In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:

     The man pulling radishes  
   Pointed my way  
     With a radish.

Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.