku Study Group, 2009, page 39

In the book’s publication credits, no prior publication credit is listed, so this is presumably the poem’s first publication. However, I made a note of the poem in 2006 when it was submitted for that year’s Anita Saddler Weiss Haiku Contest that I judged (not selected as a winner). The contest coordinator, Cathy Drinkwater Better, confirmed for me later that the 2006 submission was written by the same author as this 2009 version, except that in 2006 the poem said “pigeons” instead of “birds.” Which version do you prefer? How does the choice of bird affect the idea of birds on wires seeming to be like notes on a musical staff?

            on a staff of wires
blue notes inked from April skies
       truly, spring’s first song

Michael J. Rosen
The Cuckoo’s Haiku and Other Birding Poems. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2009, page 6

This poem comes from a lovely illustrated book aimed at children. The poem is more of a syllable-counting than a haiku, though, with shortcomings such as wordiness that would keep it from being published in any of the leading haiku journals, not even counting the clichéd image. Birds, of course, are not even mentioned, but are easily implied by the poem itself, and especially by the context of the book being a collection about birds. The same author has published similar haiku collections on cats and horses.

tolls—
crows on wires changing
the musical range

Kaiser Kahn
Shiki Internet Kukai, March 2011 (free format section, on the theme of crows)

This poem stands out for its intriguing juxtaposition. What does the musical range have to do with tolls? Is the poet on a toll road? Or is he imagining tolls paid to make long-distance phone calls? The musical range itself is a different way of looking at crows on a wire, suggesting that the birds on wires represent a “different” kind of music.

a score of starlings
on the telegraph wires
the wind’s song

Claire Everett
Notes from the Gean 2:4, March 2011

Everett uses the word “score” inventively in this poem, meaning both the number of birds (even if it’s not exactly twenty) and the music they may be “writing.” An additional innovation is the suggestion that the wind is writing the song, whether it blows the birds about on the telegraph wires or not. In a way, this poem is not even an example of “bird-music” haiku like the others because the only music is that produced by the wind, not the birds, and not any perception of the birds looking like musical notes. This is how to write freshly on this theme.

Impromptu

Strung like notes on fence wire,
five midwinter crows.
Watch! See song take flight.

Brigit Truex
The Raven Chronicles 15:2, 2011, page 58

The preceding poem is not intended as a haiku, but it shows that the same trope is not limited to haiku or related Japanese poetry. Further research would no doubt find other poems, longer than this, also devoted to the same idea.

On telephone poles
          the notes are birds
          playing in 12 tone

Jack Galmitz
Letters, Aberdeen, Scotland: Gean Tree Press, 2013, page 23

How many times can this poem be rewritten? Yet, for most of the poets here, surely each poem is the first time they have written on this subject. Here I am reminded of Dobby Gibson who wrote the following in his book Polar (Alice James Books, 2005), lines I’ve quoted numerous other times in the context of déjà-ku:

It may be true that everything
has already been said,
but it’s just as true that not everyone
has had a chance to say it.

scoring concertos,
crows arrange and rearrange
on five hydro wires

R. W. Watkins
Comparing Tattoos: Haiku Canada Members’ Anthology 2015, Ottawa, Ontario: Haiku Canada, 2015, page 43

In Canada, if not elsewhere, electric wires are often called hydro wires, as a shortening of the term hydroelectric power, because electricity transmitted by the wires is often produced by water-powered dams.

hydro lines
the sixteenth notes
of grackles

Debbie Strange
From “In the Key of Grey,” a rengay with Jennifer Hambrick, third place winner on the 2019 Haiku Poets of Northern California rengay contest, Mariposa #43, Autumn/Winter 2020, page 32

Another Canadian reference to hydroelectric power lines (the author lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba). It’s interesting to compare the delicacy and efficiency of this poem to the relative heavy-handedness and wordiness of the preceding poem by R. W. Watkins and especially the earlier poems by Ga-Go (Travis S. Frosig), Magdalene M. Douglas, and Hō-ō (Harold Stewart), among others. Debbie’s poem illustrates how to write about this topic with freshness and restraint.

chords of blackbirds
rest on a wire staff
music in the air

Jillian Calahan
Posted to the NaHaiWriMo page on Facebook, 3 January 2022

Here’s a very recent example of the same idea. Each of the preceding poems is different in its own way, so there’s no question of plagiarism in any of these poems. The question that lingers is simply one of cliché. There will no doubt be more poems written in a similar musical vein. Perhaps a fresher way to interpret birds on wires is to see them as looking like an abacus. Here are three examples:

Busy abacus
of birds in swift addition
On a power line.

Gloria Maxson
Janus & SCTH 2:1 [SCTH 7:1], July 1970, page 29

winter abacus—
no sparrows on the wire
this morning

Alexey V. Andreyev
Moyayama: Russian Haiku: A Diary, Kennewick, Washington: A Small Garlic Press, 1996, page 27

on the wires
an abacus of birds . . .
I eye the tax forms

George Swede
Mainichi Daily News: Haiku in English 705, March 2008

Abacus interpretations probably do not risk cliché because they still seem relatively rare, but perhaps interpreting the wires as being anything other than telephone wires is already still a cliché. Nevertheless, even the many bird-music haiku I’ve quoted might be understood in a larger context where birds on telephone wires are mostly not interpreted as being like musical notes. That may not excuse musical interpretations as being clichéd, but their relative frequency is a factor to consider. Yet, even having just two poems on this shared subject might be too much for some readers.

