The Haiku Foundation Forums

To ask if gendai is "good" really makes no sense. Taking that "gendai" means new, contemporary, fresh the question really means: "is new haiku good?" ...

One aspect of haiku we have to embrace, or at least acknowledge, is its vast diversity. Haiku is very much more than adapting Western minds to Japanese tradition (and why would we do that?). Haiku is poetry written by humans. Humans have a very different experiences with being alive, humans are different. People write for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways and we should be applauding this fact. The days were emulating a Japanese mind-set seemed to be "the thing" are gone ... for most parts. Of course there are still those that do so and that's fine, but this isn't The Way in haiku; there isn't one way of writing haiku, there isn't One Haiku except for that abstract Big Haiku that is all the various types of haiku that is written these days.

I could revert the question: "Is traditional haiku good?" Haven't we moved on past replicating what we never can become as Westerners?

I have to say I don't care much to these looks into "the machine room" (as we say in Danish). What counts is the poems. Period.

But maybe Jack Galmitz's book views might help you: http://www.scribd.com/doc/215446148/VIEWS-for-Seawall-Press

it's free on Scribd

Alan has already put up a lot of fine examples of one-line haiku (the term "one-liner" refers to a joke) I'll just ad a sequence published in Modern Haiku (can't recall which, though)

winter etudes


Matins a D-minor chord while the coffee brews

almond flowers silent etudes for a skull

how this waltz grew mute and fifty mysteries on a chain

where The Book would have been rusty nibs and laudanum

moorish tiles all faces turned inwards

coughing roses in winter it's plausible

Prime a halfhearted mazurka and the mist the mist the mist

a faint spatter of blood it's nothing my dear

between the screams of pigs the sound of an angry pen

in Polish he longs for Paris Terce

it fades as we smoke the kids are outside

the piano sleeps praying they still walk the hallways

ivory kneeling for Sext in C-major

it's time but it's not a red bougainvillea and she slams the door

she is away the middle four octaves are ebony

this note tells about rain None

a notebook with corrections major to minor and back

just this word nocturne and a day has passed

Vespers as the winter settles in the lungs

lush valley the sunset enters his mouth

how many more breaths and scales Compline


--

further reading than the excellent books suggested might be "Right Under the Big Sky I don't Wear a Hat", Hiroaki Sato's one-line translation of Hosai Ozaki, Jim Kacian's "where i leave off" that also works as an "over-view" of various "constructions".