Mike Knowles • Cap'n Brooks & Haiku Crew kasen renga: Wednesdays Alan Pizzarelli's Dark Haiku

KINDLING A collection of Haiku by Mike Knowles So I guess the first question is: Why write haiku? My answer, at first, was because I had to. I think that poetry is essential to understanding one another and I think, as a writer, it's damn near required. Haiku offers something that other poetry can't. It gives you just enough space to make something marvelous or really damned terrible. There's not a lot of room for error so it engages your language capabilities more. I really like that kind of challenge. I guess, if I had to sum these haiku up, I would say they're just about little moments in my life. I had to get to a different place mentally than I was at to render these. They required a certain attention to wonder that I didn't have before. I think the ones on each page are related to one another. I called the collection "Kindling" because it acts as the start of something else; it's the spark and crease of flame that consumes a forest.