What is common among both the musical staff and abacus interpretations of birds on wires is the idea of seeing those birds and wires as something other than what they are, thus revealing a mental and metaphorical imposition on the image perceived. The experience of imagining significance in a random or ambiguous visual pattern is known as pareidolia. For the sake of creating a musical composition, as Jarbas Agnelli did with his “Birds on the Wires” piece, such creative inspiration can be positive. And I would also welcome similar inspiration for haiku, to at least some degree, wherever it may arise, because it’s worthwhile to pay attention to the interpretations and realizations that occurs to you, because you might want to try implying those very thoughts. A problem with many of these bird-music haiku, however, is that few of them rise to seeing freshly, or to fresh expression, tiredly repeating nearly the exact same idea that other writers have expressed before. This is not a fault of any one individual poem, but more of a cumulative effect, with the trope being “used and reused,” as E. E. Cummings once wrote, “to the mystical moment of dullness.” The frequency of these poems also suggests that the poets may not have encountered such poems before, which seems to be a reasonable excuse for their proliferation, but perhaps journal editors should not be so forgiving, even while the poets might want to know the literature better. This subject is not the worst example of cliché. And I imagine that what is clichéd to one reader may not feel that way to others, and vice versa. Or maybe the sense of something being clichéd happens at different times for different people.

It’s fair to say that bird-music haiku face a double challenge. One is that it’s a tired subject that has already been written about too often by others, or not in sufficiently fresh ways. The other, and perhaps the more significant problem, is that these poems rely on the presentation of an interpretation of images rather than the images or experiences themselves. By withholding interpretation, the best haiku enable readers to have their own interpretations rather than, in Charlie Trumbull’s words, having the meaning spoon-fed to them. With tired subjects, I have always felt it’s fine to write your own version of the poem, to get it out of your system, but not to publish such poems. In this way you might challenge yourself to write about other subjects that haven’t already been written to death.

What do you think? Has this subject become clichéd and tiresome in haiku? Are birds on wires looking like musical notes too obvious a perception to even bother writing haiku about in the first place? In the history of déjà-ku, where a particular haiku brings to mind another poem, one common challenge is writing freshly, and how one defines freshness is of course a highly subjective question. For me, the freshest of these haiku are those by Herta Rosenblatt, Claire Everett, Debbie Strange, and perhaps Jane Reichhold, Kaiser Kahn, and one or two others. But what about all the rest? Are any of these haiku “fresh” for you?

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Watching Haiku: People

A surprising number of haiku present the experience of someone or something watching someone or something else that, in turn, is watching someone or something. Sound complicated? The following example poems, fortunately, are clearer than my description of this shared sort of experience. I’ve presented essays on “Watching Haiku: Cats” and “Watching Haiku: Other Creatures,” and now it’s time to focus on people. Each one of these haiku, created independently, offers its own celebration of a common experience, and it’s this very sort of commonality that makes haiku poetry rewarding to both write and to read. All poems are arranged by year.

watching my daughter
watching her daughter washing
her doll’s white socks

The preceding poem by Louise Beaven appeared in The Haiku Hundred (North Shields, United Kingdom: Iron Press 1992, page 15), a book edited by David Cobb, James Kirkup, and Peter Mortimer. A common variation of these “watching” haiku is one generation watching another watching something else, which we see here. And although the youngest daughter is “washing” rather than watching, we know that her doll is being watched too.

watching you
as you watch
television

Jocelyne Villeneuve’s poem, from Marigolds in Snow (Waterloo, Ontario: Penumbra Press, 1993, page 54) takes place indoors, where she’s watching a friend or loved one. We get the sense, too, that the poet might be feeling a little bored, or wishes she could interact with the other person because the television show isn’t nearly as interesting.

breakfast time—
watching strangers across the way
watching televised war

Another television poem. This one from New Cicada 10:1, Summer 1993, page 5, is by Norma C. Plummer. Readers cannot quite know exactly what “across the way” means (a road, an alley, a gap between tenements?), but whatever the interpretation we do see the watching of those strangers watching war on television. Perhaps the author is weary of that war, and can watch its unfolding no longer, yet she cannot get away from seeing others who are still watching it.

I watch my mother
watch my husband’s
speedometer

The preceding poem by Diane Tomczak appeared in Brussels Sprout XII:2, May 1995, page 16. There’s surely a wagging finger in that stare, isn’t there? And we can wonder what might happen next. Will the husband instinctively slow down, or will the mother speak up in concern? Or will the wife beat her to it?

First China trip
Watching people watching me
Watching them

We often watch creatures in nature to see what they’re doing. Here the creature being watched is a tourist, who in turn watches those who are watching her. The poet is D. Ronnie Barrett, and the poem was published in A Solitary Leaf, the 1996 Haiku Society of America members’ anthology edited by Randy M. Brooks and Lee Gurga (page 8).

in the river reflection
he watches himself
watch the sunset

This poem appeared in 1997 in the Australian poetry journal Paper Wasp. Poet Alan J. Summers gives us someone watching himself. And yet that “himself” is not the poet, but someone the poet is seeing—and he is surely empathizing with that person’s introspection (self-reflection). The sunset must be reflecting in the water too. I’m not quite sure how the person watching a sunset (far away in the distance, with eyes looking up) could also watch himself in a river’s reflection (close by, with eyes cast down), so the logic is not quite solid with this poem, unless we take it to mean the person watches himself in the river’s reflection after he has just been watching the sunset—they cannot quite happen at the same time.

silence—
the sculptor and his head of clay
watching each other

Tomislav Mijović’s poem was published in Knots (Tolmin, Slovenia: Prijatelj Haiku Press, 1999, page 132), edited by Dimitar Anakiev and Jim Kacian. Here we have an inanimate but anthropomorphized object watching a human, a different take on this watching theme. One kind of watching is literal, the other figurative.

