Living a Haiku Life in the Mississippi Delta: An Interview with John Zheng by Charlotte Digregorio

This week, as part of New to Haiku’s new Interviews with Haiku Educators series, Charlotte Digregorio shares her interview with author, educator, poet and scholar John Zheng.

John (Jianqing) Zheng’s haiku publications include Dreaminations, A Way of Looking, Just Looking, Delta Sun, One Hundred Views of the Moon, Delta Notes, Delta Lenscapes, Deltascape, Found Haiku from Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Sudden Rain which will be out in 2026. He is also the editor of The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, African American Haiku: Cultural Vision, Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and Conversations with Lenard D. Moore.

1) Please tell us about your background in academia and why you choose to teach haiku to your students.

I have been teaching college since 1982. Ten years in a city university in China and twenty-nine in a rural university in the Mississippi Delta. I earned a PhD and MA in English and an MLIS in library and information science from the University of Southern Mississippi. I hold a certificate in graduate study from Wuhan University.

The sweet thing I remember in my first ten years of college teaching was that each time I published a scholarly essay, I received royalties from the journal. Very much like a half-month salary. But I never published haiku back then though I wrote some poems in classical Chinese poetic forms and shared them with friends.

I moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1991 and relocated to the Mississippi Delta in 1996 after I earned my terminal degree. The benefit of living and teaching in the Delta is that it’s a remote area and too far to drive to Memphis or Jackson on weekends, so I have tons of time to write at home. It’s my alone time to enjoy the writing life. So far, I have edited and coedited ten books, some are essay collections; some are conversations with contemporary authors like Dana Gioia, Gish Jen, Sterling Plumpp, Jerry W. Ward, Lenard D. Moore, and Michael S. Harper, three of which are about African American haiku. I have also published more than two hundred essays, interviews, photographic essays, and review essays. This is my academic life. As for poems, translations, and haiku, they are the products of finding joy in life.

Teaching poetry writing to undergrads can be fun and challenging. Without providing a prompt or theme, their verse can be about God or love brimmed with no things but ideas or written like a Hallmark card poem. So, many times I give them some prompts. To encourage students to be objective, to look outward, not inward, to understand no ideas but in things, I choose to teach haiku before we jump to free verse or other forms.

2) What do your students find both challenging and enjoyable about writing haiku? What methods do you use to instruct them?

Usually, a challenge for students is the resistance to abstract expression. It’s like a tug-of-war between abstract and concrete. Another challenge is to fill each line with literal images that are juxtaposed to convey a meaning or fill each line with images littered there meaninglessly. I often ask students to write their haiku on the board for class discussion in order to find a way to chop the wordy part and turn the draft into a publishable haiku. I also give my suggestions by asking if it is possible to change this way or that way.

It’s good to help students understand the unimportance of 5/7/5, the importance of images beyond images through juxtaposition. It is also good to point out that if their first line is an abstract word like marriage or loneliness or solitude or whatever, lines 2 and 3 must be concrete so as to help the reader visualize the abstract idea. One example I use is:

marriage
a dovetail that interlocks
tenon and mortise

At the beginning, I also ask students to write a complex sentence and then delete unnecessary words. Here’s an example:

snow moon [that is] too cold to touch [is] frozen on the window

snow moon
too cold to touch
frozen on the window

I also ask students to pay attention to the assonance in this example because when teaching haiku writing or analysis, it’s good to point out the musicality that is pleasant to the ear.

Another example uses an incomplete sentence that requires students to use a simile:

watermelon seeds on a plate look like …

When students provide an ideal comparison, we can then convert the sentence into three lines like this:

watermelon seeds
on a plate—
tadpoles

More importantly, since we are in the Mississippi Delta, I encourage students to write haiku about the place, culture, blues, or history. Here’s a student’s haiku published in the Asahi Haikuist Network:

delta sun
even sunflowers
droop in the heat

Destiny Washington

Here’s another student’s haiku published recently in Fireflies’ Light:

family reunion
our old dog
wags around everyone

Omarion Anderson

There are lots of rich haiku fields to nurture our students’ interest. To name a few: Asahi Haikuist Network, Daily Haiku, curated by you, Fireflies’ Light, your texts: Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All and Wondrous Instruction and Advice from Global Poets, and the fundamental website of The Haiku Foundation. Sometimes, I urge students to use the prompts from Haiku Dialogue to write haiku. A recent topic on island life challenged my students to write some. Here’s one just published in October 2025 in Quachita Life Haiku Column edited by Howard Lee Kilby:

island life
sand finds comfort
in my toes

Shyla Davis

3) What was your life like in China, and what brought you to the U.S.?

