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Tombo: A Dragonfly of American Haiku
by Andy Jones
Lorraine Ellis Harr was an American haiku poet whose simple yet deep haiku are something of a hidden treasure. She was born in Illinois in 1912 and throughout her life lived in North Dakota and Oregon. Early in her life Harr had been labeled as a poet in school. Her love of poetry transformed into a passion for haiku when Harr entered a haiku contest in 1964 and won.
Harr became a figure in the American haiku scene within a decade of that one contest. She became the editor of the “Haiku Highlights” magazine and changed the title to “Dragonfly: A Quarterly of Haiku” in 1972. Her choice of title was based off of her penname, Tombo, which means dragonfly in Japanese. She also formed the Western World Haiku Society with which she gave guidance to aspiring haiku writers through connections in Portland and Japan.
Much of Harr’s later life was devoted to many haiku related arts. She learned the Japanese art of flower arranging called ikebana and Chinese brush painting. Harr combined some of her brush paintings with her haiku resulting in a collection of her own haiga.
Until the end of her life, Harr preferred to produce her haiku in her own traditional fashion: on a typewriter and copied with a mimeograph machine. Harr lived to the age of 93, surviving her first and third husbands and one of her sons. Before her death, Harr published 15 books with a number of haiku translated into a number of languages including Japanese and French.
The haiku that were produced by Harr’s life represent everything simple. The term “simple” here means that Harr focused on the reality of an object or event instead of making symbolic allusions. An example of this is from her book The Red Barn:
The farm boy
finds the hidden nest—
a dozen warm eggs
Harr, TRB, 21
This haiku represents nothing more than that pure moment when a boy is emptying the hens’ nests and discovers a pile of eggs hidden beneath some hay. All the things that this poem implies are good illustrations of what Harr leaves unsaid. The picture includes hens clucking around the boy’s legs, their brown and white bodies contrasting against the blue denim of his overalls. The smell of hay fills the air of the dusty light of the brown hen house.
The techniques Harr chose to employ in her haiku were simple yet effective. The one she seemed the most adamant about was the idea of the syllables being 5-7-5. Harr did not always stick to this technique, but she valued it a an artistic process much akin to modern artists who followed a process rather than focusing on the final product. The difference between that art and Harr’s poems is that she did value the final product and her content such as in the following haiku from her book Cats Crows Frogs and Scarecrows:
Scent of new-mown hay
a sliver of moon-and then
cricket serenade!
Harr, CCF&S, 9
She achieved the 5-7-5 syllable scheme while still creating her minimalistic style. The haiku creates a very picturesque scene which appeals to several senses. The simple way she makes the reader smell the hay by telling them it’s there perfectly illustrates her upfront way of describing things. She wanted the reader to smell fresh hay, to see a thin crescent moon, and then to hear crickets chirping in the night. The reader also feels the summer warmth in that night because the crickets are still around. This is a haiku technique called the kigo, a seasonal item.
Harr enjoyed the usage of a kigo throughout her entire collection of snow haiku in Snowflakes in the Wind. She revealed in her preface that she enjoyed going caroling in winter and was inspired to write a collection on that love. In the following example, she includes snow to add to her scene:
Snow on the wind gusts;
Around the scarecrow’s legs blow
tatters of old pants
Harr, SITW, 9
Her minimalist haiku is simply presenting a decrepit scarecrow in the snow. This is one of her haiku that is symbolic, symbolic of cold and barrenness of winter. The harsh winter that has robbed everything else of life is now ripping through the scarecrow, the defender of life.
The previous haiku also employed one of Harr’s favorite themes to write about, the scarecrow. Ever since Harr was read The Wizard of Oz in elementary school she was infatuated with scarecrows because of Frank L. Baum’s character. This whimsical character appears in many of her haiku, perhaps as her favorite subject. The following haiku shows Harr’s feelings of the playfulness of a scarecrow:
Scarecrow plays maestro
keeping time to fluting winds
while cornstalks sway.
Harr, CCF&S, 30
This haiku simply captures the playfulness of Baum’s scarecrow. One can easily imagine the classic scarecrow meeting Dorothy and conducting his field of corn. The idea of a brainless straw man leading a symphony is quaint and brings back the child-like awe of things. Perhaps Harr was playing at that meeting of a girl and a scarecrow, she sees the wind blow the straw arms and she thinks it’s moving. This simple and pure style is why Harr was so successful at what she did.
Harr was more than just a haiku artist. As stated earlier, she was an accomplished Chinese brush painter. Sometimes she experimented with the haiga technique and paired her own paintings with her haiku. An example of this through a sequence of seven haiku from her book 70 Sevens:
Full Moon
 Under a full moon
the smell of pear blossoms
from the orchard
Harvest moon:
Walnuts drop from the tree
roll down the roof
The full moon—
it even brightens up
the town dump
Moon filled night:
Even the cricket’s song
has brightened
 Garden pool:
In moonlight, the goldfish
roil in the water
Full moon:
reflections on the quiet sea
on the quiet dunes
Clouds that cross the moon
cross the moon’s reflection—
in the autumn pool
Tombo, 70S, 38-39
Her simple ink paintings do not detract from the reader’s response or force an image in. The simple moon with wispy clouds is merely a moon and does not influence the reader in perception. The goldfish painting is a very minimal fish and simply shows the reader a fish; it merely adds an option for the reader to imagine this kind of fish. These paintings when paired with her soothing lunar haiku create a very peaceful series of images. It is also interesting to note that she uses her penname here.
Lorraine Ellis Harr had a simple position on the art of writing haiku. She viewed them as a way to celebrate the everyday. The very precise words she chose were carefully selected to emphasize that which we sometimes ignore, such as the humble scarecrow or the nimble dragonfly. She saw beauty in the simplest of things and captured that unseen beauty in her humble collection of works. Enjoy this final haiku from Frog Bites and remember the woman who went by dragonfly.
Park playground at dusk
and all that’s left there
one cicada crying
Tombo, FB, 2
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Works Cited
Harr, Lorraine Ellis. “Scarecrow plays maestro.” Cats Crows Frogs & Scarecrows. Kanona, New York: J&C Transcripts, 1975.
Harr, Lorraine Ellis. “Scent of new-mown hay.” Cats Crows Frogs & Scarecrows. Kanona, New York: J&C Transcripts, 1975.
Harr, Lorraine Ellis. “Snow on the wind gusts.” Snowflakes in the Wind. Kanona, New York: J&C Transcripts, 1976.
Harr, Lorraine Ellis. “The farm boy.” The Red Barn. Kanona, New York: J&C Transcripts, 1975.
Starke, Amy Martinez. “Life Story: Lorraine Ellis Harr.” The Sunday Oregonian. 9 April 2006: B7.
Tombo. “Full Moon.” 70 Sevens. Salt Lake City: Middlewood Press, 1986.
Tombo Group. “Park playground at dusk.” Frog Bites. Portland: Pond Stars Press, 1993.
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