watching her watch
on the way to the pawn shop
for groceries

Dwight L. Wilson’s poem appeared in “Family Sequence,” in A Half-Moon Shining: Haiku from an African-American/Quaker Perspective (Princeton, New Jersey: Leopard Press, 1999, page 51). In this case the “watch” is a timepiece (a noun rather than a verb) so not strictly connected to the commonality of someone watching something watch something else, but I include it here for being in the ballpark. It’s a sad poem where the watch is being watched . . . for the last time (pun intended).

watching my daughter
watch her daughter
miss the basket

This poem is by Nina Wicker, and it appeared in Frogpond 22:3, 1999, page 44, and also in Wild Again: Selected Haiku (Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2005, page 24). Here we have a hint of empathy—more than a hint. The grandparent feels love, surely, for her daughter, who is so intent on paying attention to her own daughter, perhaps worrying how the youngest daughter feels after missing a shot in a game of basketball. Even if no words are exchanged, or no pat on the back offered, the youngest daughter no doubt feels the support of her mother and grandmother who are both present to watch the game—and watch over their youngest.

4 a.m.
a neighbour I have never seen
watching the eclipse

Seán O’Connor’s poem appeared in Haiku Spirit #19 in March 2000. In this case the poet’s act of watching is not explicitly stated. However, it’s clearly implied that the poet is watching his neighbour watch the eclipse. A small tension arises in that the poet has never seen this person before, yet we also feel that they have at least a small bond in both appreciating the eclipse. Perhaps, too, this neighbor is not known to the poet because something else has been “eclipsing” the poet’s view of his neighbour, such as that neighbour being reclusive.

a short pause
watching tourists watch me
rappelling

I have no publication credit for this poem (it came to me via Charles Trumbull’s haiku database—thanks, Charlie), but it would have been written before August of 2003, which was when Kylan Jones-Huffman, its author, had died—a casualty of the war in Iraq. Here the focus of attention is on rappelling, and in this case the poet is doing the activity rather than watching someone or something else do something. The poet becomes aware that others are watching him and for a moment he is watching them watching him. And thus the reason they are watching him, rappelling down a mountain face or climbing wall, is probably no longer happening at that moment. But after that pause he will begin rappelling again.

waiting for bats
you notice me
watching you

Malcolm Williams published this poem in Presence #26 in 2005. Here we have noticing instead of watching, but still we have one person seeing someone else watching him or her. This contrasts intriguingly with the context of bats, creatures that notice their prey by echolocation instead of by sight. The bats, however, are not being watched, but two people notice each other while waiting for the unseen bats. We can imagine that both of the people are hoping the bats will fly soon, presumably at dusk. Because the bats are not present in the poem, this is more of a people poem that a creature poem.

linden shadows
watching people watching
the blind man

This poem, by Helen Buckingham, was an award-winning haiku in the English section of the ninth Suruga-Baika Literary Prize in 2007. All the other example watching poems here are about the act of seeing, but this time the poem presents someone who cannot see. The viewer is apparently under the shade of a linden tree, most likely in a place of comfort and repose, where it is easy to watch other people who are watching a blind man—who is perhaps not at ease at all.

watching him
watch someone else

This two-liner by Philomene Kocher appeared in a renku (linked collaborate verse) titled “Crows Return.” It was published in Haiku Canada Review 4:1, February 2010, and was originally written at the Haiku Canada weekend in May of 2008 in Ottawa, Ontario. Though not intended as a standalone haiku, its juxtaposition with the preceding verse, by Christine Nelson, has an amusing haiku-like effect: “her bathing suit / rides up / and has sand in it.”

clear sky
the window washer
watching us watching him

Ed Markowski’s poem tied for eighth place in the Shiki Internet Kukai (anonymous haiku contest) in November of 2008. The window washer is the source of attention, and we may immediately worry about being up at such heights. Such risks have become ordinary and accepted by the window washer, but perhaps the window washer watches the people below with a touch of envy, not necessarily to be on the ground but to be idle enough to not be working. Over and over, these “watching” poem imply empathy for a nearby person or animal.

early dawn—
I watch her on the balcony
watching it

This poem, by A. Thiagarajan, appeared in Modern Haiku 40:1, Winter–Spring 2009, page 88. It preserves that moment of appreciating someone else appreciating a natural phenomenon. It must be a beautiful sunrise, and the love or admiration that one person surely has for the other must be more beautiful yet. There’s an unspoken love here, in that one person might feel a deeper pang of love when seeing someone he or she loves appreciate something beautiful that he or she also appreciates.

watching his face
watching the moon
a passing cloud

Pat Benedict Campbell wrote this poem. It appeared on the DailyHaiku website on 4 May 2009, and later in her book The Alchemy of Tea (Carleton Place, Ontario: Catkin Press, 2019, page 39). Here we have a moon poem—the moon is so much more watchable than the sun. There’s an overtone of love in this haiku. As with the previous poem, the poet sees someone else watching the moon, and surely admiring it. And when a cloud passes over the moon, surely a “cloud” also passes over the face of the male being watched. The sense of love comes to mind because of an inherent empathy for that moment of loss because of the passing cloud. The unstated emotions of the observed person seem to extend to the concern of the observer as they both share this moment together, but in different ways.

speechday
watching my son
watching his son

Quendryth Young published this poem in the online German haiku journal Chrysanthemum, in issue #6, October 2009. Here we have intergenerational attention, and no doubt pride. So often in these poems the connection between human watchers is between generations.

