Chorus 3 — the past
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.
Poll 7 – Hekigoto 1
Chorus 7 drew 25 responses. Most respondents are long-time writers: 19 have written haiku for more than five years, and 4 for more than twenty. What follows is my own reading, intended to provoke thought rather than report findings. With such a small sample, any pattern should be taken with a grain of salt.
We first asked what creates the effect when a haiku feels immediate, or “present”. Fifteen of the twenty-five chose “a combination of all of these”. Five attributed the effect to the reader’s experience while reading, and two to the poet’s direct perception of the moment. One respondent each chose the author’s interpretation and choice of words, the use of present tense, and the structure of the poem.
We then asked how respondents understand the relationship between Zen and haiku. Eight said that Zen strongly influenced haiku but does not define it, seven that the connection is often overstated, six that Zen is one possible way of reading haiku among many, and four were unsure.
I began by treating these as separate questions, but the answers seem to belong together. The two respondents who attributed presence to the poet’s direct perception both said that Zen strongly influenced haiku. Of the five who located presence in the reader’s experience, four held Zen at arm’s length: three called it one way of reading among many, and one said that the connection is overstated. All four respondents who were unsure about Zen chose “a combination”. It may be that the Zen question is a question about presence in disguise. If presence is the poet’s direct perception of a moment, Zen is close at hand. If presence is made in the reading, Zen becomes one lens among several. The numbers are small, so I offer this only as a hunch.
Both respondents who credited the poet’s perception were in their first three years of writing, which I also find suggestive. The “haiku moment”, the poet’s direct encounter with something seen or felt, is often the first idea of haiku a newcomer encounters. It explains presence in terms of the poet: the poem feels present because the poet was present.
With more years of practice, I suspect attention may drift towards readers, craft, and everything else that makes a poem work on the page, until presence looks like the result of several causes rather than one. Among respondents with more than five years of writing, 13 of 19 chose “a combination of all of these”, compared with 2 of 6 among those with fewer than five years. That is roughly what we might expect if the haiku moment is not discarded, but demoted from the source of presence to one ingredient among several.
The pattern is not tidy, though. The most author-centred respondent in the survey had been writing for more than twenty years. This person chose the poet’s intention as what makes a haiku, and the author’s interpretation and choice of words as the source of presence. Their answer about existence also took poetry out of its own category, describing an effect at work in speech, advertising, and even manipulation. It may be that a poet-centred view does not disappear with experience but changes, from the perception of a moment to the control of an effect.
Perhaps that is the more interesting shift. The haiku moment begins with the poet’s encounter: the poem is present because the poet was present to the moment. With experience, the poet may discover that the moment that started the poem is not necessarily where the poem lives. It may be more like a first note whose resonance carries somewhere the poet could not have anticipated at the time.
If presence may happen later, in ways unanticipated by the author then the question of where a poem exists becomes hard to avoid. We asked it directly: where does a poem’s “existence” most fully occur? Fifteen of the twenty-five chose the interaction between text and reader, and no other answer came close. The poet’s moment may be the first note, but on this view the poem lives in the resonance.
Only two respondents located a poem’s existence in the words on the page, and both had been writing for more than ten years. That is striking in a group where several definitions of haiku rest on form. Our respondents seem willing to say that form matters, but not that form is where the poem is. I would be curious whether a group of translators or editors, who spend their days with the text itself, would answer the same way.
One respondent answered with a quotation and a question: “‘Until we married my wife did not exist’ – clever or silly?”In the interest of parity, I should point out that the husband did not exist either. I take the remark to be a reductio: distinguish modes of existence and rank them, and we risk saying absurd things. But this is only if we treat the question as being about bare existence. The scare quotes were there to prevent that. We asked about a poem’s existence “as a poem”. The marriage brought the woman into existence as a wife, just as it brought the man into existence as a husband. It did not bring either person into existence. So I would call the quip clever. It reminds us that something can exist in several modes. However those modes are not necessarily equivalent. We can still ask which mode matters most for poetry, as fifteen respondents did in choosing the encounter between text and reader.
Presence and existence also came apart for some respondents. Five said presence comes from the reader’s experience while reading, but three of those five put the poem’s existence somewhere else: on the page, in the poet’s original experience, or wherever the aim of the poem places it. The two newcomers did the reverse, placing presence with the poet and existence in the encounter. If we use the presence and existence as though they meant one thing, we may be smoothing over a distinction some of our readers are drawing quite carefully.
The question posed by Hekigotō’s haiku is a close cousin of the existence question: what makes a thing what it is? Which is the “truer” fly-swatter? Of the twenty-three who answered, only three chose the one answer that named a truer swatter, the one that has actually fulfilled its function. Fourteen said both are equally real, in different ways, and six said the question itself changes how we think about objects. So twenty respondents declined the choice offered by Hekigoto’s framing.
