New to Haiku–Brad Bennett’s Opening Doors: In Praise of the Thesaurus

Today at New to Haiku, we are happy to present an essay by Brad Bennett. A former editor of haiku and senryu at Frogpond, Brad has published three collections of poetry, with a fourth book in the works. He is also the former Education Committee co-chair of The Haiku Foundation. Thanks for sharing your expertise with us, Brad.

Opening Doors: In Praise of the Thesaurus

“A thesaurus—here it comes—is for increasing one’s aliveness to words. Nothing more and nothing less. By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself: its coloration, its interior, its traces of meaning.”

James Parker¹

You’ve experienced the moment. You’ve written the first draft of your haiku. Now you’re embarking on that heady, tumultuous, wild ride known as “revising.” It can be a challenging journey with many twists and turns. Occasionally, you may need some help in navigating the trip. You may decide to consult a thesaurus. We’ve all probably used thesauri at some point in our lives, but how useful are they when it comes to revising our haiku?

All poets strive to find the right words at every corner. Since haiku are so very concise, finding the right words is perhaps an even more critical task. In an essay entitled, “Haiku Diction: The Use of Words in Haiku,” Charlie Trumbull suggests three basic strategies for choosing the right words:

“1. minimizing the number of words in the first place
2. being sure that every word used is the right one
3. making sure each word is as full of meaning as possible.”²

This is great advice, but how do we achieve this? The thesaurus is one helpful tool we can use in our efforts to find words that are right and meaningful.

How do editors of thesauri define their mission? According to the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, “The word thesaurus literally means ‘treasury’ in Latin, and we hope that the treasure trove of words contained in these pages will enhance the user’s interest in and appreciation of the English language.”³ The word “treasury” certainly suggests that the words contained within might gleam with meaning, a prospect very enticing for the haiku writer and reviser.

How welcome are thesauri for creative writers? Their value has been debated through the decades. When Peter Mark Roget’s first thesaurus appeared in 1852, people were immediately concerned that it would be used as a writing crutch.⁴ And some creative writers have been mildly to vehemently opposed to its value and/or use. Poet Mark Doty was quoted in an interview as saying, “If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else.”⁵ Novelist Stephen King wrote, “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”⁶ Others have been enthusiastic about the potential of a thesaurus. Poet Sylvia Plath was very committed to using her thesaurus in her early poems, and novelist Margaret Atwood gave this advice to creative writers: “You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.”⁷

SYNONYMS VS. RELATED WORDS

We all know that a thesaurus is a book full of words and their synonyms, but what exactly are synonyms? The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus defines them thusly: “Put simply, synonyms are words that mean the same thing. Words that are only somewhat similar in meaning—but do not mean the same thing—are not true synonyms. They are merely related words, and they belong in a different category. In this thesaurus a word is classified as a synonym if and only if it shares with another word at least one basic meaning.”⁸ But if synonyms must mean the same thing, and we consult the thesaurus to find an alternative to particular words that just won’t do, then perhaps what we’re really trying to locate are not synonyms but rather those “related words” mentioned above.

Billy Collins, in his poem “Thesaurus,” claims “…there is no such thing as a synonym…” In the same poem, Collins suggests that a thesaurus is “just a place where words congregate with their relatives, a big park where hundreds of family reunions are always being held…”⁹ Of course he’s right, in one sense. Two words never mean the exact same thing. But that’s not the most valuable function of a thesaurus anyway. The thesaurus can act as a tour guide or roadmap, conducting you from one word to the next, until you find the consummate word for that spot in that poem at that moment. And the word you end up with may create a much different poem from the one you started out with.

I would argue that we’re not actually looking for synonyms when we consult a thesaurus for poetry revisions—rather we’re in search of the most apt related word. In her book, Translating Myself and Others, novelist Jumpa Lahiri compares synonyms with the act of translating. “Translating means understanding, above all, how words slip and slide into each other, how they overlap, how they end up producing a fertile lexical promiscuity. Even the meaning of synonym, from the Greek [ouv/syn] (to express, identify) and [ovoux/onoma] (name), suggests a type of translation… A translation, like a synonym, literally creates more pathways and more sense.”¹⁰ It is the lexicon of related words in a thesaurus that leads to new pathways and new meaning. And, as James Parker, staff writer for The Atlantic, posits in the epigraph above, “By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself.”¹¹