I catch him
watching me
watch someone else

The word “catch” suggests an interpersonal relationship between the “me” and “him.” Did someone attractive catch the poet’s eye? The poem does not say “he catches me / watch someone else,” which would suggest guilt on the poet’s part for being caught. Instead, the poet catches someone else catching her watching someone else, which complicates the nature of the relationship. Is the “him” jealous, perhaps? We may also infer any number of possibilities for who the “someone” is—is it a child at a playground, a cute guy at a bar, a skater pirouetting in a competition? But quite aside from that, the poet has “caught” someone noticing her noticing something else, and the poem draws us into that moment. This poem by Philomene Kocher appeared in Hearing the Silence (Pointe Claire, Québec: King’s Road Press, 2011, page 14). Also note that this haiku echoes Philomene’s renku verse from 2008, quoted earlier.

Come in her nightgown
to watch the moon—
I watch her . . .

We turn from possible jealousy to love. David E. LeCount’s poem appeared in his book La Honda Journal (El Granada, California: Day’s Eye Press and Studios, 2011, page 13). When the poet and his lover (so it seems) both go out to look at the moon, he finds her the more attractive option. The word “nightgown” also gives the poem a potentially erotic overtone. No wonder he is watching her instead of the moon.

approaching squall
she watches his eyes
undressing someone else

This poem, by Cameron Mount, brings to mind an earlier one by Philomene Kocher, but more overtly suggests guilt and eroticism. Cameron’s poem appeared in Frogpond 35:2, Spring–Summer 2012, page 49. That approaching squall is not just a rainstorm but quite likely a storm of protest from the woman in this poem.

I catch her
watching me . . .
pitch on my fingers

Bill Pauly published this poem in Modern Haiku 44:2, Summer 2013, page 96. The poet is obviously busy at an important task, working with his hands, and the only clue as to what the task might be is the word “pitch.” Perhaps it’s also dangerous, which might be why the female is watching him carefully. Or perhaps she’s just admiring him for being industrious, doing whatever the work is, whether it’s dangerous or not. Either way, there’s a connection, with the “catching” having nothing to do with guilt, unlike Philomene Kocher’s earlier poem.

watching people watching me
condo balconies

This poem by Ben Moeller-Gaa appeared in the German online journal Chrysanthemum #14 in October of 2013. This is a common inner-city experience, but it could be anywhere—we’re always watching each other, or at least aware of each other because of our increasingly close proximity.

ICU
watching the machine
watching me

Jane Reichhold’s poem, from her book A Dictionary of Haiku (Gualala, California: AHA Books, second edition, 2013, page 252) lets us imagine what the machine might be in the intensive care unit. Perhaps it’s an ultrasound machine. Or perhaps it’s a machine providing medication, sustenance, or some other benefit, and thus “watching over” her. Or is it a closed-circuit video recorder, for security or safety purposes? Whatever it might be, the poet is watching back.

losing her mind—
watching a woman
as she watches herself

This poem, by Fran Witham, appeared in Bottle Rockets #31, 16:1, 2014, page 19. The poet is watching a woman who is somehow watching herself—we don’t know how. Nor do we know how the watched woman might be losing her mind, but that fact or presumption is offered as a given. Perhaps the act of watching herself incessantly is why the woman is losing her mind.

I watch someone
watch someone else
the promise of rain

Rainy and overcast days are conducive to watching—and introspection. This poem, by Nicholas Klacsanzky, is a small confession. We don’t know why he is watching someone else, or who that person is, but something that person is doing is enough to catch the observer’s attention. The unstated aspects of this poem empower readers to engage with the poem to finish its unfinishedness. All of this is presented in the context of a promise of rain, and we might easily assume that the rain, if it comes, will change the activities of the person being watched—and the watcher as well. This poem appeared in Zen and Son, by George Klacsanzky and Nicholas Klacsanzky (n.p., 2017, page 36).

watching them
not watching us
sun-hatted gardeners

Now we have a turn—in this case the people being watched are not aware of being watched and are not watching back. By this fact we can easily gather that the gardeners don’t know they are being observed because they so engrossed in their work or pastime. We get a sense of the summer season from the mention of sun hats, but we don’t know who the people identified as “us” are. Somehow we feel that the watchers are self-conscious, not necessarily for watching others at work but for not also being similarly productive or engaged in a hobby. This poem, by David Jacobs, was published in his book Buzz (Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2018, page 13).

night train
watching myself
watching myself

This poem by Alan S. Bridges appeared in his ebook, In a Flash (Ormskirk, United Kingdom: Snapshot Press, 2019, page 25). It shares a moment of introspection, of seeing one’s reflection while looking out a train window. That reflection, of course, is both literal and figurative.

condolence card thinking of you thinking of him

Susan B. Auld’s poem, from Chrysanthemum Dusk (Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2016, page 9) moves from sight to focus on an idea. This is a poem of empathy once again. The card is a sympathy card, but the poem is all empathy—the poet is motivated to send condolences because she wonders how her friend must be feeling when thinking of a lost loved one. While this poem is about more than the sense of sight, it extends a similar perception to other senses and feelings.

a father
chasing a child
chasing a butterfly

This poem by Garry Wilson is from Paper Mountains, the 2020 Seabeck Haiku Getaway anthology (Bellevue, Washington: 2021, page 43). In this case watching is replaced by chasing, a different kind of attention. As with all the other poems, this one is about a relationship, not just between a father and child but between one person and another, which is central to the appeal of these poems, in both writing them and reading them.

