The Heron's Nest

The Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Awards for 2023

Judges' Commentary - Michele Root-Bernstein

My heartfelt thanks to John Stevenson, managing editor of Heron's Nest, and to all the Heron's Nest editorial staff, for entrusting me with the selection of winning haiku in this year's 11th Annual Peggy Willis Lyles Awards. Seven hundred and forty poets sent in 3,229 poems; out of a focus pool of ninety haiku, some ten to fifteen persistently rose to the top over a month of reading and rereading. I know that another judge might—would—choose differently. Since my selection says as much about me as it does about the haiku, I share here some of the sensibilities that informed my choices.

Haiku essence traditionally includes sensory imagery, brief form, juxtaposition of fragment and phrase, suggestive ambiguity, and space before, after, and within the poem for readers to make the moment their own. Of a more contemporary, somewhat experimental bent, I am happy to forgo seasonality for other universals. I am equally glad to trade juxtaposition for other disjunctive breaks in compressed and fragmented language. And I am open to the poem's "performance of itself,” to use John Ciardi's phrase. I have high regard for any haiku that has me asking, "How does it do that?”—that being a vivid mental image, a flush of strong emotion, a frisson of "felt-thought,” a startling vision of other minds or realities, and/or a sudden consciousness of aesthetic pleasure. As the judging process neared its end, I paid attention to effective novelty in image or technique and to refreshing fusions of the figurative and the literal, the abstract and the concrete. In this way, I hoped to choose haiku that would honor The Heron's Nest and Peggy Willis Lyles as flashpoints where tradition meets innovation.

That said, it is with some regret that I rank my final picks, each of them superb in their own right. In assigning first, second and third place and honorable mentions, I have had to defer to unknowable reasons of the heart.

First Place

This poem seamlessly marries the new and the old in haiku. Lines 1 and 2 have me out on an end-of-summer dusk, watching the stars come out or "fill." Fill what? I expect sky and get instead, in line 3, "the lake's lap." Wow! The vibration of literal and figurative meaning in that last word, "lap," surely privileges the overt personification. I know that in the real world, "lap" refers to the sound (and action) of lake waves. And the idea that starlight "fills" that sound and movement effectively fuses all my senses, merging my separate experience into that of the night, the stars, the lake. This is solid, traditional haiku technique. But my readings cannot shake the metaphorical. In an alternate, if-only-possible world, the lake holds in its embracing lap, as I do in mine on this last warm night, an abundance of forever, even as I know it will not last. Every word of the ku contributes to this feeling, not only in meaning, but in sound. The l's in each line, as well as the iterating vowels, echo the lake's susurrations—and those voiced sounds work to enhance the poem's felt expression of a perfect repletion.

Second Place

Feast the mind's eye—and ear—on this poem in six short words and we may feel something of Monet's passion to capture the nuance of light on cathedral walls. The one-line format offers two internal cut points, after "sunrise" and after "sunrise stone by stone," each a different take on the moment. In the first instance, the poet juxtaposes the ethereality of light with the substance of human manufacture, the stone-by-stone labor of building an immense church. All our proprioceptive senses of movement, force, and balance are engaged. In the second instance, "sunrise stone by stone" the poet has us visualizing the sweep of light over the rough cathedral walls and along its flying buttresses, then imagining its spill through the stained-glass windows of the east-facing apse. We see and feel the cathedral, in all its solidity, as a repository of light, both actual and spiritual. The sound values contribute to this sensory impression: the i in "sunrise" evokes a light feeling; the o's in "stone" and "Notre" a heavy one. And the contrast is telling. One need not be religious to appreciate this ku as a novel meditation on the draw and the difficulty of an enlightened life.

Third Place (Tie)

The intrigue of this haiku lies in its ambiguity. In line 1, does "still" mean quiet or does it mean not over yet? In line 2, who or what does "them" refer to? In line 3, is there movement on the stairs, discerned by the creaking "weight" of footsteps or is that "weight" better understood as the burden found in the homonym "wait," which adds to the haiku an additional and disjunctive image? These questions, especially the last, speak to the poem's teeter between the said and the unsaid. Indeed, I can imagine multiple stories in which the outer is inner, the inner outer. In the cold darkness of a winter night or a depressive mood or a difficult stage of life, the poetic narrator hears but does not otherwise engage with the coming and going of housemates or family. He or she is alert to others, yet inertly lonely. Then again, perhaps the narrator "knows" the "nights," knows them all, like some J. Alfred Prufrock locked in indecision and delay. Each moment becomes its own tedium. The felt-thought of this haiku speaks to our existential condition—and to our acceptance, such as it may be, of purpose. We are all of us on a journey on the stairs.

Sometimes the names we give our more abstract understandings carry their own poetic spell. So it is with the term "soft mathematics," an apparent oxymoron for those of us who find algebra or trigonometry hard. Soft mathematics refers to the use of mathematical ideas in non-mathematical areas of human knowledge, including the humanities, including poetry! Even the sound of the phrase, with its mix of hard and soft consonants, mimics that meaning. Now connect the concept and its connotations with "rain falling blossoms." The novel juxtaposition refreshes what is common yet compelling imagery in haiku. For me, the blah blah blah spring rain effect yields to an intuitive feel for the logic that ties "rain falling" with "blossoms" and, as well, ties "rain" with "falling blossoms." The "soft mathematics of rain falling" also "blossoms" cognitively, as formal patterns in flower growth and form, and perhaps in life and in death, come to mind. Daring an unusually apt abstraction, this haiku gives me an embodied sense of our most recondite thinking about and with the world.

