The Haiku Foundation Forums

All the best for this endeavour, good to see big 2013 haiku plans declared early. Makes for an exciting year.

Alan

For any students very new to haiku, my course has a New Year resolution ten per cent off.   I'll be covering haiku, senryu, tanka, and gendai approaches to haiku in great depth.   This is great value to any student, as it's both a month's worth of feedback, plus an extra month of peer feedback:
http://area17.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dates-jan-7-feb-1-2013-haiku-and-tanka.html

kindest regards,

Alan

Many thanks for the kind words.

kindest regards,

Alan

Please consider buying this excellent book direct from Stonebridge:
A Long Rainy Season (contemporary tanka & haiku)
http://www.stonebridge.com/shopexd.asp?id=133


Modern Japanese Tanka
ed. Makoto Ueda
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Japanese-Tanka-Makoto-Ueda/dp/0231104332/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt

I'm actually starting an intensive month long online haiku and tanka course with an American organisation on January 7th, which also allows a further month for peer exchanges.   Some of the aspects I'll cover in tanka are:

How to Kick-Start a Tanka Poem
Humor in Tanka
The Tanka Medicine Cabinet of Cures

I think the links you have will certainly start you on a great journey, enjoy!

Alan

If you just want to read in front of other haiku poets, and you are based in the States, I'd join the HSA:
http://www.hsa-haiku.org/

They have regular meetings throughout the USA.   I don't know how far you are prepared to travel, and of course there is the HNA: http://www.haikunorthamerica.com/

It's also worth considering going to general poetry open mic sessions to learn or enhance performance skills.

Alan

Quote from: Chase Fire on January 02, 2013, 09:43:18 PM
I'm looking to find a place where I can read my haiku in front of other haiku poets. I have no idea where to go, or how to find these events. Any help is appreciated! :)

.

TEDx talk by Alan Summers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxLTiR7AKDE&feature=player_detailpage


.

Welcome to THF Gillena!  :)

I hope you post some of your work for critiques, look forward to it, the more the merrier.

kindest regards,

Alan

Quote from: gillena on November 26, 2012, 04:58:48 PM
Defining Haiku, a blog series; during the month of  November  2012

http://myblog-lunchbreak.blogspot.com/


C&C welcome

much love
gillena

Dear Tray,

Excellent topic.  Please go ahead and put up a new post about it.  I'm sure it would garner a lot of interest.

Alan

Quote from: tray on November 19, 2012, 10:12:13 AM
I would vote for a discussion on the role of criticism in haiku.

Dear Adam aka Tray, Lulu, Karen and Jack, and other writers,

I would welcome one or more of you opening up a discussion topic on THF about approaches to haiku writing.   Also would anyone like to open up a topic on reading haiku approaches for newcomers to the genre?

Personally I have a heavy workload, both paid and unpaid, but I do enjoy regularly reading discussions on haiku and haikai literature.

Please do feel welcome to start up new topics for discussions.

kindest regards,

Alan

Code of Conduct:
http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/code-of-conduct/

Quote from: Jack Galmitz on November 18, 2012, 07:05:24 PM
Thank you so much Karen.
I thought even my somewhat irritated remarks would go-per usual-without any response.
For a supposedly sensitive, focused, receptive group of poets, they sure know how to miss things when they want, which is usually the case.

Thank you for your response Devora,

I know Don's stance, and I support his take on hokku.

re your response to Don's comment:

QuoteI noted Don Baird's agreement, and he is absolutely right when he says that ". . . in many respects, haiku is losing a sense of identity (genre) and the problem is increasing." A subject, I dare say, that is worthy of many serious discussions.

Could you expand on this?   There have been a lot of statements made, and I've read ones from others, but I'd be interested in your own definition, and why you think it's absolutely right that haiku is losing its sense of identity, giving examples.  That would be educational, and we'd get a clearer picture of where you come from as well.

You said:

QuoteAnd while I agree that the response to Lamb's words can support a range of feelings and images (as Vida noted), it is still, to me, a "telling," not "showing," sentence.

Could you give a few examples of what you consider to be non-sentence showing only haiku?   I gather you probably do not or will not like Marlene Mountain's style?  Her one line haiku is currently at Per Diem.

As you touch on discussions, I welcome more discussions on the aesthetics of haiku, thank you for starting this discussion.

Have you read The Future of Haiku by Tohta Kaneko:
http://www.redmoonpress.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=37&products_id=145

There are useful essays on Tohta Kaneko, possibly Japan's greatest living poet of around 75 years at Notes from the Gean: http://www.calameo.com/books/001101822fbea9c25750a

As I personally write and appraise many of the styles of the West and Japan, I embrace all the exciting developments that have galvanised haiku which, without the perseverance of Shiki, may have either completely disappeared altogether, been relegated to a quaint backyard, or purely forced into doggerel that abounds in pseudo-poetry social media territories as joke verses in 17 syllables.

