INTRODUCTION: Warming Up
Baseball Haiku presents more than two hundred of the best haiku about baseball ever written by American and Japanese poets. Haiku and baseball were made for each other: While haiku give us moments in which nature is linked to human nature, baseball is played in the midst of the natural elements—on a field under an open sky; and as haiku happen in a timeless now, so does baseball, for there is no clock ticking in a baseball game—the game’s not over until the last out.
The few words of a haiku can bring to life a pitcher rotating the ball behind his back as he looks in at the catcher’s sign or they can reveal the over-confidence of a rookie getting picked off at first. Haiku can also find meaningful moments in the stands or even in a passageway to the locker room where all we hear as a player leaves the last game of his career is the sound of his cleats echoing on the floor.
Fans of haiku will want this book for its outstanding haiku. Fans of baseball will want it for the way the haiku let them relive the joys and the sorrows of the game. The unforgettable images that pop up out of the pages of this collection capture the actions and atmospheres, the moods and tensions, the weathers and memories of America’s national pastime—and Japan’s.
Haiku often relate us to nature by invoking one of the four seasons, either by naming the season or by suggesting it. Baseball, too, is a game for all seasons. It is played in the spring, summer, and fall, and is enjoyed in retrospect during the winter. When participants and fans read about and discuss the game during the “off-season” they are in what is called “the hot stove league,” from the days when people used to sit around a stove in the back of a country store or tavern to talk baseball. Baseball haiku follow that tradition, they help us to relive significant moments and aspects of the game. And they, too, can be enjoyed year-round.
In an essay on baseball haiku written for and read at a National Baseball Hall of Fame conference in 2001, Edward J. Rielly, one of the poets in this anthology, points out how fitting a topic baseball is for haiku:
Baseball is an especially appropriate subject for haiku…Haiku usually seek some union of nature and humanity, and baseball grew out of a pastoral setting. The game still retains something of that natural setting, even in modern stadiums, but more so in minor league parks (the term “ballpark” itself recalls the game’s origins) where the diamond is outdoors, the fans close to the field, the grass real, the dirt rises in small puffs as the runner slides into base, and trees and hills loom beyond the fences. So, among the major team sports, it is baseball that most clearly touches the natural world that is a vital dimension of haiku.
In Japanese haiku, to ensure nature is present in the poem it must contain what is called a season word or kigo. For traditionalists, this is a rule: if there is no kigo the poem is not a haiku. The kigo is a word that tells a reader in which season the moment evoked in the haiku is taking place. It can be the name of the season or it can be a word like “snow” to indicate winter, or “cherry blossoms” to indicate spring. The word nait
(“nah-ee-taahh,” the Japanese adaptation of the coined English word “nighter,” meaning “night game”) indicates summer. It and the word “baseball” itself (either yaky
or b
sub
ru), also suggesting summer, are the only kigo directly referring to the game that are listed in Japanese haiku almanacs or saijiki. (The word “baseball” is also listed as a seasonal topic or kidai.) That may be one reason so many Japanese baseball haiku seem to be about night games. The season words are arranged in such almanacs, along with haiku demonstrating their use, so that poets and readers alike can know which season custom and usage has dictated that a particular word will represent. Japanese poets have been using baseball as a subject for their haiku since 1890.
American haiku poets work in a less regimented fashion. They might imply, suggest, or actually name a season in their haiku, but they don’t have to use a prescribed season word. They do have traditional indicators of seasons, however. A robin can suggest spring, a firecracker the Fourth of July, football autumn, and ice skates winter. Whether or not an American haiku poet always names or suggests a season in his haiku, nature will always be present, even if it is not immediately apparent. American poets in general take a freer approach to haiku than do their Japanese counterparts, just as American baseball players have a more relaxed, less rigid style of playing and training than most Japanese players.
Just as they do not have a kigo rule, the best writers of haiku in America rarely write in seventeen syllables. They write a free-verse haiku that usually has less. Trying to write haiku in seventeen syllables in English often results in using unnecessary words to fill out the count. Such words will destroy a haiku, which depends on concision and suggestibility for its effect. [The Japanese count syllables differently than we do—they count shorter elements, onji, as “syllables.” The word “haiku,” for example, is three onji, while we count it as two syllables. Ten to fourteen English syllables equal the time duration of seventeen Japanese onji.]
