The Haiku Foundation Forums

Haiku North America is one of the largest gatherings of haiku poets in the United States and Canada. You might have seen the news item on our blog about the next Haiku North America 2011 conference in Rochester, New York from July 27-31. Please see that post for contact information and other particulars for HNA 2011.

If you have been to an HNA conference, please share your experiences so that others will know what they are like. Feel free to ask anything you want, of course! Although if you have a question about the particulars for HNA 2011, you'll probably get a better answer if you contact the organizers mentioned in the blog post above.

As a reader, I like to learn about all elements of Japanese haiku, including elements that cannot be translated, such as Japanese syntax, rhythms, literary references, and cultural associations. As a writer of haiku  in English, however, I am more interested in the elements of Japanese haiku that can be translated, such as seasonal  references, certain approaches to imagery, certain ways of expressing feeling,  a sense of "now," and the effect of surprise (based the Haiku Guide by Patricia Donegan and Kazuo Sato).

For example, when I read The  Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass,  I see poems that are like nothing else in English, poems which probably could not have been born in English. Yet, there they are in English, inviting us into another world.

Is this world the world of Japanese haiku? Not really, that world cannot be reached unless you can study haiku in the original Japanese. But translations are the closest that most of us will ever get to that world. Whether this is close enough to give English-speakers the right to create haiku in English and call them haiku is a debate that will never be resolved until the River of Heaven falls into the sea. Poets will make up their own minds about this question.

What Japanese haiku traditions (including 20th century traditions) help you to write haiku in English?