Poetry Thursday - haiku by Philip Whalen

Waiting for ... spring?

Early Spring

The dog writes on the window
with his nose

From a 2008 essay, The Haiku of Philip Whalen by Miriam Sagan, which says of this poem:

"As a poet Whalen [one of the original Beat poets] was not a self-conscious practitioner of haiku. Indeed, Kerouac [another Beat] was more devoted to his understanding of the form, and consciously practiced it. Allen Ginsberg [another] is credited with developing his "American sentence," a sort of one-line haiku in English. For Whalen some of the impulse to short poetry was similarly epigrammatic, or aphoristic, in the tradition of Western wisdom literature. His work is also often humorous or quirky in the senryu tradition. Whalen did note, however, perhaps with some surprise, that his most anthologized poem, written in 1964, was one he thought of as a haiku:

Early Spring 

The dog writes on the window
with his nose

"This poem is indeed emblematic of Whalen's work in the form. To begin with, he titled his haiku. Yet in many cases his titles might serve as conventional first lines in a haiku. If the title "Early Spring" is considered as the first line of the poem, we have a very fine haiku—the dog impatient to get out into warm weather, the window maybe a little steamy, the humor of a poet seeing "writing" in an unusual spot."