The Haiku Foundation Forums

Hi Sandra
Thank you for the additional information and encouraging words. That quote is a whole lot of balm thank you :0)
Regards
C

Hi Alan

Thank you for the further link. I can't be alone in finding the whole situation extremely sad. I agree that one of the best defences/practices is to write from personal experience. It is my much preferred material gathering technique. It still leaves open the possibility of inadvertent plagiarism. Whilst out walking this morning I crossed the grass in our local park. The sun was shining on the dew in the grass and mushrooms were pushing through. In a flash of what I hope was inspiration I saw the mushrooms as nails and thought of

morning walk
mushrooms nail the lawn
to the earth

Okay it needs much work!

But how am I to know that someone else hasn't had the same thought about mushrooms and published such a line somewhere. Or whether I have read it in amongst the hundreds if not thousands of haiku I have read over the last few months or before and forgotten. I did an Internet search and found nothing but who knows whether my search was thorough enough? There are hundreds of thousands of haiku published in magazines that are unsearchable.

It would be incredibly sad for an innocent poet to be branded a plagiarist for true inspiration that mirrored another's. The label once attributed would be nigh on impossible to remove. There can be no guaranteed solution. So it appears one must write from and with the best of intentions at all times in the ever present fear that what one is writing may not be unique. And, on occasion, one must be prepared to give up the authorship of a loved poem because of an inadvertent similarity to a previous work. The only alternative is to not write at all. So wrote in fear or do not write. Rather takes the pleasure out of it doesn't it?

Regard

C

Hi Sandra
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my query and post a reply along with so much valuable information. I appreciate it,
Regards
Carl

Quote from: PAllen on July 06, 2015, 12:18:42 PM
An interesting read:
http://www.graceguts.com/essays/selected-examples-of-deja-ku


With that being said – consider:
A successful one-page/one-word haiku: tundra
http://www.haikupoet.com/definitions/davidson_def.html


Take a look at page 20 of the following link:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=25&ved=0CDUQFjAEOBQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.mit.edu%2Felizqian%2FPublic%2Fjunction_misc%2FHaiku.pdf&ei=oq6aVaDqLIKJoQTVqL3gCQ&usg=AFQjCNGf4lEaqgDp5zlc05QXjZBGGIH3zQ


Now consider the entry by Tom Paining:
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/haikunow-awards-for-2012/

Hi
Thank you for the information and taking the time to answer my questions. I will read and inwardly digest all that I can,
Regards
C

Hi Alan
Thank you so much for your in depth reply. I will read all of the links and take all of the advice onboard, thank you. To answer the direct points.
Similarities can happen deliberately and inadvertently. My snail verse was influenced on reading Virgilio's 'lily' poem. If ever I intended to submit that I would inform the editor. No doubt an 'after Virgilio' tag may be appropriate. But where does similar end?
How do we double check our work against inadvertent copying? Is a simple google, yahoo search sufficient?
The debate was quite raw it certainly wasn't an article!
My snail poem after Virgilio is an example of what I had in mind.
By reading much I am hoping to push my 'novice mind' although hopefully I will never lose my 'beginner's mind' :0)
By struggling I meant in terms of grappling with the art not in the pecuniary sense :0)
I shall as suggested keep reading. I do feel that I am getting more open to layers within verses whereas only recently I was quite out of the 'a frog is a frog' mould :0/ reading, especially on the mentoring fora, has opened me up a lot. In fact I may now get too carried away :0/
Thank you yet again for all of your help and answering my questions,
Regards
C