To be honest with you, my life in China was cozy and cheerful. My wife was a pharmacist. I usually taught the same class of English majors from their freshman year ’til their graduation. Teaching eight hours per week as a full-time professor. Except for department meetings, I stayed home reading, grading, or writing, or babysitting my son if one day he refused to go to kindergarten. Time flew away like that. In the early 1980s, my professors Don and Nell George and I wrote to each other about studying at the University of Southern Mississippi, but since we just started building a family nest for a child, my desire to come to the U.S. remained in banked coals until 1991 when I came with the support of a fellowship they established for the university. In fact, it was them who brought me to the U.S., like giving me a new life and opening my eyes to a new world. They were more like parents, for whom I have written haiku, cherita, and haibun to express my unerasable memory of and deep gratitude. I would like to offer a few poems about them. A monoku:

daylilies — mom’s smile everywhere in the yard

and a cherita:

sis calls
to tell
dad’s dead

a low sob
of rain

through the line

I treat cherita as a variant form of haiku or tanka in longer lines with more flexibility in expression and the flow of language.

4) You wrote A Way of Looking, a collection of your haibun and tanka prose about exile and immigration, praised as a significant addition to Asian American literature. How was your collection both difficult and gratifying to write?

I have never thought of my writing as part of Asian American literature or part of exile or immigration, maybe because I am not in that circle or network, maybe because I live in a place far away from the rest of the world, or maybe because my research is not in Asian American literature. I just write when I hit upon an idea, whether it’s about a thing seen in the Mississippi Delta or on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Each time I simply focused on how to make it new, but sometimes you get a result of making it unnew. A professor in New York used A Way of Looking in her class on Asian American literature, and I felt honored. This collection is about life in Mississippi, travels, and memories. It’s not exactly exile but transplantation if the book does reveal the life of me traveling between two tongues or two cultures. However, I think that identity remains ambiguous because I barely focus on writing about it.

As for writing A Way of Looking, it was a little difficult to pick it up. I remember I wrote my first haibun which was published by Jim Kacian in American Haibun and Haiga in 2003. Then I let the desire of haibun writing go to hibernation. When I woke up one day and stretched my legs and arms for it, eight years had already passed. Maybe this long hibernation gave me full energy or made me hungry for producing haibun and tanka prose, I threw myself into them and harvested quite a few, feeling they provided me with a larger platform to express myself creatively. Of course, this zeal made me ambitious or dreamy for the publication of A Way of Looking. So, I submitted my manuscript for the book award to the same press four or five times until it was chosen for the prize. The difficulty of writing haibun and tanka prose is the creation of an effective interplay of prose and haiku or tanka for a juxtaposition of the two parts that brings you a moment of quiet or cheerful laugh when you make it. I do appreciate editors for their comments or rejections, so I have a chance to present a way of looking.

My second collection of haibun and tanka prose, Dreaminations, is forthcoming with Madville Publishing in January 2026.

5) What other forms of poetry besides haiku, haibun, and tanka do you love to write and why? What are some other recurring themes in your work?

I was a product of the university creative writing program. Mainly I write free verse and sometimes I try to write a sonnet or just forms. I don’t write prosy free verse or erasure poems, barely use the loose structure. Maybe affected by my recitation of classical Chinese poems at a young age, imagery is the natural thing to consider when I write free verse. Sometimes, I change a free verse into a haibun or change it back into a free verse. This flipflop helps me find a better way of expression. In 2020, I published my first cherita and fell in love with it. Now I have several cherita manuscripts snoring in my flash drive. Now I try my hand at writing fibs (fibonacci). In 2026, I will have a haiku collection published. I have at least ten manuscripts of haiku, tanka, monoku, haiga, and cherita, but I don’t think I am eager to find a home for them now. It’s good to keep some as embryos.

