Bird's-eye view

Watching feathered friends inspires Japanese-style poetry


If you're interested in taking up birding, the Audubon Equinox HP 10 x 42 binoculars retail for $236.

If that price is too steep of if the possibility of cold and rain are deterants a body could do worse than turn to Hopewell Springs author Michael J. Rosen. He comes cheap: his most recent book, The Cuckoo's Haiku and Other Birding Poems costs $17.99. The book is geared toward children but appropriate for adults as well.

"I want to be your partner on a field trip, even if we're only heading out into the back yard or a nearby park," Rosen said by e-mail.

"I want to point out something I've caught -- not so much in my binoculars as in my imagination. I can't promise that you will see with your own eyes the picture that that I'm seeing. But in these haiku, I'm trying to hold steady and to move out of the way so that what you are holding -- the open pages of this book -- can be a pair of steadied and focused binoculars.

Rosen has written a variety of books for children including Balls, A Drive in the Country and Elijah's Angel. The Cuckoo's Haiku received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. 


Q:  You say that haiku and birding are similar pursuits. Can you explain?

A: Both are fleeting impressions. Rather than whole stories and studied observations, these two arts usually offer snatched glimpses and surprising hints. Even when they address something familiar -- for instance, a mourning dove or a backyard robin -- a steady, long look through binoculars' lenses or a haiku's lines can turn that common sighting into something remarkable.

Q:  Many of the birds you write about are common: crows, robins, cardinals.

A: All the birds in The Cuckoo's Haiku are familiar to me. They're all found in central Ohio. And they're all birds that I thought most readers across the country would know if not from experience, then at least from the media.

But even beyond that, I never intended for the poems to rely on familiarity with those specific birds. As a whole, as a book, the poems are about watching. They're about sharing a place with other creatures. For me, looking at one specific thing, one species, helps to focus and clarify ideas or principles that apply more broadly It's that odd thing: appreciating the details of one creature can lead to broader thoughts that touch on the communal, or even the universal.

Q:  How do you make your observations of birds and nature?

A: I walk my dogs every morning and most evenings. I live on 100 acres in the foothills of the Appalachians. More than human neighbors, I see and hear wild turkeys, bluebirds, juncos, owls, chickadees, various woodpeckers -- they're all a part of the daily circuit.

I also have a desk and chair -- the rolling desk chair my father had in his basement office for most of my childhood -- with three floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook bird feeders and then the pond and pine trees of the hillside above it. A pair of binoculars sits on the desk so that when I hear a kingfisher stuttering or if I see a flycatcher looping in the air, I can rush to the window.

(Here's) one of the haiku that didn't fit into the book:

flash of white wings - quick!

where are the binoculars?

what we misslooking

Fleeting snatches are often all we 'catch' of birds. And, as with anything complex and subtle -- be it classical music, painting, dog shows or architecture -- art, if you don't know what to look for, you literally don't notice much. Not that there still isn't a pleasurable amount of seeing without learning more, using binoculars, or writing haiku.

Q  How long have you been writing haiku?

A: I began to write haiku in 2001 shortly after my father's sudden death at 71. Grief took away my concentration. September 11th came soon after. For me, work is a way to slow my racing thoughts and re-center myself in the small but dizzying world I occupy.

And while I considered poetry the core or center of my imagination, I had never paid much attention to this short form that is almost a stereotype of amateur ambition in English. It's standard fare in elementary schools. It's thought of as little more than breaking up a sentence into 17 syllables. But I'd always held a profound respect for this excruciatingly short form as someone who errs on the side of overboard. I mean, I only know what's enough by a little overkill; I can only walk that edge between true sentiment and sentimentality by jumping over, and revising my way back.

That terse form emerged as the best thing for holding my attention, allowing me to work and rework at a single idea, solving it like some conundrum -- some eternal question. Yes, even short poems about backyard birds tap into that mechanism because they're all about language, about the power of words to give birth to thought, not merely to put it in a stroller and walk it to the playground.

