Robert Spiess

"Haiku are best appreciated through the intelligence of the heart."

— Robert Spiess

American Haiku Poet

1921 - 2002

Commentary

Art, music and poetry should be appreciated in the heart.  Recent scientific research indicates that the heart has its own intelligence separate from the brain.  Creative leaders understand the heart's intelligence and have learned to listen to their hearts when creating works of art.  Are you listening to your heart?



Creative Practice

Meditate for five minutes on the love within your heart.  Then write a poem or paint a picture from the heart.  Don't think, analyze or question.  Just write.  Just paint.



About the Poet

In 1981, I was privileged to have dinner with Robert Spiess in Madison, Wisconsin.  We discussed haiku, the magazine, Modern Haiku, and his kayaking the rivers of Wisconsin. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man.



Robert Spiess was born on October 16, 1921 at 2 am in Milwaukee, WI to Myrtle and Oscar Spiess.  He was their only child.  The gregarious Oscar Spiess, was a sales representative for Miller Brewing Company.  Robert remembered his father as a storehouse of jokes and pranks.  Once Oscar cut the yoke out of his wife's egg and replaced it with the half of an apricot.



A high school English teacher inspired Robert's interest in poetry.  He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1939.  World War II interrupted his college education and he joined the Army Air Force.  He served as a cryptographer in the Pacific.  When  Eleanor Roosevelt visited the troops, Robert was surprised to have her join his buddies and him for breakfast one morning.  He was discharged in October of 1945 and returned to college where he graduated in June 1947 with a degree in botany.  A year later he received a master's in vocational guidance.  He worked as a employment counselor.



Spiess discovered haiku in the late 1930's.  Robert's first haiku were published in the American Poetry Magazine in 1949.  He often wrote his haiku while sailing, canoeing or kayaking.  In 1963 his haiku were published in American Haiku, the first magazine devoted solely to English-language haiku.  In the mid-sixties he served as editor of American Haiku.  In 1969, Kay Titus Mormino founded Modern Haiku which published several of Robert's haiku.  By the third issue, he was an associate editor and assumed the role of editor and publisher in 1978 which he held until his death.



Robert Spiess published haiku in many publications including American Haiku, Haiku West, Cicada, Dragonfly, High/Coo, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Leanfrog and Windchimes.  He also published ten books.



Here are a few of his haiku from his book, The Turtle's Ears.



An open channel

     winding through the river ice

          . . . the old green canoe



Morning river mist;

     somewhere in the distance

          the drumming of a grouse



Evening rain;

     frogs purring

          in the marsh



Tar paper cabin

     behind the river's white birch

          — a muskellunge leaps



Shooting the rapids!

     — a glimpse of a meadow

          gold with butterflies



Muddy summer stream . . .

     finding an abandoned farm

          with a useless pump





Video

Here is a video discussing the intelligence of the heart.

Biography Sources:

http://www.worldhaiku.net/poetry/eng/us/r.spiess.htm

http://www.modernhaiku.org/issue33-3/spiessmemorial.html

http://www.haikupoet.com/definitions/speculations.html

Spiess, Robert. The Turtle's Ears. Wells Printing Company, 1971. 



Quote Source:

Spiess, Robert.  New and Selected Speculations on Haiku, p. 26.

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Santoka Taneda

"Real haiku is the soul of poetry.  Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku."

— Santoka Taneda

Japanese Haiku Poet

1882 - 1940

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Harley King

"The more I try to be perfect; 

the more I fail."

— Harley King

American Poet, Speaker, Storyteller

1949 —

Much of my life, I have tried to be perfect: the perfect son, the perfect student, the perfect husband, the perfect father, the perfect writer, the perfect speaker and the perfect employee.  But I failed every time.  I have never been able to live up to the image I had myself or that others had of me.

And most people can not live up to the images that other people have of them.  I am sure that you have favorite writers or artists whose work you love.  Yet, if you ever read a biography of the person, you realize that he was not as good in his personal life as you imagined  him to be.  All our heroes have clay feet.