The two questions seem to have elicited similar responses. All three who chose the swatter that has fulfilled its function also placed a poem’s existence in the encounter with the reader, which makes sense if a thing is partly defined by what it does. Two of the six who said the question itself changes how we think about objects were also among those who questioned the framing of the existence question: the respondent who asked “clever or silly?”, and the one who wrote that existence is existence, and that things do not exist “more” at certain times than others. Those who challenged the framing of one question tended to challenge the other. Three of the four respondents who were unsure about Zen also gave that sceptical answer. Perhaps people who resist settling one question are inclined to resist settling another. What we may be seeing here is less a position than a habit of suspending judgement.
Finally, we asked respondents, in their own words, what makes a haiku a haiku. Two answers led, with seven each: the experience it creates in the reader, and a balance of inherited form and poetic effect. The rest were scattered. Four gave combination answers, two were unsure, and three named craft or form: the cut, kigo with structure and convention, or concision, understatement, the haiku moment and juxtaposition. One newcomer argued that haiku is a genre whose boundaries are socially constructed, so that a poem is a haiku if enough people call it one. The respondent who listed the haiku moment treats it as one feature among four, the demotion I described earlier.
What struck me is that our respondents agreed more readily on where a poem lives than on what makes it a haiku. Five of the seven who defined a haiku by its effect on the reader placed its existence in the encounter, and so did five of the seven who defined it by a balance of inherited form and effect. There is an interesting tension here. Many respondents seem to share the intuition behind Hekigotō’s question: that a thing is not entirely separable from what it does. Yet about a third still keep inherited form within the definition of haiku. Perhaps they see form as the tested tool by which poetic effect has so far been achieved, and are wary of trusting an untested one.
Taken together, these answers rarely place a poem in one spot or one moment. It seems to live in an encounter; the parties to that encounter keep changing, the author included, while form is the instrument that carries the poem from one to the other. This leads to an interesting question: if the moment is only the first note, what exactly are we trying to make present when we write?
Poll 8 Hekigoto 2
Chorus 8 drew 18 responses. This is an even more experienced group than Chorus 7: 15 of the 18 have written haiku for more than five years, and 3 for more than twenty. As before, this is my own reading, meant to provoke thought rather than report findings, and any pattern should be taken with a grain of salt given the small sample. I have left the kigo question aside to be taken up with the later poll on kigo in a future Chorus.
We first asked whether traditional haiku techniques guarantee a sense of presence. Eleven said no, presence comes from the poem’s actual effect on the reader. Six said techniques help but cannot guarantee it, and one was unsure. Nobody said yes outright.
We then asked, for English-language haiku, whether a poem’s energy comes more from a central image or from the movement between images. Eleven said primarily from the relationship between images, and one added “relationship between elements (not just image).” Only one chose a central image. Two said both equally, two said it depends or varies, and one was unsure.
The two questions seem to have drawn similar answers from the same people. Of the eleven who said presence cannot be guaranteed by technique, ten also located a haiku’s energy in the relationship between images. Of the six who said technique helps but cannot guarantee presence, four gave a qualified answer on energy too, saying it varies, depends, or comes from both equally, and only one chose the relationship outright. One group seems to hold a relatively consistent view: what a haiku does is not fixed by its parts, whether we are asking about presence or about energy. The other is more willing to let the answer depend on the poem in front of them.
This is the same shape of thing Chorus 7 gave us with presence and Zen. There, presence in the poet’s perception went with a strong view of Zen’s influence, while presence in the reader’s experience went with a weaker one. Here, presence tied to effect rather than technique goes with energy found in the relationship between images rather than in any one image. In both cases, a view about where a poem’s power comes from seems to travel together with a view about where its force comes from.
We next asked whether breaking established conventions can sometimes keep a tradition alive. Everyone answered yes, in one of two ways: ten said renewal may require challenging inherited forms, and eight said only when the change preserves the spirit of the tradition.
Finally, we asked how respondents experience the tension between traditional and modern approaches. Seven called it a productive tension that keeps haiku alive, four said they feel little tension, three said both productive and conflicting at different times, two called it a conflict that makes haiku hard to define, and two were unsure.
These two questions are close cousins, in the same way the fly-swatter and existence questions were in Chorus 7: both ask what a tradition can survive changing. And the answers cluster in a similar way. Six of the eight respondents who said breaking conventions is acceptable only when it preserves “the spirit of the tradition” also said presence comes from the poem’s actual effect rather than from technique. This suggests that, for these respondents, “spirit” and “effect” may be related ideas: what matters can survive even when the form does not. The two who called the tension a conflict that makes haiku hard to define both belonged to this “spirit” group, while none of the ten who would challenge inherited forms without qualification did. It may be that wanting to preserve a spirit creates a need to say what that spirit is, and that this is where the difficulty of definition is felt. Those willing to challenge form more freely may simply feel that need less.
There is also a hint of the pattern Chorus 7 showed with experience. Among respondents with under ten years of writing, six of nine gave the unqualified yes to breaking conventions. Among those with more than ten, four of nine did. The numbers are small, but they point in the same direction as before: longer practice seems to go with more qualified answers, rather than bolder ones.