Living out in Perry County on an old farm, I had been writing georgics, "poems of pastoral instruction," inspired by Virgil. In my case, I was both the instructor, so to speak, and the one being taught. Since moving out here from Columbus, I have been trying to understand the complexity of sustaining a house and a garden amid a natural world that doesn't accommodate human "taste." I mean, my fellow denizens have their own taste for the way things -- meadows, flowers, insulation -- should be. A warm garage? Mice shred nests from the car's air filter. Clear a path through the woods? A tree is sure to fall across it. Plant heirloom tomatoes? A 'varmint' is sure to prefer that to whatever sustained it before you planted your prized fruits. Participating in that equilibrium or give-and-take presents a challenge, at least if you're not going to shoot or poison all the creatures that sort of define the very idea of being "in nature," the very idea of wanting to live in the country.

Q: Gerald England wrote a haiku called Not a Haiku, which went,

the simple writing

of seventeen syllables

doth not haiku make

 Do you agree with that sentiment?

A: Oh, yes. That poem certainly represents exactly what's most simplistic and most undermining of this form in English: is a poem nothing beyond dividing a sentence into three lines that are five, seven, and five syllables respectively? In other words, if haiku is only counting syllables, a computer -- anyone who can count to seven -- could generate poems ad infinitum, ad nauseum. That's not engaging to me, or to a reader, I don't think.

Q: What is it about the haiku form that's so compelling?

A: The 'it' is everything beyond the mere counting of syllables. Indeed, the original Japanese form does not pertain to 17 syllables broken into three horizontal lines but rather, to 17 units of sound arranged in one vertical line. Furthermore, what sounds like two 'syllables' to an English speaker's ear, may not possess two units of sound. For instance, the Japanese word haibun is often used as an example. It posses one elongated vowel, as well as an "n" at the end of syllable, which counts as another sound. It's pronounced ha-i-bu-n: four sound counts.

In other words, like all translation, the job is finding an equivalency between languages, not making a precise match.

Q: Do you have a favorite writer of haiku?

A: I'd have to say that I read anthologies of haiku, admiring individual poems more than poets. Oddly, I don't read much contemporary haiku (although a read plenty of contemporary poets); it's the traditional Japanese poets I enjoy most, even though I depend on English translations, which require that other layer of another poet's interpretation or emphasis. What I particularly enjoy is finding more than one translation of a given poem, and then using the different word choices or line breaks to help my imagination linger there.

The temptation, which I have to resist, is to read quickly: I mean, you can zip through a few hundred haiku in the time it might take to read a New Yorker feature article. And that's the problem, really, or the challenge of the form. How to write something that thwarts such hasty 'appreciation.' Haiku, as I appreciate it or use it, needs to possess a centripetal or centrifugal force rather than a forceful gust. It's a churning and a spinning into associations, and not a rolling out of a maxim or a homily.

Q:  When did you get into birding?

A: During my college years as a zoology and pre-med major, I became an avid birdwatcher. For all but the winter months, I would troop off with Jim, my partner from ornithology lab, for one or another prime birding spot at four o'clock each Saturday morning: the fish hatcheries near Hebron, the marshes around Lake Erie, the grounds of a local cemetery. We carried our new copies of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds of North American, hand-me-down binoculars, backpacks of breakfast snacks, and all the vocabulary, song patterns, flight pictures, and other details we had crammed into our memories from two courses in ornithology.

The only really useful thing we had was our eagerness: every bird was a rare bird to us. Our life lists -- the roster of all birds a person has ever seen -- were composed of those cardinals, robins, sparrows, and other familiar visitors to our respective childhood backyards.

We worked well as a team. In earliest spring, when no leaves hid the various songbirds we'd hear, we could spot birds in nearly every direction. And given a really large, sluggish bird, or a whole flock, we could even make a positive identification -- or at least narrow down the choices to five or six possibilities in the field guide.

We hiked around those sites, no more than a few feet apart, moving closer together whenever one of us had a bird in sight. We each owned different kinds of binoculars: Jim could see farther than I could see, but my magnification was greater. Despite our efforts to describe a given bird's location, usually only one of us sighted each bird. For instance, if I spotted a might-be-interesting singer, I'd direct Jim's gaze toward it: 'See that dead elm? Just left, there's a tulip tree, I think. Where it meets the elm go up about 10 feet -- there's a finch, reddish, maybe a purple finch, see it?"

