By the time I finish a second pot of tea every morning, I'll have read 100 or more haiku poems. They arrive at my home in Kagoshima by postcard, fax and e-mail. Haikuists write to me from most every prefecture in Japan and from many countries around the world. Most of the overseas writers have lived or at least visited Japan. That is how they came into contact with this fascinating shortest poem in the world. I enjoy reading their haiku, short poems about the everyday life of people lead in modern times, and would like to share some of them with you in this essay. Haiku poetry is an intriguing form of communication provides an insight to how people live and what they think about. Each week, I select nine for a column called Asahi Haikuist Network that appears on Friday in the International Herald Tribune/The Asahi Shimbun edited in Tokyo. Asahi is a Japanese phrase meaning "morning sun."

I chose an oolong blend of tea this morning. The tea master who sold the mixture of black and green leaves to me in Taipei said they could be infused up to nine times. "The fourth and fifth tasting of the partially fermented leaves would be the best," he said. I apply that philosophy to the way I edit poetry submissions. I pare words to a minimum and encourage a three-line, 3-5-3 syllable form rather than the popular 5-7-5 form in English, often reviled by serious poets as spam haiku. A few are composed on one or two lines in fewer than 17 syllables. More than just an image, a reference to nature and a thought, the poem needs a subtle surprise, "ahness" or intriguing juxtaposition that brings the three lines together. It is not just a pretty picture in words.

K. Ramesh sent me a poem from Chennai, India. It was a lovely poem, but he was concerned about the form (which is 4-7-4, but I occasionally accept such variations) and the meaning of a few of the words he had employed. We bantered back and forth about the poem by e-mail. He sent a few revisions before we settled on this one for the newspaper:

Reading in bed . . .
memory of the flavour
evening tea

I have received haiku from writers in over 50 countries. I keep every letter, every foreign stamp. Occasionally I receive haiku from a priest living in Malta. Missing his train, Francis Attard said he had time to enjoy tea with a stranger.

Missing the fast train
tea with a stranger scented
in paper cups

Wen Wei is from New York, but he occasionally visits family in Tokyo. He is sometimes delayed by the weather. He sent me a haiku from Narita that contrasts all of autumn and its furious hurricanes and typhoons with the serenity of a simple cup of tea.

Blue autumn
hurricane gone,? cup
of warm tea

I regularly receive haiku from a science teacher in North Carolina who studied for a year on sabbatical in Hiroshima ? where quietly sipping his tea Charlie Smith realized that fall had begun.

Gentle breeze
first autumn colors
float in tea

But I think the American prefers coffee most. In the next haiku Smith put emphasis on a red oval--perhaps a coffee maker logo like Seattles Best.

Red oval
vending machine change
hot coffee

Murasaki Sagano in Kyoto and Angelika Wienert in Germany are also coffee connoisseurs.
While chatting
an autumn wind sweeps--
aroma of coffee

Drizzle
across the street
a coffee bar

Michael Corr has been living in Nagoya for two decades. He has been sending me haiku every week for the last 14 years. A botanist, he often writes about plants, and he enjoys a cuppa. He believes composing haiku is best the first time it is set down in print. Like the impulsive beat poets of California, he writes dozens of haiku at a time, rarely changing them. He has the uncanny ability to spout haiku poetry in both 5-7-5 and 3-5-3 syllables on a whim.

In Kanayama
tea house tiger lilies are
lavender ones ah

Fresh Nishio
tea delivered boxed
just from beach

Kennosuke Tachibana sent me a haiku daily during my first eight years as a columnist. I was with him through illness, depression and even dental visits, all vicariously through haiku. We've never met. By reading his many letters and haiku I learned that he was born in Matsuyama, studied at Aiko Gakuen High School, and moved to Tokyo to become a journal editor. When his father died, he composed the following to express the sound of summer birds in the hills near his native Matsuyama.

The white smoke
of his cremation
mountains laugh

I have met very few of the people who write to me almost every day. We share poetry at first. I do my best to question, suggest, and after I get to know the writer better, sometimes even edit their poems. Editing poetry, lines written with direct links to someone’s heart, is not at all like editing this essay I am sharing with you now. Although the notes in my column are closely proofed, the editors at the head office of the giant newspaper company never touch the poems.

Haiku, the smallest poem in the world, allures people in different ways. Some are tempted because it looks so easy to write. The more they write, the more they become attracted to its complexity. Japanese who grow up with haiku in school find the English version particularly tempting. Anna Akamatsu has been a constant contributor of fine poetry to my column for 14 years. I still remember the day she wrote to happily announce the creation of her "first haiku composed directly-originally-in English."

Gardenia
in memory of
Summertime

Her breakthrough was achieved while watching "Summertime," a romantic movie filmed in Venice in 1955 starring Katherine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi. Akamatsu said that she was definitely "thinking in English then." Prior to her debut in English, she had reflected on the process of how she translated her own Japanese compositions. Reading from my book, "Haiku Composed in English as a Japanese Language," (Pukeko, 2003), she sympathizes with students who "feel it is much safer to translate their native Japanese" and agrees with a premise raised in the book that the "translation of haiku is impossible." So Akamatsu tried to conjure the original images of her Japanese haiku and to re-experience them until they became clear again in her mind before expressing them with English words. She admits she can't use this process successfully on other haikuists' poems, but she is able to bilingually share her own heartfelt messages. In just a few words - a few nouns, maybe a verb - and little grammar, haiku composed in English can express much to English speakers. Here's one more haiku from that budding author of haiku composed in "English as a Japanese language." It's about her favorite sweetly perfumed white flower.