Often, I write a poem out of a sudden urge, an instant association triggered by a single word, an image, or something that links to something else. Life in the Mississippi Delta surrounded by cotton fields can easily bring back my farm years during the reeducation years. That’s why even though I have published a book of poetry about reeducation, I still write poems about that experience, trying to find a new voice in my expression. Sometimes, I do focus on writing poems with similar themes in an intensive period. For example, in the past few months, I buried myself in writing more blues and jazz poems for a collection. Love is an interesting theme about place, trust, belief, confidence, marriage, divorce, and religion. That’s why I wrote a small collection of disco poems about how it dismantled the chain of marriage of a couple.

6) Poet Richard Wright wrote more than four thousand haiku. You edited a book of scholarly essays, The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku. Why is Wright’s work significant to both the haiku aesthetic in English, African American literature in general, and Japanese culture?

I didn’t know Wright wrote haiku until his posthumous publication of Haiku: This Other World in 1998. Because Wright was a well-known writer on the required reading list for my doctoral comprehensive exams, I read two of his novels, Native Son and Black Boy. I was delighted to find his haiku book one day in the library. In 2004 I received a research grant that supported me to research Wright’s haiku in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The grant also urged me to write a few essays about Wright’s haiku. Wright was an internationally acclaimed writer whose novels and short stories have been widely read and written about. Numerous essays and scholarly books were produced about his novels, but there was not a single book about his haiku. That was why I edited The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku. Oftentimes you hear or read a comment that Wright’s haiku are not good enough or are not haiku or follow the 5/7/5 pattern no longer popular today, but one fact that’s been ignored is that at the time Wright wrote haiku, many haikuists in the haiku mainstream also followed the 5/7/5 steps and wrote like Wright. We also need to understand that Wright wrote four thousand haiku in his final days when he was ill. He might not have been able to polish all his haiku. No one should use today’s magnifier to enlarge the weakness of Wright’s haiku written in the late 1950s, to say nothing that he did write some fine haiku.

Lee Gurga said in his essay, “Richard Wright’s Place in American Haiku,” that “Wright’s haiku are a subject of perennial interest. Their charm and simplicity have universal appeal. Their contrast, in tone and subject, to his other writings makes them stand apart . . . To judge them in any other way would be a disservice both to Wright’s achievements and to the unique beauty of haiku.” When I published The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, I thought it would add a much-needed brick to the study of Richard Wright and, to a larger extent, African American literature because his haiku show how willingly he opened his arms to embrace the influence of Buddhism, Daoism, and Japanese literature. I always encourage my students to write research papers on Wright’s haiku, especially the ones about Mississippi, African American culture, and the South and help them polish their papers for publications.

7) You also interviewed Haiku Poet Lenard D. Moore for your book, Conversations with Lenard D. Moore. Why do you revere Moore as a haiku poet, and what can we learn from his style?

After publishing The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku, African American Haiku: Cultural Vision, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, I thought I would consider Lenard D. Moore for a conversations book because he is the best representative of contemporary African American haiku as well as American haiku.

I think literary conversations or interviews are important because they foster critical thinking and improve understanding of the writers’ thoughts about their creativity, history, society, etc. It is also a platform to provide a fresh view of the writers’ works. A book of conversations would give the reader a chance to look at Moore as a haiku poet from a different angle and find useful clues in better understanding his haiku. To me, the most prominent characteristic of Moore’s haiku is his writing about African American culture, music, and history.

Moore’s haiku style shows through his dexterity in using a variety of forms to catch the haiku moment. For example, The Open Eye is his first haiku collection, which is full of delightful moments for aesthetic appreciation through the working of senses. This book shows Moore’s development as a haiku poet, from his adoption of the 5-7-5 pattern to his minimal form of one-line haiku. It’s safe to say that Moore is one of the most crafted in the tradition of haiku and in the variety of his expression through forms, moments, and techniques. As an assiduous haiku practitioner, Moore must have used the 5-7-5 pattern in his early stage, and his haiku using this pattern parallel Richard Wright’s, as shown in this one:

Old deserted farm;
spring whirlwind twirls peach petals
over sunlit hills

It catches a moment that interacts between the deserted farm and the whirlwind for simultaneous resonance of past and present as well as a moment to gain aesthetic experience from sudden realization of a state of nature and human nature. Even the recurrence of alliteration, consonance, and assonance offers a moment to experience an irresistible and inevitable sound of nature.