Honorable Mentions (Not Ranked)

"Ombre," meaning a color gradation from light to dark (or vice versa), strikes me as the perfect opening to this meditative haiku. The mystic mantra, "om," in the first syllable seems to expand outward in the second, with its open vowel a. Line 2 brings us back to earth. Waxwings, those nomadic birds washed with pearlescence from pink to pewter, are surely an ombre in living form. Where I come from, they appear out of nowhere in whispering flocks and then suddenly disappear. Just as magical is their juxtaposition with "mist to drizzle"—another modulation in visual and tactile phenomena. There is also the subtle shift in sound from "ist" to "izzle" as we voice the words themselves. The aesthetic pleasure of this haiku is an actively felt thing.

This haiku elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. What can go more unnoticed than a button on an old sweater? Yet this button glows gold, catching the light of an autumn sun. The sound values alone lend the poem's language a tensile strength worth admiring. Yet the shasei moment also yields to something more: the intuition that this ku is about love, child for mother, mother for child, even as the nurturing roles change and even reverse. The emotional tug in this poem seems in every way earned. There are no sentimental words here, just the oblique observation that some bonds may age, may alter, and still hold.

The impact of this haiku is visceral. From line 1 to line 3, I am on pins and needles, real and imagined. Taken whole, the ku evokes last minute adjustments to the wedding dress—whether it needs it or not. Separately we have the bride's "wedding nerves" and the mom's pinched lips. How fragment and phrase inform one another in this haiku! But wait, there's more to this unusual imagery. Those pins in line 2? Not straight pins or dressmaker pins, but head pins. The bride and her mother think each other's thoughts, push each other's buttons, willy nilly. With her mouth full, mom's tongue is tied, but her face says it all. And so does the haiku, as each word contributes to the interplay of emotions in a vulnerable moment.

The very act of reading this haiku rings true for me. Many of my thoughts careen through my mind like electrons deflected by the effort to locate them in space. Taken as one whole rush of words veering sharply at midpoint, the fusion of ideas in this poem creates a non sequitur that, under grammatic pressure, takes on the force of logic. The haiku pulls the reader into a speculative world. Does she/he juxtapose "before we were thought of" with "starlight"? Or "before we were" with "thought of starlight"? Or does she/he pivot from "before we were thought" to "thought of starlight"? It's a truism to say we are made of stardust, but to suppose that something of our conscious awareness may be found in the stars fissions a mind-blowing awe.

2023 Readers' Choice Awards

One-hundred-nine readers of The Heron's Nest have provided us with their selections of the best poems we published during 2023. We published 491 poems in Volume 25. Of these, 376 received at least one reader nomination. Ten points were awarded for a first-place nomination, nine for second, and so on.

Here are the top poems and poets as identified for these Readers' Choice Awards:

Popular Poems

Grand Prize Poem

Haiku of the Year (28 nominations, totaling 229 points)

First Runner-up

(14 nominations, totaling 103 points)

Second Runner-up

(12 nominations, totaling 100 points)

Third Runner-up

(10 nominations, totaling 67 points)

Other Highly Rated Poems:

• 63 points: “hospice” — Roberta Beary — September
• 62 points: “advice for my son—” — Chad Lee Robinson — March
• 61 points: “longest day” — Mary Stevens —March
• 59 points: “pulled from the cello” — Ben Gaa —March
• 55 points: “nevertheless” — Meera Rehm —December
• 50 points: “spring thaw” — joan iversen goswell — December
• 49 points: “knowing” — Bryan Rickert —June
• 49 points: “about the wind” — Marie-Therese Taylor — June
• 47 points: “wildflower field” — paul m. — March
• 47 points: “ghost pipes” — Nancy Orr — December
• 44 points: “pouring rain” — Vandana Parashar — December
• 44 points: “before he knew” — Angela Terry — March
• 43 points: “late November” — Jacquie Pearce —March
• 42 points: “school play…” — Peter Newton — December
• 42 points: “snow bones” — Christopher Patchel —September

Popular Poets

This category represents the total number of points awarded to each poet for the poet’s entire body of work in Volume 25.

Grand Prize — Poet of the Year

Peter Newton: (38 nominations, naming 3 of 5 poems published in Volume 25 = 299 points)

First Runner-up

Ben Gaa: (29 nominations, naming 7 of 7 poems published = 204 points)

Second Runner-up

Carly Siegel Thorp: (18 nominations, naming 4 of 6 poems published = 121 points)

Third Runner-up

Ruth Yarrow: (14 nominations, naming 2 of 2 poems published = 112 points)

Other Popular Poets

• Chad Lee Robinson (104 points)
• Eric Sundquist (104 points)
• Bryan Rickert (98 points)
• Mary Stevens (96 points)
• Christopher Patchel (91 points)
• Angela Terry (91 points)
• Francine Banwarth (90 points)
• Alan S. Bridges (88 points)
• paul m. (85 points)
• Lisa Gerlits (83 points)
• Peter Yovu (82 points)
• Ann K. Schwader (77 points)
• Harriot West (76 points)
• Nancy Orr (71 points)
• Mimi Ahern (64 points)

We congratulate the poets honored in this year's Readers' Choice Awards and offer our sincere and deepest gratitude to the readers who devoted their time, effort, and discernment to the nomination process. Whatever value these awards may have comes directly from this community of readers.