The Haiku Foundation Forums

Bruce Ross


New Year's Eve
a puppet snowflake drifts
across the stage


*****


Randy Brooks


I immediately thought of this haiku by Raymond Roseliep:

down from the mountain
the sculptor carves
a cherry stone

This haiku was published in Step on the Rain (Rook Press, 1977).

For me this haiku represents the gifts of creation . . . both by forces beyond us and by us. I love the way this haiku scales from mountain to stone from millions of years to the immediate work of carving a cherry stone. I like the way this haiku invites us to take part in the gift of creation.


*****


Billie Wilson


winter solstice—
a shiny red trike
outside the thrift shop

Treetops column/World Haiku Review I:3 (2001)

for years to come
the flowers he planted
along the narrow road

Hermitage I (2004) ; Cornell University's Mann Library Daily Haiku (June 2008).

winter sun
a box of old books
from a new friend

Modern Haiku 43:1 (2012)

spring day—
the pup brings a different stick
from the thicket

Snapshots 12 (2006); Haiku Journey [video/computer game] (Hot Lava, 2006); Moonlight Changing Direction (HPNC Two Autumns Press, 2008 - Guest Reader)

after the thunderstorm
he brings me lilacs
and rain

South by Southeast 19:2 (2012)

the barista
remembers what I like—
chinook wind

Modern Haiku 44.1 (2013)


*****


Michael Dylan Welch


first star—
a seashell held
to my baby's ear


Perhaps every haiku is a gift, a way of saying "this matters." I hope the gift of new life that I receive in having a newborn is reciprocated by my starting to give my baby a sense of wonder at nature and the world around us.


*****


Peter Newton


Every poem is a gift. Some coal. Some a bit more worthy of holding up to the light. Honestly, there is one poem of mine (that recently appeared in The Heron's Nest in Dec. 2013) that I very much consider a gift because it came to me so quickly and completely. I had actually come across a small slab of smooth stone from the East Middlebury River up in Ripton, VT--a place in deep woods where I often go river walking in the heat of July. I came across a striated bit of stone among the millions that line the river bed and banks. This one was different. It had a smooth wave one might see in a modern marble sculpture. I carried it back to my room as a reminder of... what? I must've wondered in my sleep. . . July, the river, solitude, how smooth things can go if you let them, etc... Next morning I looked at my new-found paperweight and said:

                            the age of the river a ripple in stone

Another poem that I consider a true gift, in a different way, is by my friend Jean LeBlanc because I have never had someone dedicate a poem specifically for me. She included it in her recent book The Haiku Aesthetic; Short Form Poetry as a Study in Craft (Cyberwit.NET, 2013) which I only recently received, seeing the poem for the first time. It's a sequence but it begins like this:

                                    the meadow suite
                                    a little room filled
                                    with robin song


*****


Max Verhart


For sale: this cottage
gift-wrapped
in Virginia creeper.

Clara Timmermans

The original Dutch language version:

Te koop: dit huisje
met een geschenkverpakking
van wilde wingerd.

was published in 1980 in her chapbook 'Een papieren parasol' (A Paper Parasol). With the English translation (by the Whirligig team) it was reprinted this year in Whirligig IV/2 (November 2013).

Clara is quite an old lady by now, daughter of a famous Flemish writer from the early twentieth century. Felix Timmermans is still read - and his daughter too!


*****


John Stevenson


first warm day
the ground
gives a little

Giving is yielding, in both directions. It starts slowly, with a promise.


*****


Peter Yovu


I am drawn to haiku that require unpacking; haiku that reveal their gifts slowly, and with patient engagement. They seem to require something of me.

A poem needs to give the reader something. But it needs to take away something more. Like love, it wounds. How else can it get past our habitual ways of seeing and feeling? Wounding is its gift.

I can't recall who said this, or something like this: in your wound is your gift to the community.

Here are two poems, among others, that I yielded to, and that opened to me as gifts. The first is by Jim Kacian. The second by Mark Harris.

fording the river
the moment closer
to neither bank


A quick reading of Kacian's poem might satisfy the reader with a sense of
being midway on a journey: just that moment when one's past and one's future are held in balance and one might have to make a choice-- go on, or go back.

Upon closer inspection I discover the poem's difficult gift: it presents an impossibility, a state of moving closer to a negation--  to not either bank; to nothing reachable. To a polarity with absence at both ends.

This is different than a mid-way point. It is a no-way, or vanishing point, a point, in fact, that does not exist except in a realm where time and space have collapsed into each other; where the one who finds himself/herself may disappear. Depending on the reader's own experience of this state, it will be either terrifying or joyful.


rain, rain . . .
        we let her unborn twin
        return to loam


Mark Harris' poem also requires careful reading. It opens up once one has accepted that unborn is not the same as stillborn. A stillbirth refers to a
child that has been born, but is dead. Unborn in this poem means exactly that: not born, at least not in the world of common experience.

So once again, we are looking at an impossibility, at something the rational mind will either defend against or yield to. Yielded to, Harris' poem propels us into the realm of myth, where every child that is born is accompanied by a shadow child. What that shadow may contain-- its gift--  will be conceived of differently by different readers.

&

You may recall this by Robert Frost:  "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader".




*****


David Lanoue


I believe that this poem is very much about receiving a gift:

to my open palms
snowflakes flitting
down

--Issa

.掌へはらはら雪の降りにけり
tenohira e hara-hara yuki no furi [ni] keri


*****


Richard Gilbert


Here is something -- in the manner of a list poem, authored as text by Jerome Rothenberg:

============
Originally published in "Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas" & before that in "Technicians of the Sacred." Based on native accounts in "The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life: The Potlatch & the Play Potlatch" by Helen Codere (1956). Posted by Jerome Rothenberg at 8:13 PM, 2009/01, ][http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/01/gift-event-after-kwakiutl-newly.html]


Gift Event, after the Kwakiutl
-------------------------------------

Start by giving away different colored glass bowls.

Have everyone give everyone else a glass bowl.

Give away handkerchiefs & soap & things like that.

Give away a sack of clams & a roll of toilet paper.

Give away teddybear candies, apples, suckers & oranges.

Give away pigs & geese & chickens, or pretend to do so.

Pretend to be different things.

Have the women pretend to be crows, have the men pretend to be something else.

Talk Chinese or something.

Make a narrow place at the entrance of a house & put a line at the end of it that you have to stoop under to get in.

Hang the line with all sorts of pots & pans to make a big noise.

Give away frying pans while saying things like "Here is this frying pan worth $100 & this one worth $200."

Give everyone a new name.

Give a name to a grandchild or think of something & go & get everything.


*****


Eve Luckring


hōchō wo motte shūu ni mitoretaru


holding a knife
I feast my eyes
on a rain shower


Tsuji Momoko
(translated by Makoto Ueda in Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women, 2003, Columbia University Press)

"Every poem is a gift. Some coal. Some a bit more worthy of holding up to the light" says Peter Newton (below). And here's Michael Dylan Welch: "Perhaps every haiku is a gift, a way of saying 'this matters'".

This approaches the spirit and subject of this first in what we hope will be an ongoing series called
FN Themes, where you will be invited to contribute haiku and other poems on a given subject, and to say something about your choices if you so desire.

Gift. Giving.

Do have one or more poems on this theme? Do you know of any written by someone else?
Is there a poem or two about which you have been prompted to say: "This is a gift". In what way?

FNQ&A is an occasional feature wherein a Field Notes panelist is asked to comment on a previous Field Notes post. For this first FNQ&A, Tom D'Evelyn agreed to expand upon the essay--"A Modest Proposal"-- he wrote for FN4. We're grateful for his generosity.

******************************


Metaphysical Reflections on Issa's Fly


Key Terms: Cut, hyperbole, void, asymmetry, transcendence, universal, particular, imaginative universal, finesse, metaphysics,  Zhuangzi, Simone Weil 

My "Modest Proposal" requires an answer. There I argued that much of modern haiku is cast in the modern, objective mode sanctioned by the modern mind-set.  As a companion to "A Modest Proposal,"  this piece sketches a metaphysical approach to the poetics of haiku, hereafter "H." Original terms of art – kigo, kireji –reappear in a vocabulary that will be foreign to most readers, prompting I hope a rethinking of H. By "rethinking" I don't mean anything revolutionary; on the contrary, I believe there is a core of existential truth in the hokku tradition, starting with the structure of the hokku. By "existential" I refer to something more elemental  than the modern configuration of mind's possibilities, which are limited by the modern episteme. The historicist will argue that we are all trapped by dint of birth in this historical moment, that even our thought processes are limited by this accident. I disagree.

Major critical sources for this project (a work-in-progress) include: Simply Haiku, the journal edited by Robert Wilson and Sasa Vazic, and scholarly books by Pipei Qiu, Haruo Shirane, and William LaFleur, and the contributors to Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces: Exploring Haikai Intersections, ed. Eleanor Kerkham (2006). On the other hand, I draw on the explorations of the "metaxu" by Simone Weil, Eric Voegelin, and William Desmond. Practical outcomes of this "East-West" dialogue have been posted at http://ecoku.wordpress.com/

I have numbered the paragraphs to guide the reader through this labyrinth of concepts. For an overview, read only paragraphs headed with whole numbers: e.g. 4.00.

I.00 The defining feature of H is the "cut." In the popular three-line form, the cut is indicated by a dash or colon after the short line, or simply by nothing; everybody who knows H. expects the cut. The cut creates  syntactic tension and expressive rhythm. Avoiding the cut is, well, playing tennis without the net.

1.01The "cut" does not cut the form in half; the smaller part is devoted to the "universal" and the larger part to the particular or concrete.

I.02 "Universal" refers to a transcendent element; universals include "concepts" like "autumn evening"; universals can be seemingly conceptual or they can be imaginative. In H. universals by their nature are "hyperbolic" or "exaggerated" when compared with the particular details of the base. Once linked to the base with finesse, they resonate.

I.03 The term "imaginative universal" goes back to Vico and is current in critical discourse, e.g. about the philosophy of William Desmond and about Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

1.04 We see the imaginative universal in Zhuangzi 32: "Zhuangzi was dying, and his disciples wanted to give him a lavish funeral. Zhuangzi said to them, 'I will have heaven and earth as my coffin and crypt, the sun and moon for my paired jades, the stars and constellations for my round and oblong gems, all creatures for my tomb gifts and pallbearers" (Ziporyn).

1.05 The imagination engaged by H. is not the imagination of Simone Weil in "Imagination Which Fills the Void," Gravity and Grace. Weil writes: "We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves. If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe? We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full." This is directly relevant to H.

2.00 The "cut" does not assert a determinate relationship between the parts; it does not signify "this was caused by this"; yet it is more than mere juxtaposition. The relationship between transcendence and what it transcends is more than linguistic; it is ontological. We imagine Zhuangzi lying dead in his coffin surrounded by the sun and moon. The image expresses the tension or difference between the finite and mortal and the universal, transcendent, eternal. As always in Zhuangzi, a delicate hyperbole plays over the images; hyperbole points towards the "more" of transcendent meaning. (H. often have this sense of heightened reality; it is one source of the sense of affective or "profound" immediacy achieved by the form.)

2.01  H. has a vertical (hyperbolic) and a horizontal (concrete) dimension, as Shirane has often said. These are in tension – dynamic tension. They are in communication. The dynamism of the cut is suggested in this passage by William Desmond, from God and the Between (165): "The hyperbolic startles us with a reversal of directionality: more than our erotic self-transcending from below up, a reverse way down is suggested in the agapeics of communication. This way down is not symmetrical with our way up. Given the asymmetry, can we think, even in our not-knowing, the reverse movement from the origin?" This kind of thinking suggests the spiritual discipline of H.

3.00 The unique particularity of the singular is felt most sharply as informed by the universal.  Basho: "coolness / a crescent moon faintly seen / over Black Feather Mountain" (Reichhold 140). Coolness is the transcendent universal; the rest is particular, densely particular, given the proper name of the mountain. The tangle of universal and particular has the result of making the "crescent moon" stubbornly there, drawing some of its energy from the single line, and in tension with the black mass of the mountain. In H. the particular has presence. The poet's finesse is seen in the modifier "faintly."