It has taken me years, but I have made progress.  I worry less today about being perfect.  In fact, I have learned to celebrate my failures.  And to enjoy making mistakes.  It is okay to be human.

How about you?  Are you a perfectionist?  Are you trying to live up to the image that others have you?  Or have you let go of your need to be the perfect writer?  The perfect painter?  The perfect singer?  Do you celebrate your mistakes?

And to help us celebrate this summer, here are a few of my summer haiku.

lightning bugs

    flicker in the neighbor's lawn . . .

        another June gone

at the crack of the bat

    the crowd roars to its feet . . .

        full moon tonight

family picnic —

    lightning bugs

        among the voices

heat wave —

    sharing watermelon

        with friends

a monarch lights

    on my sweat-covered arm . . .

        and is gone

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Matsuo Basho

"When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy."

— Matsuo Basho

Japanese Haiku Poet

1644 - 1694

The act of creation should be done with little forethought.  Too much planning can destroy the creativity.  Create in the moment.  Create in an instant.  Like the swordsman or the woodcutter, the poet does not need to think about what he creates.  He creates in the moment.  This does not mean that he has not studied or practiced his art.  Hours, days and even years may have been spent in practicing and improving his skill.  But in the moment of creation he is one with the creation.  He does not think.  He creates from the heart, not the head.  A poem composed in the head is like an empty shell.  A poem composed in the heart will touch the reader.

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Medardo Rosso

"What the artist must aim at above all else is this: to produce, by any process whatever, a work which by the life and humanity emanating from it communicates to the beholder . . . ."

— Medardo Rosso

Italian Sculptor

1858 - 1928

Ecce Puer
Behold the Boy
(1906)

Who is the audience for your creative work?  This is a question I have struggled with for years.  Is there an audience for my work?  Is there someone who understands what I am communicating?  First, poetry has a very small readership in this country.  So the audience from which I can draw my readership is very small.  Second, finding this readership is very difficult.  One would hope that one could find a readership among other poets, but there are many people who write poetry who have never read it.  Third, what I write does not fit within the historical categories of poetry.  I don't rhyme or follow western forms.  I did spend seven years writing and studying Japanese haiku which many in the west perceive as an exercise for school children.  So after 35 years of writing, I have yet to find an audience for my writing who will stand in line for six hours to buy my next book.  In fact, there are days I can't give it away.  But I don't let the lack of an audience stop me from writing.  I keep writing and believing that one day someone will read and appreciate.

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Robert Bly

"When anyone seriously pursues an art — painting, poetry, sculpture, composing — over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression."

— Robert Bly

American Poet

1926 - 

I first heard Robert Bly read poetry in 1969 while I was in college and I still own a copy of his very first book of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, which I bought when he was in town and is autographed by him.  He was majestic, expansive and seemed to blow the roof off the auditorium.  I fell in love with the poetry I read in that small sixty-page book, published by Wesleyan University Press, full of images of the midwest where I was born and raised.  Years later I had another opportunity to hear Bly read and I bought a collection of his prose poems, Morning Glory.  I own a number of his poetry books and his books of translated poems.  I even bought the book that made him rich and famous, Iron John, a non-fiction book I have never been able to finish reading.  

Here is a short poem that I love.  The last two lines have the feel of Japanese haiku.

Watering the Horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

Here is another favorite poem of mine from his first collection.  This poem evokes the feeling of the rural countryside in which I grew up.  Anyone who grew up in the rural midwest will immediately feel at home.

Three Kinds of Pleasure

        

                   I

Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin

Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles

One by one lift themselves out of the fence line

And slowly leap on the gray sky —

And past them, the snowy fields.

                   II

The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields

In Wisconsin:  and on these black trees

Scattered, one by one,

Through the winter fields —

We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,

And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine.

                  III

It is a pleasure, also, to be driving

Toward Chicago, near dark,

And see the lights in the barns.

The bare trees more dignified than ever,

Like a fierce man on his deathbed,

And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.

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Arvo Part

Portrait of Arvo Part
(2011 by Michael) 

"I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.  This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me."