hotel mirror
watching you
watching us

The preceding haiku, by Lee Gurga, appeared in Hedgerow #134 in early 2021 (page 14). We’re in a hotel but we don’t know the rest of the story. Who (or what) is the “you,” and what are the people referred to as “us” doing? There’s a hint of lovemaking to this, but then who would the “you” be in such a situation? Perhaps the “you” is someone seen out the window through a mirror in the hotel room. Whatever the case, it’s another example of watching the watcher, and being watched, in this case with a touch of the ominous. On the other hand, and more likely, the “you” could be one of the people in the poem’s “us” just looking at themselves in the mirror, and in this case the feeling would not be ominous but just self-aware. (In this same issue of Hedgerow, another watching poem also appears, by Stephen Page: “falling snow— / a warbling vireo watching me / watching him,” which I quote in my “Watching Haiku: Other Creatures.” essay. The editor, Caroline Skanne, feels no hesitation in publishing both poems, each one with a sufficiently unique take on the idea of watching the watcher.)

old diary
cringing at myself
cringing at myself

A variation on this “watching” theme is the preceding poem by Aaron Barry, from his privately published book, Eggplants & Teardrops (n.p., 2022, page 45). In this case the poet is reading his own words about himself, cringing at his writing that cringed at his own behaviour. It’s a doubled sort of self-reflection. There is surely no end to the ways we can observe ourselves and others and be self-aware of those observations.

Allen Ginsberg purportedly said, “poets are people who notice what they notice.” While it’s one thing to be aware of watching someone or something that’s watching something else, or perhaps watching us in return, what haiku poets do with this awareness, in this case of noticing the noticing of a noticing, is to create haiku poems. The poems here celebrate these layers of taking notice.

Futhermore, haiku poems dwell in experience. Haiku poets write similar poems because they have similar experiences—and cannot help but have similar experiences, simply because they are human. In some cases the writing can be tired, saying what too many people have already said, being excessively similar or even plagiarizing another poem. But aside from such extremes, poems that have a common topic offer a cause for celebration. The similarity of such poems serves to validate our human existence, and how we share much more than we may realize. In the opening paragraph of The Haiku Handbook (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989), William J. Higginson emphasizes that the purpose of haiku is to share them. We cannot celebrate this sharing if we do not hold much experience in common.

Note: Some poems do not appear with indented lines as originally published, due to a limitation in the WordPress blog software. A nod of thanks to Charles Trumbull for his help in discovering some of these poems through his invaluable haiku database. See also “Watching Haiku: Cats” and “Watching Haiku: Other Creatures.”

How Attribution Becomes Plagiarism

In July of 2018, Gary Hotham emailed me to ask if I knew who wrote the following poem, presented anonymously, which he had encountered in The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here, by David Friend and the Editors of LIFE (New York: Little Brown & Company, 1991):

Quite apart from our religion
there are plum blossoms
there are cherry blossoms

He wondered if I knew the author, as it seemed like it might be a Japanese haiku. I did not know, but suggested he ask Charles Trumbull to check for similar poems in his expansive haiku database, which documents hundreds of thousands of published haiku in English, including haiku in translation. Charlie found that H. F. (Tom) Noyes had published a similar poem in Persimmon 2:2, Spring 1999, page 32:

Religion aside
there are plum blossoms
and pussy willows

You might suspect plagiarism here, but that’s fortunately not the case, as we’ll see by digging into the poem’s history. Charlie also noted that Tom’s poem had been reprinted in the following journals and anthologies (I’ve added some of the publication details here), with a lowercase “religion” in The Heron’s Nest, South by Southeast, and Seed Packets, but initial-capped elsewhere:

• The Heron’s Nest 4:4, April 2002 (see online)
• South by Southeast 16:1, 2009, page 18
• Stanford M. Forrester, ed., Seed Packets, Windsor, Connecticut: Bottle Rockets Press, 2009, page 101
• H. F. Noyes, Raking Aside Leaves, Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2011, page 2
• Jim Kacian, Allan Burns, and Philip Rowland, eds., Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, New York: Norton, 2013, page 117

What’s significant with Tom’s poem is that its first publication, in Persimmon, included the following attribution: “After Nanpoku—R. H. Blyth, Zen and Zen Classics.” Tom clearly meant to acknowledge his source. His poem is therefore homage rather than plagiarism, but nor is it allusion, as the “after” construction acknowledges that the poem is surely too obscure for readers to receive the poem as an allusion, or at least that Tom chooses to be overt in acknowledging a direct derivation, regardless of how obscure or well known the original poem might be. The poem does indeed appear in Blyth’s Zen and Zen Classics collection, which I have in the one-volume compilation edited by Frederick Franck (New York: Vintage, 1978). I found it on page 41, where it differs slightly from the unattributed version Gary found in the Meaning of Life book, and should have the middle line indented (not shown here):

Quite apart from our religion,
There are plum blossoms,
There are cherry blossoms.

Tom’s acknowledgment therefore helped us determine the original author, but if that acknowledgment had not been present, I and others might have wondered if Tom had plagiarized. My point here, however, is not to focus on the Nanpoku poem but how the Tom Noyes poem lost its attribution and especially how that loss nudges the poem—or shoves it—from attribution to plagiarism. Or at least so it would seem, if one did not know the history that I present here. Years from now someone might encounter Tom’s poem and feel indignation, or falsely accuse Tom of plagiarism when that is not the case. This is because instances where the acknowledgment is missing suggest that Tom wrote it himself, when he clearly intended it as an homage to Nanpoku, as demonstrated by his original acknowledgment.