4.00 Pressed for a clear (geometric) image for the relationship between the two parts of H., I suggest "diagonal." As whole, H. is not linear, and it is not circular. It is diagonal because of the abiding tension between the universal and the particular. The space of H. is not geometric, it is directional. The "whole" is not a self-enclosed unit; it is a whole open to its transcendent other (conceptual paradox is part of H. discourse; see the opening of the Tao Te Ching). 

4.01 Discussing the relationship between rhythm and color in the music of his master Messiaen, Pierre Boulez said that what we should hear in all this complexity is "the strange 'diagonal' where harmony and colour blend with rhythm and melody" (see John Milbank in Between System and Poetics, 231). This distinction between harmony/color and rhythm/melody is a musical version of the distinction between the universal and the particular in the verbal arts.

5.00 The mental state associated with H. is not a normal everyday state of mind. It is meditative. For the everydayness, as well as the sublimity, of the meditative background of H., see David Hinton, Classical Chinese Poetry. For research, see Louis Roy, O.P. Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers (2003). The struggle to attain this state of mind is unforgettably dramatized in Natsume Soseki's novel Kasamakura (1906). Readers of Wallace Stevens will know William W. Bevis, Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature (1988).

5.01 As the word "meditative" suggests, H. requires an act of mind. It involves the will and attention in inverse proportion. Simone Weil's remarks on "Attention and Will" (Gravity and Grace) include this: "It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains a reward." As for Zhuangzi's Cook Dan, practice makes perfect. Reading mindfully and rewriting critically prepare one for H., but only when the cut is deeply interiorized as a way of "seeing" the world afresh can H. appear as if spontaneously.


6.00 There is a metaphysics of haiku. The world is not simple, not clearly organized, not atomic. It is complex and equivocal, ultimately mysterious as to its meaning. As Weil would say, in this world, all things are metaxu, intermediaries.

6.01 Each individual comes from nothing and returns to nothing. This nothing is a fertile void. The wonder that signals H. is a wonder that there is anything at all.

6.02 Issa's fly moving from window ledge to window edge following the autumn sun is a timeless image of this relationship.  The imaginative universal of the sun allows us to know that fly in its singularity/originality. As creaturely finite beings ourselves we can identify with the fly in its pursuit of the last warmth of the season. We just can't talk about the universal or nothingness directly. We can talk about it diagonally, as the fly flies.

6.03 The image of the warm sun on the fly's back is "sympathetic" (the whole issue of "anthropomorphism" in H. needs refreshing). The sun is an "imaginative universal" because it, the sun, is universal, imaginative because our lives are saturated with light and darkness. The sun, to use Desmond's distinction, may be an image of the Tao "making way" by "giving way," allowing the particulars their own spaces, their elemental selves. (This is the root of the Zhuangzi's infamous "relativism.") 

7.00 H. is ubiquitous today. Recently Abigail Friedman posted a haiku on her Facebook page (November 5, 2013): "in the swirl / of autumn leaves / your joy" . . . . This seems exemplary in several senses. On the page it looks "traditional"; read carefully, one has questions. Who is you? Or rather, what is "your" joy? Just where is the "cut" between the universal and the particular? (Readers of Japanese hokku will know how the kigo can drift from one side of the cut to the other.) One feels the tension between the two images, the swirl of leaves and the "joy." The intermediations of the personal finite element and the impersonal, universal element are handled with finesse. They are not easily separated by the formal design, yet they are distinct. The haiku is about the surging of ultimacy within experience. Joy is embodied; joy is a universal. In ontological terms, the haiku opens to "immanent transcendence."

8.00 H. is not a blank page, it is a "form." As such it "informs" experience. Because of its defining features – the cut, the asymmetrical proportions – it sponsors a mindful act of attention. As a form of writing, it requires "finesse" for the two parts to be brought into right relationship.

8.01 There's a term we can borrow from Desmond in discussing this "right relationship": "porosity." He writes, "The porosity is a between space where there is no fixation of the difference of minding and things, where our mindfulness wakes to itself by being woken up by the communication of being in its emphatic otherness. Already before we more reflectively come to ourselves, in the original porosity of being there is the more primal opening in astonishment. There is no fixed boundary between there and here, between outside and inside, between below and above. There is a passage from what is into the awakening of mindfulness as, before its own self-determination, opened to what communicates to it from beyond itself. We do not open ourselves; being opened, we are as an opening" (see "Wording the Between" in The William Desmond Reader [2012], 201 f.)

I do not know a better philosophic text with which to explore the ahah! moment of H. It is more than emotion; it is not sentiment; it is not narcissistic.... It is ontological. One reason H. is important is that it provides a "model" for this elemental experience, which, cross-culturally, indicates the capacity of the artist to go beyond the limits of the present by entertaining the presence of particular beings in light of the mystery of being.

--Tom D'Evelyn

Francine Banwarth

Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years

Prompt: Where English-language haiku has been, where it is now, where it might be going.

Since the early years, when haiku was finding its footing in the English language, serious practitioners of the genre have played and experimented with its content and form. Gayle Bull, wife of James Bull, who, with Don Eulert, founded American Haiku, recounts the journal's inaugural days when Nick Virgilio would send multiple versions of the same poem in one submission; he milked every possibility, and I can't help but think that his willingness to view his haiku from all angles is among the reasons he became one of our foremost English-language haiku poets.

Throughout the history of  ELH, we've also witnessed a proliferation of  junk haiku, spam haiku, "haikus" that are not haiku. It is disheartening to see an art form that we respect and admire be treated so shabbily. How can we lift and keep haiku on a higher tier, let alone move it into mainstream poetry, if that is our goal?

The publication release of HIE includes the following assessment, which recognizes haiku at a level many are trying to achieve in their writing practice today:

"The best haiku, so many of which are collected in this volume, take but a moment to read yet are so condensed and so masterfully composed that they evoke an experience much larger than nearly any other collection of words so small."

This statement alone suggests that there is so much more to the art of haiku than getting 17 or less syllables down on the page.

English-language haiku has been on an evolutionary path and continues so in the present, and hopefully so into the future. That is the lifeblood of any art form: if it is going to last through the ages, it must evolve. The challenge lies in the fact that there are many haiku being written today that need a good dose of freshness and originality; themes are overused and the "art of juxtaposition" has become a "quick fix" to tie 3 lines of verse together. Based on the thousands of haiku we've read in Frogpond submissions over our first 5 issues, many potentially good poems fail because the writer didn't push deep enough or reach far enough with word and image.

What HIE comprehensively lays out for us is a level of excellence over the first 100 hundred years of English-language haiku that is equaled today by practitioners who assess their own work critically, who reveal rather than define meaning through subject, technique, form, and allusion, who are open to fresh and surprising possibility, and who experiment on a variety of levels to keep haiku alive and breathing on the page. This is what I hope for English-language haiku in the present and it is where I believe the future of haiku lies.

***


Peter Newton

Q: What does the recently published Haiku in English; The First Hundred Years tell you about haiku—where it's been, where it is now or where it might be going?
 
In his historical overview at the end of Haiku in English, one of its editors, Jim Kacian states: "the subject of the best poetry has always been the wild—that over which we have little or no control." I compare that statement to one by Thoreau who said: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Are they saying the same thing. I think so, yes. Though I suspect Kacian is speaking in more literary terms, Thoreau in more environmental. Maybe they're both speaking on behalf of environmental literature.
 
From re-reading the last quarter of the HiE where, according to Kacian, many of the relative haiku newcomers appear, I noticed this call of the wild in some ways. Poems of protest almost. The use of haiku as an antidote for the increasing number of things that may seem like they are out of our control: be they global warming, species extinctions, alternative energies, rampant consumerism or nuclear meltdowns.
 
retreating glacier—
how long since we've heard
the black wolf's song
 
(Billie Wilson, p.227)
 
the passenger pigeon returns
      on a canceled stamp
 
(Scott Mason, p. 280)
 
the wind being farmed the wind that isn't
 
(John Barlow, p.260)
 
migrating geese—
the things we thought we needed
darken the garage
 
(Chad Lee Robinson, p.269)
 
radiation leak moonlight on the fuel rods
 
(Melissa Allen,p.300)
 
These examples, among others, indicate to me that haiku is being written to counteract what Kacian calls "environmental disregard."  It seems to me that haiku is the original green poetry returning to its roots to help combat an increasing problem. And in the 24-hour news cycle we find ourselves in it is difficult for the average person to avoid even the basic knowledge that our planet is experiencing escalating abuse. What's a haiku poet to do but fight back.
 
So is haiku becoming the environmental poetry of the 21st century? The latest insurgency of protest poetry? A movement by which we can realign ourselves with nature? Get back in tune, so to speak.
 
I hope so. And I think the very last poem in the anthology makes a similar point by grounding itself in nature. And drawing the comparison of two disparate images by using old and new ways of writing haiku. Old style, new approach:
 
Snow at dawn . . .
dead singers in their prime
on the radio
 
(Rebecca Lilly, p. 303)
 
The seasonal reference sets the tone in L1, the way a lighting designer in a film might cast just the right shadows to evoke a mood. In fact, the line "Snow at dawn. . ." could've been written by Basho. Maybe even was at some point, in some poem. Lilly awakens the reader to nature --the fact that it is dawn and it is snowing-- and directs our attention to the imposed distraction of the radio instead of an expected silence. Falling snow is a soothing visual but contrasted with a pop song on the radio speaks to the near constant infiltration of noise, even white noise, into our lives. Her poem conjures a timeless loss—is it Amy Winehouse? Jimi Hendrix? Janis Joplin? All of the above.  Either way, we are reminded of the brevity of dawn, of snowflakes, of songs and singers. The poem is a little "wild" sounding when you read it aloud. Irreverent. It is that wildness that forces us to stop and think.

***


Bruce Ross

Since the majority of haiku in HIE are American, an analogy to American modern dance is apt. As haiku was dominated by imagism while conceiving haiku as a nature poem primarily, modern American dance infuses various kinds of emotion with recognizably appropriate gesture, step, and music. A trajectory from Martha Graham to Paul Taylor is exemplary. A lesser represented dance trajectory, from Alvin Nikolai, to Merce Cunningham to Armitage Gone!, as Whitman "broke the pentameter" in poetry, created new forms of movement and aesthetics of choreography as a whole.  American poetry has taken many forms, borrowing from Classic or Romantic idioms, fixed forms and open forms, word fixated and visionary fixated, long forms and short forms. When modern Japanese haiku occurred, a rejoinder was: Fine, write what you want, but why call it haiku. The question is, What makes a haiku? So, in English-language reception of haiku, there has been a reliance on kanji (Chinese characters) for the "grammar" of haiku and a latent image in perceived/expressed experience in images and images in kanji, rightly introduced into Imagism and what follows. HIE captures some of these issues in choosing examples and discussing individual haiku poets. There is good in HIE: its breath of choice and individual haiku examples. There are some issues in HIE: haiku not represented of a given haiku poet's style and a perhaps overstating certain directions in haiku in Japan and the USA (gendai). HIE has a "current" feel with Billy Collins's "Introduction" and a number of "hip" idiomed contemporary haiku and examples by John Ashbery, suggesting an issue of whether American haiku and American poetry are really that close together in import. Otherwise, a volume to be enjoyed and pondered.

***


Billie Wilson

I speak more from an emotional than an intellectual base. A major highlight of my haiku life occurred at the "unveiling" of this book at Haiku North America. It was like being in the vortex of haiku history. One poem by each poet was read aloud – either by well-selected readers – or by the poet if present. The room seemed to vibrate as the first reader announced, "Ezra Pound" and then read his poem. The next reader said, "Wallace Stevens" and read his poem – and so it continued. Several poets were there to read their own work, and that was awesome, especially for someone who only dreamed of being in the same room with those poets. Whatever the book reveals about haiku, it deserves its place on the most prominent shelf in every haiku poet's library. It will be as rich a resource for future poets as Cor van den Heuvel's venerable anthologies and The Haiku Society of America's A Haiku Path.