Gardenia
in a roof-garden
remains so

Some haikuists prefer to study past masters of haiku such as Kobayashi Yataro (1763-1828) who chose Issa, meaning cup of tea, as his pen name. He wrote: yamadera ya cha no ko no an mo kiku no hana. Perhaps he had a sweet tooth in addition to enjoying a good cup of tea.

Mountain temple
the sweets served with tea
shaped like mums

I enjoy the sweet taste of maple tea. It is readily available in a shop near my home in Kagoshima. I also enjoy sipping tea in a shop called Haiku-jaya or Haiku Tea House. All its walls, beams and doors are hung with haiku-sheets composed by customers. When I return from vacation in Canada, from my cottage on Maple Lake in Ontario, I always bring back maple syrup and a haiku penned in Canada for the neighbors. The taste is a bit sweet for them, so I really shouldn’t add maple sugar and cream to the scented tealeaves when I drink it here in Japan. Tea is best when it is clear. The images used in haiku must be clear and the reference to time or nature explicit. Haikuists eliminate overly bold metaphors or similes and explanatory remarks. Something must be left unsaid.

The Canadian poet Eric Amann once defined haiku as "the wordless poem." Meaning is more important than the words, he claimed. I suppose the most moving poetry lies not in the syllables, not the words, nor the lines, nor the meaning. The timing of a poem is what matters. When the timing is right, readers will always be receptive to a poem no matter when it is penned.

Having selected haiku for 14 years as an expatriate Canada in Japan, melancholy sets in the deepest when a fellow Canadian returns home. Canadian Barbara Wybou wrote to tell me that she was preparing to return home to Toronto after having resided in Tokyo for 18 years. That homecoming has motivated her to start recording precious memories. She says, "There is nothing like composing haiku to keep alive moments in time." She shared two haiku with me. The first was written while she was coming home from the Kawagoe antique market.

First cold night
smells of grilled fish
floating on wind

The datura that she mentions in the next haiku is a plant that blossoms at night. It is also known as jimson weed and looks like an oversized morning glory. Its large, white flowers close in the morning, wrapping themselves into star-shaped buds.

Revealing its depths
? a star-shaped datura bud
spreads into moonlight

Wybou says that once she started writing haiku, she realized the extent to which she didn't know the names of plants and birds in Japan. She revealed that "Last spring I stopped someone on the street to ask what bird it was making a strange sound, only to find out that I was listening to a frog!"

The next haiku illustrates an attempt by Antol Knoll to learn the name of the frog while she was touring Japan. Knoll, who works in the incunabula (pre-1501 printings) department of Old and Rare Books at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, asked me to decide whether the onomatopoeic sound of the frog in Japanese (kero kero) is better than the English: "but where is the frog?"

Honda, Toyota,
Nissan, Subaru, Datsun
kero kero ka?

The first issue of my Asahi Haikuist Network column appeared April 5, 1995 in the Asahi Evening News. Over 10,000 haiku have been printed since: Many of the contributors becoming well-known haikuists. The greatest change in haiku submitted to the Asahi Haikuist Network during the past 14 years has been the shift from 5-7-5 picturesque or idiomatic-type poems to shorter 11-syllable poems that use poetic techniques such as metaphor to fuse images of humanity and nature. This trend toward shorter English verse is likely to continue in Japan, where 10- and 11-syllable haiku in English are awarded top prizes.
Yukiko Yamada, a talented haikuist who sent me many haiku from Tokyo wrote to me one day about going to live in Matsue in 2005.

Moving day
one last look
cherry blossoms

Her haiku won first prize in the Haiku International Association contest that year. She prefers life in her new home in the country, but I think she still reminisces about the big city. Traveling up and down hilly back roads in Tottori Prefecture, I understand from her haiku that she passed through a tranquil town just after dusk. Hungry from the day’s drive, she noticed a soba shopkeeper closing his door for the day. Urban dwellers take 24-hour convenience stores and restaurants for granted, but shops and restaurants in small towns tend to close early.

The lonesome village--
willingly served buckwheat noodles
after closing time

Some writers want to capitalize every line, which can make the little poem topple over sideways on the page, and others are upset if I don't use all lower case when I print the column. Haikuist og asknes in Norway wanted to leave our network of haikuists around the world because I once capitalized his name. His work is wonderfully pithy, so I have obliged ever after:

november
moon, feeling closer
to my bones

In an age when trendy people sport a coffee cup while walking down the street listening to music through earphones or sending text messages through a cell phone no one wants or seems to have the time to read anything that is very long, haiku can seem the perfect form. Being the perfect selector is another matter. As constant counsel to the way I edit haiku and read the letters from contributors, I always keep in mind a haiku by the 18th-century master, Yosa Buson, translated from his 5-7-5 into a 4-7-4 format:

Passing spring
rejected poet resents
the selector

There is a steady warm flow of rain outside my window. This afternoon I’ll begin selecting haiku for this week’s column, and try to keep cool with a tall glass of ice tea. In a frame by the window I notice a translation I made a few years ago of a haiku composed by the last recognized master of haiku, Masaoka Shiki. He had worked as a newspaper editor in Tokyo.

Alone
in the editorial room
summer rain

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David McMurray