The joke verses that stick to seventeen syllables do contain a strong sense of their genre, and it's interesting that they are rarely criticised.

It is gratifying to hear a new voice in haiku, which often keeps haiku fresh, and for me, far from being in the doldrums, haiku remains as it always has, either as haiku, haikai verses, hokku, pre-Basho to post-Shiki, and that it has been ever evolving.

It's just a shame we didn't have even five more years of Basho as even on his deathbed he was developing yet another approach.  He was a modern thinker and met up with many groups who thought differently like him, and he absorbed and refined their challenging viewpoints and methods so that presented well, would be adopted, and later adapted by his students, and other serious haikai writers.

Alan

Quote from: devora on November 12, 2012, 01:46:35 PM
Alan, I truly appreciate your willingness to discuss not only your take on the living picture invoked by Lamb's one-liner but also the wider airing of some other aspects of haiku. And while I agree that the response to Lamb's words can support a range of feelings and images (as Vida noted), it is still, to me, a "telling," not "showing," sentence.

And please forgive me if I add that Lamb's good reputation (of which I am familiar and whose work I generally like) would not necessarily make it a haiku. After all, not every haiku works, even one written by a well-known haijin.

I noted Don Baird's agreement, and he is absolutely right when he says that ". . . in many respects, haiku is losing a sense of identity (genre) and the problem is increasing." A subject, I dare say, that is worthy of many serious discussions.

P.S. Nope. I am not Devora Geday. By the way, her last name isn't a play on the Australian "hello," by any chance?

EDIT REASON: Adding and smoothing out.

Dear Mark, and other contributors,

I'll be working on an essay and exercise on ambiguity, and where its dynamics can occur and enliven haiku for an American poetry organisation course I've been asked to run in 2013.

I would love to see more examples of ambiguity in haiku posted here.

kindest regards,

Alan

Quote from: Mark Harris on December 11, 2010, 11:33:02 PM
I feel obliged to add that when I write "more believably the former" I'm anticipating certain shared cultural and literary assumptions

slippery terrain that only readers (including future readers if we are so favored) can map, and even then not with certainty

Ambiguity anyone? :)

m

Dear Devora,

I don't know if you are this person, a painter, and amazing artist, but if not, I really like this quote from your shared namesake:

"My art is an intimate practice rooted in spiritual experience.  I paint not to sell, I paint because it is divine experience and a meeting with my self in the totality of the moment." Devora Geday


the blind child reading my poem with her fingertips

-- Elizabeth Searle Lamb


All good haiku have sub-text, they have vertical axis, so that the surface meaning is just the pith (still vital for many reasons) before we get to the fruit.   It is up to us to peel, or unpeel.


There can be many great compliments bestowed on a poet, and Elizabeth Searle Lamb has had many [see selected weblinks further below].   It's often the simple things that make an open poet feel more blessed, like a small young child who is blind, actually reading a poem that we wrote, and have the priviledge to be able to write because we have sight, and hands.

Before I even mention Helen Keller, and the allusion jumps out at me, as a reminder of how difficult it is to be missing something most of us take for granted, as we are mostly visual artists, it's the quietnesses that this haiku folds that enthralls me.


the blind child reading


There is a feel of quietude, of dilligence, of high appreciation, and that most treasured of most artists who think art before money: connection.


my poem with her fingertips


The innocent sensualness, where a poem of our's is not lightly skipped over with fleeting eyes, but pored over fingertip reading by fingertip reading.

Often braille pages are snowy white, pure white, and as freshly thrown snow is white, slowly becoming darker as we leave our tracks (be it postman, mother getting kids to school, women and men starting early for work, children walking or sledging) we leave our own marks of involvement.  So too will the young child as her fingertips revisit this braille page and other pages.

I have a feel of a winter morning, with a fire crackling, perhaps Christmas morning, and this is her first poetry book.  Girls are keener readers than boys so this is a huge new adventure for her.

Coming back to the monostich (not stitch), Japanese haiku are written as one line haiku, and Western one line haiku have something of those dynamics, but also their own styles and techniques, from the abrupt techniques I teach, to the "speedrush" and "multistops" that Jim Kacian teaches.

One line haiku, as with gendai haiku, is still controversial, for many reasons, in the West, but 2013 will see a lot of publications regarding this genre or sub-genre, from the American poetry organisation course I'll be teaching, to one publisher bringing out two anthologies.  I've also just had my gendai haiku (and other haiku) collection Does Fish-God Know (the first British gendai haiku collection to my knowledge).

One line haiku can also inform our writing in other areas, including three line haiku, as I've learnt myself.