***


Michael Dylan Welch


I have yet to read Haiku in English, particularly the prose content, but after reading through all the poetry, I'm generally pleased. The book does a fairly thorough job of representing most of the high points in English-language haiku history -- which any reviewer needs to remember is one of the book's primary goals, thus making it different from other haiku anthologies. It's true of all anthologies that they can be easily criticized for who they leave out, who they include, and whether they feature the editor or the editor's friends too much. This anthology is no exception, but it is still clearly a high-water mark for our haiku poetry. I also recognize that some omissions may have occurred because of exorbitant permission fees, or perhaps if a person simply declined to be included. I also know that hard choices needed to be made, making it impossible to include everyone's favourite haiku writers. Nevertheless, while inclusions and omissions are details that can still be debated, the general thrust of the anthology is effective, and marks a changing of the guard from Cor van den Heuvel's three venerable anthologies. Haiku in English does not supplant those anthologies at all, however; rather, it builds upon them.

What does Haiku in English tells us about where haiku has been, where it is now, and where it may be going? On its own, the book gives the perspective of its editors, so it needs to be taken in a larger context, of course, but overall it tells us that haiku has explored imagism, the concrete, and the surreal, and that it is now well established to have begun what I think is a healthy splintering into various approaches, even if these approaches are sometimes sharply divided (gendai being the latest vocal minority). There's a point where a poem goes too far and is no longer haiku, but then I've always felt it's more important to value something as poetry, regardless of whether it's a "haiku" or not, so I welcome all explorations, although I don't always agree that some of it is still haiku. As for the future, I'm not sure any haiku anthology can answer that question, except to point to its major practitioners with the invitation to watch what they get up to.

If I might comment on anything particular, it's that the E. E. Cummings poem is printed very incorrectly, and I feel that there are too many one-line haiku, out of proportion to their actual frequency and influence over the last hundred years. On the other hand, there are one or two poets who are new to me, and several fine individual haiku that I also wasn't familiar with, so for that alone I'm grateful. I believe the book will go a long way towards educating the public about the breadth and depth of haiku in English, a public that should include grade school and college teachers, education administrators (who need to fix badly outdated curriculum guides that define haiku in English superficially and incorrectly as just 5-7-5 syllables), MFA programs, poetry anthologists, poetry publishers, and anyone else who is interested in poetry, even if they're not normally interested in haiku. A book like Haiku in English helps to get English-language haiku out of the ghetto that haiku poets have put themselves in, so bravo for that. Here's to more haiku ghetto-busting.

Gary Hotham

Field Notes 4 (FN4) is tough. As I read the e-mails for this one all I could think was there goes Peter Yovu again – asking too much.  Soon he will be suggesting we provide examples of the Great American Haiku or at least our criteria for one.  So what is the meaning for us of this anthology,  Haiku in English: The First 100 Years (HIE)?   What deep power will it have on the genre?  I'm not ready with any profound response to the FN4 expectations.  An evaluation at this time has all the dangers that any pundit had writing a few days after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914.  Do you think any advised the European royalty:  never ride in a vehicle that doesn't have a reverse gear. 
 
At least in the short term I think Haiku In English: The First 100 Years will be a significant anthology for  the world of English language haiku.  Just like the anthologies Cor van den Heuvel compiled starting in 1974 have been important for the growth, definition and development of English language haiku.  I think HIE reflects a generous variety of styles, depth, ranges, possibilities and successes for the English language haiku. In providing many real examples of the genre over the past century the anthology should be very helpful in bringing an understanding of the form to anyone starting out in the haiku world either as reader or writer - and even those who have been working longer in that world. The haiku in HIE provide substance to any prose definition.  Also once a reader discovers some haiku that strike home then it is easy to follow up on those writers to find more.  Or write one's own.
 
Hopefully some of the best English language haiku written in the last 100 years are in the anthology – I know some of best will be missing and at some date in the future we will probably discover that some of the best writers were missing from its pages.  Will someone try to make the case that it contains some of the worst?  We know there is no perfect anthology.  Even so I think it will be a collection worth going back to for another read from time to time.  Just like any good collection of poems whether by one poet or an anthology it will bring pleasure again and again.  The great thing about good poetry is that re-reading them is not wasted effort – good poetry adds layers to one's world.

***


Tom D'Evelyn

A Modest Proposal: Haiku in English is haiku, not poetry

Looking at HIE as a historian of poetry, I see several aspects worth commenting on: HIE as an anthology (which raises the issue of selection and canonicity); the differences between this and other anthologies of Anglophone haiku; the editorial matter as interpretive or descriptive; and the relative value of individual haiku. Some of these aspects would require too much space, some can be covered by general comments, the last requires some examples.

The intention of the book, judged by the editorial material, appears to be not simply to collect the best haiku but to document the case for the proposal that haiku is poetry. The various arguments made by the editors do not seem to me to succeed in making the case, in part because of a lack of coherence at certain points, in part because the editors didn't first question the definition of poetry itself. The argument seems to be played out among established hierarchies. Why raise the issue "what first is poetry?"  if we can assume what the audience believes. Best let sleeping dogs lie. But the problem then for the historian is what the audience believes. I have no way to discuss that except by inference so won't do that here.

That said, the editors seem to graft the question of poetry onto the question of modern poetry, or contemporary poetry. Poetry is modern poetry; and we all know what modern poetry is? Modern means "contemporary"?  Here the idea that haiku is "contemporary" seems paramount. But historicist claims are famously sticky. In masterful hands, they are tactical.  The role of the concept of modernity or the contemporary, is crucial at certain moments in the history of poetry. Whether in Catullus's Rome or Baudelaire's France, the claim of the modern is tactical: to promote the new style in face of the traditional hegemony. But in the case of HIE, the claim of the contemporary produces slippage in the argument: are we supposed to believe that contemporary haiku is "modern" by contrast to poetry in general or modern by contrast to a more traditional haiku, or both? Or is poetry automatically contemporary? The argument that haiku in English is poetry may well be lost in the argument about a particular contemporary style of haiku being representative of haiku-in-English. There are signs in the state of the debate about HIE that those who feel this way see the anthology as excluding other kinds of contemporary haiku; they see HIE as a manifesto. This comes as no surprise to the historian of poetry.

One may say a little more. Given the ideology of the editorial matter it does seem that there is an "American" assumption that good haiku are written by interesting individuals (see the thumbnails) who display the American virtue of individualism, even iconoclasm. Haiku then would ideally capture something arbitrary in the writer's experience that mark it as unique. This would justify the approach to interpretation that favors impressionism over analysis connecting the text to beliefs shared by others. Perhaps contemporary haiku as envisioned by the editors involves a kind of "will-to-power," a happy-go-lucky nihilism.

Trying to make sense of all this  gives one a headache, so we turn to the haiku collected here with relief. Something occurs to me repeatedly as I peruse this anthology. While I see the good-natured nihilism, I don't see the anxiety about poetry. At best I see mindful very short texts that respond quite well to rational criticism. The clarity of the language, the seamlessness of form and significance reminds me not of poetry but of the family of short forms that includes aphorism, maxims, pensees, etc. (see Gary Saul Morson, The Long and the Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel,  for a discussion of the traditional prose short).

So maybe brevity is the soul of haiku and the problem faced by the haiku writer is the problem of exclusion. How much can be excluded before you cut into the bone? How deep a feeling can a very short text produce? What's the trick of making a very short text memorable?  Since this is a literary problem for every writer, haiku can be read as exemplary of very short texts (I need not mention the success of flash-fiction today).

Form in art, regardless of size, depends on repetition as well as movement or change; repetition makes change evident. (The writer of shorts Lydia Davis is a master of repetition.) Take as example Peter Yovu's piece: "she slips into / the ocean the ocean / slips into." Read this as many times as you wish, the mystery remains, and the mystery is coded in the repetition of this very big thing, "ocean." This is no formal mystery: Ocean IS mystery. Can the ocean itself be compare to a woman to slips into it? What can the ocean slip into? If the ocean is a traditional name for "what surrounds us," one feels a dizzy imaging this horizon slipping inside its own horizon. Aside from the verbal slide, the rhythm conveys a sense of vertigo. This is both clever and provocative. It embodies a vertiginous question that irritated Plato into thought. And everybody worth the name of thinker since.

A variation on Yovu's elegant repetition (I'm not saying one haiku is based on the other: they are both based on a seminal idea of form) is Philip Rowland's "inside an envelope / inside an envelope: / funeral money." Where Yovu may strike a metaphysical note, Rowland discovers the pathos of discretion in the face of death. Again, using repetition, the haiku captures a moment of ultimate reflection. The subject matters. Death and Ocean: two mammoth themes. While both of these texts are "original" in the simplicity of their design, they are also traditional in their topics. They are unique witout being arbitrary, profound rather than solipsistic.

Finally, contemporary haiku may draw intertextually on the origins of haiku in the Japanese early modern period, thereby gaining authority by innovating, marking a difference within a dense undergrowth of tradition. Jane Reichhold does this in "autumn / taking a dirt road / to the end." This is both "classic" (Bashō's Japanese tradition, which she knows intimately) and utterly at home in the English language. It resonates every which way. It is "classic" in more senses that one (or two).

So I do find much to admire here. I have always loved writing that is short; I try to practice "writing short"  whenever I write. Years ago I studied Greek and Roman epigram and traced its influence through European language. I teach "writing short" in various genres. For the last ten years I have specialized in carefully balanced couplets framed on models supplied by classical Chinese poets, especially with regard to the making of resonant images. That training has prepared me to enjoy HIE – though "enjoy" may not be the word. I don't like them all. It seems that many of the haiku collected here seem intent on expressing what the editor calls "sentiment" and that alone is not enough for me. Given the contexts provided by the anthology, many of the more famous writers represented here seem over-valued. Many of the haiku collected here are verbally clever but lack the verbal resonance and the deep sounding of the bottom of the heart I want in any literary text, however short. Each time I put the book down, I come away believing even more strongly that to write a good haiku in contemporary English is quite an accomplishment for a writer.

***


Michael McClintock

The Haiku in English anthology: Some Notes and Observations
 
The Haiku in English anthology doesn't need a Paul Revere, does it?  It's a big, friendly collection, and comes without rifles or cannon shot.  
 
My general impression of the Haiku in English anthology is that the collection and its prose commentary and history represent a solid, competent effort to provide a fair and balanced overview of its subject. There is ample bibliographic information for all readers to follow up on poets, translators and criticism . . . I am not aware of any other book that attempts to give a similar introduction to English language haiku and its first hundred years.
 
The real energy that can come from a book like this is difficult to measure but nevertheless is real and welcome. It's ironic, perhaps, that the book's physical limitations practically assure that its presentation is not ---  nor should we expect it to be --- exhaustive in its treatment. Because it is not exhaustive, I think it is certain to stimulate further anthologies and deeper, more narrowly focused collections and critical examinations of individual poets, as well as groups of poets, who share a time-period, region, subject matter, similar aesthetics, principles of composition, artistic philosophy or vision, and literally dozens more areas of interest.  I know of at least five such anthologies in the works, one being already completed and, last I checked, targeted for publication this November.
 
Haiku in English is a splendid book and makes a solid case for the genre, in direct line of evolution with the previous three editions of the haiku anthology edited by Cor van den Heuval, and numerous other collections and anthologies published over the last fifty years. Haiku poets  have been fortunate to have received freshened exposure by a major anthology from a large,  respected publisher, about every ten years -- that is as "mainstream" as haiku ever needs to be.
 
