the process

When I was in college, I was taught how to write haiku by the award-winning haiku poet Bill Pauly (who himself had been a student of one of the first US haiku poets, Fr. Raymond Roseliep.) I daresay I wasn't very good at it, and no doubt Bill would be astonished to learn that I have tried to carry on his legacy through my haiga.

I continued to write various forms of poetry during and after college. I spent a summer studying 20th Century British Poetry at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. It was there that I learned poetry is an oratory artform and you need to hear the poem read out loud, preferably by the author or at least by someone who has the same dialect as the author. Prior to that time I had considered poetry to be a written art.

I lived in Japan for half a decade studying many things, finding a particular fascination with Japanese death poems. 

I also continued to explore the world of more "formulaic" poetry such as sonnets and villanelles. I continued to read poetry, with Garrison Keillor's Good Poems being a mainstay of simply good poems.

Then I discovered the artificial intelligence known as MidJourney.