Chorus 1 — Introduction and Old Pond Polls

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Orense Nicod.

Periodically, Moon and Finger pauses its close readings and essays—not to settle an argument, but to map one. That’s what Chorus is: a running poll of haiku readers and writers, gathering opinion on questions the tradition itself has never fully resolved.

The results are never a verdict. They’re a snapshot of practice, agreement, and disagreement as they actually exist among people who read and write haiku today—a different, and rarer, kind of evidence than any single essay can offer.

Chorus also gives us room the regular issues don’t. It’s where we turn reader questions back to the readership itself: when a question raised through the proposals form seems larger than one exchange can settle, we bring it here and ask what the rest of you think.

You don’t need to have read the Moon and Finger essay to take part. Most Chorus questions aren’t about theory—they’re about practice: how you actually write, read, and judge haiku, whatever your background. If you’ve ever hesitated over whether something counts as a kigo, or wondered whether a poem you loved was “really” a haiku, you already have the experience these polls are asking about.

A snapshot, though, is only as good as its sample, and it’s worth being candid about ours. Our first poll drew 56 responses; by the fourth, that had fallen to 13—though the fourth also had less time to run than the others, so the decline might not be quite as steep as it first appears. Even so, a poll of 13 tells us something, but nowhere near as much as it could.

The gap between what Chorus could show us and what it currently shows us is largely a matter of how many people take a minute to vote. So consider this an open invitation, repeated every issue: if you write haiku, if you only read them, if you’ve never been quite sure where you stand—vote anyway.

The value of Chorus rises directly with the number of people willing to be counted. It’s meant to be your space, and it will only become what you make of it.

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Launch Poll Results

Fifty-six responses came in for the launch poll, and the experience curve turned out to be one of its more useful surprises: read as five bands—under five years, five years, more than five, more than ten, more than twenty—the sample splits almost evenly, each band accounting for between 14% and 27% of respondents. No single career stage dominates the poll. Beginners, mid-career poets, and multi-decade veterans are all sitting at the same table in roughly equal numbers, which means the answers that follow aren’t the view of any one generation of haiku writers—they’re a genuine cross-section.

Against that balanced backdrop, the learning question surfaced something worth pausing on: among our readers, haiku is largely a self-taught art. Sixty-one percent learned on their own, dwarfing mentorship (11%), online community (16%), and formal education, which barely registers at 4%. That pattern holds across experience levels—this isn’t simply older writers who came up before formal programs existed. Whatever the “rules” of haiku are, most of the people who hold them absorbed them without an instructor in the room, which may explain why so many treat rules as negotiable rather than settled.

And negotiate they do. Only 9% describe themselves as strict rule-followers; the plurality (52%) do both—following and experimenting—while another fifth are still working out where they stand. Friction against the rules they were taught is nearly universal: 86% have felt it, whether occasionally or often. What’s murkier is the practical cost of that friction. A quarter of respondents say they’ve had work rejected over a rule they disagreed with, but the largest group by far—58%—simply isn’t sure. That uncertainty is its own data point: it suggests that editorial rejection in haiku journals rarely comes with a stated reason, leaving writers to guess at the “why” behind a no.

The clearest consensus of the poll was also its most theoretical question. Ninety-eight percent of respondents believe theory has some place in haiku practice—the disagreement is only over how much weight to give it. Forty-one percent take the unqualified “yes”; 31% grant theory a role only in service of the poem, not as an end in itself; and 26% go further still, arguing that theory is unavoidable because every rule is already a theory. Only one respondent said no outright.

Given how evenly the respondents span from novice to veteran, and how overwhelmingly self-taught they are, that near-unanimous vote for theory carries more weight than it might in a narrower sample. This isn’t academics defending their own turf. It’s a genuine cross-section of practising poets—mostly self-schooled, at every career stage—telling us that thinking about haiku and writing it are not separable practices, whatever their route into the form.

Old Pond Polls

Before turning to the poll results, we want to thank all those who took the time to answer the polls and everyone who joined the conversation in the comments—this is exactly the kind of energy Moon and Finger hopes to encourage. Discussing the varied and illuminating perspectives over these past three weeks has been a genuine pleasure.

In that spirit, before moving on to the numbers, we thought it worthwhile to gather together the translations and responses to old pond that emerged in the comments over that time. Taken together, they paint a wonderful picture of how readers continue to engage with this venerable poem.

Part 1 Results

Our second poll drew thirty responses—down from the launch poll’s fifty-six, continuing a decline we’ve been tracking honestly rather than papering over. Some of that drop is likely structural: this poll followed a specific essay (the Old Pond close reading) rather than asking about haiku practice in general, narrowing the audience to readers who had engaged with that particular piece. Even so, the trend is worth watching, and the invitation stands: thirty seconds of your time makes the next Chorus more representative than this one.

