Teaching Haiku
in Higher Education:
An Immersion into the Living Tradition -
The Case of Millikin University
A major aim of WHC
is to promote the field of education, including, of course, haiku in education.
Throughout the U.K., WHC officers and members work with all ages of school
children, teachers and other adults in workshop settings. Lectures on haiku are
presented in halls of higher education. Scholars of haiku and Japanese studies
are invited to submit papers to, and participate in, WHC's WHF conferences and
events. Recently, WHC Academic Director, Daniel Gallimore, became Convener and
Editor for WHCacademia, WHC's online organ for debate and kansho. This online
organ is designed as a bridge to bring poetic and academic communities closer
together. It is with these interests in mind that World Haiku Review initiates
"Haiku in Education". We are honored to present Dr. Randy Brooks
and his work in haiku at Millikin University as this feature's premier offering.
Randy M. Brooks, Ph.D.
Director of the Writing Major
Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois, USA
Twenty-six college students sit in a large circle, excitedly whispering to
friends about our anticipated visitors. It is 10:00 AM on Friday, April 14,
2000. Having just arrived at Millikin University for the Global Haiku Festival,
our guests enter the classroom still exchanging greetings and sharing news of
their latest writing projects or forthcoming books of haiku. The students murmur
with recognition and excitement-they are actually witnessing famous figures in
the international haiku community in the flesh!
The haiku poets
find seats in the circle, shoulder to shoulder with my students, who are visibly
eager to ask questions and to hear tales about the life of poetry from some of
the leading contemporary writers, editors and scholars on English-language
haiku. After introductions of our nine guests, the first question sets off a
lively discussion that leads into a variety of current issues related to the art
of haiku. Then the hour is suddenly gone. My students are reminded to fully
participate in the weekend haiku festival-attend lectures, write haiku during
the ginko, read at the open-mic reading-and several students plan to seek out
certain authors for a personal conversation or interview.
Obviously we
cannot host a Global Haiku Festival every year at my university, but immersing
college students into the living tradition of contemporary haiku can remain as
one of the most important goals of teaching haiku in higher education. To
implement this goal, at least two or three haiku poets are invited to Millikin
University each year for a short workshop and reading. It helps a great deal
that my haiku reading partner, Lee Gurga, the associate editor of Modern Haiku,
lives only a short distance from Millikin and often has haiku visitors. The
haiku e-journals and various haiku web sites provide my students with a glimpse
of the haiku community. Also, each student conducts an in-depth study of a
single contemporary author, borrowing books from my personal collection. These
single author studies result in a web profile and reader response essay, often
based on a personal interview with the author by email or correspondence. This
allows students to receive a sense of the living tradition of the contemporary
haiku community even when there is no festival on campus.
The primary goal of my haiku courses are for my students to experience the joys
of reading and writing haiku, to appreciate the discipline necessary to achieve
excellence in the art, and to understand the historical traditions of haiku as a
genre-including its Japanese origins and the major developments of the genre by
various Japanese and other haiku writers. My goal is to introduce them to the
world of haiku and its aesthetically related poetry-tanka, senryu, haibun, renga
and Zen poetry. And I want the students to understand what it means to be an
active member of the haiku community, a world-wide community of dedicated
literary artists devoted to serious artistic development of themselves and haiku
as a unique literary genre.
So what are the haiku courses I teach and how have they been developed at
Millikin University?
First, let me share a little bit about the context of the university sponsoring
these courses. Millikin University is a small, private university in Decatur,
Illinois with about 2400 residential students enrolled in four colleges-Fine
Arts, Arts & Sciences, Nursing and Business. We have a very strong music,
theatre and visual arts curriculum which celebrates hard-working student
performers. Each of these colleges take pride in Millikin's emphasis on
experiential learning and advanced learning opportunities for its students
through research or performance partnerships with faculty in the faculty
member's area of expertise. So it was quite natural for me to share my passion
for haiku and my involvement in the haiku community as a writer, editor and
publisher with my students.
Millikin University has a long tradition of integrating theory and practice-a
combination of intellectual inquiry and practical application of knowledge in
creative performance. So from the very first conception of the haiku courses, I
knew I wanted to integrate reading about the historical tradition with the
dynamic artistic struggle of writing, editing and publishing original haiku. I
wanted to establish the art of haiku as a campus tradition through events open
to the public-with readings, exhibits, guest speakers, festivals on campus-so
that my students and their work would be publicly appreciated and embraced as
another example of excellent student performance. In addition to live
performances and exhibits in the art galleries, my students' work is also
publicly available through the Millikin University Haiku Web Site located at:
http://www.millikin.edu/haiku
I offer three levels of haiku study at Millikin: (1) a haiku writing roundtable
workshop, (2) a global haiku traditions course, and (3) advanced publishing
internships and independent study projects.
