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CIIS community comes together in haiku to remember the scents of their summer
CIIS has always cultivated a creative spirit, and this year, to open the fall 2026 school year, the CIIS community was invited to recall one scent from their summer and turn it into a haiku. Students, faculty, and staff submitted works celebrating tender feelings and ephemeral images, delighting in moments human, beyond human, and divine.
Poetry extends its roots deep into CIIS’ history. The University grew out of the American Academy of Asian Studies, founded in San Francisco in 1951, where Frederic Spiegelberg and Alan Watts brought Eastern philosophy into conversation with the city's literary scene. Poet and activist Gary Snyder studied with Saburo Hasegawa, who taught him to see landscape painting as a form of poetic meditation. Other Bay Area poetic greats, including Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen, were all working and riffing the same ground, bringing together poetic wanderings, Zen, and reflections on the natural world.
These same themes also resonate in the poetic form chosen. Haiku traces its beginnings to thirteenth-century Japan, where it began as the hokku, the opening stanza of the renga, a collaborative poem. Centuries later, master poet Shiki transformed it into the standalone modern, 5-7-5 syllable poem, in the late nineteenth century.
One of the enduring joys of haiku is how it strips away pretense, leaving only presence. Below, the CIIS community carry the collaborative spirit of haiku and the artistic heritage of San Francisco and CIIS. Together, these poems honor our roots and show what emerges when we gather in verse.
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