I am such a poor poet, I can’t really claim to be happy or satisfied with any of the haiku in this collection. There are several pitfalls I have tried to avoid, successfully I think, but the absence of vice doesn’t equal virtue, at least not in artistic matters. Anyway, here are a few haiku guidelines I’ve tried to adhere to. I hope I haven’t screwed it up too badly.

Don’t tell too much or too little (the literary equivalent of the sublimely comical baseball dictum, “Don’t walk him, but don’t give ‘im anything to hit”). Use the fewest words possible, without sacrificing clarity. Put yourself in the mind of anything, everything, even the inanimate. Related to this, I suppose, is a somewhat detached outlook, what I guess you could call a passionless regard for others. Conviviality and conscience, without the counterfeit tenderness that only masks contempt.

What do I like about the haiku that follow? In truth, I do see an unexpected variety of subject matter. I did not over-indulge in structural eccentricities, or over-eager punctuation.

My goal is to someday record haiku that already exist, so to speak—to be the conduit for something that is new and yet offers the immediate flash of recognition: “Yes, that’s how it is.”

—Bob Reed

Uncle Sam towers
over everyone
parading on stilts

the girl almost forgets
her poison ivy

teenagers fire bottle rockets
over the quarry . . .
no real direction

the purple smoke bomb
rolls downhill
…trailing stink

black clouds somersault
not high above
              thunder

on the bus ride home
a report card to show off
finally

sprinkler spray
rises and falls
…watered children laughing

he speaks with
great urgency
to her mirrored sunglasses

from her white foot
     he pulls the stinger
          old married couple

she had to save
that doll…
and the others

James Barr

When I was a small boy, my parents, sister and I lived in my grandfather’s small house. My mother’s father, a widower was a retired school principal (principal is a “prince” of a fellow, and he’s your “pal”). I was ten years old when he died—by then he was living in OUR new house—so many memories are less focused. He had green pet fish and yellow fish , with a tiny treasure chest at sea-bottom.atop

grandfather’s knee
I weigh nothing
—like the astronauts

Chicago Heat

Reading about a friend's wedding at this time of year takes me back to mid-July of 1995. Chicago hadn’t been so hot since the fire of 1871, and I was a groomsman for a 112-degree wedding. (The next day, when the temperature dipped to 105, you actually felt more comfortable.) Merely stepping out of the shade on that wedding day, however, provided a toxic rush of heat that rivaled the exhaust fumes of a city bus pulling away from the curb. There was a misunderstanding with the choir, and while the singers straggled in late, the diminutive bride—in her full heavy dress—waited in a back room.

quieter than lace
the patient bride stands
fanned by her mother