The Haiku Writing Roundtable Workshop
The first level is a one-credit course called the "Haiku Writing
Roundtable" which students may take up to three times. This workshop
includes weekly haiku readings, an introduction to Zen aesthetics, and ten
approaches to writing haiku. The ten approaches are:
1 on the spot writing
2 reader response associations
3 ginko haiku hike
4 Zazen meditation
5 western visualization meditation
6 imagination
7 consonance as the genesis of haiku
8 dissonance as the genesis of haiku
9 senryu
10 collaborative rengay (Garry Gay's approach)
The main activity of the roundtable is our weekly editing session and frequent
haiku competitions (kukai) on given season-words or topics. Each week students
submit 5-10 haiku to me and I select some for review and edits by the entire
class. The students receive a print out of the selected haiku seeking responses,
select 3-4 favorites through the blind review process (anonymous writers) and
prepare responses. Then in the editing session, we begin by "giving
birth" to favorite haiku and discovering the "parent" of the
favorite haiku. I offer haiku books or haiku magazines as awards to the authors
of the haiku that receive the most votes.
After favorites
have been fully celebrated and enjoyed, we enter into the editing session-asking
questions, suggesting alternatives, moving lines, seeking a more effective word,
and so on. We edit the anonymous haiku and the author may claim it as their own
or leave it as anonymous if they wish. Students whose haiku have been selected
as favorites may also solicit edit suggestions if they are still dissatisfied
with their current version of the haiku.
Millikin offers the Haiku Writing Roundtable each fall semester. Many students
enroll in the course more than once, which creates an excellent combination of
experienced and novice haiku writers-establishing their own campus community of
students who enjoy reading and writing haiku. This workshop is officially listed
as a first year level course, so freshman students can feel welcome in the
workshop their very first semester.
The Global Haiku Traditions Course
Each spring Millikin offers The Global Haiku Traditions as a three-credit
course. It is a junior-level course cross-listed as either (1) a "Global
Studies" course fulfilling a general education requirement or (2) an
"Advanced Studies in Poetry" course fulfilling a literature
requirement for English majors. Although usually about half of the students are
English majors, I am especially glad that the course is quite popular with
students from all disciplines. Just as the contemporary haiku community includes
people from all walks of life-scientists, politicians, dentists, business
executives, technical writers, naturalists, editors, professors-the Global Haiku
Traditions course includes students from all disciplines and majors.
In this course, students engage in a more extensive study of the origins and
history of haiku traditions and they continue writing their own original haiku
considering the approaches and techniques from various traditions. The plural
"traditions" is a key component of the course as students consider the
competing approaches of various schools in the history of Japanese haiku, and
the variations of the haiku as a living genre that has spread and changed
throughout the world in different cultures.
The course begins
with reading and sharing our reader's responses to haiku. We share the various
places our imaginations go from the same starting haiku. We share the
associations and memories that haiku stimulate in us as we read them. And as we
formulate a better understanding of haiku, we also refine our abilities as
readers of haiku. Throughout the semester, students develop a reader response
approach to criticism, learning to consider historical contexts but also
trusting their own imagined responses as readers of haiku (or at least the
translations they have available). Throughout their reading, they are encouraged
to seek out favorite haiku, consider why those are their favorites, and to
establish their own criteria of excellent or significant haiku as both readers
and writers. After studying Bashô in depth, students use the critical method of
"matching contests" to write a comparison study of two authors (often
from different cultures, different time periods, or different schools of
practice). To see examples of these matching haiku comparison essays, please
visit the Millikin Haiku Web Site.
In addition to historical studies, the students read a great deal of
contemporary English-language haiku and contemporary haiku from Japan and other
countries. I have already discussed this part of the course, based on interviews
and an extensive research of a single author. These studies are presented to the
entire class during the last week of the course, and the resulting profiles and
essays are often published on the web site.
Fridays are usually devoted to an editing workshop on original haiku by the
students in the Global Haiku Traditions course. As most members of the haiku
community know, haiku stimulate our imaginations and our aesthetic memories and
triggered associations. They make us feel and think again about our own lives.