The real strength of any anthology resides in the poems selected to go into it. The selection here amply illustrates the diversity of approaches taken with haiku, but exhausts the possibilities of none of them --- another strength of the anthology. The haiku movement, as a movement, shows surprising endurance, having achieved this kind of track record and performance: the anthologies have sold well relative to other collections of poetry --- and this fact reveals something about the truly radical posture of haiku when seen alongside,  and in opposition to, "mainstream" poetry ---in all its styles, fads, and movements --- over this same period of time.
 
The future? I think I'll be practical here and sidestep too much guessing about the future of haiku in English. I have no personal need to speculate; I'm content to wait and see, and do so (I hope) with an open mind while at the same time aware of haiku fundamentals --- those qualities and characteristics that make haiku haiku and not something else. Meanwhile, what I'm going to do, in the time I have left, is try to write haiku that are good enough to find a place in the next anthology --- the one about the second hundred years.
 
Likewise, I'm sure, haiku poets generally will need to produce work that re-animates, through changing times, the aesthetic and artistic ideals of these past hundred years.The 400+ pages of poetry in Haiku in English show that we are well-equipped to do that and not lose our bearings as a distinctive poetry with unique powers of vision and language.  We should be under no illusions about the artistic challenge in advancing haiku aesthetics and craft while at the same time perpetuating a relatively small body of core principles gleaned from the genre's actual five hundred year history.  It may be literary pooh-bah to think that haiku must be on the way to somewhere else: the great endurance and beauty of the genre may be rooted in the solidity and simple basics of its compass, art form, and territory now occupied.

Richard Gilbert

My genuine appreciation of HIE is accompanied by five main questions for discussion. My primary question has to do with the inclusion of works designated as haiku within (by default as it were), which are snippets extracted from poems that are not haiku. There is no discussion within of the disjunct between editorial decision and authorial intention, that I can find. Next, as a number of people have mentioned to me, there is plenty of blank space on many poet pages, and a number of poets seem under-represented (by just one or two ku) -- though their oeuvre includes a good selection of excellent works. Is HIE overall too conservative in its selections? This goes to the point (present in any "selected" anthology) of bias.

These questions aside, HIE was instrumental to my ability to research haiku for the 2013 book, "Disjunctive Dragonfly." I praised the achievement, within. HIE provides a sorely needed resource for haiku, and as it's published by Norton, HIE has in a stroke extended the long-term impact of the English-language haiku genre. My main interest is in having a discussion relating to how HIE 2nd. ed. could be improved.

Questions for others:

1) What do you think of including as haiku, extracts of poems that clearly are not haiku? Does HIE well-explain this choice? (Give some HIE examples, and discuss.)

2) Do you think included poets are underrepresented (with spare page space apparently available)? Which poems (and poets) should have been included/would you have included? What was missed? Please give some examples.

3) General bias. Does HIE adequately represent haiku in the 21st century, particularly in the last decade? If not, what poems/poets are missing? Too conservative, progressive? (3b. What might be missing, from any particular decade?)

4) Who or what (poems, poets) would you remove from the anthy as non-representative/irrelevant, misleading, etc. And the converse, what/who might have been missed?

5) How could HIE be improved? Could you present a prioritized list, with a short explanation of each point?

These are the things that piqued my interest, as points of discussion.

I feel that an honest critique of the work is important, and could parallel a discussion of "What does HIE tell you about where haiku has been, where it is now, and where it may be going?" which seems to overleap possible limitations or issues with the anthology. It also may be helpful to the co-editors to hear from FN inviteds on what they miss and would have liked to see.

***


John Stevenson


It seems to have been a passing interest for early poets; of interest primarily as it might relate to Imagism. Kerouac seems to be the first to really make it an important focus within his writing. We are now in a time when there are "haiku poets" - in great variety. In the future, we may see "haiku poets" with work appearing in other kinds of anthologies - non-haiku poems that were produced as a passing interest for her/him - the symmetrical opposite of Pound in HIE.

***


Max Verhart

In a way Haiku in English (HiE) is too much for me. In a way to me it simply is a sort of fourth edition of the Haiku Anthology (HA), the first three editions having been compiled by Cor van den Heuvel: state of the art of haiku surveys at now four different points in time. And there is much to be said for that, for both HA and HiE have a lot of poets and poems in common - though of course you'll hardly find non-American poets in HA, while HiE covers a few more continents.
But HiE has a greater ambition than simply collecting what the editors perceive as best haiku written in English. 'Best haiku' as such is not even a selection criterium. The poets and poems selected were picked for their contribution to the development of English-language haiku. So there I am, reading in HiE, liking some poems, not understanding others and often wondering: so this poet and/or poem somehow contributed to the development of English-language haiku - but how and what? And I am at a loss, for to be able to understand how and what a certain poet contributed to the development of English-language haiku, one has to know what the state of that art was at that particular moment. HiE simply fails to convey the relevance in that respect of this entry and that one. And besides, most poets are included with just one poem (and yes, I am happy to be one of them). Now what the heck is there to learn about that poet's contribution to etcetera on the basis of just that one poem?
And another question: are we to understand that all poets not represented in HiE have not contributed, or not significantly enough, to the development of etcetera? I don't think so and I am quite sure that the editors do not want to imply any such idea. We all fully understand that the selection of poets and poems is subjective and hence arbitrary. Which also means that in that respect HiE is a failure. But necessarily so.
Too conclude: HiE is both a major achievement and a failure. In a way too much for me. But I cherish it.

***


Cherie Hunter Day

What does HIE tell you about where haiku has been, where it is now, and where it may be going?

HIE is the fourth incarnation of the haiku anthology from a major publishing house.  The tradition started in 1974 when Anchor/Doubleday published the first edition of The Haiku Anthology by Cor van den Heuvel.  Simon & Schuster published the second edition in 1986, and W.W. Norton released the third edition in 1999.  Another anthology on that scale (368 pages), The Haiku Moment, edited by Bruce Ross, was published by Tuttle in 1993.  Tuttle Publishing specializes in 'Asian-inspired books,' and, while influential, it is not a major publishing house with the distribution scope of Norton.

Cor had the podium for 39 years, and now with HIE a different set of editors has weighed in with their selections. There are poets that are elated at inclusion and others that are disappointed either in being excluded altogether or with the number of their poems that were included. Side-stepping discussion of the sequencing and selection process, what makes this anthology different?  First consider Cor van den Heuvel's opening remarks in the introduction of the first edition of The Haiku Anthology (Doubleday, 1974):  "Haiku in English got its real start in the fifties, when an avid interest in Japanese culture and religion swept the postwar United States."  He offers this lengthy footnote to qualify that statement:
"The Imagists, and those who follow them, had no real understanding of haiku. Because they had no adequate translation or critical analyses available, they failed to see the spiritual depth haiku embodies, or the unity of man and nature it reveals.  English-language haiku owes practically nothing to their experiments except in the sense that all modern poetry owes them a debt for their call for concision and clarity in language."

Here is a major difference in HIE: the editors start the haiku clock in English much earlier than in previous anthologies—1913 to be exact.   Indeed, the timing of the volume's release coincides with the centennial anniversary of the publication of Ezra Pound's two liner in Poetry magazine.  The Imagists are represented as are Objectivists, Modernists, Jazz poets, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Black Mountain poets, New York School, Black Arts Movement, the Beats, and other well-known novelists, essayists, and translators.  One of the chief goals stated in the acknowledgements was to "spark much interest from the poetry mainstream and aid in the realization of how much common literary heritage we share." Haiku written in English has a rich heritage, not only in Japanese culture and literature but also in Western literary influences as well.  In the spirit of inclusion, HIE makes a case similar to the Parable of the Sower in the Gospels that the haiku seed fell not on rocky soil or among thorns and was lost, but rather fell on good poetic earth at the beginning of the 20th Century.  It grew and produced a hundredfold.  In addition to being a wonderful opportunity for mainstream poets to appreciate E-l haiku poets; it's an invitation for E-l poets to become familiar with the work of mainstream poets.  There must be innovation in order for the genre to move ahead.  HIE thoughtfully opens that dialog.  Where haiku is headed is up to what poets make of it.

***


Mark Harris

10/21/13
As the editors of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years maintain, "an awareness of the interface between haiku and other short-form poetry is vital." Their anthology includes poems by poets who never claimed to write haiku, Wallace Stevens for one. Is it too much of a stretch to make room for a poet who "never termed anything he wrote haiku"? In my opinion, the decision to include such work corrects the view that haiku poets work outside the influence of historical and contemporary English-language poetics, and instead places the genre within a cultural and literary context that is as natural as it is unavoidable. 
Combined with the timeline threading through the bibliographic information provided in the book's "Index of poets and credits," the rough chronology achieved by ordering HIE "based on the publication date of the earliest poem in each poet's selections" suggests interesting connections.
For example, "tundra" appeared in Cor van den Heuvel's 1963 book The Window Washer's Pail. The editors of HIE observe in their forward that Cor's one-word (surrounded by blank page) poem, "tests a boundary between haiku and minimalist-concrete poetry..." and proceed to make it possible to pursue that line of thought.
in 1958, 5 years before "tundra" appeared in print, E.E. Cummings published 95 Poems, which included

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)

one
li
ness


one year later, in 1959, the following poem by Paul Reps appeared in his book Zen Telegrams

cobwebs
hesitating
us 


Thus helping set the stage for "tundra" ...or so I imagine.
Taking a closer look (hope I'm correctly interpreting the index credits) I notice that haiku contemporary with "tundra" also made it into HIE. American Haiku was a fledging journal in 1963. Its first issue contained this 17 syllable haiku by James W. Hackett

The fleeing sandpipers
     turn about suddenly
          and chase back the sea!


O Mabson Southard's 5/7/5 take on a similar scenario also appeared in AH 1:1

One breaker crashes . . .
   As the next draws up, a lull—
      and sandpiper cries


Looks as if "traditional" and "cutting edge" English-language haiku have progressed side-by-side for quite a while now, doesn't it?
Here's another grouping that interests me (these are my free associations, inspired by the format of HIE, which I recommend to you if you have yet to peruse a copy).
In 1977 (the date given by HIE; the year was 1978 according to MM's website—maybe the release month is uncertain?) Marlene Mountain published this one-liner in Cicada 2:1

one fly everywhere the heat


In 1978 Matsuo Allard published Bird Day Afternoon, which contained the one-liner

alone at 3:00 a.m.—the doorknob turning slowly


and in the same year Robert Grenier published Sentences. His collection of brief texts resists sense and categorization, and yet in the context of HIE, a line such as

except the swing bumped by the dog in passing

helps to frame the whole.
. . . I'm running out of time and space for this particular field note, although I'm tempted to continue—that's the goal of any anthology, to inspire readers to delve deeper, don't you think?

***

For Field Notes 4, we asked panelists to take a look at Haiku in English: the First Hundred Years. The book presents a wide range of haiku spanning a century, and so it seemed a good idea to ask: what does HIE tell you about where haiku has been, where it is now, and where it may be going?

What do you think?

Please note that Sandra Simpson's contribution to FN3 was inadvertently curtailed.
This has been corrected. Her complete text is now available.

PY




     on this cold
                spring  1
             2  night  3  4
                kittens 
                 wet
                    5

                    Marlene Mountain



This haiku was the springboard for Jim Kacian's playful and illuminating talk, called
"A Grammar of Organic Form", at HNA this year.

I was happily reminded of the first time I read this many years ago.

For me, this is a brilliant example of how content and form can become one and the same.  What makes this poem stand out for me is how it gives shape to an event—a cat birthing kittens—that defies an easy outline.  And in the process of giving form to this experience, the poem itself is born in front of us. The poet's process of discovery is delivered in "real time" right along with the newborn kittens. 

Like the best of any haiku, this poem does not rely on the illustration of appearance; rather it is an evocation of experience: cold, darkness, anticipation, wonder, surprise, wetness. It is resolutely concrete, deceptively simple.  Its novelty does not feel to me like it is trying to be clever; it feels like the poet is trying to communicate the perception process itself.