— Arvo Part

Estonian Classical Composer

1935 -

Many of the poems I have written are full of simple words and simple images.  I spent seven years early in my career writing haiku, a Japanese poetic form, that has a maximum of 17 syllables.  Most of my haiku are less than 17 syllables.  Here is one with four words and six syllables.

pregnant —

    she weeds

       carrots

Here is one with three words and six syllables.

spider

    underfoot —

        squash

For me, it is what is not said sometimes that is as important as what is said.  Listen to the silences between the words — the silences within the images, the silences between the notes.  Some writers are lavish with their words and sentences.  One of my favorites is John Irving.  His novels are written as circles within circles — very complex in construction and development and I enjoy them.  Some writers, artists and musicians seek simplicity in their work.  Arvo Part, the Estonian composer, is one of them.

Here is a track from his album, Alina.  Enjoy the pictures as well as the music.

We need both the simple and the complex in our lives.  If you are complex artist, seek simplicity in a few of your works.  If you are a simple artist, seek complexity.  And don't be fooled into thinking simple works are not as good as complex works.  Sometimes simple works are harder to create than complex works.  In a 500 page novel, you can make a few mistakes and nobody will notice.  In a haiku, one wrong word will ruin the haiku.

Here is a short poem, I wrote back in March 2011.

Your breath,

a feather

of love,

touches my ear.

I listen

to the moon

and cry softly.

(The portrait of Arvo Part above was done by Michael.  Check out his blog, Red. Yellow. Blue.)

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Matsuo Basho

"Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought."

— Matsuo Basho

Japanese Haiku Poet

1644 - 1694

Poems by Basho on Tanzaku paper

Yamagata Museum of Art

Sometimes we seek to copy the masters.  We need instead to look deeper than the surface technique and understand what they were attempting to accomplish — what was the passion in their lives.  We need to connect with their souls.  What was their moment of enlightenment?

I believe we have a spiritual connection with those artists and writers who have gone before us.  We need to explore this connection and learn from it.  We should not simply copy what we like.  We should connect with the meaning in their work.

What are you seeking to accomplish in your art?  What do you want others to perceive in your writing?  What is your understanding of the universe?  Have you achieved enlightenment?

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Henry Moore

"The observation of nature is part of an artist's life."

— Henry Moore

English Sculptor

1898 - 1986

How much is your art connected to nature?  Do you spend time observing the shapes and patterns within nature?  Do you study nature and learn from it?  

When I spent seven years writing and studying haiku, I spent time connecting with the physical world around me — listening to nature.  I would take walks and write haiku.  Even those of us who live in cities are a part of nature.  Here is a haiku that I wrote while walking around Chicago.

downtown Chicago

     a squirrel buries apples —

          warm autumn sun

As creative leaders, we must look for inspiration in nature whether we write novels, paint abstract paintings or compose music.  Nature has much to teach us about ourselves and the world in which we live.  Watch the rabbits playing in your backyard.  Enjoy the beauty of a sunset.  Take a walk and feel the snowflakes on your cheeks.

Oval With Points
(1968 - 1970)

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Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Never does the human soul appear so strong and noble as when it forgoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury."

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

American Author / Preacher

1814 - 1880

As creative leaders we often face rejection.  People ignore our paintings.  Editors reject our writing.  Critics criticize our work.  How we respond to this rejection is a indicator of our character.  When I was in sixth grade I was asked to be the reporter for our class news in the local newspaper.  The criticism I received was that I needed to tone my writing down because it was too much like advertising.  I was so deeply hurt that it was years before I picked up a pen and began to write again.  But those articles foreshadowed a later career in marketing and advertising where I did actually write ads.

