New to Haiku: Advice for Beginners – Kathleen O’Toole

Today at New to Haiku, let’s welcome Kathleen O’Toole. Kathleen has been writing and publishing haiku for nearly forty years. One of her haibun was recently recognized as favorite in Modern Haiku.  Thank you for sharing your haiku journey with us, Kathleen!

In Advice for Beginners posts, we ask established haiku poets to share a bit about themselves so that you can meet them and learn more about their writing journeys. We, too, wanted to learn what advice they would give to beginning haiku poets. You can read posts from previous Advice for Beginners interviewees here.

Welcome to New to Haiku, Kathleen! How did you come to learn about haiku?

In about 1983, I met the American haiku pioneer Nick Virgilio at Sacred Heart Parish in Camden, NJ, in his home town amidst the decidedly vivid images of his haiku landscape. I attended several of his readings which were lively and provocative. He was truly a master, grasping the need for a distinctly American expression in haiku poetry. By then he’d already won awards for several of his early haiku such as:

lily:
out of the water ...
out of itself

and

bass
picking bugs
off the moon

I was captivated. I did not dare to write haiku while he was alive—too intimidated!—though his haiku were clearly a strong influence. His first book was published in 1985, and when it garnered an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, he called me at something like 6:30AM to tell me to listen!

When he died suddenly, only months after the publication of the second edition of his Selected Haiku (Black Moss Press, 1988), I helped his brother go through his books and papers, including a voluminous correspondence with other haiku poets. I learned a lot by osmosis in those long hours in his basement writing space. I also started writing haiku. Frogpond included this one in a 1990 Virgilio tribute feature:

at Whitman’s grave
the day of your funeral
footprints in the snow
-    Kathleen O'Toole

Once I became very involved in efforts to preserve Nick’s legacy (see the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association And Writers House), I met a whole cadre of other legendary American haiku poets: Cor van den Heuvel and Alan Pizzarelli, Geraldine Clinton Little and Ruth Yarrow, Raffael de Gruttola and Charles Trumbull, among others. I subscribed to Frogpond, Modern Haiku and others; haiku became not only a writing practice but a spiritual practice of attention.

Where do you most often write? Do you have a writing process?

I always carry journals with me (per Walt Whitman’s advice) in order to scribble scraps of verse. This is most often my practice in “collecting” haiku images. I’m sure if I looked back, I would see that my early efforts needed lots of revision. These days (nearly 40 years since I started practicing haiku) I feel as though I have the form, or some version(s) of it in my head, so often what I scribble comes out as haiku that may need tweaking. Every so often I go back through the journals and collect the haiku I think are “close” into a marble notebook and set about revising. I keep updating that marble notebook and a binder of poems I’ve actually sent out for publication (once or twice a year).

Nick was an amazing example [of a haiku writer’s process] in that some of his best haiku took years to “finish.” For example, in this image from his brother’s funeral, Nick waited a decade or more for its last line:

flag-covered coffin:
the shadow of the bugler
slips into the grave
-    Nick Virgilio

Among his papers are hundreds of legal sized sheets with multiple typed versions of haiku he was working on.

What are some of the fun ways that you have used or experienced haiku?

Over the years I have led a lot of workshops that feature haiku, as I believe it’s a great way to get poets out of the habit of emotions and the “I” dominating their work. And as Nick Virgilio would say: haiku’s essence is “emotion expressed at the sensory level.” So, from elementary and high school students to an on-line workshop for cancer survivors, I find ways to introduce haiku as a great poetry opener (powers of observation, keen perception and spare language), and a way to connect to the healing power of nature.

One fun “found haiku” was on a visit to Tangier Island, VA with my sailor husband. I was taken by the isolation (no cars, same five family names on all the tombstones) and wrote this haiku which landed in an HSA Anthology of travel haiku:

Tangier Island
all the cats
are related
-     Kathleen O'Toole

You came to the haiku community after writing mainstream contemporary English-language poetry. Do you find writing haiku to be a different experience for you or a continuation of your poetic expression? Is writing haiku different from writing other forms of poetry?

