Some people choose writing. For Barry Koplen, writing chose him.
“It was a covenant,” Koplen explains, describing the inexplicable pull he felt toward the written word since childhood. “I simply could not disregard it.” Yet for decades, he couldn’t understand why. While other kids enjoyed football and crafts, young Barry found equal joy in putting pen to paper—though he thought of it as nothing more than another pastime.
The answer came unexpectedly during a family dinner.
As his father was leaving the table, he mentioned a conversation with a distant cousin researching the family tree. The genealogical trail led back through centuries, finally arriving at a twelfth-century rabbi who was also a poet. In that moment, everything clicked.
“Instantly, I felt at peace,” Koplen recalls. “Writing had been my inheritance.”
But peace and commitment are different beasts. Knowing he came from a line of writers didn’t automatically mean embracing that identity fully. The internal struggle continued for years until it reached a crisis point at a weeklong writer’s workshop at the Robert Frost Homeplace.
As the workshop drew to a close, Koplen found himself at a crossroads. After a sleepless night wrestling with his future, he made his choice. He confided in a friend facing a similar struggle: he would be a writer. The relief was immediate and profound—”a burden of so many years had been lifted.”
A Voice Shaped by Many Voices
Koplen’s literary influences read like a who’s who of American letters: Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Leon Uris, Galway Kinnell, Harper Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Stephen Dunn, and Campbell McGrath, among many others. But he also found inspiration in unexpected places—his own students, and peers like Baron Wormser, John Guzlowski, and Carol Barrett.
This openness to learning from others has kept his work evolving across the decades. Looking back at his published collections, the changes in style and subject matter are obvious, each volume representing a new chapter in his poetic development.
Highway Inspiration
After sixty-five years of writing, Koplen felt ready to create something entirely his own—a poetic form he could name and claim. The inspiration didn’t arrive in a quiet study or library. It came while he was driving south on Highway 29 near Lynchburg, Virginia.
He’d been visiting artist Dotti Stone to discuss their collaborative projects. On the drive back toward Danville, stress lifted from his shoulders, and his mind opened to possibilities. That’s when it hit him: the American Traiku.
The concept was bold—to create a uniquely American poetic format suited to the 21st century and the vast scope of the nation itself.
Expanding the Haiku
Traditional haiku contains seventeen syllables in a single stanza. Koplen’s American Traiku is deliberately larger and more robust. It consists of three stanzas, each containing three lines with a syllable count of 7-5-7. That’s nineteen syllables per stanza, fifty-seven total.
“A number that large would not prohibit any subject from being written about,” Koplen explains. While the name “Traiku” had been used before, adding “American” distinguished his format from the standard version.
The form is expansive enough to explore the themes that fascinate him: all aspects of love, poignant emotions, the examination of art, war and peace, heroes and heroism, nature and astronomy, Biblical references, family, travel, sports, tributes to other writers—and always room for humor.
A Form with Potential
The response to American Traiku has validated Koplen’s vision. A retired professor with extensive literary knowledge raved about the poems, appreciating how the compact yet adequate form maintains interest throughout its nine lines. Even the prestigious library in Wilton, Connecticut—which had previously declined Koplen’s books—accepted his first collection of American Traiku.
But Koplen’s greatest hope lies in education. He believes poetry can be difficult to teach, especially when students struggle with complex schemes like iambic pentameter. The American Traiku offers something different: a sound platform from which students can compare and contrast other poetic forms while learning to “construct even ordinary ideas into poetry” at whatever level they can achieve.
A Living Legacy
The form is already proving its versatility. Koplen has written three books containing at least 100 American Traiku poems each. American Traiku, TWO, and Angles are available now.
From a twelfth-century rabbi to a highway outside Lynchburg, Barry Koplen has transformed his inheritance into a legacy—offering poets of all ages a new way to capture the American experience, fifty-seven syllables at a time.
