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The HSA web site features short profiles of members.
Marylouise Knight
Meet HSA Member - Marylouise Knight
Meet Marylouise Knight and her granddaughter Samantha
August 2015 profile by
David G. Lanoue, President of HSA
In the year 2000, Marylouise Knight started writing one haiku a day, and she's still at it. Regardless of what's happening around her or in her family, she keeps up her daily ritual of one-breath composition. Because she has learned to "think in haiku," she believes that her unconscious mind files ideas away as she goes about her normal daily routine--until finally she picks up the pen, "and there you are."
For over ten years, Marylouise has been the sole member of HSA living in my own hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. (Let's hope that this profile will change that sad statistic!) In fact, it was due to her lack of local contact with fellow haiku poets that she decided to join HSA in the first place. "It was important for me to hook up with others beyond my city limits. I didn't want to be so isolated in this endeavor I loved," she says.
When I asked how she found haiku, Marylouise said that, in reality, haiku found her--and quite accidently. She was attending a Cape Cod Writer's Conference in the late seventies. She had played with longer forms of poetry in the past but was becoming more interested in memoir, so signed up for that workshop. She admitted, "I was really upset to discover that a mistake had been made, and I was in a poetry workshop led by a Geraldine Clinton Little. She thought I had a knack for the form, and although it took years before I really got serious about it, to the exclusion of other forms of poetry, I kept hearing her positive words in my ear. I finally got serious about it in the late 90's. Haiku had started imposing itself on everything I wrote. It was much later that I learned who my teacher really was and of her stature in the Haiku Community."
Marylouise says that she has always been drawn to the seasons, and that she likes to speak the language of seasons in all her creative work, including painting. Haiku has become for her "a Way, as natural as breathing."
Her advice to younger poets: "Mostly, it seems important not to think you’ve got it when you feel you've mastered the form. It felt natural to me, but after 15 years, I'm still learning and still excited when a new facet appears. Don't be deceived by the simple appearance of the form, as there are depths and depths and more depths to it."
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