Natalie Goldberg - Three Simple Lines: A Writers Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku

Natalie Goldberg takes haiku, a subject few of us in Western culture richly understand, and unearths the themes of human life we all yearn for and recognize: connection, loss, wandering, arrival. She shows us how to pay great attention to what really matters. This book is the salve our chaotic world needs right now.

BILL ADDISON, food critic, Los Angeles Times

The wide-open, engaged mind and pen of Natalie Goldberg, a pilgrimage to Japan, and haiku what could be better? Three Simple Lines is a sweet and moving read about the mysterious connections, across cultures and time, that exquisite writing can make. As Goldberg walks the trails and visits the graves of Basho, Buson, and others, she brings us home to the shattering feeling of being alive the feeling of haiku.

NORMAN FISCHER, Zen priest, poet, and author of Training in Compassion

This exquisite book takes you into the heart of the mystery of haiku and into Natalie Goldbergs remarkable and intimate discoveries about Japan and herself, by walking in the footsteps of great haiku writers of former times. Laced with threads of sorrow, humor, and wisdom, Three Simple Lines will be cherished by all of us for its humanness, bravery, and brilliance.

REV. JOAN JIKO HALIFAX, abbot at Upaya Zen Center

In Three Simple Lines, Natalie Goldberg blends memoir with the lyrical history of a poetic form. The result is an unclassifiable book that is utterly poignant, riveting, and hypnotic. It is a book that, in the truest sense, achieves transcendence.

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA, author of the Booker Prize finalists The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities

This is a wonderful immersion into haiku and, thankfully, more than three lines.

RED PINE / BILL PORTER, author of Finding Them Gone: Visiting Chinas Poets of the Past

Natalie Goldbergs writing always offers a respite from the world, which it achieves by diving right into the madness of the moment. Like the haiku she reads, writes, and treasures, Three Simple Lines is a refuge in a chaotic world. Through her travels in Japan to seek the origins of haiku, she reveals the honest struggle of being a writer and, just beneath that, the honest struggle of being human.

JENN SHAPLAND, author of the National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

This jewel of a book represents a dream meeting between subject and author. Natalie Goldbergs trademark prose wonderfully clear, simple, and deep takes us into her profound understanding of haiku and makes this story of her search for haikus origins among beautiful gardens, mountains, modern cities, and ancient temples compelling and gripping. Its also the ideal meeting of verse and prose: The haiku are embedded in a limpid narrative, free-flowing and irresistible as a mountain stream. When they appear now and then as beautiful stepping-stones in a journey of discovery, they come alive in ways that still the mind, expand time, and open the heart. A classic narrative of discovery and homage and a simple, humble book to fall in love with.

HENRY SHUKMAN, author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart

Like haiku itself, Natalie Goldbergs Three Simple Lines is spare, keenly observed, and blessedly light on its feet. This wise and spirited travelogue acquaints us with some of the forms legendary practitioners and reminds us just how much of lifes magic can be packed into a few inspired words.

HAMPTON SIDES, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground

MEMOIR

Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America

The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth

Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home

ESSAYS

The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life

The Truth of This Life by Katherine Thanas, edited by Goldberg and Anelli

POETRY

Chicken and in Love

Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings

WRITING BOOKS

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Wild Mind: Living the Writers Life

Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writers Craft

Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir

The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language

NOVEL

Banana Rose

NOTEBOOK

Essential Writers Notebook

DOCUMENTARY FILM

Tangled Up in Bob: Searching for Bob Dylan
(with filmmaker Mary Feidt)

Copyright 2021 by Natalie Goldberg

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Permissions acknowledgments beginning on are an extension of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldberg, Natalie, author.

Title: Three simple lines : a writers pilgrimage into the heart and homeland of haiku / Natalie Goldberg.

Description: Novato, California : New World Library, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: An autobiographical meditation on the writing and reading of haiku, the essence of haiku mind, and the country and culture that nurtured the form-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020039241 (print) | LCCN 2020039242 (ebook) | ISBN 9781608686971 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781608686988 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Haiku. | Haiku--History and criticism. | American poetry --Japanese influences.

Classification: LCC PL759 .G65 2021 (print) | LCC PL759 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039241

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039242

First printing, January 2021

ISBN 978-1-60868-697-1

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-698-8

Printed in the USA on 30% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For Upaya Zen Center,
where haiku blooms every February

And for Roshi Joan Halifax,
Upayas founding teacher
and my good friend