'All art is plagiarism or revolution' so wrote Paul Gaugin.
A recent post on one of the boards threw up an interesting point about which I as a newbie am rather interested. What happens when you write a line or a complete haiku that closely resembles a previously published or unpublished work?
Haiku are by their brevity susceptible to accidental similarities. The advice to newbie poets is to read as many haiku as possible. That is sage advice. It is also a problem. Good lines are taken in by the subconscious and one can find oneself having a line pop up sometime later which you think is a moment of inspiration but is in fact the forgotten line from a previously read work.
I have had great delight in reading back issues of notable haiku magazines. In one such issue there was a raging debate between a reviewer and a well known haiku poet who was accused by the reviewer of publishing a poem closely resembling a previous work. Was there a need to include a note of the previous work or not? It was mooted but never decided.
Is there a need to include a note when the poem is modelled on a previous work? It seems many of the Japanese haiku masters regularly took inspiration or whole lines from previous works. Did they make such acknowledgments? I can't find any reference to them doing so.
I have seen advice to newbie poets to rework previous haiku to get a feeling for content and form. In such cases it is undoubtedly just an exercise and not an invitation to publish works such as 'slightly old/rather old/ really old/extremely old pond, frog/dog/aardvark jumps in, the sound of the water'.
This problem may also account for some poets choosing to become ever more revolutionary in their writing as intimidated by Mons Gaugin. It can lead to what to my novice mind are completely impenetrable haiku that seem to make no sense at all. This in an effort to either get away from the problem or simply explore new forms.
Is there in fact anyway to check one's work for originality? Is this an accepted issue with haiku? What do people do?
I gather that in olden days haiku were written largely for the enjoyment of small social groups where the issue of copyright and accusations of plagiarism were unlikely. Now however (with the evidence of at least one vehement debate in a noted haiku publication albeit rather old) with people more alive to the value of their original work and the EU ever ramping up the matter of copyright what is a struggling poet to do?
I have not perhaps for lack of looking seen this debate much vented on the net. Perhaps it is the elephant/frog in the room/pond.
Any guidance would be much appreciated. As a newbie I accept that I may not have much that is original to say and if someone has said it before and better then what is to be done?
Regards
Carl

Hi
As a newbie to THF I was also struggling to organise my steadily growing scraps of haiku fragments and complete verses. I have scraps everywhere on my iPhone, on my ipad on my MacBook and in various notebooks. It was becoming unwieldy, cumbersome and I couldn't find what I needed.
Having considered all of the suggestions here I plumped for the following method using ipages on my MacBook. I had looked at all sorts of note taking apps for my ipad but none really seemed to offer what I needed. Plus my handwriting is atrocious and I can't read my own writing most of the time so record cards were out!
Firstly I set up a 'template' in ipages from an old music hall poster template available in the existing templates. It means I have an interesting olde worlde style page to look at when typing! The template is set up with a title field, notes about the haiku moment for referance in the future and then a table of 3 columns by 6 rows with a title row. This gives me space to put in a title explanation and then 18 little boxes to type in variants of the same haiku, changing words, punctuation etc to see which works best.
Using ipages means I can also have the thesaurus and dictionary to hand. I can also add notes in the margin if I want to explaining various things. I can also add photos I have taken or sketches drawn to the documents if required.
Each haiku or fragment (I seem to having a growing collection of two liners with no first or last line!) is on its own document. Documents are saved into files by month and then year. Using Search in the files it is easy to find keywords. Additional Tag keywords can be added to the document if necessary such as 'nature' or 'urban' if the haiku does not contain these words but I feel I need to be able to search by category.
The secret to any system is knowing it and sticking to it and being able to find what you want when you want. The latter is down to discipline which as any writer knows is the key to writing as well as as filing :0/
Hope this assists others in their search for filing systems for their haiku
Regards
C

Hi Alan

Virgilio, Nick, "Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku," The Haiku Foundation Digital Library, accessed May 12, 2015, http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/313.

Regards
C

Does anyone know anywhere I can buy this as an ebook or pdf version. I can only find it as a hard copy. I see it is in the CVH library in THF digital library but is not available to access yet.
Kindest Regards
Carl

Hi Alan

I enjoyed reading this post very much :0)

I hope that what follows is of some use to move the discussion forward.

In my extremely limited haiku experience what I have noticed about my haiku is that cliches slip in when I am imagining a haiku moment as opposed to experiencing a haiku moment and simply recording it. In the latter even cliches seem to sound fine. In the former every word seems a cliche.

In western writing the advice to write what you know translates very well into write what you are experiencing.


Perhaps the exhortation to simply write what is happening there and now will overcome these problems. For me the reason for writing haiku is to be more aware (in both Japanese and English senses of the word) at every moment and not simply to produce poems for distribution. It deepens my practice and allows me to enjoy the world around me more. If a semi decent verse springs out of it fine, if not, I still have the moment.

My haiku experiences are a constant battle between stamping on my ego that simply wants to send out another haiku into the world and my aware-ness  that simply wants to let the moments be.

Hope this all makes sense :0.

Regards

Carl