JoDee Whitlock • JoDee's Haiku •

Internationally recognized haiku poet Margaret Chula has won prizes in haiku, tanka and poetry. In 1998 she received an Oregon Literary Arts Award. Ms. Chula has been awarded many honors and awards for her brilliant works. Her haiku have received awards from Modern Haiku, Brussel Sprouts, Mainichi Shimbun, and Gifu Women’s University. Itoen Tea Company selected one of her haiku for a publicity poster, which was displayed in train stations throughout Japan. In 1993 she won the Japan Tanka Poets Club Prize in the Third International English Tanka Contest. In 1987 she placed second in the Japan Airlines/Mainichi Daily News National Haiku Contest. Her haiku have been included in the prestigious Anthology of North American Haiku Writers and collected in the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo." Then, Grinding My Ink won the Haiku Society of America’s National Book Award in 1994. A recent book, Shadow Lines by Margaret Chula and Rich Youmans, was the winner of The Haiku Society Of America’s 2000 Merit Book Award (Bernard 2001). Margaret Chula presents wonderful insights to her haiku. Chula picks up on everyday life occurrences and turns them into a three-line wonder. Her writings give the audience a sense of realism because their main focal point is on everyday happenings, but overlooked events. A simple episode in life such as a cat in a tree is turned into a remarkable piece of artwork written on paper. Margaret tends to exaggerate her style of writing by fooling around with the spacing and indentations of lines in her haiku. She also uses different types of punctuation like the exclamation point to emphasize and dramatize the haiku a little more. Margaret Chula started writing haiku while she was living in California in the early seventies. She moved to Kyoto, Japan in 1980 and lived there for twelve years. In Japan, she taught English at Kyoto Seika University and studied the brilliant R.H. Blythe’s translations of haiku. Besides teaching at Kyoto Seika University, she also taught creative writing and haiku at Doshisha Women’s College. Japan influenced Margaret’s life from a new perspective. She really didn’t see the importance the form of haiku portrayed until her move. Haiku is more than a form of poetry; it is a way of seeing the world. Each haiku captures a moment of experience; an instant when the ordinary suddenly reveals its inner nature and makes us take a second look at the event, at human nature, at life. It can be as elevated as the ringing of a temple bell, or as simple as sunlight catching a bit of silverware on your table; as isolated as a mountain top, or as crowded as a subway car; reveling in beauty or acknowledging the ugly. What unifies these moments is the way they make us pause and take notice, the way we are still recalling them hours later, the feeling of having had a momentary insight transcending the ordinary, or a glimpse into the very essence of ordinariness itself. I chose to research Margaret Chula’s work because I enjoy reading haiku about the richness and love of life. Fortunately a lot of her work is published and sold in bookstores today. A particular book that won the HSA Book Award in 1994 is called Grinding My Ink. It is a book of Chula’s experiences while living in Japan, of the person she became through her twelve years living in a different country. Chula believed that living in Japan enriched her life. She would often take journeys on foot or by bike and sit within the wilderness that inspired many of her haiku. She takes pride in the well-written and well-structured haiku shown in her award-winning book. In fact, Ms. Chula wrote most of these haiku in Japan but didn’t actually gather them into a collection until she returned to the United States. The book opens with the grinding the ink in preparation for painting or writing. Seemingly, the artists mind begins to clear, allowing space for creativity. grinding my ink— a black cat howls in childbirth This haiku, obviously from the title of the book, sets the tone for the entire volume. The writer is organizing her many thoughts and trying to express them on paper. She is feeling the agony of starting that first sentence. I can feel the intense pressure as the writer sits and contemplates how she should start her first piece of work; her first haiku. The writer does a good job comparing her birthing process of writing to the cat giving birth. Both aspects the cat and the writer are giving life to a piece of artwork. In the third line the word howl makes me see the cat howling and the writer screaming out in frustration, but in the end a whole new outlook on life is visible. And it was this book that allowed her to become acquainted with haiku poets in America as well as become active in the haiku society today. Some more haiku from this award winning masterpiece are listed followed by some of my personal extended responses. spring cleaning a white kitten rolls in the dust This haiku definitely brings the reader to a sense of realism. When I visualized this haiku I saw a newly built home with wood floors. A new mother was standing on the front porch shaking out the rugs that have been trampled on by the move. The first line in this haiku set the tone and the feeling to this particular scene in my mind. The use of ‘spring cleaning’ distinctly filled my mind with beautiful colors of sunshine, flowers, water sprinklers and bright shiny floors. I associated spring-cleaning with the freshness of the outdoor air and the beauty it shares. As the mother is shaking the rugs their four year old daughter’s kitten stands right by her masters feet rolling around like a roly-poly would do when being approached in the fallen dust. I can smell the dust so vividly that it makes my nose ache. I liked how the author used the adjective "white" when describing the cat because I can see the cat getting dirty but it is not obvious because the dust blends in with the rest of the cat’s body. I enjoyed seeing that image in my head of a white cat trying to dirty itself in white dust because it portrays a cat and it’s mischievous personality. Like the cat wanted to be dirty but didn’t want its master to find out and stick him or her in the tub. sound of a moth trapped in a paper lantern summer rain I can visualize a family traveling to the wilderness on one of the most curvy and steep roads in their small town. The roads play tricks with their stomachs. They