The Arabic numerals, their placement, their sounds, and the rhythm of their counting sequence irrupt the flow of normative reading.  The first three lines are composed of single syllable words. The sounds of the words in relationship to one another (along with the line breaks) cause them to enter the counting rhythm of the numbers.  This suspends, ever so briefly, any one-to-one mapping of word to meaning. Words and numbers point to their referents in different ways.  Are we making a list? of what? Are we counting spring nights?

With the next line, the two-syllable, one-word "kittens", I suddenly realize what is taking form in this cold dark air.  And the next one-word line "wet", an adjective, dangles sensually out of its proper position before the noun and lingers viscerally.  The sequence of the one-word lines "kittens"/"wet" slow the pace and visually direct me down vertically, from the moving shape of the mother's lumpy belly to the last kitten, "5", just out of the birth canal.  This poem is simultaneously mother, carrier of new life, and the newly born itself.

Eve Luckring

                                               ***


While I can't find any examples of what I'm about to describe, I know I've encountered haiku in journals and anthologies that have provoked my thinking about the relationship between dialogue and haiku, and the ways in which haiku could incorporate the words of a particular imaginary character who is meant to be distinct from the author---say, a fantastical being or comic strip character. I've lately been curious as to how to create a comic strip with characters that "speak" in haiku and how such a comic would differ from the usual comic strips---that is, what limitations on dialogue would be imposed by the haiku form.  If it were an action-centered comic strip, resembling a serial with a plot, how would the narrative momentum be carried if the characters spoke in haiku? Perhaps an extended haiku comic (with dialogue) would consist of a series of present-centered observations, all revolving around a single subject, so that the contrast between perspectives would generate the interest for a reader. The value would lie less in the suspense created by a serial plot, and more in recognizing multiple perspectives on a subject, and in clashes or absurdities that might result from that. These juxtapositions would spark interest, rather than the suspense of a narrative thread (though the two need not be mutually exclusive).  But suppose the writer wished to create a haiku comic strip consisting of character dialogue with narrative pacing, and suspense--- how might this occur? That is, how would the speech of the comic strip characters generate narrative momentum yet remain true to the spirit of haiku (however that might be defined)? How would the distinctive personality of each character be developed through haiku dialogue? Perhaps each would have a particular 'style' of speech, defined by syllabic accent (smooth or staccato), number of syllables per haiku, a distinct vocabulary for each (such as a season word).
To offer an example, one haiku that recently reminded me of this possibility of developing dialogue in haiku between comic strip characters was Kerouac's:

The bottoms of my shoes
    are clean
From walking in the rain

--which could be the admission of someone who's just come out of the rain, to another, in words which sound like a prelude to further dialogue:

Great to hear---but wipe
here, in any case---floor's dry---
been a long day. Boy!

It would be interesting to see how well the elements of the serial action-centered comic strip could be preserved if the character dialogue were re-composed in haiku format.

Rebecca Lilly

                                             ***


1974 - Silence in Fear of Words

For this Forum we were asked to write about one haiku which has impressed us and had a long lasting effect on our own haiku.  I think I have already done that with one haiku for Scott Metz's Virals [1] when I wrote about meeting up with one of Larry Wiggin's haiku in the 1974 edition of The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel

1974 was very early in my writing life and I tell the beginning of my haiku efforts from high school in the forward, God Bless You, Mrs Maloney, Wherever You Are, to my 2010 collection, Spilled Milk: Haiku Destinies. [2] The Wiggin's haiku didn't show up until August of that year.

In 1974 I was newly married and living in Japan stationed at the U.S. Air Force base in Misawa [3] and had time or took time to keep a notebook of thoughts and attitudes about various haiku I was finding in the current haiku journals.  So in looking over the entire year it wasn't just Wiggin's haiku that was having significant impact on my haiku poetics.

Maybe more than now we looked to the haiku of Japanese masters for examples of what we wanted our haiku to do.  So we read what we could find in English.  In late December 1973 I received a copy of thistle brilliant morning, a booklet of translations of Shiki, Hekigodo, Santoka and Hosai by Bill Higginson. [4]  This one by Santoka resonated with me:

thistle
brilliant
morning
rain finished

Words creating or re-creating summer days I had experienced growing up in northern Maine.  So easily said.

And another by Shiki:

mums withering
on the fence socks dry
a fine day

Rather odd images to juxtapose:  mums withering and socks drying.  Neither of great significance but part of a fine day.  Simply said.

From the January issue of Dragonfly which I received in March [5] a Larry Wiggin haiku: 

scouring pans;
snow deepening
in the yard

and Michael McClintock's

going out
into the ground mist
    on naked legs


And also in March this by Thom Szuter published in Haiku Magazine: [6]

                                                 the only
                                           noise the hunters
                                               red jackets

It was from a collection published in 1965 and probably not written as a haiku but had the power of one and certainly created a vivid moment.

And from the April Dragonfly which arrived in April this one by Karen Kayali cited in an essay by  R.E.T. Johnson:

   Doves in its branches
the pine
      grows old

And one by the mysterious Tao-Li [7]  whose non-traditional format for a haiku were creating some fascinating discussion: 

   on            the          of
   the            shadow      a
   geranium                  geranium
   leaf                  leaf

As one who finds shadows of more than passing  interest this was one to pull into my notebook.

An issue of Modern Haiku [8] arrives in May with some good haiku but this one by Foster Jewell was the one to copy into my notebook:

      Even the pond
   holds the passing of wild geese
      to the very last


And from a scholarly article, Ancient Facets of Modern Haiku, by Kaneko Tota this haiku by Nakamua Kusatao:  [9]


O falling snow/ Meiji times gone far away / sense of regret

The juxtaposition of the now with a well-know time in history was a delight.  I suspect you might have to enjoy history as I do for that.   Later that year I found what I considered a better translation by R.H. Blyth in the 2nd volume of A History of Haiku:


                                                     Snow falling;
                              The Meiji Era,---
                                                     How far off it is!

OK, I grant you, the exclamation mark is bit too much.  I don't blame Kusatao for that.  It does have a tighter expression.

In August The Haiku Anthology: English Language Haiku by Contemporary American and Canadian Poets edited by Cor van den Heuvel arrived with a wide range of stimulating English language haiku in a variety of styles.  And in it Cor's

hot night—
turning the pillow
to the cool side

Great simplicity.  And one haiku that has been re-done by a number of others!

And of course Larry Wiggin's haiku of powerful simplicity:

crickets...
then
thunder

One in later years I would use to impress Robert Bly and Cid Corman with the worthiness of English language haiku. It was a try but to no avail...

In September, Janice Bostok, an Australian, who was editor of the haiku journal, Tweed,  showed up with a collection, Walking Into the Sun.  Many good ones and this one I copied into the notebook:

   pregnant again...
       the fluttering of moths
             against the window

Later in September a copy of Eric Amann's, The Wordless Poem: A Study of Zen in Haiku, arrived. I spent some time thinking about his points and in November spent some time interacting with them in the notebook.  I would use Wiggin's cricket haiku to argue against his thought "that the haiku poet seems to avoid words rather than display them." [10] I think Wiggin's haiku is a penetrating display of words.  In the case of haiku fewer words means greater attention is drawn to the ones used.  Poetry is about the effect of carefully chosen words, carefully placed. [11] Good poetry, good haiku, are the words that silence fears.

So that was some of the 1974 haiku world's influence on my writing.

Notes:

[1] Virals 7.33, 22 April 2010, http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2010/04/22/viral-7-3/.

[2] Based on my more detailed essay that appeared in Woodnotes #31 in 1996, edited by Michael Dylan Welch.

[[3] I found out from both Bill Higginson and R.E.T. Johnson that they also had been stationed at Misawa in the past.

[4] Published by Gerry Loose under the Byways imprint in England.


[5] At that time edited by Lorraine Ellis Harr.

[6] Now edited by Bill Higginson. The haiku from Szuter's More Poems published in 1965.

[7] After much speculation we were later to find out was really Evelyn Tooley Hunt.

[8] Modern Haiku Vol V No.1.

[9] The Japan Quarterly, Vol XIX, No. 1, Jan-Mar 1972, pp. 66-70.  I must have found this in the base library since I did not have subscription.  We now see the essayist's name spelled Tohta.

[10] On page six of The Wordless Poem, published as a special issue of Haiku Magazine (Vol III, No: V, 1969).

[11]  Which reminds me of what James Tipton said in the Biographies appendix of The Haiku Anthology about his interest "in the possibility of discovering new energy through words put together with precision and emotion."

Gary Hotham

                                                  ***


Pin-pointing a poem or poet as the strongest influence over my writing in the last 15 years is a difficult deed for me.  I'm somewhat of an open channel that if I taste the salt in the air, near the ocean, I wonder if it is msg - and the wonderment changes me somehow . . . and my poetry.  

I could start with Basho, but then, there is Onitusra and his endless pursuit of truth/fact in poetry; yet, the smoothness of Buson is intriguing and then there is Virgilio who often came up with stunning, mind bending, and terrific moments in his haiku.

Yet, for the thousands of hours of my reading, studying and pondering, it is Dr. Richard Gilbert that caused me to pause, to wonder and search more for what I want to express in my haiku compositions.  It isn't that I will emulate; it isn't that I will consciously change my writing.  These are not my thoughts at all.  Rather, in some esoteric fashion, I believe that what I learn isn't learned; and, what I master isn't mastery; and yet, my palette to draw words and style continues to expand, enveloping more choices of hue and finer brushes to work with by pondering Gilbert's thoughts and poetics.

My experiences with Dr. Gilbert have been something like all of the above.  He is challenging - his mind is unusual and rich with oblique perspectives that are sensible at the core but challenging to understand.

The following poems of his . . .

what became deeper of you i let in

               R'r 12.3

deep in woods
all the dancing in
space


running forever
spring after
tragedy

   R'r 12.3

. . . are poems that create and recreate thoughts within the reader as the reader's resistance to the meanings is diminished through the gate of reading and re-reading for meaning - "misreading as meaning"1.

I'm not one to emulate style intentionally but I also do not believe anyone has written anything, ever, without at least some incidental emulation - even if the source for emulation is the extant rules of writing haiku (5/7/5 etc. et al) as purported by earlier generations. Education does affect us.

Recently, I penned . . .

nagasaki . . .
in her belly, the sound
of unopened mail

   Haiku Now, 2013, 1st

. . . and I am sure this poem would not exist if it were not for my crossing mind-paths with Dr. Gilbert. 


all for now,

Don


1 Richard Gilbert, Poems of Consciousness, Red Moon Press, 2008

Don Baird

                                    ***


A book of haiku that changed my life and helped to confirm my desire to follow haiku as a lifetime adventure was John Wills' 1970 edition of river.  No collection of haiku up to that time had equal or greater impact, and very few since. Poems like these became a kind of scripture for me---

river shanty
sliding by    the faces
in the doorway


river
  just at twilight moving off
     in rain


blackbirds
on the blowing reeds
one above another


     another bend
then at last    the moon
        and all the stars


Though set in a rural world very unlike my own at that time, in Los Angeles, these and other poems in that book convinced me that haiku were possible as a way of life in a complex world, affording me a means to live well, wherever I happened to be, whatever I might be doing ---
haiku could be foundational to a life worth living, wholly sustained on its bread, fruit, and meat. It offered me the world and I took it up.  I have not been disappointed.

Michael McClintock

In a poetry handbook (I wish I could recall which one), I encountered a translation of Bashō's striking "heron" haiku. Sam Hamill translates it like this:

A lightning flash--
and, piercing the darkness
a night heron's cry

I had been writing terse imagistic poems since 1990 and was searching for appropriate ways to render the experiences I was having while hiking and birding in and around Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. As I started to grasp what haiku might be, it seemed the perfect vehicle for helping me to achieve my goals. At the time, I was completely ignorant of all efforts to write original haiku in English except the provisionary ones of the Imagists.

A few years later, while browsing a bookstore, I stumbled upon the third edition of Cor's Haiku Anthology . . .