I’m not sure why Tom would have submitted a previously published poem for republication in The Heron’s Nest and then South by Southeast, since both journals have typically sought only unpublished poems. Gary Hotham has told me that The Heron’s Nest did allow previously published poems at the time (later ending the practice), but I don’t believe South by Southeast ever allowed prior publication. Whatever the case, no prior publication acknowledgment appeared with the poem in either journal. Moreover, perhaps Tom became less detail-oriented in his old age, and it may have slipped his mind to include the prior publication credit when he submitted this poem, or he may not have remembered that the poem was already published. Tom died at age 91 in 2010, so he would have been about 83 when the poem was republished in The Heron’s Nest in 2002, and about 90 when it appeared in South by Southeast in 2009. This apparent inattentiveness is relevant because it could explain why the “After Nanpoku” attribution was also omitted, when surely Tom would have conscientiously included it if it had been brought to his attention. The same issue of Persimmon included another poem by Tom with a note that says “After Rabindranath Tagore,” demonstrating a pattern of intent to acknowledge his sources. So if there’s any accident here, it was Tom’s for not including the “After Nanpoku” acknowledgment in later publications, and anthology editors for not knowing that the poem was really an homage to Nanpoku that should have been acknowledged rather than being offered as an original poem or allusion.

And so readers would not know. With its publication in The Heron’s Nest and South by Southeast, and then in the Seed Packets anthology, this poem lost its assertion of homage and became an apparent plagiarism—for anyone who knows the Nanpoku poem and would spot the extensive similarity. Even if one does not know the original poem, Tom’s piece still remains a silent plagiarism when it lacks the original acknowledgment. The matter becomes particularly problematic with the poem’s publication in Norton’s Haiku in English anthology, which is much more widely available, will have many more readers than prior publications, and will be read for years to come. In this collection, any reader encountering the poem would naturally assume that Noyes wrote it himself rather than deriving it from Nanpoku. So Tom’s poem has unwittingly moved from homage, with attribution, to a seeming plagiarism, moving away from the author’s conscientious intent. How easily this happened, suggesting that any of us who write haiku with “after so-and-so” attributions should be careful to maintain those attributions. I hope that a correction can be made in Haiku in English to make sure that future readers are not misled.

Do Not Resuscitate: A Case of Haiku Similarity

In Geppo XLI:4 (August–October 2016, page 2), the following poem immediately grabbed my attention, not the least because of its subject:

winter twilight
the weight of a pen
for the DNR

A “DNR,” of course, is a “do not resuscitate” order. Signing such a directive is a difficult—weighty—decision, and such a somber moment echoes poignantly with the setting of winter twilight. This poem was presented anonymously in that issue of Geppo, as its submissions mostly are (so that favourites can be voted on anonymously), but I’ve since learned who the author was. But here’s the twist. It wasn’t just the poem itself that grabbed my attention, but its similarity to another poem, by Yu Chang, first published in The Heron’s Nest XI:2 (June 2009), where it was an editor’s choice selection, and republished in numerous other places, including in Jim Kacian’s widely available anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). This is a famous haiku:

bearing down
on a borrowed pen
do not resuscitate

I initially wondered if the first poem might have been influenced by Yu Chang’s, where the person in the poem feels so helpless than even the pen must be borrowed. Might the more recent poem have been a case of cryptomnesia, or remembering someone else’s work but forgetting the source (and thinking it to be one’s own)? I doubted that it might have been deliberate plagiarism, but the possibility did cross my mind (since at first I did not know who the author was or anything about the poem’s circumstances). Or was it independently created? But even if so, was the similarity excessive? I raised the issue with Geppo editor Betty Arnold, and she let me know that the poem’s author was Bruce H. Feingold. He has since explained how this poem arose out of his direct personal experience as a clinical psychologist. “I remember writing this haiku very vividly,” Bruce said in an email to me on 8 December 2016. “I wrote it several years ago on the spot when a patient told me about signing his wife’s DNR and relating how the pen, which is so light, felt so heavy in his hands.” Bruce also said that he was unaware of Yu’s poem when he wrote his, although he did say it was possible he might have seen it, though unlikely. Nevertheless, the poems do seem to have been written entirely independently. This is what I would expect with Bruce’s work, since I have the utmost respect for his integrity.

Yet still the similarity remains. Is it too much? Even though two poems may be written independently, at what point is similarity excessive? Can anyone be “first to the patent office” with haiku? This is a subjective question, and your feelings may differ if you wrote one or the other of the two poems in question (as a “victim” or “perpetrator”), or if you’re a third-party reader of both poems (an “innocent bystander”). Ultimately, what may seem excessive to one reader may not feel excessive to another, especially when these two poems aren’t alone. Indeed, other poems have been written along this vein. Betty asked Charles Trumbull to check his haiku database, and she sent me Charlie’s results, including two directly similar poems (with publication credits for the first one):

by the light of the pine do not resuscitate

John Stevenson, Roadrunner VIII:3, August 2008; this poem also appeared in Haiku 21, Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, eds., Modern Haiku Press, 2011, 165

“do not resuscitate”
moonlight outlines
a left-over cloud

        Mark Hollingsworth (previously unpublished)

John Stevenson and Yu Chang are both members of the Upstate Dim Sum haiku group, and we may wonder if Yu had seen John’s poem (published about a year before Yu’s, which Yu told me was written about his stepmother), and speculate on whether it was any influence on the later poem, but apparently not. John told me in an email of 5 January 2017 that “when I first read [Yu’s poem] (at one of our monthly Dim Sum sessions), I thought of two poems immediately. One was mine, and the other was an earlier poem of Yu’s: ‘lichened pine / my poet friend asks / for a pencil.’” It’s invigorating how poems resonate and echo like this, in personal ways, but they do seem to have been written independently. John also said, “I remember writing mine—vividly. And yet I would find it hard, and perhaps perverse, to attempt to explain it. I was staying at Jim Kacian’s house, in one of the guest rooms downstairs. Had turned the lights out and was about to go to sleep when the words came to me. I got up and wrote them down and then went back to bed. There was a pine tree outside the window and the window was open. Perhaps ‘do not resuscitate’ related to ‘stop thinking about everything and get some sleep.’ It came in one of those twilight moments of consciousness, which is not quite wakeful and not quite dreaming.” For his part, Mark Hollingsworth said in an email of 6 January 2017 that he wrote his poem on 27 January 2005. “I can’t recall if the incident was personal or professional (I am a pastor),” he said, “but I do recall the feeling after making the decision in the hospital, walking outside and seeing a lone small cloud in front of the moon, the front had passed and all the other clouds were far to the east.” He also said he wrote the following poem on 12 October 2005, almost a year later (also previously unpublished):

do not resuscitate
blot at the end
of her signature

And now, of course, the subject extends to Bruce’s poem, and beyond, and all of them seem to have been written independently. We can dwell in the serendipitous mystery of how they each came to be, and celebrate their shared subject, even if sad and traumatic.