The passage of time in a baseball game also relates to haiku. Haiku is about the present moment: now. That is why almost all haiku are in the present tense. The present moment holds within it all time. For it is in all time, including past and future, where “now” occurs. The haiku moment expands into the infinite, for the reader is made one with all of nature through the particular aspect of nature to which the haiku relates him. This may be one reason R. H. Blyth (1898–1964), the most important translator of Japanese haiku into English, and others have asserted that “haiku is Zen.” Time in baseball by its slow pace and open-endedness—there is no time limit as in other team sports—also makes it possible for us to experience those special moments during the game that are haiku moments. Again, Edward J. Rielly:
The pace of baseball permits fans to view the game in distinct moments rather than as a blur of action or a complex fusion of bodies whose individual motions are almost impossible to decipher. Fans watch the individual fielder or batter, the baseball rising toward left field, the pitcher starting his windup, the graceful shortstop flying through the air to encircle a liner in his glove, the fleet runner stealing a base. Even when more than one player is involved, as in a double play, the viewer easily follows the movement from player to player, the experience so readily divisible into its component moments that the parts may even be immortalized (Tinker to Evers to Chance). These are moments that invite reflection and haiku.
And since haiku can present these moments in the present—in the now—no matter when they originally occurred, we can preserve moments from the past, either from games we have watched years earlier or from the memories of our own days on the diamonds of our youth. We can reexperience both the special and the most common elements of baseball as happening right now. For the lover of baseball, the common elements of the game are special, too—even something as simple as a long-ago game of catch.
Included along with the haiku in this book are poems in a related genre called senryu. Some poets even consider senryu a kind of haiku. They have the same form and both come out of the same tradition of Japanese linked verse (renga) and they are both concerned with an awareness of the world and the life around us. But where haiku relate us to nature, senryu make us more aware of human nature itself. For this reason, they are often humorous. American haiku poets write both haiku and senryu. Examples of senryu in this book are Alan Pizzarelli’s “struck out—/ back in the dugout / he kicks the water cooler” and Mike Dillon’s “the last kid picked / running his fastest / to right field.”
Pizzarelli, a major haiku poet, does a regular senryu section for the online magazine simplyhaiku.com and is himself one of America’s leading senryu poets. One of his best-known senryu is “done / the shoeshine boy / snaps his rag.” It is a senryu because it is about human nature—about how one can take pride in a work of perfection, whether it’s a world-renowned symphony, a perfect curve, or a flawless shoeshine. There is, too, a touch of humor in the poem.
Until modern times in Japan haiku poets usually wrote only haiku, poems that followed the rules requiring seventeen syllables, a kigo, and a kireji (kireji are “cutting words” used for pauses or emphasis with no literal meaning, but possessing an emotional coloring); and senryu poets wrote only senryu, poems also requiring seventeen syllables, but not a kigo (though they may have them), nor kireji. For some time there have been signs that this division among Japanese poets is changing (Blyth noted the trend about fifty years ago), that is, some poets are writing both (though when a Japanese haiku poet writes a senryu, he will probably still call it a haiku). The eminent translator and scholar of Japanese poetry, Hiroaki Sato, recently described one way the distinction between the two has become blurred: the poem is often defined by who wrote it rather than what is in it because “if the author is known to write haiku, the pieces he or she writes are haiku; if the author is known to write senryu, the pieces she or he writes are senryu” (Modern Haiku, vol. 34.1, 2003). However, we have not included any Japanese baseball senryu in this book. Those we were able to find by senryu poets didn’t seem to us to get to the spirit and essence of the game. They were more like journalistic comments or jokes, usually about players or teams in the news, or ephemeral topics that will be forgotten by next season.
The First Baseball Haiku
The story of baseball haiku begins with Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), who was to become the fourth pillar in Japan’s pantheon of great haiku masters (joining Bash
, Buson, and Issa). Shiki was only five years old and living on the island of Shikoku when baseball was being first taught to Japanese students in Tokyo by Horace Wilson. An American teacher at what is now Tokyo University, Wilson introduced the game there in 1872. It became very popular with both the students and faculty at the school. It soon spread to other schools and to amateur athletic clubs in the Tokyo area, and gradually from there to the rest of the country.