reach their cabin far within the woods. There is no lighting, no plumbing and no roads for miles. I can hear the sounds of crickets, woodpeckers, rustling leaves and the sound of peace. The warm day has turned into a cool night. The moon shines so bright and the fireflies are everywhere. A paper lantern is places in the screened in porch of the one room cabin. The family sits together on the porch as they hear pitter-patter of water, first slow and rhythmic then faster and chaotic. There are bugs galore out but one in particular a black and gray spotted moth. It flies frantically to find shelter from the rain. I can hear the sounds of its wings flapping as it dodges golf ball-size bullets of water. It sees the light of the lantern above and rests there in the warmth of the light until the rain stops. It flutters inside the lantern trying to figure out how to get out of the ‘cage’ it was in. The wings of the creature create dust as they hit the side of the paper lantern. The family still sits and watches even when the rain had stopped. lying side by side separate letters from our divorced friends This haiku also brings out a lot of realism. I see a young married couple lying together in the front room before a warm fire. This haiku gives me a vision that it is dark, quiet and still in the room. They are each reading letters from their best friends who once used to be married. I can hear the crackling of the paper as they hold them tightly. The fire also makes a crackling noise that I can distinctly hear when I picture this image in my head. The young couple embraces each other as they read page by page the heartache their friends are going through. I liked this haiku because there is a lonely feeling but yet comforting feeling to it. It shows the ups and downs to a marriage and shows the how close friends are to the heart. In some of Margaret’s other works a few haiku stuck out in my mind as I read through them. on Easter morning the bread dough breathes and rises under its damp cloth The key and punch phrase is ‘breathes and rises,’ and this objective description makes us imagine a happy family expecting the Easter festival. Haiku has no ample space to depict fully, so suppression is essential and also it is important not to express trivial human feelings directly and superficially, but to leave them in something’s care. The haiku spirit lies in the second line. I can smell the aroma of the fresh bread that has just been taken out of the oven to cool. A red and white, checkered damp cloth is placed over the bread to seal in the moisture. The cloth moves and looks as if it is trying to keep a monster from escaping its dungeon. It is Easter morning and there is no other smell than the signature smell of fresh cooked bread. This haiku provides a very loving and happy scene that Margaret Chula seems to do so well. In this particular haiku I believe she is stressing how important one little instance in life, like a familiar smell, leads to so many great memories. blowing soap bubbles on her eightieth birthday the years glide away The author never says ‘happy or something’ in the lines. That’s haiku, suppressing such human sentiment and putting it on some other objectives. In rainbow color on the round surface of each bubble, we can clearly see the many incidents of the happy life. Haiku exists between or behind the simple lines especially with the works of Margaret Chula. In this particular haiku she used the indentation which she often does. I believe Margaret was trying to get us to see that blowing soap bubbles on an eighteeth birthday is as acceptable as blowing them on a fourth birthday. The indentation gives it a sort of pause and an unexpected but welcoming thought. I can see all the friends gathering around the birthday girl all with their bubbles in hand. I sense a lot of realization here because the girls now are accepting that they are young adults but want to do just one thing to explore that feeling of youth. Together they sit and laugh but can’t believe how just yesterday they all learned to ride their tricycles and today they are picking out their colleges. This haiku brings out a lot of what people usually think but don’t say. People realize that growing older is a part of life but are very hard at accepting it. And this haiku really says that it is ok to accept life for what it is, but have fun doing it in the process. sudden shower in the empty park a swing still swinging In this haiku, unlike in many Western poetic forms, the writer tries to maintain an invisible hand, avoiding overt "poetic" phrasing, use of metaphors, etc. in favor of simple, direct language. The writer's reaction to the scene is not stated, but comes across in the choice of images and juxtapositions, the exact wording used. As I read this haiku the image in my mind was so strong that I felt like it was happening to me. The adjective, sudden, is what sets the flow of the rest of the haiku. This haiku moved in a fast-pace motion. The sudden shower lead to the sudden movement of the swing to the, but is offset by the emptiness left behind in the park. I can see a rain out of nowhere start to fall from the sunlit sky on a particular day when the park was full of laughing children. I can picture a little boy swinging on a swing with all his might to impress a little girl on the swing next to him. And boy is he getting high, but his moment of fame suddenly stops because the rain starts to hit. The kids start running and the little boy jumps off the swing as it is still moving and runs to shelter. In a blink of an eye the park has no life but the swing doesn’t mind. It continues to move when there is no other movement. I enjoyed this haiku so much because Margaret really hides the whole point to her haiku. The reader really has to imagine the scene she portrays; they must imagine the life that once used to be on that swing and the life that once used to be in that park. Margaret Chula is in fact a brilliant and dedicated haiku writer. The way she picks out a scene in life and writes about it the way people don’t usually see it is why she has won many awards and honors in her lifetime. The realism in her haiku is why so many readers want to read more and more of her haiku. They appeal to every individual because each person out there has experienced one if not two of the everyday situations written in her haiku. I truly loved her work and loved learning more about her. —JoDee Whitlock