My early efforts, predictably, were in strict 5-7-5 form, which I then believed was "essential" to haiku. Cor's anthology supplied some excellent models along these lines, such as some of the work of James W. Hackett and O Mabson Southard.

But what was eye-opening was that most of the haiku were not composed in that form. One that instantly took me by the throat was Nick Virgilio's

bass
picking bugs
off the moon

Seven syllables, five stressed. Here was everything I was after: concreteness, suggestiveness, density, essence, relations, fidelity to experience and perception rather than mere literalness . . . a visionary naturalism that seemed to fulfill the unachieved ambitions of the Imagists and their allies. And like a faithful translation of Bashō or Buson, it wasn't 5-7-5. With such a catalyst, I was ready to evolve in my own practice.


Recently, I experienced a sense of renewed faith in the power and possibilities of the genre when I read this:

one of the wolves
shows its face
firelight

Chad Lee Robinson
South by Southeast 19.3, 2012

So much of what's important here is unstated yet implied: the darkness, the howls, the cold, the people huddled round the campfire. There's a spine-chilling atmosphere to the whole thing. This fleeting encounter, fraught with a mixture of fear, respect, and awe, presumably on both sides, possesses an elemental and timeless quality that's actually quite rare. It could have been written during the Ice Age. And yet it speaks also to the contemporary reintroduction of wolves into the United States, and in that respect it's about humans and wolves in quite another way than what's apparent on the surface. Both a cave painting and the field note of a contemporary ethologist, it reminds us that a seemingly traditional subject can be a very current one. And even as it evokes past and present realities, it might seem also like the seed out of which myth is born. It was that rare one in thousands that instantly imprinted every word on my memory.

And that firelight, do you see it principally in the wolf's eyes?

Allan Burns

                                              ***


warm rain before dawn:
my milk flows into her
unseen
            Ruth Yarrow

I remember seeing this haiku in the second edition of The Haiku Anthology by Cor van den Heuvel in the summer of 1992. My son just turned three. I would read and write haiku while he took his afternoon naps. This haiku opened a whole new realm for me. It granted me permission to write from very personal experience. I had nursed my son for nearly a year and it was surprising to me how my slim body produced enough milk to not only feed but fatten a baby. I remember how the let-down reflex felt as milk begins to flow. It's a very intimate moment between mother and baby, and Ruth shared this experience. Yarrow juxtaposes the warm rain that feeds the earth with mother's milk – the connection feels absolutely true and part of a deeper mystery. It's celebratory. This haiku validated for me that a woman's experience is a worthy subject for poetry. In a culture that vilifies a woman for breastfeeding in public even when hidden under a cover, this haiku clearly challenged that notion, but it does so in the most gentle and positive way. Twenty-one years later it still reverberates for me. I'm grateful to Ruth Yarrow.

Though I rarely write haiku as openly sensual as "warm rain before dawn:," I admire poems that take that risk. 

everywhere you touch is yes     cherry blossoms

           S.B. Friedman

Cherie Hunter Day

                                                  ***

On being posed the question, "show me a haiku that changed your life," I can't say that it's possible for me to narrow it down to a single haiku. I first started writing haiku fairly regularly in 1976, when I learned about this poetry in high school. I wrote perfect 5-7-5 haiku, all with glorious titles, for nearly a dozen years. Then, in July of 1987 I bought my first haiku book (a minimalist Lucien Stryk translation of Basho) and began buying other books of and about haiku. In November of that year I got a copy of the second edition of Cor van den Heuvel's The Haiku Anthology. This book, more than any other, confronted me with my naïve presumption that haiku in English was supposed to be 5-7-5 syllables. If I could point to one poet who flew in the face of the 5-7-5 straightjacket, it was Marlene Mountain. Her visual work was especially confronting. Together with Cor's "tundra" and other visual/aural poems in this anthology, the general fact that nearly 90 percent of the poems were not 5-7-5 (yes, I counted) radically shifted my sense of haiku. That, I think, changed my poetic life. But again, I don't think I could point to a single poem that changed my life.

The larger point here is that haiku has more range than many of us might at first believe. This idea is central to the idea of "targets" for haiku rather than rules. Haiku has many possible targets, 5-7-5 being one of them, if one so chooses—although the syllable-counting target is one that comes at a cost for producing a longer poem than the seventeen sounds counted in Japanese. A given haiku might not hit the season-word target (by accident or on purpose), or might not hit the cutting word or juxtaposition target, and so on, but if a poem hits a preponderance of possible targets, then it can succeed as a haiku, or at least be a haiku. There's a point where a poem goes too far and is no longer a haiku, and each of us will draw that line where we will. But the general point holds up, I believe, that the difference between haiku and not-haiku is whether a poem hits a preponderance of possible targets for the genre. Beyond a certain point, a poem might evoke a haiku sensibility, or beg to be considered as poetry in relation to haiku, but there's a point on the continuum where a poem is no longer haiku. As we learn more varieties and approaches to haiku, we may add new targets to the various possibilities, and thus the threshold point may shift. Also relevant is how territorial or proprietary we want to be in saying "this is haiku" and "this is not haiku," but the first perceptions most people have of haiku are necessarily narrow—or in some cases exceedingly broad. Exploring the possible targets for haiku is a process of expanding our reading and writing experience, of encountering the strange and uncomfortable. Those encounters don't stop after one gets past the urban myth of 5-7-5. In this context, I suppose that any poem that one encounters along the way has the potential to change one's life if it changes the way one draws the haiku map.

We can become addicted to edge haiku, though, and forget that they're just the edges. Such poems that "change your life" do indeed tend to be on the fringes, the way Cor's "tundra" is a fringe haiku—and one that changed my life. It's a poem I dearly love but would not use as a central model for teaching haiku. So, not to be neglected among "boundary" haiku that might change one's life are more centrist haiku that might not have changed anyone's lives but are still dearly loved for aesthetic or personal reasons. Basho talked about taking the "middle way" with his poetry, and I think it's important to remember these poems as much as the fringe poems, even if they don't necessarily change our lives. I know some people keep notebooks where they record favourite haiku by others that have really moved them over the years. I wish I'd had such a practice, as it would be useful to see what mattered to me at certain times, and perhaps to understand why. Over time we can see how certain poems continue to stand out, whereas others might fade away. In all, I would say that what matters is not just poems that have changed your life, but poems that are your life. It's not just one's first and last breaths that matter, but every breath in between.

Michael Dylan Welch

                                                 ***


A certain deep moodiness in which tangible reality and an affective expression meet in haiku began to seep in the 1950's by reading in the Beats and what they read and exposure to the Rochester Zen Center. Basically a realization of facets of Buddhist ideas and practice. This coupled with a fondness for nature poety, by way of the English Romantics, Whitman, Snyder, etc., and exposure to Native American culture, and later in understanding Shinto fused with the simplicity of imagist sensibility, such as in Amy Lowell. All this came together when I read Virginia Brady Young's:

moonlight—
                a sand dune
                shifts

in "Frogpond" (1990).

Later I used this poem as an example of the so-called "haiku moment." A kind of realization provoked on the sensibility by an occurrence in the natural world. How simple and how momentous. An opening up of consciousness.

And later still I was struck by a haiku by Burnell Lippy in "Frogpond" (2004) whose depths I have not yet totally fathomed:

deep in the sink
the great veins of chard
summer's end

I recently understand the first two lines augur the burrowing down of the natural world, literally for flora through roots and fauna through hibernation and us through warmer clothes. They demarcate as embodied in the objective correlative of the chard's prominent veins (the plants' roots deep in the earth). One envisions perhaps the approaching coldness in the deep metal sink. The poet's sensibility picks up already the beginnings of this coldness in line three which loops back or links to the objective correlative of lines one and two. I had been writing haiku based on the subtle change of seasons but this poem occurs in a subtler expression than I could have achieved up until reading it. In all, the poet is alive in a subtle sense and the haiku records the opening of broader consciousness and natural sensibility that occurred. When I read the haiku and experience the depth of the opening, as in a different modality I had with Young's "moonlight" haiku, I am drawn into the wondrous facet of such openings as such and the conjunction of this with all the affective elements of poetry that are so appreciated in such a simple pared down manner, as if haiku were an essential metaphor, the simplest poetry in and of the world.


Bruce Ross

                                                  ***


Haiku, in general, has changed my life but I can't identify individual haiku in this way. Here is one that changed my sense of haiku:

pig and i spring rain

               marlene mountain

I am grateful that this poem was already published and well known before I encountered the world of ELH. It both partakes of traditional ideas about the genre (seasonal resonance, juxtaposition, concision) and makes them new. It was, for me, an invitation to use all of my previously developed skills as a poet in this new (to me) poetry. Many other poems subsequently reinforced this point but this one might have been the first for me.

John Stevenson

                                                ***

We've been asked to share a haiku that influenced us or taught us something or changed the course of our writing or reading haiku.  As I mulled this over, I went to my bookshelf and picked out R.H. Blyth's four volume set, Haiku.  These books were my first introduction to haiku, and I flipped through some of the poems I recall having liked when I first read them. 

yuku ware ni todomaru nare ni aki futatsu

I who am going,
and you who remain
two autumns

When I reached this haiku by Masaoka Shiki, it overwhelmed me once again.  My muscles relax, my sense of time disappears, and I slip into a haiku vortex.  What is it about this haiku that moves me so?  And by extension, what has it taught me?  A few thoughts come to mind.

First, in the original Japanese, the aural rhythm of the poem is gorgeous.  The haiku flows when I speak it aloud.  (Another haiku with perfect pitch, which also happens to be by Shiki, is one of his most famous: kaki kueba kane ga naru nari hōryūji.)  These are haiku I can sing in my head, the way I might a favorite tune.

So, from Shiki's yuku ware haiku, I learned to respect the aural aspect of a haiku.  A haiku isn't just about the moment or just about the message.  It's poetry.  Make it sing!

Another powerful aspect of Shiki's yuku ware haiku is the moment that it captures.  If haiku involves capturing a moment in time and space (I'm not saying it has to), then which moment is worthy of a haiku? Why this moment and not that moment?  A great haiku poet or a great haiku captures a moment that stirs not only the author, but also the anonymous reader.  This is not easy, given that the reader wasn't there for the original moment, and can only experience it secondhand.

So, the second thing I learned from Shiki's haiku is to pay heed to the moment I choose to capture.  I suppose a more accurate way of putting this is to say that I learned to throw out haiku that capture trivial moments, or moments that others cannot connect with.   

Finally, a third aspect of this haiku which I value is its intellectual appeal.  In addition to grabbing me on an emotional level, I like a haiku to stimulate my mind.  With a good haiku, the more I learn about the author, or about the circumstance in which it came about, or about its context, the greater my pleasure.   

Shiki wrote his yuku ware in 1895, upon bidding goodbye to his friend Natsume Soseki, when Shiki was leaving Matsuyama for Tokyo.  Only a few short years later, though, Shiki's tuberculosis worsened to the point where he was completely bedridden.  In 1902, at the age of 35, he died.  In his waning days, as he lay on his futon, nearing death, I wonder whether this haiku held an entirely different meaning for Shiki and for his friend Soseki:

I who am going,
and you who remain
two autumns

Abigail Friedman

I don't think I can point to one poem, but I can point to one poet: Fay Aoyagi. If you look at the arc my work has taken it started out very derivative of what I was reading in Blyth, and then started to incorporate local flavors, mostly from my hikes in the various hills/peaks of California. This is also around the time I discovered John Wills and Christopher Herold, both poets who at that time tended to subsume their personality to their surroundings. There is nothing wrong with this. And frankly I found it a relief to write about the wonderful natural world I was encountering than to be yet another confessional poet. As my pseudonym implies, I know/hear enough about myself to not want to hear anymore, and at that time I couldn't think why any other person would want to hear about me either; I delighted in writing about the other.