Shiki left his hometown of Matsuyama on Shikoku in 1883 and went to Tokyo to further his education. In 1884 he was accepted at Daigaku Yobimon (University Preparatory School). By this time baseball was already popular at the school. Shiki discovered the game there and immediately fell in love with it, so much so that his friends called him “baseball mad.” He and a fellow classmate, Iwaoka, alternated with each other in playing pitcher and catcher for their school team. Catcher was Shiki’s favorite position even though he threw left-handed, unusual for someone working behind the plate. It is said that he even practiced his catching technique in his room.
Shiki was so enthusiastic about baseball that when he went back to his hometown in the summer of 1889, he brought with him a ball and bat as a present for his friend Kawahigashi Hekigot (1873–1937) and taught him the game. The next year, he also taught Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) how to play baseball. Hekigot and Kyoshi would both become famous haiku poets, beginning as disciples of Shiki. After the master’s early death in 1902, they became leaders of their own schools of haiku.
Shiki not only taught baseball to his friends, but is credited with having been the first to introduce it to his hometown of Matsuyama, and thus to the island of Shikoku. His writings on baseball later helped to popularize the game throughout Japan. The first baseball haiku we have by Shiki—by anyone—were written in 1890. He wrote four that year. Here is one of them: spring breeze / this grassy field makes me / want to play catch. We have a total of nine baseball haiku from his pen, or brush, and we’ve included them all in this book. Here is one he wrote in 1898:
natsukusa ya bsubru no hito tshi
summer grass
baseball players far off
in the distance
In 1889, Shiki was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was no longer able to play for the school team. The following year, he went as a spectator to see the team play Meiji-gakuin University (a Christian college). His friend Iwaoka was pitching, but their school lost. Shiki recorded his disappointment in his writings. He was the first Japanese writer to use baseball as a literary subject. Besides composing haiku, tanka, and fiction related to baseball, he also wrote essays about it. In an article for the newspaper Nippon, in 1896, he described the game’s rules and equipment, and even translated baseball terms from English into Japanese. Here is one of his tanka (lyric poems slightly longer than haiku) written in 1898 (he wrote ten tanka on baseball, all in 1898 or 1899):
hisakata no Amerika bito no hajime nishi
bsubru wa mire do akanu kamo
under a faraway sky
the people of America
began baseball
I can watch it
forever
Tanka does not seem to be as adaptable to baseball as haiku. Its lyric, romantic style leads the poet to generalize about the subject, rather than to create details that can represent in vivid fashion the spirit of the game. The longer form—traditionally tanka has thirty-one syllables (onji) to the haiku’s seventeen—seems to get in the way of the action. There is a tendency to go on rhapsodizing about the subject, which can result in banalities.
Even a great poet like Shiki could not capture the essence of the game in tanka the way he did in haiku. The one just quoted, while expressing an admirable sentiment, is simply a comment on the game and not a re-creation of any of its aspects. When he describes an aspect of the game in a tanka, it, too, is generalized and lacks any visual snap: a high fly ball / having shot up to the clouds / drops back down again/ to wind up in the glove / of the waiting fielder.
Shiki never lost his love for the sport. There still exists a photograph of him in his school baseball uniform. A large reproduction of the picture is prominantly displayed in the Shiki-Kinen (Shiki Memorial) Haiku Museum in Matsuyama in a wall-size glass case along with copies of the haiku and tanka he wrote about baseball. For his contributions to baseball Shiki was elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002, the 144th to be chosen since the Hall of Fame was begun in 1959. Horace Wilson, the American credited with introducing baseball to Japan in 1872, is also in the Hall of Fame—elected in 2003.
Other Japanese Haiku Poets and Baseball
Following Shiki’s personal output of nine baseball haiku, baseball as a subject in Japanese haiku seems to have been fairly rare until the advent of night games sometime in the 1930s or ’40s and the subsequent development of the word nait (nighter) as a season word for summer. And baseball haiku are still fairly uncommon.
After his death Shiki’s disciples gradually parted from each other. Differing in their ideas about haiku and how to write them, they moved in different directions not only in the methods they used, but often in the subject matter they chose to write about. In Japanese haiku an acknowledged master usually becomes the head of a group, the members of which try to follow that master’s ideas of what is the best way to write haiku. The leader is called sensei (literally “teacher,” but often translated as “master”). When he dies, one of his pupils usually takes over as leader while others may leave to form their own groups. The two most important of Shiki’s disciples were Kawahigashi Hekigoto and Takahama Kyoshi. As noted above, Shiki had not only been their haiku mentor but had also taught them the game of baseball. Hekigoto took over Shiki’s job as editor of the haiku pages in the newspaper Nippon, thus becoming the most influential haiku poet and critic in the country. Kyoshi at first began to concentrate his energy on writing novels and essays, leaving the leadership of the haiku world to Hekigot.
