The 2010 Asilomar Haiku Retreat: 35th Anniversary Retreat
[Notes by J. Zimmerman]

Yuki Teikei Haiku Society: Join. GEPPO magazine. Annual anthologies. The Yuki Teikei Haiku Society Retreats at Asilomar: 2007. 2008 (a haibun). 2010.

Haiku Pacific Rim Conferences.

Toward an Aesthetic for English-Language Haiku by Lee Gurga. 2004 Pescadero Haiku Weekend Workshop (including exercises) with Christopher Herold. Published haiku by J. Zimmerman. Bashō. Buson.

Index of Poetry. Highlights for Poetry. Books of Poetry Form. How to Write Poetry.

Essays on how to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa edited by Robert Hass.

Also see the great 2011 anthology:

wild violets 2011 Members' Anthology of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society.

Cover art Copyright © 2011-2015 by Ann Bendixen. Cover layout design and typography Copyright © 2011-2015 by Harry Lafnear.

To purchase copies of an anthology, contact Yuki Teikei Haiku Society.

Note: we use the spelling Ginkoo [ginkō] for "a walk for the purpose of writing haiku. The original Japanese name is two Japanese kanji: the first, pronounced GIN, means "singing, praising, making a poem"; the second, pronounced KOO, means walking. [After notes from haiku poet Bev Momoi, who is Kanji-literate.]

Favorite sessions are highlighted.

2010 Asilomar Haiku Retreat:
Day 1, Thursday September 16th

• Picnic lunch at Carmel River State Beach; Tour of Robinson Jeffers' Tor House (guided by Neal Whitman).

• Registration for the retreat; receipt of a packet of information and notebooks.

• Optional personal afternoon Ginkoo [ginkō] on the beach and on the boardwalk that protects the Dunes and helps their vegetation recover: See our on-going lists of flowers seen at Asilomar and vacinity and birds seen at Asilomar and vacinity.

• Welcome by Yuki Teikei Haiku Society retiring President Carol Steele.

• Schedule briefing by Retreat Organizer Patrick Gallagher.

• Opening of Silent Auction, presented by Patricia Machmiller, of a dozen items related to haiku and Japanese culture, as a benefit for Yuki Teikei Haiku Society.

• 2010 Tokutomi Contest results, presented by Alison Woolpert. The judges were the Japanese poets Masoka Kakutani and Toru Kiuchi. Of the 20 winners and honorably-mentioned's, 5 were by retreat participants and so they could be honored in person.

• Self-introductions: President Carol Steele invited us to introduce ourselves to the thirty participants by speaking about how we came to haiku and to illustrate our feelings by reciting one of our own haiku.

2010 Asilomar Haiku Retreat:
Day 2, Friday September 17th

• Optional personal pre-breakfast Ginkoo [ginkō] on the beach and on the boardwalk that protects the Dunes and helps their vegetation recover: flowers seen and birds seen.

• Introduction of the First Edition of the San Francisco Bay Area Nature Guide and Saijiki edited by Anne M. Homan, Patrick Gallagher, and Patricia Machmiller. Includes several haiku by J. Zimmerman.

• Two-hour morning Ginkoo [ginkō]

• Closing of Silent Auction, presented by Patricia Machmiller, of a dozen items related to haiku and Japanese culture, as a benefit for Yuki Teikei Haiku Society. I was very pleased with my purchase, a collection of essays on haiku.

• Haiga workshop led by Susanne Smith. Using supplies of plain and patterned papers together with inks, rubber stamps, brushes, scissors, glue sticks and many other supplies, we decorated and assembled pages to make ourselves our personalized notebooks.

  To fasten each of our sets of pages together in a book, donnalynn chase demonstrated the three-hole pamphlet stitch.

  The optional haiga was then for us to write our own poems — and to invite participants to write their poems — in our books, juxtaposing haiku and art.

  A highlight of this session was a generous gift to each of us from Ann Bendixen: a copy of her Reflections of an Old Pine Tree (2010), a book of haiga in which she juxtaposed her own haiku with her Chinese brush paintings.