The experience curve held its balance from Poll 1: no single career stage dominates the sample, from newer writers (1–3 years, 20%) through multi-decade veterans (17%). What’s different here is familiarity with the poem itself. Sixty-three percent said they knew furuike ya well before reading the essay, and only two respondents were encountering it for the first time—or only superficially. Given the poem’s fame, that’s hardly surprising. This is, in other words, a poll of readers who largely came to the essay with the poem already in mind, which makes what follows more interesting rather than less: familiarity with a poem this canonical did not foreclose new readings of it.

That’s borne out by the “unreadable” question. We asked whether the poem’s fame had, at some point, made it hard to actually see, and a solid 73% said no. Familiarity hadn’t flattened it for most readers, even those who had known it for years. The dissenting 27% is worth sitting with, though: for roughly one in four respondents, overexposure had done exactly what it often does to famous poems, dulling first encounter into recitation. That tension between familiarity and freshness may be worth exploring in its own right.

The most striking result is the dead heat at the centre of the poll. Asked which reading of the poem’s central image they were most drawn to, 40% chose “I oscillate between possibilities,” while another 40% independently converged on the synesthetic reading—the frog somehow entering the sound itself, rather than producing it in sequence. Only 13% read the poem as straightforward cause and effect (frog jumps, therefore sound), and two respondents offered interpretations of their own: one arguing there is no water in the pond at all, the other suggesting that oscillation itself is truer to lived experience than any single resolution. Taken together, well over half the respondents actively resist a settled reading—either by holding two possibilities at once or by choosing the reading that itself refuses linear cause and effect. That’s not a poll converging on an answer. It’s a poll suggesting that the poem’s power lies precisely in not converging.

The fūeki/ryūkō question tracked closely with that instinct. Sixty-three percent saw both the unchanging and the ever-changing at work in the poem, and only two respondents said no outright. Combined with the interpretation data, this suggests readers are primed to find duality in this poem.

Finally, the half-cut question comes closer to orthodoxy than it first appears. The familiar phrase-and-fragment structure is often taught as the default model of haiku, and a half-cut departs from that model by holding two readings in play rather than resolving into a single division. In that sense, asking whether respondents had written one before was also asking whether they had ever departed from a commonly taught structure, knowingly or not. Forty-eight percent said yes; 38% weren’t sure. Read this way, the responses become a live test of how firmly the phrase-and-fragment model actually holds once we begin looking for its exceptions. The answer, it seems, is: not that firmly at all.

Part 2 Results

Poll three drew seventeen responses—down from thirty, which was down from fifty-six. The decline has slowed rather than continuing at the same rate, which is worth noting without over-reading it either way: this remains a smaller, more self-selected group than Poll 1’s. With a sample this size, individual responses still carry real weight, but any patterns deserve a light touch rather than firm conclusions. The experience mix looks broadly similar to the earlier polls.

The frog-and-pond question produced a genuine three-way split: the most conventional causal frame—the frog acts upon the pond—ties at 29% with the fully nondual reading, in which frog and pond become one another, while “arise as a single event” trails only slightly behind at 24%, with 18% unsure. There’s no real plurality here; the vote is divided almost evenly across three genuinely different ways of picturing the same moment.

The “moment of the splash” question tells a similar story from a different angle: 41% chose “all of the above,” ahead of 18% “none of these,” 12% each for “frog meets water,” “not sure,” and “a distinction disappears,” and one write-in. That write-in is worth pausing on. One respondent rejected the entire premise, insisting a splash is simply what happens when something enters water and nothing more—no distinction dissolving, no dual event, just mechanics. “Frog meets water” expresses much the same position without the explicit rejection of the premise. Taken together, these two questions point to the same underlying pattern: readers resist settling on a single answer. And read alongside Poll 2’s near-even split on interpretive stance, this is now a recurring feature of how this readership engages with the poem, not a one-off result.

Asked which of the essay’s frameworks resonated most, a clear majority found at least one that fit. More than 80% named a specific framework or chose “all of them,” with Bashō’s own fūeki/ryūkō concept the clear leader (38%), perhaps reflecting its being the framework most native to haiku thought. Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm and Zen nonduality each drew genuine support (12% apiece), with Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied cognition trailing at 6%, while another 12% felt all of them applied at once. Only 19% chose “none,” meaning that for roughly one respondent in five, none of the essay’s frameworks matched their own sense of the poem.