Shiki had revitalized haiku in Japan by introducing modern subjects and the use of a more contemporary language than the classical haiku allowed. Hekigot opened up haiku to more experimentation than even Shiki had countenanced. He not only said haiku could use everyday language about any subject—new or old—but that they could be written in more or fewer than seventeen syllables. Traditionally the seventeen syllables are written in a single vertical line, but are in grammatical units of 5-7-5, which is why they are usually translated into three lines. Haiku has to be a short poem, but Hekigot by writing some of his with more than twenty syllables was dangerously close to creating a “regular” free-verse poem. He did retain a fondness for the season word and felt a haiku should—at least usually—have one.
One of his followers, Ogiwara Seisensui (1884–1976), took the idea of a “free” haiku even further and advocated rejecting both the seventeen-syllable form and the season word. He also borrowed from Western poetics such modern techniques as symbolism, surrealism, and impressionism to widen haiku’s horizons and give it new vitality. Following in his line of development were such barrier-breakers as Ozaki H sai (1885–1926), Taneda Santka (1882–1940), and Nakatsuka Ippekir (1887–1946) in the first half of the twentieth century; and Tohta Kaneko (b.1919) and Natsuishi Ban’ya (b. 1955) in the last half and into the twenty-first century.
We might expect such poets to have written at least once about baseball in their haiku, but though we have one baseball haiku from Hekigot we have found none from Seisensui or from any of the others. Both Santka and Hsai led monklike lives and their haiku are often about wandering in the mountains or living simply in a hut. However, Hsai did write a haiku about the sport of sumo wrestling. Ippekir, one of the most radical innovators, wrote a haiku about rugby, but none that we know of on baseball.
Tohta has written haiku about motorcycles, and such sports as boxing and soccer, but none on baseball that we could find. Natsuishi, though he writes about everything from Japanese mythology to boomerangs and atomic bombs, along with allusions to contemporary Western literature and a generous use of graphically explicit sexual imagery and symbolist obscurity, also seems not to have written directly about baseball. He does have one haiku about playing ball (tama asobi), which may refer to baseball, perhaps a game of catch. It opens with an image of a cloud in a wide sky forming the shape of a manji (swastika) and concludes: “so I play ball.”
These poets who came after Seisensui took haiku into an avant-garde mode that has become a special haiku category in Japan: gendai (modern) haiku. The Gendai Haiku Association in Japan has over eight thousand members.
Alongside the strain of avant-garde haiku poets that branched out from Hekigot, a more traditional line developed from Shiki’s other major disciple, Kyoshi. Though he himself may have not brought the subject of baseball into his haiku (we have not found any), a number of haiku poets that were at first influenced by his more conservative poetics and later broke away from his group did write baseball haiku. After some years of concentrating his literary talents on trying to write novels, Kyoshi returned to making haiku his main focus in 1912 and immediately responded in a reactionary way to what Hekigot and his followers were doing. Alarmed by the free rein these radicals were taking with the genre, he set out to try to return haiku to the traditional conventions he felt really defined haiku as haiku. He had taken over the editorship of Shiki’s magazine Hototogisu (Cuckoo), but had been using it mainly to publish prose. He now returned it to haiku. Using the time-honored image of “plum blossoms and bush warblers” as a symbol of all the conventions that went together to create the classical haiku, he began rallying a large following and soon his school of thought came to dominate haiku. It still dominates in spite of the very talented and vocal poets who are active outside the boundaries of this mainstream. Five-seven-five, kigo, and kireji are all thought to be essential characteristics of haiku by the vast majority of Japanese haiku poets.
Among the most important of the haiku poets temporarily taking their stand with Kyoshi and then opting for a more original kind of haiku was Mizuhara Sh
shi (1892–1981). He broke with Kyoshi’s group (which was still gathered under the banner of Hototogisu) around 1930 to join with a group of younger poets associated with the magazine Ashibi (Andromeda). He wanted a more lyrical and imaginative haiku than he felt the traditionalists would allow. In 1935, he was joined by another deserter from the Kyoshi ranks, Yamaguchi Seishi (1901–1994), who wanted to include the things of the industrial age in his haiku such as trains, cars, guns, and elevators. He also wrote about a number of sports borrowed from the West, including rugby, golf, skating, and baseball. Shshi and Seishi lived in big cities and wrote about urban life, including big-league baseball games. Shshi is represented in this book by two night-game haiku plus a remarkable five-haiku sequence about an afternoon at the Meiji-Jingu Stadium, Tokyo’s most traditional ballpark; and Seishi by five night-game haiku, one about a black ballplayer, probably one of the American ex-major leaguers who have played professional ball in Japan.
