Best of the Haiku Challenge (January 2025)

“Haiku humor” is extremely varied. It can be whimsical or wise, funny or sad, sexy or spiritual, philosophical, topical, scatological, or even dark. Critics have found it difficult to define for just that reason. The comical aspect of haiku is always dancing ahead of us, just a little bit out of reach. Its job is to surprise us with the unexpected twist that subverts our ordinary understanding of the world. The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge each offered a different take on haiku humor.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the current challenge here.

WINNER:

circadian shift . . .
coils of the plug-in heater
grin at me all night

— Monica Kakkar

In last month’s haiku tip, we looked at the work of the modernist poet Yamaguchi Seishi (1901–1994). Seishi’s haiku often addressed topics like industry, machinery, or technology—aspects of modern life that his contemporaries considered inappropriate for haiku.

One of Seishi’s most famous poems shows the wheels of a locomotive coming to a standstill in long summer grass. Another, written at a factory, describes an enormous red chain with its tip dangling into a summer river. “It was made to hold an anchor,” Seishi later explained. Both poems include a traditional season word, but, before Seishi, no one had dared to use them to express the stark contrast between modern culture and the rhythms of nature.

In last month’s winning poem, the seasonal topic (heating) is as old as haiku, although the season word is not. The “hearth” of former centuries has become a “plug-in heater” with coils that glow with an electric current throughout the night.

Reliable and ever ready, these portable devices provide heat at the flip of a switch. But they offer no emotional comfort, and no point of connection to the natural world. A hearth stands at the center of a home like the heart inside a body. The heater is an appliance that spends the offseason in a closet or garage and ends up in a landfill when its life is done.

It is hard to imagine a more disquieting set of images. Then again, that seems to be the point. “Circadian shifts” are disruptions to the body’s natural rhythms caused by artificial lighting, jet lag, stress, caffeine or alcohol use, and a host of other factors, including the hour lost or gained through daylight saving time. It may be one of these that has caused the poet’s sleepless state, or it may be the light from the heater that has caused her to fall out of sync with her circadian rhythms.

As her insomnia stretches on, the plug-in heater grins at her all night. The image is apt if we consider that the coils of such heaters are often arranged in a crescent to maximize heat convection. But there is something menacing about it as well, as if the device she counts on to keep her warm had a hidden agenda of its own. A darkly humorous thought that adds a Halloweenish vibe to the poem.

As human beings rely more and more on mechanization and automation, increasingly we find ourselves imagining a world where our technologies turn against us. Although AI has made that possibility a legitimate cause for concern, the roots of our fear go further back than that. With each new technological advance, we have drifted further from the evolutionary niche established for us by nature, and further from the daily tasks necessary for survival—tasks that tell us at the most fundamental level what it means to feel human.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

If your furnace fails
to ignite on a cold night,
you can burn this poem.

— Ryan Nichols 

the oil truck pulls in
both the delivery guy
and furnace humming.

— Sari Grandstaff

♦

You can find more on January’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Winter season word: “Furnace / Heater”

The furnace clicks off
now the silence gets to say
what it was thinking

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the winter season word “furnace” or “heater.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “furnace” or “heater.”

Haiku Tip: Update a Traditional Season Word!

Most season words are centuries old, but some are of more recent vintage. “Baseball” was added to the canon in the late 19th century, for instance, when the sport was first introduced to Japan. And then there are those season words that adapt over time, changing form even though their substance remains the same.

Few Japanese dwellings are heated with charcoal braziers nowadays. Furnaces have replaced hearths in larger standalone houses, while heaters are used in place of the hibachis that once warmed the rooms of apartments or boardinghouses.

Even so, the new words often have a very different feeling. Consider the effort required to heat a home with wood or charcoal (not to mention the satisfaction derived from doing so) as opposed to setting the thermostat to a given temperature and leaving it there for days or weeks on end.

A haiku written in 1934 by the modernist poet Yamaguchi Seishi offers a good illustration:

Ship’s heating system
coming on with the movement
to high latitude.
— trans. by Alfred H. Marks and Takashi Kodaira

“On our way north to Dairen by steamer, we moved gradually higher in latitude,” Seishi writes. “I was made aware of it by the sounds of steam passing through the heat pipes in the cabin.”

Every aspect of the poem is rooted in modern technology. The steamer itself. The fuel-based heating system with its knocks and hisses. Even the scale of the journey, which is measured in latitudinal degrees rather than nautical miles. The poem describes heating, true—but there is nothing cozy about the experience. This is intentional on Seishi’s part. He registers the movement to colder, higher latitudes only through the sound in the pipes. Nothing is direct.

Seishi had written a more traditional “heating” haiku a few years earlier, the effect of which was completely different:

The shrine maiden’s hands
held over the charcoal pan
radiated love.
— trans. by Alfred H. Marks and Takashi Kodaira

On a visit to Nara, Seishi saw a miko warming her hands over a brazier. Such women were originally shamans who could communicate with the spirits at Shinto shrines, although their role had become ceremonial by Seishi’s time.

The light from the coals glowing warmly on the young woman’s hands inspired Seishi’s admiration, if not his passion, although he attributed these feelings to the hands themselves in order to draw a direct, sensual connection between the woman’s flushed skin and the glowing coals.

Both haiku are effective, but only one is a masterpiece. The language of the first poem is detached, its mood objective and impersonal. And yet Seishi has captured the experience of living at a comfortable, but strangely destabilizing, distance from the natural elements—a distance that has only increased in the years since he wrote the poem.

A note on furnace and heater: It is important to note that, while these modern season words exist on a historical continuum with words like hearth, wood stove, or brazier, they reflect an automated, “arms-length” approach to heating our dwellings, vehicles, or public spaces. We often don’t notice them unless they malfunction or the power goes out, or we have to change the setting. I wrote this month’s sample poem when the thermostat switched the furnace off on a cold winter night. I felt that the silence had been waiting for that moment in order to speak.