Moore becomes economic in his haiku writing, using few words to present a stronger and sharper visual sense for a vivid haiku moment, as this example shows:

wind chimes:
a robin stops
to listen

His terse expression is best exemplified in a one-line haiku:

eyes of a cat   the fog

It is composed of only six monosyllabic words. Though short, its intensity reveals the dynamism of the relationship between the cat’s eyes and the fog that provides different angles for an associative thinking or comparison, for example, with Carl Sandburg’s imagistic poem “Fog”:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Four years ago, Moore published a collection of tanka and haibun, Long Rain, with Wet Cement Press. It’s a significant publication that reflects his ability to use tanka to present African American experience and culture.

8) Tell us about your book Conversations with Dana Gioia and what you find particularly significant about his work that serious poets of all forms should practice.

I have edited and coedited six books of conversations, four of which are on African American writers and the other two are on Gish Jen and Dana Gioia. I edited Conversations with Dana Gioia because he is an internationally acclaimed poet, critic, and cultural leader. His unique voice in contemporary American poetry and literary criticism has been an appeal to me. Reading his interviews is an experience in gaining aesthetic pleasure because they cover a wide range of topics and offer his insightful ideas about poetry, art, music, public service, aesthetics, and beauty of arts. Gioia helped revitalize contemporary American poetry with a new movement called New Formalism, for which he became the central figure. New Formalism aimed to be connected to popular culture for poetic energy while deeply rooted in traditional techniques of poetry. Gioia’s poetry, as he said in an interview with Michelle Johnson, tends to “combine the intensity and integrity of Modernist poetry with the sensual appeal and musical power of meter and rhyme.”

Gioia believes that poetry needs a vital connection with the musical and narrative energy found in popular culture. The unique characteristics of poetry include not only the use of imagery and forms but musicality that creates the sound pleasant to the ear and the mind. Many of Gioia’s poems arouse the sense of beauty because he holds that this sense is the natural response of humanity to a creation that delights the mind with splendor and mystery, an aesthetic experience of appreciating beauty through poetry. In a sense, his aim to create beauty in poetry finds an echo in haiku writing.

9) Among other journals, you edit the Journal of Ethnic American Literature. Which cultures do you focus on, and why does haiku play a large role?

I founded several journals, Valley Voices, Poetry South, Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Haiku Page. We are lucky to have published a few fine poets, including American Poet Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, and winners of other national awards. Journal of Ethnic American Literature is an annual that publishes only scholarly essays on American writers from any culture, including haikuists. We are eclectic; we don’t want to lock ourselves in publishing writers from one single culture. That’s not the way literature and criticism are supposed to be. I still edit Valley Voices and Journal of Ethnic American Literature though Poetry South found its new home seven years ago at the Mississippi University for Women. Valley Voices doesn’t publish haiku, so I started Haiku Page, which was a printed brochure mailed to poets it published. Later, I changed it to a print journal. Due to fund shortage, I later published Haiku Page only as a PDF version. There was a five-year hiatus since 2020. I just revived it this year with a special issue on tanka. Next year, Haiku Page will focus on haiga and senryu. I appreciate the generous support from Jim Kacian and The Haiku Foundation for saving each previous issue in their digital library.

10) What scholarly projects do you have planned for the next few years that involve haiku?

Next year, Conversations with Michael S. Harper, coedited with Michael Antonucci, will be published by the University Press of Mississippi. I also edited a book of interviews about the Mississippi Delta, which will be scheduled for publication. Currently I am working on a project about Richard Wright’s haiku, which has been left aside for some years. If an academic press is willing to cover the copyright fees, I will wrap up the project soon. Otherwise, I may let it sleep and turn to a project on the Mississippi Delta poetry and a collection of essays on an Asian American poet or do nothing but dream a haiku by the glowing bars or slowly read A Way of Looking. Life will be full of sleep, not scholarly projects. I would conclude with this haiku:

hand in hand
shadows of the old couple
stretch red sunset

We thank Professor Zheng for the interview. You can reach him at [email protected]

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time. 

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.