Weblinks to Elizabeth Searle Lamb:
http://www.americanhaikuarchives.org/curators/ElizabethSearleLamb.html
http://sfpoetry.org/bio27.html
http://www.laalamedapress.com/books/acrosswindharp.html
http://performance.millikin.edu/haiku/writerprofiles/lamb.html


Across the Windharp, Collected and New Haiku, by Elizabeth Searle Lamb
Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards 2000 (for books published in 1999)
Honorable Mention



Helen Keller Throughout Her Life
Images of the champion of civil liberties for disabled persons
http://www.squidoo.com/the-student-helen-keller-WOC

Even before she published my first Frogpond (HSA journal), I was an admirer of her work.


above the mountain
earth's shadow
blocks a moon

Alan  Summers

Note:  eclipse of the moon, Queensland, Australia, Friday 4th June 1993

Publications credits:
Frogpond (Haiku Society of American journal, Summer 1994) ed. Elisabeth Searle Lamb; Fellowship of Australian Writers, Queensland, Scope magazine (paid) feature (1994); Micropress Yates (Australia 1994); Haiku Friends ed. Masaharu Hirata  (Japan 2003)


For me, and I'm sure it was for Elisabeth Searle Lamb also:


"...an intimate practice...because it is divine experience and a meeting with my self in the totality of the moment." Devora Geday



.

Thanks Scott,

I like your haiku very much,  and remember a version of this on the forum some time ago.  It will resonate with English readers of a certain age as well, because it was the first and only time that the England football (soccer) team won the World Cup.

Someone else recently posted a haiku that I really liked, despite containing a number of overused words, including 'old'.  It just shows that if we work that little harder we can uncliché our haiku.

Alan

Quote from: Scott Terrill on November 08, 2012, 05:49:14 PM
Nothing unique about this cliché:

old shed –
he claims 1966
for a pillow

A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012

Dear Lulu,

Thank you for the time you have committed to replying to Tray's post.

Many of us who are experienced haiku writers pride ourselves on the support we give to new people interested in haiku.  There are a number of commentators on the mentoring section who were themselves very new to the genre not so long ago.

The mentoring section is a very useful and highly successful workshop feature of THF.

I too miss the addition of in-depth dicussions, and urge yourself and Tray to post some discussions.  They would be gladly received.

kindest regards,

Alan

Quote from: lulu on November 02, 2012, 09:18:42 AM
Tray --

You are right. It has been disappointing that there have been so few in-depth discussions because there is so much about today's haiku today to talk about, but perhaps, here's one reason – and in a very real way, it is a tribute to the ever-stimulating Haiku Foundation site.

It appears to me that the very people who had often taken part in some of the in-depth discussions have moved their energy (and time) over to the "Mentoring" section, both for beginners (where they critique new poets), but especially to the advanced site. All of a sudden there is a place for many well-known haijin to give and get feedback on their existing – almost daily – work. It is a magnet, an instant gratification that's too good to pass up. Some haiku entries have many responses, with varied and interesting commentary. One recent entry prompted 20 responses, including interesting analyses and notes such as "enjoyable thread" and "great discussion."

These sites, of course, do not make up for the really stimulating exchanges that had been, as you said, so much a part of THF in-depth discussions at one time. The interesting thing to me is that, as far as I know, there is absolutely no other place to go to share commentaries on a more advanced level. For example, I just read an essay in Haibun Today that I would have liked to rebut, but there was no place within the journal to send it. Now that I think about it, and after reading your comment, I could have highlighted that part of the article and talked about it in the in-depth discussion site (giving proper attribution, etc.).

All of this is to say, thanks for your comment, and reminding those of us who love THF site, that there is a place to talk about haiku and be heard. Perhaps your remarks will stimulate some new submissions. 

Dear Tray,

Thank you for the post.

I guess the bottom line is that the people who have created dicussions in the past are the very ones now too busy working.  There a vast number of projects behind the scenes, not just THF, but elsewhere, and they all take time.

I'm a full-time haiku poet in that I earn my income almost exclusively running haiku and haikai literature events, workshops, readings etc...  I have no time to spare, being a freelance poet, but I do make time I can ill afford to post feedback on haiku posted for commentary.

There are just not many people with both the time and the income to buy that time, alas, to start and continue a discussion.

Please do consider starting a post for in-depth discussion though: We have had many new members, and I'm sure many of them would support you.

Would you have anything in mind that you could start?

kindest regards,

Alan

Quote from: tray on November 01, 2012, 12:02:31 PM
I have not logged into the Forums for some time now. Last time I did, I was disappointed to see how little discussion there was on the forum. That seems even more true now. The forum, at least as far as "in depth discussion" goes, appears dead. I wonder why.

Yes, I could get something started myself, I guess, but it looks like recent attempts have gone nowhere. The shell game for example, which was fun and informative, stuttered and died at its last attempt. Sails has bailed out. And so on.

So why is this? Do people not have the time, or the interest? Some interesting and challenging books have come out lately-- where's the discussion?

Or maybe it could be that some people are just like me-- unwilling to start something that few if any will respond to.