Asked to characterize their relationship to the poem overall, roughly two-thirds of respondents (64%) landed on some version of unresolved—finding it inexhaustible (35%) or finding it changes on rereading (29%)—while the remaining third (35%) claimed some degree of comprehension, whether full (29%) or partial (6%). The group leans toward the poem remaining open rather than closing, even after three polls and several different interpretive frameworks.

Finally, the chiasmus question repeats a pattern from Poll 2’s half-cut result almost exactly. A plurality (41%) weren’t sure whether they’d used a chiastic structure before, ahead of “no” (24%) and either form of “yes” (24% and 12%). As with the half-cut, chiasmus isn’t standard haiku vocabulary, so this uncertainty probably reflects two things at once: a more instinctive approach to composition, and unfamiliarity with the word itself. The gap seems to be less about resisting the device itself and more about not having a name for it—respondents may well be using such structures without ever identifying them as figures of speech at all.

Part 3 Results

Poll four drew thirteen responses, from a group weighted toward more experienced haiku writers. It continued the decline—though the drop has clearly been slowing with each round, and this poll in particular had less time in the field than the others before we closed it.

Every respondent called old pond at least a good poem, with two-thirds going further and calling it a masterpiece. This isn’t evidence of the poem’s reputation among haiku readers broadly; it’s evidence that readers who volunteer for a third consecutive poll about one poem tend to love that poem. Worth keeping in mind before treating this as any kind of verdict.

The renga-instruction question split three ways almost evenly—yes (46%), not sure (38%), no (15%). The ars poetica reading fared better, drawing a clear majority (62%), and the tension between the image’s simplicity and the poem’s underlying structure was felt by more than two-thirds of respondents (69%). Both results suggest a readership that is comfortable holding the poem as simultaneously plain on its surface and intricate underneath—exactly the kind of doubled attention the essay’s close reading argued for.

Taken together, these answers show that allegorical or structurally suggestive readings of furuike ya are not rejected outright; they remain one interpretive mode among others rather than something the readership resists.

Asked what feels most central now, after three polls’ worth of frameworks, half point to the relationship between frog and pond rather than either term alone, and 42% point to the act of perception itself—two readings that are not in tension so much as different entry points into the poem. Only one respondent named the sound in isolation, a small but real reminder that for at least some readers the poem still resolves to something as simple as what it sounds like.

Which brings the Old Pond arc to its natural closing question: after all this analysis, does the poem feel more explained, or does it still feel unresolved? The answer came down almost to a coin flip—54% still turning, 46% more explained. Roughly half of this readership walked away still watching the poem turn, and the other half feeling they’d got hold of something stable. Both responses are plausible, and neither invalidates the other. 

The essay’s case was never that old, famous haiku in general reward this level of intense attention—very few would be able to sustain layered, multi-framework readings. If some of the conceptual framing along the way felt unusually dense, a brief reassurance is in order: this won’t be the norm going forward. Excursions into French theory or formal metaphor frameworks will stay occasional, and part of the point here is that this particular poem is a kind of perfect storm that can bear that weight of attention—without asking the same of every poem that follows it.

Merleau-Ponty can go back to propping up my dresser—we’re not expecting to need him again anytime soon.

Questions and Proposals 

First we want to thank you for all the suggestions and questions that were submitted through the proposals form.

The first such topic that we will address is haiku contests and their judging. Our focus here is on contests assessed by appointed judges, rather than kukai-style submissions, which are evaluated communally. Given the topic’s scope and the range of perspectives it invites, we felt that beginning with a poll on your experiences would be an appropriate starting point. We also hope to gather the perspectives of a few contest judges in response to the data and build an issue around it. The aim is to better understand current practices and, where possible, highlight ways to improve this part of haiku writing. Special polls like this one run longer than the ones at the end of regular issues. But fear not — it still won’t take very long.

TAKE THE ANONYMOUS POLL ON HAIKU CONTESTS AND JUDGING

A question from a reader on double (and multiple) kigo is addressed in a post by Keith dealing with various aspects of kigo currently scheduled for August 25th.

We will also  address another comment received, that rules can be a positive thing, within the frame of an upcoming essay on Richard Wright and 5-7-5 haiku.

We will explore another reader suggestion, the question of opaque words (foreign words, scientific names, archaic or obscure words…), in a future Moon and Finger post.

This Saturday, Keith will continue his exploration of Shiki with the full Haikai Taiyõ in Moon and Finger 6. There will be another Chorus poll at the foot of that. Do read part I that appeared on Saturday 4 July if you haven’t already, and please add your anonymous votes to the shasei and Shiki poll.

Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:

Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.

Introducing the hosts:

Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.

Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).

A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group.   Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.

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