So it is quite natural that students want to write their own haiku as part of
their critical response to reading haiku. The Friday workshops are conducted in
a manner similar to the Haiku Writing Roundtable, with students reviewing
anonymous haiku attempts and "giving birth" to celebrated favorites.
The main difference between the Roundtable workshop and the Global Haiku
Traditions workshop is that there are usually about 30 students in the Global
Traditions course, so it is difficult for each student to receive the benefits
of the full-class editing process. We all vote on favorites and celebrate the
best haiku written each week, but it is hard to establish a good reader response
critical process for each student with a large class.
From personal experience, I know how valuable a small group of trusted readers
can be when working on a collection of haiku. At Brooks Books, when we are
editing a book of selected works by an author, it is not uncommon for us to send
the haiku being considered to 5-8 readers for selection, evaluation, edit
suggestions and arrangement strategies. I wanted to provide the students with
the same opportunity for collaborative critical exchanges around their own
original collection of haiku. In order to provide each student with a strong
on-going critical review process, I divide the class into small editing groups.
Each editing group exchanges their work with each other and writes imagined
responses to the haiku. Although the primary task of the editing groups is to
work on each other's original haiku, they also take up issues and questions in
response to their readings. However, the main task that energizes and focuses
the groups is that each student must create a collection of their own original
haiku by the end of the semester. The groups provide support and encouragement
in this task.
I also know the value of having a "haiku buddy" or trusted reader who
examines your own work in progress and gives honest responses, questions and
critical suggestions. I have been blessed with three such relationships in my
twenty-five years of work in haiku. First, I mailed Raymond Roseliep most of my
rough works which he diligently responded to, teaching me a great deal about my
own haiku writing limitations and possibilities. Second, I was mentored in tanka
writing for several years by Sanford Goldstein, the professor at Purdue
University who introduced me to Japanese literature and Zen aesthetics. And now,
Lee Gurga and I meet once a month to share and review our works before
submitting them to publications or contests. In order to encourage this type of
relationship among the students in the Global Haiku Traditions, each student
finds a "haiku buddy" to read all of their original work, and to help
select haiku to be included in their final chapbook collection of best haiku
written. The haiku buddy also is responsible for writing an introduction to the
collection-a critical preface highlighting some of the best haiku in the
collection and preparing readers to truly appreciate and enjoy their friend's
work. Again, you may see selected haiku from these collections at the Millikin
Haiku Web Site, including some designated haiku reader's introductions.
Students in the Global Haiku Traditions also seek reader responses to their work
from other students and strangers and family members, as part of their process
of selecting which haiku to include in their final collections. This process of
seeking responses from others who do not know the haiku tradition is very
informative and helps the students learn the value of haiku to convey feelings
and insights even to the "untrained" reader. This is another way in
which the course creates a public presence and shared enthusiasm for haiku
across campus. The students become ambassadors for haiku, teaching their readers
to appreciate and enjoy their work.
The small groups
also provide opportunities for collaborative writing. The student groups often
write rengay or more traditional renku or sponsor a haiku competition for the
entire campus. These collaborative writing activities hearken back to the
origins of haiku and help students appreciate the use of collaborative
imagination. It also provides another means of drawing other students and
friends into the fun of haiku.
Advanced Publishing Internships & Independent Study Projects
For students who wish to continue their studies of haiku beyond the Roundtable
and Global Traditions courses, I can offer more individualized advanced
opportunities. Students interested in learning more about literary editing and
publishing often choose to serve as a student editor interning with Brooks
Books. The publishing interns help with current Brooks Books editing and
publishing projects. For example, photography student Julie Lycan and writing
major Jeremy Coulter collaborated on the design of Paul O. William's collection
of haiku, Outside Robins Sing (1999), a beautiful hand-sewn accordion fold
chapbook. Several of the online haiku collections, including Michael Dylan
Welch's Open Window and Lee Gurga's Long Walk Alone have been designed with the
assistance of student editor interns.
Over my last ten years at Millikin, several students have chosen to do special
independent studies or honors projects related to haiku. For example, a recent
honors student graduate, Kristin Boryca, spent three semesters reviewing the
history of poetics and aesthetics-both the Western and Eastern
traditions-resulting in a study of Zen aesthetics in haiku and an original
collection of her work. Her collection of haiku, A Day's Breath, and her
personal statement of haiku poetics are available online at the web site.
How the Semester Ends
We conclude each semester by holding various public celebrations of students'
research, their collections of haiku, and their reading partnerships. Students
present their research to the class and share comparative studies with other
reading groups. Favorite haiku from weekly workshops and some essays are added
to the Millikin Haiku Web Site. But the big event is a public poetry reading.