• A Retrospective Reading: How My Haiku Has Changed Over Thirty Years by our featured poet and teacher, Margaret Chula

• Thirty-fifth Anniversary Celebration, facilitated by YT President Carol Steele. This included:
  • The gift to each of us from Patricia Machmiller of a copy of the newly published Diary of Kiyoshi Tokutomi (2010), translated by Tei Matsushita Scott, with an introduction and annotations by Patricia Machmiller. Kiyoshi Tokutomi was the founding father of Yuki Teikei Haiku Society. Patricia's reading to us of samples from his diary gave us a heart-touching picture of his struggles, his creativity, and his love of haiku.

  • The unveiling of the 2010 Yuki Teikei Haiku Society Annual Anthology, edited by Jerry Ball and June Hopper Hymas; layout design and typography by J. Morrison Schallberger.

  • The anniversary cake: to tantalize us, we did not eat it immediately it was revealed. Instead we were invited to write and read a haiku to commemorate our 35th anniversary. Each of these haiku, with the help of the grandchildren of Kiyoshi Tokutomi, was pierced by a smooth and slender stick and stuck in the cake for a celebratory photograph.

  • And then we not only had our cake but we ate it too!

2010 Asilomar Haiku Retreat:
Day 3, Saturday September 18th

• Optional personal pre-breakfast Ginkoo [ginkō].

• Gendai (Modern) Haiku - A Japanese Innovation: an introduction and workshop by Patrick Gallagher. My sense of the Gendai (Modern) Haiku is that the linkage between the parts of such a haiku are rather tenuous, often to the point of making the haiku surreal, as in my attempt:

  Gendai haiku I keep falling off this tightrope.

• The Interplay of Collaboration; featured presentation presented by Margaret Chula, our featured speaker. She discussed her own work in ekphrastic poems (poems written in response to an image). In her case she spoke of the poems she wrote to correspond to each of the quilts that had been made to denote each of the camps where Japanese Americans were held during World War Two. The poems were all persona poems, written in the imagined thoughts and voices of people that lived in the camps. The poems that she showed were all free-verse poems, expect for one that was a haibun.

• Persona Haibun: The Art of Empathy; introduction and workshop presented by Margaret Chula, our featured speaker.

  We were shown copies of fifty photos of people, usually solo, taken by Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, and others; we were invited to choose an image that bore little relationship to ourselves (different gender, age, lifestyle, etc.); then we were to think a little about where the person was, what they might be thinking, where they had come from and where they were going; and so on.

  Then we could write some prose interleaved by one of more haiku, thereby making a haibun.

  It was the surprise of this exercise, the surprise of what arose, that made it so fascinating.

• Oral Kukai led by Patrick Gallagher. Each participant received two blank index cards. On each of those they wrote a haiku they had created during the Retreat. After four opportunities for participants to hear every haiku, each participant was allowed to vote for up to 8 haiku. About 80% of the Retreat attendees participated. Fun (even if I didn't win!).

  A special value of this workshop was that the counts for each poem were added up and then as each poem was announced, the people that voted for it were invited to say why they voted for it. As a result, even the poems that received only a single vote were acknowledged for their perceived skills.

• An introduction to renku and a Renku Party under the Renku masters Patrick Gallagher and Patricia Machmiller ... and/or personal time for working on art and writing. I took the opportunity to walk the quick route (about 1.5 miles) to the Pacific Grove Chocolate Shop for a truffle! And then returned along the long and winding route (about 3 miles) via the shore ... by the light of the moon and the unusually bright Jupiter in the east as well as Venus in the west.

  But I did hear from participants in the renku that they had a lot of fun, including some delicious teas provided by Wendy and Billie Dee.

2010 Asilomar Haiku Retreat:
Day 4, Sunday September 19th

• Optional personal pre-breakfast Ginkoo [ginkō].

• Reading of the two renku created the previous evening under the Renku masters Patrick Gallagher and Patricia Machmiller.

• Closing ceremony led by Carol Steel, including the "passing of the pencil" to incoming YT President, Alison Woolpert.

• Post-retreat workshop on Retreat haiku, led by Patricia Machmiller.

Other Books on Haiku

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa edited by Robert Hass. The past-poet laureate of the U.S.A has compiled this enthralling collection of his own essays in which he summarizes the lives of three masters and inventors of the haiku tradition in Japan, and presents the lives, the prose, and 300 of the poems of: Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the ascetic and seeker, Yosa Buson (1716-83), the artist, and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), the humanist. The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World by William J. Higginson.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Poetry forms and poets. How to Write Poetry.

Copyright © 2010-2016 by J. Zimmerman. This page displayed using recycled bits.

[Thanks for visiting.]