I’ve written free verse poetry since college, most as a way to capture moments of deep emotion or connection to nature. Nick Virgilio, in fact, was responsible for my first published poems when he submitted a couple of my poems to a NJ journal called Asphodel in 1985. After my “immersion” in his papers and witnessing his devotion to poetry, I was inspired (in 1990/91) to take a year off from working full time as a community organizer to get an MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Fortunately for me, JHU Writing Seminars is known to emphasize formal poetry. Not having been an English major, I dove into not only shaping my free-verse narrative and lyric poems, but composing sonnets, villanelles and sestinas, working in rhymed couplets etc. One of the reviewers of my first full-length collection (Meanwhile, 2005) called my poetry “formally restless.” I agree, and haiku is one of the forms that allows a poet to “play with words,” which I find enjoyable and challenging.

I see now that writing haiku has influenced my longer poetry, by giving me a leaner, less self-absorbed method to illuminate an insight or observation (or emotion) without centering a speaker. I would call that method, even in many of my longer poems, “paratactic” rather than “syntactic”—in other words, harnessing the power of juxtaposition that is central to haiku to convey emotion or allow the reader to make their own connections.

It is probably no coincidence that both of my full-length collections of poetry (Meanwhile and This Far) include haibun. In fact, the title of the latter comes from a line in a Virgilio haiku  which inspired a long experimental poem in which each section riffs on a line of the haiku:

having come this far
alive at fifty-five
the morning star
-     Nick Virgilio

You have participated in the Community of Writers in California, and travelled both locally and abroad for writer’s residencies. What is your advice for poets when choosing to apply for a writing retreat or residency? What do you look for in these experiences? 

I have participated in a dozen or so writing residencies. The Community of Writers in the Sierra Nevada mountains was unique as it’s more of a “poetry boot camp” which worked well for me—having to write a new poem a day was great for generating new work, much of which has been published. The others (Blue Mountain Center, Martha’s Vineyard Writers and Artists Retreat, Anam Cara Writers Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts––both in VA and France) were all opportunities to get away to a place where I had the time and space to write, revise, construct poetry book manuscripts and read a lot of poetry!

My advice is talk to people who have been at a particular writers residency. Get their advice and apply to as many that seem to fit your personality, geographic inspiration (for me––water, Ireland, mountains––landscape is important) and to be among the kind of other artists who might influence or inspire you. This was especially true for me at Blue Mountain Center and both VCCA experiences, whether the other artists were poets, painters or musicians. My most recent book (This Far, 2019) includes many poems written during these experiences, and the manuscript was constructed during one residency.

What were your experiences like as poet laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland?

I served for four years (2018-2022) which included the period of Covid lockdown, so we had to quickly take all our readings and programming online, from which I learned a lot. I think my community organizing skills came in handy as I was focused on expanding our poetry audience (younger, more diverse), in part by engaging and featuring a more diverse group of poets in our reading series, contests and events. It was a great way to top off my twenty years living in Takoma Park, MD as shortly after my tenure ended, my husband John and I moved to a continuing care retirement community in nearby Gaithersburg.

For those just starting out, what advice would you give?

Read voraciously (lots of different journals, print and online) and get into a “haiku community.” I have been in a writers’ group for my longer poems for forty years (since finishing grad school). I found Towpath (DC area haiku group) in about 2005 after presenting on Nick Virgilio at an HSA event in NYC. I can see how the feedback of Towpath Haiku poets these last 20 years has made me more conscious of ways to sharpen my “haiku eye” and be a better editor of my own haiku.

Kathleen O’Toole’s 4th poetry collection, This Far, was released in 2019 by Paraclete Press. She is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, and co-author of In the Margins: a conversation in poetry. She has been writing and publishing haiku for nearly forty years, and haibun more recently. One of her haibun was recognized as favorite haibun in Modern Haiku (summer 2024). Other awards include the 2020 Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize, and the Northern Virginia Poetry Prize (2014). After serving four years as Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, she is savoring her 9^th floor writing perch at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Find her at https://kathleenotoolepoetry.com.

[Julie’s note: You can learn more about Nick Virgilio and listen to Kathleen talk about her friendship with him in Sean Dougherty’s video, Remembering Nick Virgilio.]

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