Read together with Chorus 7, a shape starts to emerge. Presence, energy, and the survival of a tradition all seem, for a good number of respondents, to depend on relation rather than on any single fixed thing: the encounter between text and reader, the movement between images, the spirit carried across a broken form. The moment, the image, the convention: each may be only the first note, and what follows is what we have been calling presence all along.
Poll 9 The Past 1-3
Chorus 9 drew 16 responses with an even split between more and less experienced writers: eight have written for more than ten years, four for five to ten, and four for under five. This survey asked narrower questions than Chorus 7 and 8, mostly about whether haiku belongs in the present tense. As before, this is my own reading, meant to provoke thought, and the sample is small enough that nothing here should be taken as settled.
We first asked whether respondents had been told that haiku are written in the present tense. Twelve said yes, one said no, and three left it blank. We then asked directly whether they believe past tense belongs in haiku. Thirteen said yes, two were unsure, and the one respondent who had not been told the present-tense rule also said yes. Being taught the rule, in other words, did not stop people from disagreeing with it. Whatever authority the rule carries, it does not seem to carry conviction.
We asked two paired questions about relating to past-tense haiku and writing it. On relating to it, seven said no, they don’t find it harder, seven said it depends, and one said yes. One response was left blank. On writing it, six said no, five said it depends, two were unsure, and two said yes, with one response again left blank. The two questions track each other loosely rather than tightly: of the seven who said past tense isn’t harder to relate to, three also said it isn’t harder to write, but three others qualified their answer on writing with “it depends.” Reading and writing past-tense haiku seem to be different skills for some respondents.
Thirteen of sixteen said they had written a haiku in the past tense themselves, which is worth noting against the twelve who had been taught the present-tense rule. Most of this group have broken the rule they were taught.
We also put a denser, more technical claim to respondents: that because haiku derives from the hokku of collaborative renga, understood as enunciated speech, it is therefore always framed in the present. Nine disagreed, five were unsure, and one qualified it to “only when actually spoken.” One response was left blank. That last answer is a useful tell. “Enunciated” has a precise linguistic sense, closer to the act of framing something as speech than to speaking aloud, and a claim built on that sense does not survive being read in the ordinary way. A formulation this dense probably cannot be tested by one multiple-choice item regardless, but this response suggests the item may also have been answered against a different premise than the one it was written from.
The next question softened the claim: must haiku always be written as some real experience happening now? Only one said yes. Six said no, and nine took a middle position, that this isn’t a hard rule but such haiku tend to have freshness and immediacy. The pattern across these two questions is consistent: respondents reject the present tense as a rule while still granting it some kind of privilege in practice, whether as an inherited form or as a quality haiku tends to have.
We then asked whether the real experience behind a haiku can be one that is now over, being recollected and revisited. Fifteen of sixteen said yes outright, and the last said yes conditionally, if the text carries a marker of the present. We followed with a stronger version of the same idea: that whatever tense is used, the act of contemplation, awareness and insight happens in the present moment, both as the poet writes and as the reader reads. Eleven agreed with the fuller reasoning attached, four agreed simply, and one said no. So the “present” in “haiku is present tense” seems, for most respondents, to have migrated from the grammar of the poem to the act of writing and reading it. A haiku recollecting the past can still be called present, but the present in question is the mind’s, not the verb’s.
Finally, we asked how long a haiku “moment” is, offering five options ranging from an instant to a season. All fifteen respondents who answered chose the one option that named no fixed duration at all. Whatever else this survey shows, it is a clear rejection of the idea that a haiku moment must be short.
Read in order, these answers trace a single move. Respondents were taught a grammatical rule, most have broken it, and when pushed they relocate “presence” away from tense altogether and into the moment of awareness, whether the poet’s or the reader’s. That fits the relational thread running through the earlier surveys: presence and existence in Chorus 7 were often located in an encounter, while Chorus 8 repeatedly located poetic force in relationships rather than in isolated elements. Chorus 9 adds another possibility: the “present” of haiku may have less to do with grammatical tense than with the act of attention itself. The three surveys, taken together, seem to suggest that whatever holds a haiku together is not on the page in any fixed way, present tense included.
Questions and Proposals
First we want to thank you for all the suggestions and questions that were submitted through the proposals form.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
We’re still collecting haiku for the final instalment of our series on simile, which is at least a month away, and we’d love your help.
This time, we’re looking beyond the examples we’ve already discussed. What does simile actually look like in haiku written in English today? We’d like to gather as wide a range of examples as possible, including poems that use simile in ways that might surprise us.
If you come across a haiku that uses simile, please send it our way through the proposals form. It can be your own work or a poem by another poet, preferably one that has been published. Just include the poet’s name and where the haiku was published.
We’re curious to see what is out there, so please don’t worry about deciding whether an example is “good enough” or whether it fits our argument. Send us the interesting ones, the unusual ones, the ambiguous ones and perhaps even the ones that make you wonder whether simile is doing something you hadn’t noticed before.
We look forward to seeing what you find.
If you haven’t taken it already please TAKE THE POLL ABOUT KIGO it has only 10 answers so far.
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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