Interview with a Haiku Educator: Charlotte Digregorio Talks to Ce Rosenow

As part of New to Haiku’s new Interviews with Haiku Educators series, Charlotte Digregorio shares her interview with Ce Rosenow. Thanks, Charlotte and Ce!

Ce Rosenow is a poet, educator, and scholar. She served as editor of Northwest Literary Forum, co-editor of Portlandia Review of Books, publisher of Mountains and Rivers Press, and senior editor of Juxtapositions: Research and Scholarship in Haiku. She was the lead organizer of Haiku North America 1997 and co-organizer of various haiku conferences and meetings. Her articles, book reviews, essays, poetry, and translations have been published widely in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to the books of poetry she discusses below, she also co-edited with Bob Arnold The Next One Thousand Years, Selected Poems of Cid Corman. Her academic books include Care Ethics and Poetry (with Maurice Hamington, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019), Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions (Lexington, 2020), and Japanese Forms in American Poetry: Beyond Haiku (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2026). She has held teaching positions at Mount Hood Community College, Portland Community College, and the University of Oregon, and she is currently on the faculty at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

1) How and when did you become a poet, and when did you discover haiku?

I always enjoyed writing assignments in elementary school, including poetry. When I was thirteen, I started writing poems on my own rather than as a school assignment. I identified as a poet right around that same time.

I discovered literary haiku when I was a senior in college. In 1989, I had a poetry program on Santa Clara University’s radio station: Poetry and Beans. vince tripi and Jerry Kilbride came down from San Francisco and spent an afternoon recording readings that I played on future shows. vince’s book, Haiku Pond: A Trace of the Trail . . . and Thoreau had just received an honorary mention, I believe, in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards.

2) What do you love about writing haiku?

I love the focus it brings to the present moment and the way it helps me express connections between things I’m experiencing. I love that it creates a contemplative space, and I also appreciate that it helps me celebrate small wonders and large aha moments. I especially love the community I discovered when I started reading and writing haiku. I will always be grateful to vince and Jerry for introducing me to this community that gave me so many lifelong friends.

3) Who are some haiku poets who have most influenced your writing?

This question is challenging to answer. There are so many people who have influenced different aspects of my haiku at various points in my life. Here’s a partial list: Sue Antolin, Maggie Chula, Cherie Hunter Day, Wilma Erwin, Carolyn Hall, Penny Harter, Paul Miller, vince tripi, Michael Dylan Welch, and Harriot West. It is difficult for me to name everyone because I feel like I’m learning from other poets all the time. vince was the very first haiku poet who influenced my work. Before I had learned the term “internal comparison,” I saw this technique in vince’s haiku. I was also struck by the empathy and compassion in his poems, the attention to very specific moments in nature, and his specificity in naming things rather than using general terms. In my earliest haiku, I began trying to incorporate these things.

4) You were President of the Haiku Society of America for three years, beginning in 2010. In what ways was it a learning experience?

I learned more about working with people and their different temperaments. My teaching experience helped, but unlike working with students, I had to diffuse a lot of volatile situations. Members would get upset about something or someone, and they’d bring their grievances to me on a regular basis. I also learned about the poets and activities in the different HSA regions around the country because, at that time, the president had to travel to four national meetings each year. That was a wonderful learning experience! Additionally, I discovered that the HSA hadn’t done much outreach to the academic community. I enjoyed working on that as well as connecting the HSA’s journal, Frogpond, with other literary journals to develop more awareness of haiku in the mainstream poetry world. I have to say that I was fortunate to work with a fabulous executive committee that did a great job collaborating and moving work forward.

5) You founded a small book publishing company, Mountains and Rivers Press, that was in existence for several years. What are a few of the titles you published and why did you choose to publish them?

My goal with the press was to publish American poets who were working with some aspect of mid-twentieth-century poetics but in new ways. That’s how I chose the books. The press published work by authors including:

• Cid Corman (The Exultations, For Crying Out Loud, Just for Now)
• Maggie Chula (Just This)
• Lorraine Ellis Harr (Under the Roan Cliffs: A Collection of Renga 1994-2001 with Brad Wolthers)
• Penny Harter (Recycling Starlight, The Resonance Around Us)
• Sabine Miller (Circumference of Mercy)
• Lenard D. Moore (The Geography of Jazz, The Open Eye)
• Harriot West (Into the Light).

6) Tell us about the poetry collections you’ve authored, and what are some of the prominent themes of your work?

My poetry collections include: The Backs of Angels, Even If, North Lake, Pacific, Spectral Forms, and A Year Longer. I’m also one of eight authors of Beyond/Within, which is a book of rengay. All of my books/chapbooks include haiku and related forms; however, only North Lake and Pacific are comprised entirely of haiku. I think a few of the main themes in my work are grief, memory, nature, and transience.

