f/k/a . . .

When it comes to crafting excellent haiku, all poetics are local. No one knows

that better than Yu Chang, whose work demonstrates the in-person, in-the-moment,

concreteness that is the essence of fine haiku.

 

Another kind of “localness” was especially serendipitous for me: last year, I learned

that the Yu Chang whose haiku I ‘ve been admiring for years spends much of his time

less than a mile from my home, as a professor of electrical engineering at Union College.

He and I share Schenectady, New York, as our adopted City.

• It was also inspiring to learn that Yu — like myself — started writing haiku in

  his 50’s. Unlike myself, however, he was winning international haiku

  contests within a year of penning his first haiku. Maybe Yu’s haiku muse

  will make a detour to my neighborhood once in a while, and help me learn,

  from his example, the art and craft of the haijin.

Everyone who knows Yu comments on his sense of humor and his modesty. Both

can be seen in his haiku (where he allows the reader to take his place experiencing

the haiku moment) and in his freqent expressions of gratitude for the generosity and

encouragement of his friends at the online Shiki Internet Haiku Salon.

 

“streetsigns” Yu’s haiku have won numerous awards, and his poetry appears in the journals

and anthologies to which all English-language haiku poets aspire: Acorn, Frogpond,

Hermitage, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and Tundra. At present, he is active

as a founding member of the Route 9 Haiku Group, which publishes the biannual

journal, Upstate Dim Sum. The Route 9ers are Yu, Hilary Tann, and our honored

guests John Stevenson and Tom Clausen.

 

You can learn much more about Yu Chang as a haiku poet in an AHAPoetry profile,

written in 2001. I’m sure Yu will groan when he sees this sentence, but I agree with

the Profile’s author, Ty Hadman, that “Yu Chang is one of the poets currently writing

haiku that are not only being appreciated today but will also be added to that treasure

chest of haiku classics in English to be preserved for future generations.”

 

Choosing introductory haiku from Yu’s entire body of work is too difficult, so I will limit the
source today to the first collection that I found of his work, which was in A New Resonance:
Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku (Ed. by Jim Kacian and Dee Evetts, Red
Moon Press, 1999):

warm rain
the spring moon returns
to the rusty can

starry night–
biting into a melon
full of seeds

parting her pink robe
–daybreak

pebbled beach–
how carefully she chooses
her words

Yu Chang, from A New Resonance (1999).

“warm rain” first appeared in Frogpond XXI:1

“pebbled beach” first appeared in Acorn 2

“starry night” won a Museum of Haiku Literature Award 1998

The yu chang: all poetics are local by David Giacalone, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.