Sometimes he would. Sometimes, after a few minutes of trying, if I still had the bird in sight, I'd hold my binocs steady, back up from the eyepiece, and make a ring of my arms so that Jim could duck under and then slip inside them, trying to peer through my sights. Perhaps my hands shifted. Perhaps my binocs' focus wasn't right for his eyes. Perhaps the bird had darted to another branch during that changeover. If he'd spotted something I couldn't see, we'd try the thing. Often, the only birds we'd end up sharing were in the field guide's color pictures.

Q:  Can you discuss birds as harbingers of the seasons?

A: There's a word I found recently that I never learned as a zoology major: phenology. It means the season-specific phenomenon of the natural world. A 'calendaring' of what the flora and fauna are expected to do each month. When do the hummingbirds return to Ohio? When do the wild turkeys make their nests? When do the bees emerge from their hives, the bluegill make their craters of silt in the shallows of the pond, the bumblebees bore their nests into the wood?

Of course, there's a phenology of our human comings and goings as well, but it's obscured by our technology, surfeit of news, economic distractions, and so forth. The avian life cycle, like that of our dogs, cats, and other companion animals, is vividly transparent - or maybe opaque is the better word. It is what it is. And we can see it, if we look. And haiku, as we've been saying, is not simply a way of looking, but of re-looking.

The eyes are able to create saccadic movement: that is, tiny back and forth motions, less than 1/100th of a second in duration that allow us to survey, compound, and create a more accurate image. It's not something we can sense; it's involuntary, almost subconscious, and yet it's the very thing that provides our eyes an acuity that's greater than the individual compounding of single 'looks.' If this doesn't sound too pedantic, haiku can be a form of saccadic looking: repeating, compounding impressions that create an intensely focused moment in time.

Q.  The Cuckoo's Haiku strikes me as being at least as much for adults as it is for children.

A. In some ways, I resist distinguishing what's of interest to kids and what's of interest to adults. Maybe that's because I'm most drawn toward subjects that appeal to both. Or maybe I'm still drawn toward what I loved as a kid, infusing the subjects with more grown-up perspective.

So this book has subject matter - the birds that both adults and kids might find familiar or fascinating - rendered in poetry that can offer both a shared experience. Perhaps a kid might be more drawn toward the literal observations, while an adult might gravitate toward the themes that expand beyond observation, but I think the natural world is like a great magnet or force of gravity that influences us all. As an example, this is the haiku about wild turkeys:

  wild turkeys' snow tracks

their arrows point us one way

they go the other

 Maybe a younger reader would learn or appreciate how turkey tracks are arrow-shaped, and that the birds are heading in a direction opposite to what the point of the footprint-arrows suggest. And, perhaps, an older reader would think about how tempting it is to ascribe our own emotions to nature, something known as the pathetic fallacy, the tendency to see our own feelings mirrored in the natural world. We're all traipsing across the snow a little snow-blinded by what we plan on seeing, by our own 'species-centrism.'

Q:  In The Cuckoo's Haiku, you write of "the weight of winter, the wait for spring."

A: Homophones are perfect rhymes, so they can do what rhymes can do: make a connection. Set a trap for ear, and then spring the trap. For me, 'waiting' does feel like something. It causes feelings. So its dimensions, its specific gravity, its heft, are very physical and psychological. So the birds, which we think of as so weightless with their air-filled bones, even they have to bear the winter even as they bear down on the snow.

Again, I guess poetry for me has everything to do with stalking language. Overhearing what words can tell one another, can tell me. And I mean 'overhearing' as in 'overly hearing,' too. I often quote George Abbe's line to students about how poets are like most people, only more so. Maybe poetry is like creating accuracy the way analog signals are sampled many times in a given second in order to generate a digital sound that's more pleasing to the ear.

• (Candlewick, 64 pages, $17.99) by Michael J. Rosen, illustrated by Stan Fellows• For an extended version of this interview, visit