How do you handle criticism?  How do you respond to rejection?  Many years ago I submitted two haiku to two different magazines accidentally.  The reason I found out is that they both were returned on the same day.  The first letter I opened was a rejection slip and it hurt.  When I opened the second envelope, I found the haiku was accepted for publication.  I learned a valuable lesson that day.  There will always be rejection, but there will also be acceptance.  Don't focus on the rejection; focus on the acceptance.  Editors are fickle and rejection often has nothing to do with you.  It has to do with the editor's editorial needs and his personal taste.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

American Poet/Essayist

1803 - 1882

I am fortunate that I have a yard that is full of birds, squirrels and rabbits.  And occasionally, a deer or a family of ducks have found the time to visit.  And our yard has maple trees, a large old pin oak and a few blue spruce.  Even in a metropolitan city I can find nature close at hand.  As creative leaders, we can and should find inspiration in nature.  I am amazed at how strong and resilient Mother Nature is.  If you have ever observed grass poking up through a crack in the concrete, you understand what I mean.  Long after the last man or woman has passed onto a better place, Mother Nature will still be there.

For me, the ironic thing is that human beings talk about nature as if we are not a part of it, only observers.  In fact, we are very much a part of nature.  And contrary to the opinion of many, Mother Nature is stronger and tougher than man.  I remember reading a study of overcrowded deer on an island.  The overcrowding generated unusual behavior among the deer such as increased fighting, rape and homosexuality.  Nature sought to reduce the overpopulation through disease.  In the end nature will win so we need to enjoy it while we can.

Photograph by Johari King

As artists and writers, we need to find joy, solace and inspiration in nature.  We need to enjoy the sunsets and the sunrises.  We need to appreciate the changing of seasons from fall to winter to spring.  The squirrels and rabbits in my backyard bring me pleasure and laughter with their play.  I have seen rabbits play leap frog, jumping over each other.  I have watched squirrels chasing each other up a tree.  And you will find both the rabbits and the squirrels in my haiku and my poetry.




Here are a few of my haiku.  More of my haiku can be found at my website.




downtown Chicago

    a squirrel buries apples —

        warm autumn sun







Illinois farmland —

    pheasant scoots across the snow

        the pickup heads home







early morning —

    two robins play leap frog

        in the shadows







on the corn tassels

    a flock of purple martins. . . 

        summer sunset

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Santoka Taneda

"Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life."

— Santoka Taneda

Japanese Haiku Poet 

1882 - 1940

What is your painting, your story, your dance, or your song?  Is it a shriek?  A howl? A sigh? A yawn?  Or is it the deep breath of life?  As creative leaders we need to be creating art that produces the deep breath of life.  Art that is just a shriek or a howl leaves people feeling empty.  Art that is a sigh or a yawn puts people to sleep.  Our art needs to come from deep within and we need to breathe into it the breath of life .

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Albert Camus

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

— Albert Camus

French Novelist

1913 - 1960

My wife and I were sitting on the back porch today enjoying the autumn morning.  Autumn is my favorite month.  If I had to rank the seasons from most favorite to least, here is my ranking:  Autumn, Spring, Winter, Summer.  What is your favorite season?  As artists, writers and creative leaders, we are affected by the seasons.  I studied and wrote exclusively haiku for seven years and the key to understanding haiku lies in the seasons.   Many of us have lost touch with the seasons.  We live in heated and air-conditioned buildings where the environment is controlled.  The further we get from the farms and the fields, the more we lose touch with the individual nature of each season.  I like winter because it cleans the cobwebs out of my brain.  I love spring because of the renewal and rebirth.  Summer with its heat overwhelms me.  My brain melts once the temperature gets above 75 degrees.  Autumn, though, brings me back to myself and I reflect on the importance of life.

This quote from Camus, the French novelist, caught me by surprise this morning.  The phrase, "Every leaf is a flower," makes me see the world anew and I find it to be true.

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Paulo Coelho

"We must never stop dreaming.  Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body."

— Paulo Coelho

Brazilian Novelist

1947 -

What are your dreams?  What would you like to do?  Where would you like to go?  What places would you like to visit?  I would love to visit China because of the history and the past civilizations.  I want to Japan because of my interest in haiku.  I want to visit Peru because of the Inca civilization.  I have traveled to 45 of the 50 states in the United States.  I have been fortunate to step foot on the soil of Jamaica, Canada and Mexico.  For me as a creative leader, visits to other places stir my imagination and allow me to see the world in new ways.  Again, I ask what are your dreams?  Are you feeding your soul?  Do your dreams give you nourishment?

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