Yet, on occasion, the self and the other collide in meaningful ways. At this time (don't ask me the date) I became familiar with Aoyagi's work through HPNC. Never underestimate the value of groups and what other poets can teach you.  Aoyagi wrote in the wonderful Introduction to her first collection Chrysanthemum Love (see here: http://thehaikufoundation.org/diglib/aoyagi_love.pdf):

                I don't write to report the weather. I write to tell my stories.

That was shocking. And even more shocking were her poems, which were often very modern in that the link between her observation and herself was seemingly tenuous—perhaps even too personal for me to understand. But that didn't mean you couldn't write it! This all came about as I was starting find my own voice and to incorporate more of myself into my poems anyway, and as Fay commented to me once, "You are always in your poems, but lurking in the background, unseen." Her example gave me permission to step forward into my poem's foreground, to be more overt; and occasionally as Charles Trumbull once said of my work, to be "Aesopian." To quote Jim Carroll: "Everything is permitted."

Perhaps this is obvious to many poets reading this, especially with the avant garde haiku we're seeing in so many of the public journals these days, but it wasn't obvious to me at that time; and I can see how it may not be obvious to some today. After all, we have any number of "gate-keepers" to get through to get our work published (I suppose I am one of them), and to do so we sometimes write what is expected or what we think is expected, rather than what truly emerges from our mind/heart/soul. I think the lesson I learned from Fay was to believe in my own voice. She will tell you that most editors at the time rejected her work; but that didn't stop her.

Since this is supposed to be about poems, I'll conclude with a few of hers:

migrating birds—
the weight
of my first voters' guide

August waves
I tell my history
to jellyfish

cold rain—
my application
to become a crab

I particularly love the last one. No idea what it "means" but I take away a lot.

Paul Miller

                                             ***


was that a leaf
returning to its branch?
ah no! a butterfly!

This Moritake poem (in my rendition) primarily represents classical Japanese haiku here. And guess what? The whole phenomenon sure enough had some influence on me! This particular poem moreover convincingly evokes in me the awareness of being.

What does not change
is the how and why
of a dragonfly.

This poem primarily represents W.J. van der Molen's haiku poetry, demonstrating how a classical Japanese tradition can merge with a western poet's highly personal poetics. Who ever would have thought of that? Not me – at least not without examples like this.

stars     crickets

This George Swede poem demonstrates the power of evocative writing. For whatever the poet himself had in mind, I am immediately taken into a summer evening in the south of France: you can even smell it! And what's more: it shows that form follows function, that haiku does not follow rules, but that the rules follow haiku.

Max Verhart

                                                ***



It's rare to experience a poem that has caused me to rethink my approach. By "rethink," I take this to mean "expand" widen my conceptual range or understanding; to become aware of new modes of possibility or approach within the form. Haiku that have catalyzed such experiences have been presented in various articles and books I've published since 2000.

I'd like to share a poem which has most recently caused me to see haiku in a new way. This same poem catalyzed a new category of disjunction, which I termed "forensic parthenogenesis," and is now found as one of the newly coined "disjunctive techniques of 'strong reader resistance'" in Disjunctive Dragonfly (Red Moon Press, August, 2013, 132 pp.). By way of explanation here is an excerpt describing this poem—with some additional examples (from pp. 98-100):

In "Forensic Parthenogenesis," particulars of non-human sentient beings self-generate a cosmos (as environments, a wilds, expressions of nature) through strong disjunction; such beings appear as autonomous creatures (i.e. not as pets, or associated to the human body). Concerning notions of sentience, haiku that do not place themselves so strongly in alternate types, such as "misplaced anthropomorphism" or "displaced mythic resonance," and usually utilize the genre-style of naturalist description.
     In haiku with strong parthenogenic disjunction, transformative elements, though presented as objectively descriptive fact (naturalistic), will also often be "impossibly true." As relatively urban/nature-insulated moderns, surrounded by environments of utility and digital realities, technology, etc., haiku possessing forensic parthenogenesis reveal something about how we sense wild nature. There seems an urge or desire for new forms of mythos here being expressed — new ways of animal dreaming — that are at the same time, animals dreaming us.

inside a bat's ear
a rose
opens to a star

Eve Luckring, 2011, RR 11:3

(The haiku which inspired this category. The idea that an animal (or animal particular) provides a motif or fulcrum for a new poetic cosmos, impelled via disjunction. The poet draws the reader into a unique contemplation, from "inside a bat's ear," within its dark auricle, drawn from a creature of darkness, colorblind, ultrasonic, navigational, acoustic — and offers a mysterium coniunctionis ("mysterious conjunction"; a final alchemical synthesis) which may represent the unification of body, soul and spirit.)


in the nucleus
   of a migrating cell
      the summer sea

               Mark Harris, 2012, MH 43.3


within mist
the blueness of a fox
falling petals death in war

                Kaneko Tohta, 2012, Selected Haiku, Part 2 (Gilbert et al, trans., RMP)


clouds in a mare's eye the fracture beyond repair

               Clare McCotter, 2012; HIE 314


never touching
his own face
tyrannosaurus

                  John Stevenson, 2011, Acorn 27

(As Tyrannosaurus Rex couldn't even touch its mouth, with arms so short. This poem of realism forges a connection between that most terrible king of predators and our own face, by implied contrast: with the crucial difference of touch.)


ants begin to look like an idea

                 Scott Metz, 2009; lakes & now wolves (MHP, 2012)


as the world fails saxophone in the lips of a walrus

                Marlene Mountain, 2009; H21 130


Disjunctive Dragonfly: A New Approach to English-language Haiku
http://www.redmoonpress.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=32&products_id=179


Richard Gilbert

                                                   ***


Show me a haiku that changed your life--
   I wish I could say when lightning struck and what poem it was, but there is no single haiku that changed my life.  It has been like looking at a gem with many facets.   The feeling and intuition are everything. And each haiku has its truth.

   Haiku has been life changing for me because it is life affirming. It has also given me years of pleasure and companionship in the sensitivity, perceptiveness, humor and humanity of my fellow poets.

What got you started?
    I started writing and publishing my poetry in high school, but had little exposure to haiku until college. I had read a lot of modern poetry by Elliot, Yeats, Frost, Pound, and others.  Pound's famous haiku-like poem stood out:

Apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough 

    And I had read some of Kerouac's experiments with haiku : Birds singing in the dark,--/Rainy dawn  and  Brighter than the night/my barn roof/of snow

   I also was intrigued by the imagery and economy of words in Chinese poetry.  Although I don't remember specific poems, this is an example by Wang Wei
"On branch tips the hibiscus in bloom.
The mountains show off red calices.
Nobody. A silent cottage in the valley,
One by one flowers open, then fall.

    Like many older haiku poets, I started with 5-7-5,  working in isolation, not aware of any haiku groups, books on the subject, magazines, etc. And without the infinity of the internet.

     My first exposure to haiku was  Peter Pauper Press's The Four Seasons and Harcourt, Brace, and World's Cricket Songs.  The translations were forced into 5-7-5 pattern,  but something came through.

Leaf falling on leaf,
on mounds of leaves, rain splashing
in pools of rain... by Gyodai (Cricket Songs)

     R. H. Blyth, well known to most haiku poets today, was also an influence through his four-volume series of translations of Japanese haiku and commentaries published in the 1950s. His work helped many aspiring haiku poets gain insight into Japanese haiku. 

    Living in Japan was a major influence.  I was exposed to a society where millions of people enjoyed writing poetry and where poets were highly respected.

      In the early years in Japan , I  focused on the  classical poets  like Basho, Issa, Buson, Santoka , and others, whose work was translated and available. 

    I especially liked the directness and simplicity of  Santoka Taneda's haiku:
No more sake/I stare at the moon and  All day I said nothing/The sound of the waves

   Gradually, in the 80's and 90's, more and more haiku by modern poets was translated into English. We could enjoy the extraordinary haiku of  Seishi Yamaguchi, Kato Shuson, Akito Arima, Takaha Shugyo, Inahata Teiko (granddaughter of Takahama Kyoshi), Yatsuka Ishihara, and  others. 

  Some examples of their work: Akito Arima: into the ranks/of the suits of armor/deep winter, and the Big Bang's/afterglow yet also/first light of the year.
   Takaha Shugyo: In its mane/the grime of one whole summer--/carousel horse and Leaving the ocean/piece by glittering piece/winter Orion
Inahata Teiko: Lightning/running down inside/lightning
Yatsuka Ishihara:  Pulling light/from the other world.../The Milky Way

     In the 90's, poets like  Yatsuka Ishihara, Akito Arima, Kazuo Sato, Tadashi Kondo, and Tota Kaneko, among others, stepped forward to support the internationalization of haiku.

     As the American haiku movement grew, we had William J. Higginson's influential books and Cor van den Heuvel's Haiku Anthology to give us an overview of the breadth and variety of haiku being written.

    In the late 90's after leaving Japan, I found new inspiration at home in the U.S.  There were new directions in subject matter, experiments with punctuation, spacing, and more.

    Some of the haiku expressed not just gentle perceptions of nature but also  captured the loneliness and alienation of modern life in a spare  few words. Here is Jack Cain's
–empty elevator/opens/closes.  And Christopher Patchel's 
winter night/the female voice/of my computer.

    Looking at American haiku, I especially admire the feeling, the authenticity, the sense of place and large spaces.  There are so many examples, but for instance, Chad Robinson's
Buffalo Bones/a wind less than a whisper/in the summer grass;

Lee Gurga's winter prairie--/a diesel locomotive/throttles down in the night;

And Billie Wilson's retreating glacier--/how long since we've heard/the black wolf's song.
 
   There is even some wabi/sabi in poems like  Nicholas Virgilio's town barberpole/stops turning/autumn nightfall.

     And there is something very close to the bone in the haiku of Roberta Beary,as she explores the complexity of human relationships:
third date--/the slow drift of the rowboat/in deep water.

   In this poem by Yu Chang, there is a mysterious connection between the two juxtaposed images: starry night/biting into a melon/full of seeds. We feel and accept the mystery of the connection, but do not really need to pin it down.

      Marlene Mountain's striking pig and I spring rain appears to have opened the way for more one-line haiku. 

  The last line of  Kiyoko Tokutomi's  haiku gives us a  shock of reality:  Chemotherapy/in a comfortable chair/two hours of winter.

  There are haiku describing our ordinary lives and work, as in Dee Evetts' summer's end/the quickening of hammers/toward dusk

Becoming dusk,--/the catfish on the stringer/swims up and down(Robert Speiss)

  And there are haiku that catch the moment " live," as in Dee Evett's perceptive   morning sneeze/the guitar in the corner/resonates.

  Also in Glenn Coats's house inspection/a stranger plucks/the violin.

  And there is always the pleasure of reading a haiku aloud :
    Rain in gusts/below the deadhead/troutswhirl (John Wills)
     
   So many good poets, so many good poems.  It is a legacy and a community to be proud of.     

     
Kristen Deming

acid rain less and less i am at one with nature*

              *less and less nature is nature

                        Marlene Mountain


I read this haiku in the third edition of The Haiku Anthology very early within my haiku existence. I was taking my first haiku course at Millikin University in 2008. Although I'd read works I enjoyed by Peggy Lyles, George Swede, Caroline Gourlay, etc, this was the poem that got to me.

This is a poem that didn't just change the way I thought about haiku; this poem changed about how I thought about my writing. Furthermore, it ultimately steered the content of a majority of my prose for the last six years.

I'd tinkered with human/nature relations in my fiction before, which is maybe what drew me to this poem in the first place. But it was often mildly political, maybe fantastical, but rarely spiritual or philosophical. Is there a spiritual component to this haiku? Maybe. Certainly a philosophical one in the trickle down effect that occurs with the form (the footnote) and within the content.

The repetition and the form caused me to read and reread this poem (it still does), and the process of rereading takes the first line and the footnote into a deeper space each time. The erosion from the acid rain and the disconnect between man (and the self) to nature... and then erosion of nature from nature... which consequently leads to the fact that the less nature is nature... the less man is man (at least in my reading). A loss of nature is a loss of the self. The acid rain becomes even harsher, foreign, even though it's also a matter of our own self-destruction.