Also in line from Kyoshi is Akimoto Fujio (1901–1977), who was influenced by Seishi and joined that poet’s group in 1948. A year later he formed his own group, Hykai (Frozen Sea). There is one baseball haiku of his included here, an unusual juxtaposition of a night game with a natural scene at a distant pond.
The rest of the Japanese poets represented in this book are an assortment of mavericks and traditionalists, some who to a large degree have found their own way in haiku after early influences and others who have started off with established masters and remained loyal to those roots. Yamazaki Hisao (b. 1927) studied under Kishi Fusanro, who had been a follower of Seishi. His haiku about a baseball scorecard takes a very simple object with a complicated set of meanings and presents it vividly to reflect the excitement of the game. Takaha Shugy (b. 1930) first wrote under the influence of Seishi and then studied with Akimoto Fujio. His haiku have an “intellectual lyricism,” according to one critic. His evocation of the grass on a baseball diamond lets us feel it right under our feet. Arima Akito’s (b.1930) mentor was Yamaguchi Seison (1892–1988), who was in a line from Kyoshi. Arima has written only one baseball haiku. It evokes the coolness in the stands of a famous baseball stadium, Kshien near Osaka. Hoshino Tsunehiko (b.1935) has cotranslated Takaha into English and has worked in the International Department of the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo for a number of years. His baseball haiku comes from observing his son learning to play the game.
Imai Sei (b. 1950) has nine baseball haiku in this book, which all demonstrate his ability to catch the telling details in any scene he is re-creating. He has been influenced by both Shiki’s haiku technique of sketching from nature and the works of Western poets like Ezra Pound and the Imagists. The originality of his baseball haiku is perhaps partly due to his rarely depending on the kigo nait (only two of them use it). Yotsuya Ry (b. 1958) has been influenced by the free-style haiku of Ippekir and by modern French poetry. We have two baseball haiku by Yotsuya: one about a game of catch on the beach and another that celebrates his baseball glove and green fields.
Taki Shun’ichi (1902–1996), a follower of Shshi who broke with him for a while to write muki (no season word) haiku, Ozawa Seiyushi (1912–1945), who is considered a gendai poet, Kadokawa Genyoshi (1917–1975), who championed lyricism in haiku, and Suzuki Murio (1919–2004) were all original and innovative poets. Though each has only one or two baseball haiku in this anthology, they are extra-base hits worthy of the great games of baseball and haiku. Though we have probably missed many other baseball haiku written by Japanese poets, what we have found amounts to a literary treasure for baseball and haiku fans alike.
The First American Baseball Haiku
The first American baseball haiku was written by Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) more than a half century after Shiki’s pioneering poems. In fact, Kerouac was one of the first American writers to write haiku on any subject. Though haiku were written about in English, and even translated, as early as the late nineteenth century, they had not been recognized as serious or important literature. One early translator even referred to haiku as “epigrams” and thought they were light verse of the most insignificant sort.
By the time of the Imagists in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, haiku had gained a bit more respect, but writers in English, possessing only inadequate translations, still misunderstood the genre. The Imagists did bring the ideals of concision and clarity into English-language poetry as a result of their partial knowledge of haiku, but the birth of real haiku in English had to wait until the second half of the century. Most early translators were in fact baffled by haiku’s brevity and padded out their translations with too many words, trying to explain the haiku instead of just translating it. Some put them into seventeen syllables, which, as we have already noted, can cause problems. The evocativeness of the Japanese haiku was lost through the translators’ wordiness.
It wasn’t until after World War II, when the perceptive and accurate translations of Harold G. Henderson (1889–1974) and R. H. Blyth were published, that American poets had the chance to understand haiku and were able to write their own. One of the first to do so was Gary Snyder, at the time a fledgling poet with an intense interest in the literatures of Japan and China, in Buddhism, and American Indian cultures. Snyder obtained all four volumes of Blyth’s Haiku, published from 1949 to 1952. Jack Kerouac mentions seeing them in 1955 when he and Snyder first met. They were on a shelf in Snyder’s shack in Berkeley. Snyder had probably obtained them shortly after their publication, for we know he was experimenting with haiku as early as 1952, when he wrote some in his journal while fire watching on Crater Mountain in the Cascades.
