When I first contemplated this alternate spelling of haiku, I consulted the Urban Dictionary, that crowdsourced wonderland of birthed and rebirthed words that often reads like surrealist poetry.  When I found that highku had already been baptized as haiku.2, I had a like thrill at being in synch with the  zeitgeist.

This was early in the Covid pandemic, when we lived in a penumbra of panic. The zeitgeist seemed like cultural comfort food.

My route to highku was roundabout. I was studying Chinese and Japanese brush painting for a series of paintings, and was struck by how art and calligraphy – both founded on the brush stroke – often interfaced, not with the ironic edge sometimes seen with text and image in contemporary art, but as cohesive elements of a unified whole.  

I wanted to include calligraphy in my painting. What else but highku?

Though there have been many practitioners of haiku in English – Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac are among the best known – only after the lockdown did I discover that the African-American writer Richard Wright, who died in Paris in 1960 at 52 following a long illness, spent the last 18 months of his life composing over 4,000 haiku. In the posthumously published book of his work, his daughter Julia Wright recalls how he wrote them everywhere, in bed and in cafes and restaurants, counting syllables on napkins. She called his haikus “self-developed antidotes against illness,” and “that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath.” 

That line took my breath away. It was during the weeks when ventilator was the most pronounced word in the English language. In the shadow of the Covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter, I thought constantly about Richard Wright battling his personal health crisis with haiku. Though in only a few poems does Wright reference illness and impending death:  

The consumptive man
Who lives in the room next door
Did not cough today.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

A precursor to haiku, the tanka, flourished in the Hein period (794 – 1185). These were brief poems which people of the court exchanged, like the lovers’ verse in Tale of Genji. Despite its romanticism, tanka-talk made me think of tweets. Which in turn made me think of Borges’ famous remark, “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

The flu epidemic of 1918 was a precursor of Covid, as Hein poetry was of tweeting.

My eureka moment was discovering haiga – haiku painting. Haiku has been written in countless languages, but haiga is barely known. However, many of the most celebrated haiku poets created haiga, and simplicity and sincerity were prized beyond great artistic skill. The haiga was a natural extension of haiku: both founded on the brush stroke. 

This discovery, that my enterprise of mixing highku and painting was not just a personal quixotic urge but was rooted in ancient Japanese arts, seemed like a validation from the past, and bestowed the sense of connection I so craved in our 21st century crisis.

As Richard Wright said:

Burning out its time
and timing its own burning
one lonely candle