USING THE THESAURUS FOR HAIKU REVISION

How does this marvelous journey play out when we’re writing haiku? I’m sure those of us who use thesauri each have our own protocols. For instance, I never utilize my thesaurus for the first draft. For me, that would get in the way of the process of observing, feeling, and capturing the haiku moment. That would mean I moved too quickly from my senses and my heart to my head. Only when I start to revise do I pick the thesaurus up. For me, it is a tool best used during the crafting stages of the poem. In addition, I rarely find the right word at my first stop. My trips almost always consist of more than one stop. And I’ve noticed that the more rewarding thesaurus journeys are often the longer ones. Lexicographer Ben Zimmer writes, “A thesaurus, like any reference tool, requires active participation from its readers to unlock its potential utility.”¹² We start with one word and let the thesaurus lead us to others, which then lead us to others.

Haiku scholar Paul O. Williams suggested that “…the search for the exact word in haiku…is a careful and quiet search, more in depth than breadth, more in spirit than in language. It demands opposite qualities sometimes—penetration and whimsy, passive waiting and mental exploration, constraint and freedom.”¹³ As Williams implies, ultimately, we want to dive deeply into the haiku moment to try to get at its essence. It’s not a simple, straightforward process. It’s not an as-the-crow-flies kind of journey—it’s more of an as-the-hummingbird-darts exploration. Williams gets it right—it’s a search that requires many qualities all at once. As noted, the perfect word for a specific haiku is a vital part of the revision process. But we don’t want that search to yank us away from the original haiku moment. We want that search to help inch us closer to that moment. The perfect word reveals the moment’s essence.

Each move from one word to the next is like the “link and shift” process so important to Japanese short forms. You look up one word in the thesaurus and read its cluster of synonyms and related words. One of them catches your fancy. It’s related to the original word but shifts the semantic direction just a tad. Then you look up that second word and read its cluster of synonyms and related words. One of them catches your fancy. You repeat this link and shift process until you’ve settled on the right one for your haiku. Each time, you start with one conception of what the haiku needs in that instance, and you shift to a new conception. Poet William Stafford wrote, “The ‘revision’ process is largely a process of accepting what one can from the given, and then of politely declining and selecting among alternatives when it feels right to do so.”¹⁴ The experience is like ripples in a pond.

I certainly don’t use a thesaurus for each poem I write. Far from it. My best guess is that I use it for approximately 10% of my poems. I search for verbs more often than I search for other parts of speech. Traveling through the countryside of verb nuances is a very pleasant journey. I also use the thesaurus for adjectives and nouns, but the search for nouns is usually not as fruitful. A tree is a tree is a tree—the word “tree” doesn’t even occur in my thesaurus—and if I want a related word, I can just use a species name. Sometimes, a thesaurus search leads me to reimagine my haiku with a different part of speech. For instance, I may start by searching for synonyms for a noun and end up dramatically shifting a haiku’s meaning by using a new verb. Lastly, it’s important to vet a chosen word to make sure it is exactly what you are trying to say. On my writing desk, a dictionary is right next to the thesaurus. On my computer’s “Favorite Bookmarks” bar, I have a link to The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus site that includes a dictionary as well.¹⁵

FINDING THE RIGHT WORD

So, what are the benefits of using a thesaurus? Perhaps most obviously, in haiku we strive for semantic precision. Brevity begs for exactitude in the words that we choose. “Haiku poets strive for precision of meaning and appropriateness of diction.”¹⁶ Synonyms and related words can yield that specificity and accuracy. Which word most accurately describes what you want to say? Which word gives you more relevant meaning? The thesaurus is also a big help for those of us who are getting older with memories that aren’t what they used to be. Sometimes, there’s a specific word that would work in a specific poem, and it’s just out of mental reach. My trusty thesaurus will often lead me to the word I am looking for.