Besides introducing Kerouac to Blyth’s books, Snyder helped teach him how to write haiku. In The Dharma Bums (1958) Kerouac reports that Snyder (called Japhy Ryder in the novel) told him, “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing,” and that he then quoted a haiku by Masaoka Shiki: “The sparrow hops / Along the verandah, / With wet feet.” (It is a translation by Blyth.) “You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind,” added Snyder, “and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.”
After Kerouac learned about haiku he continued to write and experiment with them until his death fourteen years later. Notes for his haiku were often first jotted down in the small notebooks he carried in the pocket of his checkered lumberjack shirt. He had already been using them to make quick sketches in prose for his novels.
Snyder used his knowledge of haiku to write a different kind of poetry and he has become one of America’s most important writers on nature and the environment. The other Beat writers either did not attempt haiku or were not very good at it. At various times, Allen Ginsberg tried his hand at haiku, even publishing a small chapbook of them, but they are mostly unexceptional. He wrote none on baseball. Nor, as far as we know, has Snyder ever written any.
Kerouac had practically no contact with the American haiku movement and only a few of his haiku saw print during his lifetime. He wrote what is probably the first American baseball haiku sometime around 1958. It first “appeared” on a recording, Blues and Haikus, in 1959. Kerouac read more than thirty of his haiku on this recording, with Zoot Sims and Al Cohn taking turns playing short jazz comments on the saxophone after each one. The haiku were not printed in the notes with the album. This is the haiku:
Empty baseball field
—A robin,
Hops along the bench
Though this haiku does not directly present aspects of the game itself, Kerouac manages to evoke a combination of emotional feelings that we can associate with the game. First there is the lonely feeling called up by the emptiness of the field, then the contrasting sense of promise provided by the entrance of the robin—a sign of spring indicating that ballplayers will also soon appear on the field. Kerouac brought baseball into his haiku, because he wanted to make American haiku. As far as we know, he never knew of Shiki’s baseball haiku, nor any other baseball haiku. Blyth does not include any in his books. Translations of Shiki’s baseball haiku did not appear in English until many years later. Janine Beichman in her book Masaoka Shiki, published in 1982, translates one of Shiki’s baseball tanka, but does not mention his baseball haiku. The first record we’ve been able to find of an English translation of a Shiki baseball haiku is in a book published by the Matsuyama Shiki-Kinen Museum in 1986, Shiki and Matsuyama. [See the Book List.] Kerouac wrote only one other baseball haiku, which we also include in this book.
Jack Kerouac was a baseball player for both his high school and prep school teams. He played in the outfield and threw and batted right-handed. Where he really excelled, however, was in football. He was a star on the gridiron in high school and at the Horace Mann School for Boys, a preparatory school in New York City where Columbia University sent him for a year (1939–40). He entered the university on a football scholarship in the fall of 1940, but injuries plagued him and the promise of a great college football career was never realized.
He wrote one football haiku. It too relates to the loneliness of an empty playing field. It has the feeling of sabi, the bittersweet sadness of being alone in time, an element valued in haiku by the Japanese masters. The season is, of course, autumn:
Crossing the football field,
coming home from work,
The lonely businessman
Other American Haiku Poets and Baseball
In American haiku there is no system of masters and disciples such as exists in Japanese haiku. For the pioneers of American haiku, and those who have followed, the main teachers have been the great translators of Japanese haiku. A number of American poets found Blyth’s books around the same time as Kerouac or shortly afterward. Cor van den Heuvel discovered haiku—and Blyth’s books—after hearing Gary Snyder talk about short poems at a poets’ gathering in San Francisco in 1958.
The first haiku magazine to be published in English, American Haiku, was started in Wisconsin in 1963 and the Haiku Society of America began in New York City in 1968. The Haiku Society was one of the first groups to study and write haiku in the United States and it was started by Harold G. Henderson and Leroy Kanterman, the editor of one of the earliest English-language haiku magazines, Haiku West. Cor van den Heuvel and Alan Pizzarelli first met at one of the Society’s meetings in the early 1970s.
