This book, like women everywhere, is filling several roles and most of them at the same time. While Those Women Writing Haiku is an anthology of the poetry of one gender, it is also a small flashlight focused on the unlit history of one form of poetry to show where, how, and when women were doing what they did.

Those Women Writing Haiku began as a survey of women haiku writers in USA and Canada in 1986. The questionnaire, divided into 16 sections, was sent to every woman of whom I had record that she had published a book. I no longer know how many sent were unanswered, but 56 in USA responded and 24 in Canada kindly filled in all the blanks.

In the fall of 1986, I returned to Hamburg, Germany, and from there I was able to establish contact with women in the Netherlands and the few available in Germany.

Knowing the book would be incomplete without a report on Japanese women, but equally aware that I was handicapped by my language limits, I enlisted the aid of Kazuo Sato, Director of the International Division of the Haiku Museum in Tokyo, and Koko Kato, editor of the haiku magazine Ko, and Tadao Okazaki, editor of New Cicada. Each in many ways did more than I ever could have asked for in giving me recommendations, addresses, and translating. Chieko Lafferty, of San Francisco, finished translating other completed questionnaires and the letters that crossed the seas.

Even with all of this help, I acknowledge that the chapter on haiku in Japan is woefully inadequate and cannot be accepted as anywhere near the full truth of the situation. As the chapter now stands, it is one peek through a closed door with the tiniest hole in the paper. Still no one else has given us a better overall picture of the Japanese haiku scene without regard of gender, so I hope the reader will be intrigued enough with the brief glimpse to clamor for more from another author better suited to the job than I.

As with nearly every book, this one too arrived at a point (after about six years) when everyone wondered if it would ever be completed. Daunted, but not defeated, there was one thought that kept me coming back to the material in an effort to make a book out of all those files.

The more I learned about the contributions women had made to just this small section of writing, the more I saw how easily their efforts, if unheeded and not sealed in a book, would be lost. In just the thirty-five years of the unofficial history of American haiku, memories are fading and names not repeated by friends or admirers are already slipping from library shelves.

The only personalities and names many of the newcomers recognize are those in the anthologies. (This statement is as true for any poetry scene as well as the ancient Japanese literature.) Thus, I felt an obligation to document contributions that had, even at the time of their occurrence, not received the attention that later has proved was due.

All too easily we accept the situation as it is, not realizing how this person's work or that relationship, has influenced someone who influences someone else.

Actually, no effort is so small that it is not part of the total process of passing along of the poet's fire. If there were not numerous less well-known names in the movement, there would be no support for the esteemed names. Each person contributes as time, talent, and inclination allow. It does not mean that someone who has contributed greatly of time and effort is necessarily the best poet and some of the best poets have stayed active very briefly in the scene. And, basically, it is not an issue of who was great or merely good, but that each did what she could as well as she could.

How often have writers been greatly influenced by reading a chance poem or just a line from a little-known writer that has spurred them on to finding the best vehicle for their own vision?

So many have asked, with eyes askance, "Why a book about women writing haiku?"

Frankly, I'm neither.

However, one does not have to investigate far to find that most of the anthologies of haiku are written by men. Perhaps that is the reason the major portion of selected participants in the anthologies are therefore men, even though a glance at the list of members of haiku organizations runs from about 50% feminine names in USA to over 70% in Japan.

The title, Those Women Writing Haiku, came from a statement attributed to Basho, from his Rules of (Poetical) Pilgrimage, which appeared in the Goshichiki in 1760 (sixty-six years after his death). Coda 12 reads: Do not become intimate with those women writing haiku; is good for neither teacher or pupil. If she is earnest about haiku, teach her through another. The duty of men and women is the production of heirs. Dissipation prevents the richness and unity of the mind. The Way of Haiku arises from concentration and lack of distraction. Look well within yourself.

Thank goodness this was not the advice Basho followed because he did have female students. True, most of them were either wives, sisters, mothers or prostitute friends of his favorite renga partners or students and thus, Basho did allow them to add their poetry to the links of men writing renga.

In his last years and his final illness in 1694, Basho, gladly let the nun Ukoh take care of him and run his affairs. I guess not much changes.

It would have been most ideal if a man had written this book. That would have avoided any self-pity that has crept in.

I must admit that when I began collecting the material for the book (1986) I did not believe there was any segregation in the publishing world. However, as I began the long search for a publisher, I definitely was made cognizant that I was the wrong-shaped person to be seeking the help of a basically closed circle. Men who already were publishing with established houses, without exception, folded their hands behind their backs when I asked their help in introducing this material.

All along the way, it has been principally women who have endorsed the project, who have written letters of accreditation for the inquiries and letters of encouragement for me to keep with it.

Multiplying my efforts, my involvement, my results with the unmeasured, but real parallel efforts of other women to get other writing projects published, it is surprising that someone else has not written this book with more anger and protest.

Basically an optimist, I prefer to be thankful for the help I have received.

Doris Heitmeyer, Secretary of the Haiku Society of America, acted on a personal basis when the organization refused to endorse the project. She was the one, the only one, who wrote asking more information, listening to the whole rigmarole, and who, finally, copied all the available material and sent it to acquaintances within the group, asking for letters of recommendation.

L.A. Davidson and Geraldine C. Little, of New York, both responded. This help came at a time when it would have been the easiest to drop the whole shebang.

Help came from another quarter. As I was despairing of ever getting it all written, and knowing the job of the first chapter had not even been begun, Davina Kosh sent, out of the blue web of women weaving, what has been used here as the historical background of the genre. Being able to use this boosted my spirits, and doubled my resolve that women's efforts should not be relegated to dresser drawers or the backs of grocery lists and got that difficult first chapter down in rows of words.

Hopefully, this will be a book you will refer to again and again as your involvement and enjoyment of Japanese literature grows. It is common to be enthusiastic about a certain poet's work at different phases of one's growth. Here is a generous tasting of the moods, outlook, styles, of many women's work.

In the text, I have purposefully avoided judgment or qualitative descriptions of the haiku. I would prefer the reader decides what is liked or disliked for personal reasons and not for any literary ax I or anyone else has to grind.

The haiku chosen for the anthology are not all my favorites; I've tried to give a cross-section of styles and experiments. Many authors made available all of their published works from which I could make choices. For other authors I only had permission to use the one haiku they had listed on the answers to the questionnaire. Either way, I'm grateful to be able to bring together the many divergent works written in the spirit of haiku, which to my thinking is one of the best tests of a poem: is it filled with the spirit of haiku?

Go to Chapter One .

Go to the Table of Contents for Those Women Writing Haiku..