All Over the Place: A haiku, from first draft to publication

By Michael H. Brownstein

Haiku, as almost everyone knows, is a very popular type of Japanese poem. Traditionally, it has three lines, the first and last consisting of five syllables and the middle one containing seven. Syllabication in Japanese is much different from in English. For this reason, many English-writing haiku poets keep the three-line framework, but not the syllable count.
    I wrote a haiku for the Human Kind Journal, an online publication of Japanese poetic forms. Here’s my first draft:

a scaffolding of ticks
knitting curtains of skin
into round blemishes

Didn’t like the word round. I changed it to brown:

a scaffolding of ticks
knitting curtains of skin
into brown blemishes

Still felt too clunky. I decided not to use a third line. Some haiku journals like experimental haiku – and a two-line image might just do the trick:

a scaffolding of ticks
knitting curtains of skin

Nope. Something still felt wrong.

Here’s what I submitted to the journal:

a scaffolding of ticks
knits
a curtain of skin

Here’s what happened next:

Dear Michael,

It was an honor to have the opportunity to review your work. We’d like to accept the following for Issue 1.8, with a suggested edit.
    We loved the various readings and implications of this haiku and wondered if you’d agree to let us present it as a totally vertical haiku, further enhancing its meaning:

a
scaffolding
of
ticks
knits
a
curtain
of
skin

    Please respond and let us know if you are agreeable to this change.
    Thank you for sharing your work with us!
                    Kind regards,
                    Robin

Here is the link to the publication page.

Copyright © 2019 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volume of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else, was published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018.