7) What are the areas of research and editing that you have a passion for?

I’ve been very interested in the relationship between Japanese culture/poetry and American poetry for decades. I’ve focused most of my research and editing in the last several years specifically on English-language haiku, although I’m also interested in the connections between poetry and care ethics as well as between poetry and well-being. In the field of philosophy, care ethics is a specific area developed by feminist philosophers. It focuses on relationships and prioritizes context and compassion. Anyone interested in learning more might start with the work of Nel Noddings, who said that the attention required to provide real care is nothing short of engrossment, and Maurice Hamington, who has written on embodied care. Hamington explains that we can engage our caring imaginations to understand the experiences of others and use that caring knowledge to develop caring habits.

8) You have taught college students for decades. Why do you teach haiku to students, and what are some of the methods you use?

I teach haiku because I think it’s a wonderful form that can have a positive impact on how people write and how they live. Writing haiku is important in and of itself, and it can also help students work with imagery and getting the most out of each word in a poem. Those things impact their other writing, as well.

How I teach haiku depends on my audience and their experience with poetry. In general, I start by discussing what a haiku is and does. Then we go over some basic formal components. We always look at plenty of good examples, including winners of the Touchstone Awards, doing close readings of the sample poems so that the students can see how the formal components work and what the haiku convey. For the students’ own writing, we focus on many things including word choice, punctuation, and different haiku techniques such as juxtaposition, vertical haiku, and monoku. We also workshop the students’ original haiku in small groups and sometimes as a class. Each of these aspects can be modified based on how many times I meet with the students and where they are at with their writing.

Here are three examples of the many haiku I use when teaching:

cattails
rising about pond mist
song-sparrow trill

––Paul MacNeil

 

walking the snow-crust
not sinking
sinking

––Anita Virgil

 

leaving      all the morning glories      closed

––Elizabeth Searle Lamb

These three poems are great for students new to contemporary English-language haiku. They are accessible yet offer a depth that dispels the version of haiku that students often encountered in elementary or middle school. After close reading and discussion, they also reveal aspects of craft that the students can try out in their own work.

I use Paul MacNeil’s poem because it can be read forwards and backwards, which I think heightens the internal comparison. It’s a wonderful discussion poem as the students realize that both the cattails and the birdsong are rising above the pond mist, which they often miss in their initial reading. It also contributes to our discussion of nature imagery that appeals to multiple senses.

Anita Virgil’s haiku again engages many senses in its imagery while also showing students how the shape of the haiku can reflect the haiku moment itself.

I like Elizabeth Searle Lamb’s poem because of its delicacy, its use of the monoku form, and the effective incorporation of white space that supports multiple meanings.

9) What do your students find challenging about writing haiku?

There are three main challenges that happen consistently: understanding the haiku moment, resisting a syllable count as the primary point of the poem, and brevity. Once they understand the haiku moment, they often still want to count syllables. Once they move past counting syllables, they either write more than they need to, or they don’t write enough to successfully convey the moment to the reader. We work through each of these issues as they come up. Revision becomes their best teacher.

10) Do you have your students write haiku in free form or in the traditional form of 5-7-5 syllables?

I teach them free form, but if they produce good 5-7-5 poems, that’s fine, too.

11) Do you write monoku? What common mistakes do poets make in writing monoku?

I have written them over the years, but not frequently. In fact, it’s something I want to work with more because I love reading them and, as I note above, including them in my haiku workshops. I don’t, however, feel qualified to address mistakes that others make. I probably make them, too!

(For more information about monoku, please refer to this piece at The Haiku Foundation, or check out New to Haiku’s Whiptail Monoku Series.)

12) What is gendai, and do you write it? Why or why not?

Gendai refers to a movement in Japan that started in the 1920s and has been getting some traction in the United States for the past couple of decades, although earlier examples in English-language haiku certainly exist. It literally means “modern.” In Japan, different approaches or schools developed it. In the U.S. the primary approach is still a psychological one, which means there’s room for expansion. I do write gendai haiku, although that interest has been more recent. My haiku from the past several decades is primarily traditional. When I write gendai, it’s because of the moment I’ve experienced and choosing the best way to express it.

(See this page on The Haiku Foundation’s website for more information on gendai haiku.)

Below are three samples of Rosenow’s favorite haiku/senryu she’s written:

in this kiss
all our other kisses –
summer solstice

last rays of sunlight
savoring the taste
of a salmon berry

knowing the tide’s change
by its sound –
middle age

We thank Ce Rosenow for participating in our interview series. If you’d like to familiarize yourself more with Rosenow and her work, please log onto https://rosenowce.wordpress.com/research-projects/.

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