Charlie’s haiku database results also included the following poems about a pen’s weight:

another death—
the weight
of a pen in my hand

        Carolyn Hall, Frogpond 34:3, Fall 2011

His hand trembles
On the will’s last page
Heavy gold pen

        Herb Batt, Brussels Sprout 11:1, January 1994

And surely there are more, and they reverberate with us because the point of haiku is to commemorate shared experience. These are simply shared subjects, much like sharing the same season word. Such similarities are usually of no concern, except to note that they may well enrich a poem if they help to bring to mind other poems that share the same season word or subject. This cross-pollinating resonance, in fact, is one of the virtues of the season-word tradition in Japanese haiku. Similarity or a common sharedness (provided that it does not go too far) adds possible reverberations to each poem and shows each haiku to be a part of a larger poetic conversation. DNR topics are clearly fraught with emotion, so it’s no wonder that the subject, difficult though it may be, would draw the attention of a number of haiku poets, especially those who may have to deal with these issues in a professional capacity, such as Mark as a pastor or Bruce as a psychologist.

What else are we to make of this similarity? One observation is that similarities between haiku are certainly not isolated, which I’ve written about extensively. A further example involves another of Bruce’s poems—although in this case his poem came first. The Autumn 2016 issue of Frogpond (39:3) carried this note: “Bruce H. Feingold’s poem, ‘Egotesticle,’ was a 2012 Haiku Now finalist in the Innovative Haiku Category, which should have precluded Cynthia Cechota’s submission, ‘egotesticle,’ from being published in Frogpond 39:2” (127). This is a polite way of saying that the similarity was excessive, and leaves aside the issue of whether the later poem was possibly plagiarized or (as I would hope) written independently. In this case, though, even if written independently, the second poem is excessively similar to the previous poem (only the capitalization differs), and thus it was rightly “withdrawn.”

I could cite many other examples, but here’s just one more, also very recent, starting with the following poem by Irish poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky, from his book Horizon (Red Moon Press, 2016, page 39). Prior to this book appearance, the poem appeared in World Haiku Review in August of 2012, so this poem is the earliest of the poems I’m about to discuss here.

unscheduled stop
a scarecrow welcomes us
with open arms

Compare this with the results of the 18th annual Haiku International Association haiku contest, which included the following honorable mention by Kwaku Feni Adow of Ghana:

arriving on the farm—
the open arms
of the scarecrow

It’s remarkably similar to the following poem by Arvinder Kaur, from India, from the September 2014 issue of Cattails, later published in her book, Dandelion Seeds, in 2015 (page 108):

homecoming—
a scarecrow’s open arms
in the fields

And in October of 2015, Shrikaanth K. Murthy (new editor of the British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit) won second place in the kigo category of the Shiki online kukai with the following poem, later appearing in Sailing into the Moon, the 2016 Haiku Canada members’ anthology, published in May 2016 (page 26):

returning home—
only the scarecrow
with open arms

Before commenting on Shrikaanth’s poem, let me share yet another scarecrow poem, by Duro Jaiye, published in Persimmon, the 2017 anthology from the Hailstone Haiku Circle based in Kyoto, Japan (edited by Stephen Henry Gill, page 24):

In the winter fields
beneath Mount Atago
a scarecrow with open arms

The number of these poems, about scarecrows with “open arms,” demonstrates that this expression (not just experience) is a common enough trope in haiku, but at what point do similar poems become excessively similar? And might earlier poems have inspired any of the later poems? Shrikaanth told me he submitted his poem to the Shiki kukai a month before Arvinder sent him a copy of her book, and that he believes he created his poem independently (he said he hadn’t seen the poem in Cattails, even though he’s now a proofreader for Cattails). So perhaps Shrikaanth’s and Arvinder’s poems are independently created, despite obvious similarities, but what about the poem by Kwaku Feni Adow? It’s impossible to know from the poem itself, and I doubt that much would be gained by asking the poet. Kwaku seems to be rather new to haiku, and I’ve seen others who are new to haiku who have “borrowed” haiku and passed them off as their own when they’re first learning to write, but I have no idea if that’s the situation here—I would rather assume independent creation. I do not see Kwaku’s poem as any kind of allusion to the earlier poems, but is it excessively similar? Indeed, is the similarity of all of these poems excessive? Or should we just note the shared subject—and perhaps even celebrate it—and move on? Ultimately, it’s our emotional responses to these situations that may matter most, especially when we may never know the facts of whether similar poems were created independently or not, and may interpret those facts differently even if we did know them for certain.

This is an issue I’ve been tracking for two decades. The Essays page on my Graceguts website has several essays on what I call “deja-ku,” as does my “Deja-ku Diary” blog. For many years, too, I’ve been maintaining a Deja-ku Database, and have classified many hundreds of examples in two broad categories. The bad kind include plagiarism, cryptomnesia (a sort of “accidental” plagiarism), and excessive similarity (which is the most subjective and hardest to define). The good kind include shared subjects or season words, allusion (or honkadori, as it’s called in Japan, which can include judicious borrowing of widely known content), parody, homage, and a couple of other less common varieties. A note about honkadori is that it’s also called allusive variation. A key point with this technique in Japanese haiku is that the variation of an earlier haiku is deliberate, and readers are expected to know the earlier poem—and thus all be in on the game, the way we all know the Shakespeare reference whenever we make creative variations of “to be or not to be.”

