In all honesty, I don’t think my personal history is all that interesting. I want, instead, to get to the heart of the matter, if I may.

Haiku poetry is the quiet celebration—a word whose root means to frequent— of the great mystery that is life-and-death. Through haiku poetry, we find our way back to wholeness which, of course, is our true nature, though something we seem to have lost touch with. As the late spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, observed: “We are One Being in many forms.” Thus, reading and writing haiku fosters healing in the sense of leading one back to wholeness. For me, haiku poetry reveals to us this sacred truth, again and again and yet again.

Because we are an integral and inseparable part of nature, broadly conceived,
haiku poetry is a skillful means for re-discovering who we are by evoking insights through our unforced and undirected attention to our surroundings, internally and externally. In this way, as the Thai Buddhist teacher, Ajahn Chah, suggests, everything is teaching us. The haiku or meditative mind (as distinguished from the thinking mind) allows one’s intuition to discern what the world has to teach us; this puts us in touch with love as well as a lightness of being which Basho, the father of Japanese haiku, referred to as karumi.

For me, haiku is not something to “practice” just as revelations of truth do not require practice. More often than not, practice is ego-based and where ego is, intuition is not. If I am open, curious, attentive, haiku come to me. I don’t go in pursuit of poems, any more than I go in pursuit of seeing. When I open my eyes, I behold. Some may argue that there are different kinds of seeing. I agree, but if I am awake I naturally observe with care and this is all that is needed. . . no method, no manual, no technique, no artifice. I am guided by what I might call Loving Intelligence. If this phrase sounds like another term for God, I would not object. Haiku is the bounty of Loving Intelligence.

If I don’t practice, I remain a beginner. That is okay by me. I have no interest in becoming an expert haiku poet. That is anathema to me and antithetical to the haiku spirit. Even after more than thirty years, I regard myself as a hit-or-miss haiku poet. This is not false modesty but the truth. I know some extraordinary haiku poets and I respond to their poetry with appreciation and awe. I am not in competition with these writers; neither do I strive to emulate them. I only wish to give voice to what I have discovered, however limited that may be. Sometimes I hit the haiku note, often I do not. When I don’t hit the haiku note, I try to learn from this, too. It is learning, not perfection or expertise, that I am passionately committed to.

Haiku poetry may not save the world, but it can make one’s soul sing even on the way to hell. That is enough for me. If you are able to behold the universe in a grain of sand, as the mystic poet William Blake suggested, haiku will fulfill your heart’s desire. The pulse of life, love and mystery in haiku is all the blossom fragrance one needs to live in, and leave, this wild world with dignity. And the truth is, as the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “we die, and we do not die.” This, too, is worth pondering.

Books by Robert Epstein

Nonfiction

(Second author with Stacy Taylor) Living Well with a Hidden Disability

Poor Robert’s Almanac: Little Observations on Life

(With Stacy Taylor) Suffering Buddha: The Zen Way Beyond Health and Illness

Compilations

(Editor) Devastating Wisdom: The Radical Teachings of U.G. Krishnamurti

(Compiler with Sherry Phillips) The Natural Man: A Thoreau Anthology

(Editor) The Quotable Krishnamurti

Haiku Anthologies

(Editor) All the Way Home: Aging in Haiku

(Editor) Beyond the Grave: Contemporary Afterlife Haiku

(Editor) Dreams Wander On: Contemporary Poems of Death Awareness

(Co-Editor with Miriam Wald) Every Chicken, Cow, Fish and Frog: Animal Rights Haiku

(Editor) Now This: Contemporary Poems of Beginnings, Renewals, and Firsts

(Editor) The Breath of Surrender: A Collection of Recovery-Oriented Haiku

(Editor) The Haiku Way to Healing: Including Senryu, Tanka, and Haiga

(Editor) The Helping Hand Haiku Anthology (Including Senryu, Tanka & Haiga)

(Editor) The Sacred in Contemporary Haiku

(Editor) The Signature Haiku Anthology (Including Senryu and Tanka)

(Editor) The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss and Change

(Editor) They Gave Us Life: Celebrating Mothers, Fathers, & Others in Haiku

Haiku Poetry

A Congregation of Cows: Moo Haiku

A Walk around Spring Lake: Haiku

At the Train Crossing: Skin Cancer Haiku & Senryu

Checkout Time is Noon: Death Awareness Haiku

Checkout Time is Soon: More Death Awareness Haiku

Contemplating Nature: Pictures, Passages & Haiku

Finding My Way Home: Haiku & Senryu

Free to Dance Forever: Mourning Haiku for My Mother

Haiku Days of Remembrance: In Honor of My Father

Haiku Edge: New and Selected Poems

Haiku Forest Afterlife

Healing into Haiku: On Illness and Pain

(With Ed Markowski) Memo to Warhol: A Collaboration of Art & Haiku in Color

(With David H. Rosen) Night Owl Haiku:

A Long-Distance Collaboration

Nothing is Empty: A Whole Haiku World

On Time: A Haiku Book in Color (forthcoming)

Pandemic Haiku: Living through COVID-19

Reckoning with Winter: A Haiku Hailstorm

Standing Upright: Therapy Haiku & Senryu

Sticky Notes Haiku: This Life

To Tower Above Me Still: Tree Haiku & More at Creekside Park

Turkey Heaven: Animal Rights Haiku

Turning the Page to Old: Haiku & Senryu

What My Niece Said in My Head: Haiku & Senryu

Publications (incomplete list)

Haiku and the Ordeal of Moving. Modern Haiku, 55.1, 2024, Winter-Spring 2024.

Acceptance and Peace through Haiku.http://www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com. January
25, 2024.

Beyond the Subjective in Haiku. http://www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com. August 20, 2022.
Presence, Not Practice, in Haiku Poetry. http://www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com. September 24, 2021. Also in: New Zealand Poetry Society. http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz

Beyond Rejection in Haiku. Frogpond, 45:2, Spring 2022.

The Transcendent Function of Haiku. Frogpond, 43:2, Summer 2020.

Freshness in Haiku is Never Normative: A Reply to Lee Gurga. Modern Haiku 52.3, Autumn, 2021.

Haiku Questions: A Portal into Mystery. Modern Haiku 51.2, Summer 2020.

Motherloss and Mourning Haiku. Modern Haiku 49.3, Autumn 2018.

Recovering the Suchness of Things in Haiku. Modern Haiku 49.1, Winter-Spring 2018.

Interview with Carolyn Hall. New Zealand Poetry Society. http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz
December 17, 2022.

Interview with Julie Bloss Kelsey. New to Haiku: Advice to Beginners. The Haiku Foundation. July 11, 2021.

Amy Losak interviewed by Robert Epstein upon the publication of H is for Haiku:
A Treasury of Haiku from A to Z by Sydell Rosenberg. Frogpond, 41:3, Fall 2018.

Interview with Curtis Dunlap: Three Questions. Blogging Along Tobacco Road. http://www.tobaccoroadpoet.blogspot.com. February 21, 2010.

Foreword to Ron C. Moss, Broken Starfish. 2019.

Review of Don Baird, Haiku: The Interior and Exterior of Being. Modern Haiku, 46.2, Summer 2015.