Each student (with the help of their haiku buddy) carefully selects their best
work for the haiku reading. They invite friends, family and other faculty to the
reading, which usually has a large turnout.
A final requirement of the course is to prepare a submission to one of the haiku
journals. Each student brings at least one submission in a properly addressed
envelope including a self-addressed, stamped envelope or international reply
coupon. As mundane as this may seem, students do need to know how to properly
submit their work, and they need a little push to go through the gateway to the
larger global haiku community . . . submitting their work to editors so that it
can be shared and enjoyed by readers of the journals and haiku web sites. For
some students, this will be the only step into that world of haiku publications,
but for others it will be the first step with many return visits expected in the
future.
On the last day of class, students bring their completed collections (in various
bindings or media) for presentation to the class. Each student also brings a
gift exchange featuring their "signature haiku," the haiku they want
to be known by. Or it is one that best represents their values and their own
approach to writing haiku. The signature haiku is used as an example among
friends whenever the question about "what is haiku?" comes up. These
exchanges are the final act of community bonding in the class-an exchange of
haiku gifts. What better lesson to end with but that haiku is a joyous gift to
be shared.
Can the Millikin program serve as a model for haiku studies at other
institutions?
I believe that the model of integrating reading and writing experiences is
central to haiku studies. Haiku call for imaginative response, so reading haiku
leads naturally to writing haiku. And whether the students are excellent haiku
writers or not is not the key issue. The key issue is whether they understand
the possibilities of participating in the art of haiku as a genre. To truly
understand this genre I believe you must be both reader and writer.
Unfortunately, too many teachers treat haiku writing as merely an exercise in
form-writing any message in 5-7-5 syllables, so students "learn" that
haiku is a strange, busy-work diversion. This form emphasis so misses the point
of haiku-that sensory images connect to our perceptions which connect to our
memories and human feelings. Haiku are about sharing consciousness and
awareness. Haiku are about becoming more aware of your world and the moments of
your life that offer significant insights. The emphasis on form kills the joy of
reading and writing haiku. Reading and sharing reader responses is an essential
element of the haiku learning experience.
Another portion of the Millikin program that can be effectively modeled is the
emphasis on public performance. Students need to see the impact of their work on
others, and they need the feeling of pride that comes when others appreciate
their work. And like football and dance and music and art exhibits, the public
sphere immediately increases the stakes and motivation of the students to
perform at their best. Students work hard on their haiku, not just for a grade
or to please the teacher, but because they know others will see and watch and
applaud their work in public. The public performance element is also an
important form of outreach and support for the courses from the entire campus
community.
Although all teachers may not have the same extent of involvement in the global
haiku community as I do through my publishing and writing activities, students
can gain access to the haiku community through haiku journals, web sites, haiku
associations and direct contact with active members of the haiku community.
Haiku is very popular around the world so it should not be difficult to find
members of that community near your school. And with appropriate funding, others
would be willing to come for readings or workshops at your school for reasonable
honorariums.
Haiku studies are an important part of the curriculum for all levels of
education. Students learn so much about the power of language to express
feelings and to capture perceptions. In addition to gaining expertise with
images in writing, haiku studies provide a glimpse into the possibilities of a
joyous lifelong journey with this literary art. The global haiku traditions
remain committed to the anonymous writer, the value of one haiku, the invitation
that any one of us-with dedication and commitment and work-can write haiku of
significance. Haiku studies bring poetry out of the classroom and into lives.
For me, one of the greatest values of teaching an immersion approach to haiku
studies in higher education is that it heals two serious wounds common to
current English studies. First, it integrates reading and writing within the
context of rich, competing traditions of haiku as a global genre. Second, it
connects poetry back to the common man. Instead of emphasizing esoteric
knowledge or academic elitist trends, contemporary haiku still insists on
evoking meaning and appealing to a broad range of readers-both the literary
intellectual as well as the every day person. Haiku work on both levels. The
literary reader recognizes the literary allusions and the significant historical
nuances in the haiku. The common reader recognizes the feelings and memories and
associations from their own life in the haiku. This makes haiku ideally suited
for higher education which tries to serve both the experts and the general
public.
Finally, I would like to say that perhaps the best reason for offering haiku
studies at all levels of education is simply that it is so much fun.
Read
Tasting Vintage Haiku: The Poetry of Dr. Randy Brooks
Dr.
Brooks & Millikin University
Profile:
Dr. Brooks
Brooks
Books Website
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