A side note here is that I was more concerned about Bruce’s DNR poem before I learned who the author was. As soon as I found out it was Bruce’s, his reputation, integrity, and profession as a psychiatrist all came into play—ruling out, for me, any possibility of plagiarism. This change of feeling as a result of learning the author’s name goes to show how the name under most haiku acts as a “fourth line,” providing information outside the poem that can inform and enlarge the poem, such as gender, nationality, and other details that readers may know about the author, including biography, geographical location, the type of haiku he or she usually writes (his or her “brand,” as it were), and more. The anonymous judging process used in Geppo and most haiku contests is completely defensible, of course, but I also like finding out who the author is, because that usually expands most poems for me, as was certainly the case for Bruce’s DNR poem.

There’s one more wrinkle to the DNR story. After Bruce H. Feingold’s haiku appeared in Geppo XLI:4 (August–October 2016), it was voted on as one of the top ten poems and was reprinted in the following issue, Geppo XLII:1 (November 2016–January 2017), page 9. And then another DNR haiku appeared in the next issue, in Geppo XLII:2 (February–April 2017), page 2, by Ruth Holzer:

Father’s Day—
he signs
the DNR form

The timing may have been a pure coincidence, but the poem might also have been reactionary, written in response to Feingold’s poem. Reaction poems are perfectly defensible, because poetry is, after all, a conversation, and the addition of “Father’s Day” adds a sad twist to the experience, whether real or imagined. A useful ambiguity also arises in the word “he”—does it mean a father signing the form on behalf of a child who is gravely ill? Or is a child signing the form on behalf of an aging or sick father? Either way, the “he” is surely signing the form as a father or for his father, making the date of this event especially poignant. On the deja-ku continuum, I would consider this poem to be a shared subject rather than excessive similarity or plagiarism.

As mentioned, we might easily assume that this new poem was written in direct reaction to the previous poem. However, in an email of 23 June 2017, Ruth told me that she wrote the poem “about seven years ago, directly from the experience,” and added that “when I read Bruce’s haiku [in Geppo], I thought hmm . . . that sounds something like mine—how we are all subject to the same misfortunes. Of course, I voted for it.” As sad as this experience is, there’s something celebratory in sharing such an experience—we are not alone.

Twenty years ago, I never spoke up about another case of deja-ku in the pages of Geppo, and I wish I had. It happened in Geppo XIX:4 (July–August 1996), page 2. Yvonne Hardenbrook offered the following poem:

carolina wren
its morning song larger
than itself

It ended up getting the top number of votes from readers of that issue (by far), and was reprinted in Geppo XIX:5 (September–October 1996), page 6, as the best poem of the issue. It bothered me that most readers were apparently unaware of its antecedent, by John Wills, which is one of his most famous poems:

larger
than the wren himself
the wren joy

The Wills poem appeared in the second edition of Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology (New York, Fireside, 1986, page 298). It also appeared in Wills’ book Reed Shadows (Burnt Lake Press/Black Moss Press, 1987, page 42), and was probably published prior to this in a journal. What’s more, I also featured the poem in my journal Woodnotes as the tribute poem to Wills when he died in 1993. Yvonne would have definitely seen at least two of these publications, if not all three (she was an avid Woodnotes subscriber and reader, and had also read Cor’s anthology). There is no way she couldn’t have read Wills’ poem before writing hers, and she told me that she obviously must have, even while defending her poem—she wrote me a two-page single-spaced letter explaining the circumstances of its composition, believing it to have been written independently. But I don’t believe it was, even if it was accidental. This, in my opinion, is a case of cryptomnesia, and it can be insidious because you think you’re writing something original when you’re not. The very real experience she had brought the Wills poem to mind, but as I see it she forgot that she was essentially remembering someone else’s work rather than writing something original—the way most of us, upon seeing a frog in a pond, might think of Bashō’s “old pond” poem (and typically also remember that it’s Bashō’s poem, not our own). I could imagine a case where Yvonne’s poem could have been written independently, but not when there is irrefutable evidence (that she herself acknowledged) that she had read the original Wills poem in at least two prominent places.

Yvonne’s poem may be an accidental sort of plagiarism, but cryptomnesia is still plagiarism, and we should be watchful for it—in the haiku we read and in the haiku we write. Similarity to previous poems is an occupational hazard for the haiku poet, and it will happen to all of us at one time or another, whether we’re “victims,” “perpetrators,” or “innocent bystanders.” The “accidental plagiarism” of cryptomnesia is especially likely to happen with poems as short as haiku, and thus we should be forgiving towards such situations (up to a point). Aside from the deliberate similarity of allusion or parody, it is even likely that we will unintentionally write in a similar way about shared subjects—there are only so many ways to crack an egg. As the poet Dobby Gibson says in his book Polar, “It may be true that everything / has already been said, / but it’s just as true that not everyone / has had a chance to say it.” The trick is to take your turn at saying something but to do it in as fresh a way as possible. We can’t always know what’s fresh, of course, but we can do our best.

The good news is that most cases of deja-ku are positive, such as sharing the same subject or season word, or in alluding to or parodying another poem. In the case of Bruce Feingold’s striking “DNR” poem, like Yu Chang’s and the other poignant examples, the moment resonates so deeply it’s no wonder that more than one person has written about it.