The Haiku Year

Seven musicians. One year of haiku.

The Haiku Year exists because seven friends made a pact to write haikus every day for a year as a way to keep in touch with each other. The finished product is a document of a year’s worth of moments filled with joy, sorrow and unexpected beauty. The book creates the sense that present moments do not just disappear and provides a visceral understanding of how these moments fit into the context of the rest of our lives.

The short verses in The Haiku Year stab and elate. They hint at both the transcendence and mediocrity of everyday life. The power of Michael Stipe’s southern, twilight drenched lyrics from early REM albums is present in the volume. Douglas A. Martin’s sparse yet descriptive prose gleams throughout. The thoughtful storytelling of Grant Lee Phillips is pared down to the simplest words to describe an instance.

The Haiku Year is about the appreciation of small moments of beauty, ultimately adding up to the appreciation and respect not only for our individual lives but for all the lives that intersect with ours. The Haiku Year effortlessly urges readers to enjoy details and to let spare moments pierce through the numbness of everyday routine.

Michael Stipe, Tom Gilroy, Douglas Martin, and Grant Lee Phillips are four of the seven friends who committed to writing one haiku per day for a year as a way to keep in touch. Those haikus became their poetry collection, The Haiku Year.