The Haiku Society later helped to spawn groups all over the United States and Canada. There are now regional divisions and smaller haiku-workshop groups within the Society, but there are many independent groups as well. Many of the poets in this book belong to such groups. Cor van den Heuvel, Bruce Kennedy, and Brenda Gannam belong to the Spring Street Haiku Group, which meets at Poets House in New York City. Gannam, whose senryu rival our best stand-up comics, is its coordinator. Jim Kacian has been involved with the Towpath Haiku Group, in the Washington, D.C., area, while at the same time being an influential figure in international haiku as poet, editor, publisher, and proselytizer. His haiku about a catcher’s returning the ball to the mound after an inning-ending strike lights up one of the pages further on in this book. John Stevenson and Tom Clausen belong to a very small haiku group, four or five poets, in upstate New York called the Dim Sum Haiku Group. They meet in a Chinese restaurant. Michael Dylan Welch was once active with the Haiku Poets of Northern California. Now in the Seattle area, he is involved with the Northwest Regional Group of the HSA. Raffael de Gruttola helped found the Boston Haiku Society in 1987. He has also served as president of the HSA, as have several other poets represented in this anthology. Some of his baseball haiku come from watching Red Sox games.
These groups are not headed by masters or sensei. Though the larger groups have officers for administrative purposes, the smaller groups, where the writing and critical work goes on, usually have only members, one of whom will be simply a “coordinator.” That person will arrange for a meeting place and may moderate the meetings. Though some major haiku poets are known to have influenced other poets, they have rarely been considered “masters” in the traditional Japanese sense. Many Midwest haiku poets were influenced by the innovative haiku poet Father Raymond Roseliep (1917–1983), who taught at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He seems not to have written about baseball, but Lee Gurga, Randy Brooks, and Edward J. Rielly who have, and are in this book, all looked to Roseliep at one time or another for inspiration. Haiku poets also help each other with their creative efforts by conferring by e-mail or regular mail as well as through group meetings.
Arizona Zipper was one of the first poets after Kerouac to put baseball in haiku. His “Hopping over the mound” was written in 1981. Another early bird with baseball haiku was Alan Pizzarelli, who published a folded broadside in 1988 called Baseball Poems. It was a sequence of nine haiku and senryu about the game. Since then, a large number of American haiku poets have tried to capture baseball moments in their haiku and senryu. Bud Goodrich, who has published many fine senryu on the game, wrote one as early as 1992. His “Squeeze play” first appeared in the Midwest Haiku Anthology that year. Cor van den Heuvel, though he had been writing haiku as early as 1959, didn’t publish any baseball haiku until 1993, when several of them appeared in the haibun (prose with haiku) “A Boy’s Seasons” in Modern Haiku.
One of the most prolific and perceptive creators of American baseball haiku is Ed Markowski, who has twenty-one base hits in this book. He started writing haiku in 1989, but didn’t publish any of them until 2001. His haiku about box scores, the hot-stove league, and dingers bring aspects of the game before us more vividly in just a few words than do many of the celebrated essays of famed sportswriters.
Michael Ketchek writes tellingly about what it can feel like to strike out, and even gives us a nostalgic moment from a game of Wiffle Ball in a long-ago driveway. Dan McCullough didn’t start writing haiku until the year 2000. His baseball haiku, however, are worthy of a veteran. From the field where his closer shakes his head in the rain to a barroom where the game takes on a new perspective, McCullough captures moments of the national pastime that awaken the imagination.
Also relative rookies in the haiku game, Mathew V. Spano (his first published haiku was in 1996) and Chad Lee Robinson (first published haiku 2003) have already demonstrated more than just promise on the haiku diamond. Spano knows how to relate nature to the game and to the poetic form with his chill wind in the bleachers and with the lonely night of his home run ball. While Robinson has only one haiku here, it’s a hit that shines through the words and the night like the game of baseball shines in the hearts of its fans.
All the American poets in these pages, rookies and veterans, are exceptional. We have included one Canadian star as well, George Swede. Keeping in mind how Canadian players and even Canadian ball clubs have contributed to the glory of the U.S. major leagues, we count ourselves lucky to have a great pitcher of haiku like George decorating our roster.
As with the Japanese haiku poets, we may have missed some good baseball haiku by American and Canadian haiku poets, but here is a representative selection by some of the top players in the game, both in Japan and North America.