We choose words for a variety of other reasons besides specificity and accuracy. Sometimes, it’s about the sounds of individual words and their harmonic contributions to the poem’s euphony (the quality of being pleasing to the ear).¹⁷  For instance, you might choose a particular word that helps to create alliteration (the repetition of sound at the beginning of neighboring words) or assonance (the repetition of a vowel sound in neighboring words). Sometimes, it’s about cadence (the rhythmic flow of a line or poem). You might choose a two-syllable word instead of a one-syllable word to create a more pleasing rhythm in a line or phrase. Sometimes, it’s about finding the word that creates more effective ambiguity. Or it could be the word that sets up more ma (the potential of space).¹⁸ In situations like this, you may want to pull back from precision to create more room for the reader. Sometimes, the word you choose has more power, more vitality, or more agency, all of which can strengthen your poem.

OPENING NEW DOORS

So precision, euphony, cadence, effective ambiguity, and ma are all important during the selection process. But perhaps even more tantalizing and astonishing is the thesaurus’s knack of finding new doors. Mary Oliver writes, “I did not think of language as a means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.”¹⁹ The thesaurus can open doors that were closed before we began revising, allowing the poem to travel in new directions.

For this to happen, we must first be open to opening new doors. During my early days of writing haiku, I sometimes “bulldogged” a haiku by not letting go of my original intent. Over the years, I’ve learned the value of flying those thermals that the thesaurus provides. As Ben Zimmer suggests, “We can, nonetheless, look to it as a guidebook to help us travel around the semantic space of our shared lexicon, grasping both the similarities that bond words together and the nuances that differentiate them.”²⁰

Years ago, I took a lyric poetry class titled “The Poem Knows More Than You Do.” During that class, I learned that it helps to let each poem guide me. By extrapolation, then, it also makes sense to let the thesaurus guide me as I revise. Jane Hirshfield believes that “…poems are vessels of transformation. They are the glass crucible that a chemical reaction takes place in. And what comes out at the end is a different thing than what went in at the beginning.”²¹ Sometimes, it’s a good thing to relax in the back seat and let the thesaurus do the driving.

At the end of a thesaurus’s wormhole journey, I sometimes emerge with a word that was totally unexpected. An unexpected word can yield unexpected meaning, an unexpected unfinished metaphor, an unexpected world… James Parker gushes that the thesaurus is “…a shamanic trip into the essence of words: a shimmering, unfolding, occasionally scarifying million-petaled experience, a miraculous nest of emergent relationships…”²² Haiku poet Peter Yovu writes, “I am convinced that experimentation need not be merely imposing arbitrary innovation onto the old for the sake of novelty or excitement, but that it may be a means to uncovering truths we have left unexposed.”²³ If we allow the thesaurus to lead us, some of those new doors may yield wonderful new interpretations of our haiku moments and our relationship to them. In fact, at times the new door can even open to an antonym, turning your haiku upside down.

And if we’re open to opening new doors, we discover new things about the poem, the haiku moment, and, perhaps, even ourselves. Margaret Renkl, in a New York Times editorial on the use of A.I. during poetry revising, states, “We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words—messy, imprecise, unexpected—to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world.”²⁴ Sometimes the thesaurus process yields the “hot word” of the poem, the most energetic word of the poem, the poem’s linchpin, and we rejoice in that one word. Poet Ted Kooser seems to be referring to that elation in this portion of his poem, “march 11,” in Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison: “under layer upon layer of brooding / and ferment, a poet, / and cupped in his hands, the green shoot / of one word.”²⁵

EXAMPLE OF A THESAURUS SEARCH

In the hopes that a description of one of my thesaurus journeys might be helpful for other haiku writers, especially those who are new to haiku, I will now share a travelog of one quest for the right word for a specific haiku. Here is my first draft:

end of autumn
less leaves
more sky

As I started to revise this poem, I quickly realized that it was too glib—it sounded too much like a slogan—perhaps because it was too abstract and too static. To fix that, I decided I needed to include a verb. So, my next draft became:

end of autumn
the maples
cede more sky

But I wasn’t happy with the word “cede” either. It felt like the trees were giving in, and that wasn’t what I was trying to portray. At this point, I pulled out my thesaurus. I looked up the word “cede,” which led me to “abdicate.” But that word also felt too much like “giving in.” I kept traveling, and next arrived at “yield,” which can mean “to give in,” but can also mean “to bring forth.” I liked the ambiguity of the two meanings. I looked up “yield,” which sent me to “surrender.” It felt like I was backtracking, but I decided to look up “surrender” anyway. That turned out to be a great decision, because it led me to the word “render.” I was enticed by “render,” so I vetted it with my dictionary, realizing that it possessed multiple meanings that could work well in the poem, including “provides,” “causes to be,” “makes,” “performs a service,” “extracts,” “transmits to another,” “gives back,” “gives a performance of,” and “translates.” Each definition of this one new word created a different, hopefully intriguing, interpretation for the reader. This one word opened up a new door in the revising process that eventually rendered this final draft:

autumn dwindles
the maple tree renders
more sky

• Brad Bennett²⁶

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

As is true of any road trip, sometimes you need to use caution when using your thesaurus. You certainly don’t want to use one for every word or every poem. You want to avoid alienating yourself from the haiku moment and interfering with the flow of the poem. Also, the word you end up with needs to sound like it is authentic to your voice, that you haven’t borrowed someone else’s diction. Lastly, your search might not yield a new word. You don’t want to force it. Sometimes, after a thesaurus search, I end up sticking with my original word and feel a satisfying sense of clarity. So, either I find something better or become more comfortable with my original word. There’s no downside.

We haikuists yearn to choose the right words for every haiku we write. A thesaurus can help us find the precise words or lead us to new doors and unexpected twists and turns. It can be a wondrous and, perhaps, illuminating journey: a celebration of words.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Donna Kaplan and Barbara Schwartz for their help with this essay. I am also grateful to Judson Evans for inviting me to visit his haiku classes at Berklee College over the last decade. It was during conversations with his students that I first shared the revision process for my haiku “autumn dwindles.”

CITATIONS

¹ Parker, James. “An Ode to My Thesaurus,” The Atlantic, July-August 2022, p. 100.

² Trumbull, Charles. “Haiku Diction: The Use of Words in Haiku,” Frogpond 38:2.

³ The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2005.

⁴ Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

⁵ Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

⁶ Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

⁷ Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

⁸ The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2005, p. 9a.

⁹ Collins, Billy. The Art of Drowning. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

¹⁰ Lahiri, Jumpa. “Lingua/Language.” Translating Myself and Others. Princeton University Press, 2022, p. 134.

¹¹ Parker, James. “An Ode to My Thesaurus,” The Atlantic, July-August 2022, p. 100.

¹² Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

¹³ Williams, Paul O. The Nick of Time. Lee Gurga & Michael Dylan Welch, Editors. Foster City, CA: Press here, 2001, p. 88.

¹⁴ Stafford, William. “Where ‘Yellow Cars’ Comes From.” You Must Revise Your Life. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1986, p. 43.

¹⁵ See https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus.

¹⁶ Trumbull, Charles. “Haiku Diction: The Use of Words in Haiku,” Frogpond 38:2.

¹⁷ See https://www.modernhaiku.org/issue53-1/MH53-1-Bennett-Euphony.pdf.

¹⁸ See https://medium.com/@kiyoshimatsumoto/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-space-and-time-3330c83ded4c.

¹⁹ Oliver, Mary. “Staying Alive.” Upstream. New York: Penguin Press, 2016, p. 18.

²⁰ Zimmer, Ben. “Word for Word.” Lapham’s Quarterly. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/communication/word-word.

²¹ Hirshfield, Jane. “What a Poetic Mind Can Teach Us About How to Live.” Transcript of podcast interview, “The Ezra Klein Show,” 3/3/2, The New York Times. Accessed 3/2/25 at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jane-hirshfield.html?showTranscript=1.

²² Parker, James. “An Ode to My Thesaurus,” The Atlantic, July-August 2022, p. 100.

²³ Yovu, Peter. “Do Something Different,” Frogpond 31:1, pp. 51-52.

²⁴ Renkl, Margaret. “I, Human,” The New York Times, 2/24/25. Accessed 2/24/25 at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/opinion/i-human.html.

²⁵ Kooser, Ted. Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Melon University Press, 2000.

²⁶ Folded Word Press Equinox Series 2018.

Brad Bennett lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. After teaching third grade for twenty-five years, he now teaches haiku to adults. He has published three collections of haiku with Red Moon Press, a drop of pond (2016), a turn in the river (2019), and a box of feathers (2022). His fourth book, a rush of doves, is due to be published this spring. Brad was an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park in 2021 and served as haiku and senryu editor for Frogpond from 2021-2023.