I'd say this poem fostered kindness within me (much like haiku itself has done), even though this is not a kind poem. The lessons learned in Mountain's haiku—treat nature as yourself, identifying identity through nature, the dangers to nature (and the self)—became a part of my own poetry. The prose I mentioned earlier are a series of stories I've revised and added onto sporadicly from undergrad to graduate school, stemming from responses to haiku and focusing on mysticism and the challenges of it within a changing world.

Needless to say, I'm grateful for this poem.

Aubrie Cox

                                                     ***

This list could be much longer, but can't, I'm sure, be any shorter. I have tried, to the best of my recall, to arrange the haiku in the order I first met them. For me, they are each an illustration of good writing and I return to them when I'm in need of a reminder of what that is.

Not life-changing so much as life-affirming. The longer I go on in haiku the broader my tastes become, although I see there is nothing particularly "modern" in the group below ... yet.

scampering over saucers –
the sound of a rat.
Cold, cold

    Yosa Buson

Each line (as translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite in The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, published in 1964) is strong in its own right; together they leave us trembling with fear, revulsion and freezing cold.


summer grasses –
all that remains
of warrior's dreams

    Matsuo Basho

Life, death, the futility of war, the power of nature ... all in three lines and as applicable in 2013 as it was in the late 1600s. (Not sure where this translation comes from, but it's my preferred version.)


dusk
up to my ears
in birdsong
               
    John O'Connor, New Zealand

How often we let the busy-ness of our minds and lives dominate. This is a haiku of redemption – letting go the artificiality and falseness of modern life and just being. And what brings this about? The beauty of birdsong. Setting the poem at dusk rather than dawn adds to the feeling of the day's burden being lifted.


thunder-filled clouds –
over the bridge come
jingling-jangling horses

    Cyril Childs, New Zealand

I can "see" this haiku, as well as hear it. The pace and rhythm are surely those of a pair of Clydesdale horses with buffed and burnished coats, plaited manes and tails, and decked out in bells and brasses for a show or fair, stepping in unison and causing everyone they pass to stop and stare. The close heat suggested by the first line adds to the "unreal" sight of the horses. Magic.


foghorns —
we lower a kayak
into the sound

    Chistopher Herold, US

I sometimes forget haiku can be playful and I sometimes overlook the importance of word choice. Here is a perfect teacher and one of my favourites ... and it all hinges on the word "sound".


gentle as a dead friend's hand
resting on my shoulder –
this autumn sunshine

    Nakamura Kusadao

A beautiful lament on the passing of life, both the friend's and the poet's. I first met the poem in The Penguin Book of Japanese verse but prefer this version from Haiku Poetry Ancient & Modern (MQ Publications, London, 2002). No translation credit was given.


river sunrise
        a girl's shadow
                 swims from my ankles

    Lorin Ford, Australia

Yes, thank you, I know full well what my chronological age is, but on the inside ... I also think of this haiku as a "return home" poem where the sunrise and river have triggered a long-dormant memory.


rain, rain ...

      we let her unborn twin
      
return to loam

    Mark Harris, US

In the midst of the deep grief expressed I sense an acceptance that bodes well. A powerful and moving haiku.

Jim Kacian's work never does less than delight and astonish me although I find I can't pick one from the many so this statement will have to stand as acknowledgement of the influence of his body of work.

Sandra Simpson

                                                    ***


Below are some poems that, from memory, alerted me to somewhat 'non-standard' possibilities in haiku, and in that sense made me rethink my approach around the time I was discovering and starting to publish haiku (the mid-to-late 90s).

A pair with similarly appealing pathos and humour:

missing a kick
at the icebox door
it closed anyway
- Jack Kerouac

I open the drawer with nothing in it just to see
- Hôsai Ozaki

Also Hôsai's:

I cough and am still alone

for its astonishing brevity and simplicity. Likewise, Jacques Roubaud's minimal poem (from Dors):

une branche

frotte

la fenêtre


et puis

frotte

la fenêtre


a branch

rubs

the window


and then

rubs

the window

which James Kirkup describes as 'pure haiku' in his essay 'Some Modern European Haikuesque Poets' (in the anthology A Certain State of Mind, 1995 -- a book that I found stimulating, despite its being, as David Burleigh has put it, 'carelessly assembled and [having] no overriding theme').

Another 'haikuesque' set of poems that I found fascinating was Robert Grenier's Sentences (published in the 70s). The fragmentation in many of these was suggestive of possibilities for haiku that hadn't been explored much. e.g.

except the swing bumped by the dog in passing

or the starlight on the porch since when

Martin Shea's classic

moving
           through the criteria---
                              a breeze.

was also eye-opening and memorable for its pivotal use of the unexpectedly abstract word 'criteria'.

And John Ashbery's pieces in haiku mode (from the 80's collection A Wave) seemed to offer a distinctive take on haiku; also marking, in some cases, a boundary of abstraction, e.g.

I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors

Sayumi Kamakura's collection A Singing Blue, a 'quieter' counterpart to her husband Ban'ya Natsuishi's A Future Waterfall, made at least as lasting an impression on me. e.g.,

The swimsuit on,
my soles forget
absolutely everything

The child deep
in green sleep;
the mother sleeps
in purple

Philip Rowland
                                                     

                                              ***

For me, it was, and is, the haiku of Raymond Roseliep that got me started, make me think and rethink my approach to haiku, show me possibilities
for the craft, and keep alive my faith in the genre. He was an innovator in the form during the 19870s-80s, and it was my great luck to study under one of his students, Bill Pauly, professor at Loras College in Dubuque. Roseliep's work is timeless and ageless. His style/voice is one of the reasons that I understand there are many ways to write successful, compelling, and challenging haiku, in both traditional and nontraditional practice. I am also greatly excited about Richard Gilbert's The Disjunctive Dragonfly and do believe Roseliep would embrace the variety of voices writing English-language haiku today.

Three from each of Roseliep's collections, Listen to Light (1980) and Rabbit in the Moon (1983):


lilyhold
on itself
before burst


the cry
is here
where I buried it


flake too quick
for a peephole
to the absolute


        bird in hand
the stirrings
       in a boy


two butterflies
love-knot
the air


your death
in the bird loud air
       no further word

Francine Banwarth

                                                  ***



What haiku changed me as a haiku poet? As a person?

This one by Peggy Willis Lyles:

winter stillness
leaves become
their veins

I heard Peggy read this in June of 2009 at The Haiku Circle in Northfield, MA. She came up from Georgia with her husband, Bill. What Southern manners. She read and we fellow poets listened. Yes, in a circle. Entranced. The nuances. The humor. The heart-felt observations of a life well-lived. And well-written.

Earlier that day, Peggy said that "a haiku is the shortest distance between two hearts." Only someone who'd spent a good part of her life writing haiku can mean something like that. Poetry, Peggy was teaching me that day, is in the art of the simply spoken truth. No more. No less. This poem helps me remember what Poetry is.

winter stillness
leaves become
their veins

Yes, they do don't they. Death becomes life becomes death becomes the cycle of a tree, which is the cycle of us. A portrait of the disintegration of leaves with its descending order of syllables, 4-3-2 acts as a a count-down of sorts. We become our skeletal selves, it seems to say. A return to our original strength. For me, this is a lesson in the multiple levels on which even a six word poem can work, in fact, must work in order to be the most effective. Literal and figurative.

Brevity--there's even more to it than I'd thought. I started to look at poems in a new light.

Poet as cat thief: get in get out before anyone discovers what's missing.

I didn't know I'd been robbed of my emotions.  After all, it was just Peggy, a woman with her words with an image she wanted to share. No ego. No baggage. No glossary of poetic terms necessary. Her words and the order in which she placed them like carefully placed footsteps.

I began to realize that a powerful poem and specifically, a powerful haiku has to have invisible scaffolding holding it up. Let's make it an invisible trellis because it also has to be beautiful. The heart remembers a trellis.

winter stillness
leaves become
their veins

Peter Newton

                                                    ***


I first encountered the Roman poet Horace (65 – 8 BCE) in high school Latin, then more seriously in grad school. All that indirectly prepared me for a "life in letters" (to use an old phrase): teaching, writing, editing, agenting. As an undergraduate, I had a quarrel about Ezra Pound with a professor whom years later I'd learn was famous for haiku. I didn't know anything about haiku until twenty some years later I decided to add a haiku component to a continuing education program at Brown University. But I had been prepared by Horace (and no doubt Ezra Pound), whose lapidary style (as Nietzsche called it) depends on brevity and juxtaposition. Another feature of Horace's style is a "leap" in content prepared by often unnoticed word associations. So when I started to teach haiku (first in order to draw new students to the course, then because students demanded a haiku component), I was prepared to treat the form with great care, knowing that the form carries with it a "mind-set" or "episteme": the kigo in Basho, in conjunction with a "realistic" scene, transforms the scene as if by magic, allowing it to express feelings otherwise muted or repressed. As for Horace, scholarship for Basho has deepened my understanding and enjoyment. My head often tracks a conversation between the Roman poet and the Japanese haijin (see my haibun Accidental Pilgrim, Single Island Press, 2008). What they have in common is vital form, a way of structuring words so that invisible "intimate universals" become visible. This expectation of vital imagery drawing on deep connections – what we may call the fertile void – leaves me dissatisfied with a lot of modern haiku. Today the new Norton anthology provides us a handy canon with which to explore the "mindsets" of modern haiku, perhaps even construct a cultural history of haiku in English. It will be fascinating to discover the tacit assumptions about reality that have reshaped haiku so that it resonates with contemporary expectations.

Tom D'Evelyn

(The following was provided by Richard Gilbert to continue the discussion begun by Michael Dylan Welch above. --FN)


Richard Gilbert:

What I'd add to the discussion on form is the long paper I published with Judy Yoneoka on haiku form and metrics in Japanese and English, and issues of emulation:

http://research.gendaihaiku.com/metrics/haikumet.html

From 5-7-5 to 8-8-8
Haiku Metrics and Issues of Emulation --
New Paradigms for Japanese and English Haiku Form
RICHARD GILBERT and JUDY YONEOKA

Publication: Language Issues: Journal of the Foreign Language Education Center (vol. 1) Prefectural University of Kumamoto, Kumamoto (March 2000) Japan.

Particularly the penultimate section:

A Metrical Approach to English Haiku Based on the Japanese Template:
A Musical Analogy

    http://research.gendaihaiku.com/metrics/total2.html#8d

Also see
The Metrics of Japanese Haiku

http://research.gendaihaiku.com/metrics/total2.html#6

especially,

A Foot-based Template

http://research.gendaihaiku.com/metrics/total2.html#6b

(which begins:)

    Music is not the universal language; rhythm is.
      Plenty of people are tone-deaf, but everyone has a heartbeat.
              - Chico Hamilton, Jazz drummer

Michael McClintock

I have always thought that studying and understanding something you love, including something you would like to do well yourself, or excel at, fall very naturally into a person's daily routine. How have others loved it?  What are the best examples? Poetry has been a lifelong study and occupation. I have learned a few things about the craft of poetry, from poets, of course, but as much from teachers who themselves never wrote a word of it, and that would include common laborers, the uneducated, and children.


Susan Diridoni

The CONCISE & the LYRICAL: interface between haiku & mainstream poetry


Mainstream poets can read as if they are on vacation & expect their readers to join their leisure.  So the brevity of haiku may open to the mainstream poet a more concise landscape: not brevity for the sake of accommodating readers in a rushed state, but rather to aim for a fuller journeying, a more occupied sweep of the poem's arena.  Diane Di Prima said more than a few times (while I studied with her a few years ago) that one can tell how good a poem is within reading a couple of lines. This sounded extreme to me when I first heard it, but I have found it a bracing provisional lens.

Haiku poets can gain from mainstream poets largely in the realm of lyricism.  Specific words that "lift" the reader (never a fan of the overly "simple English" haiku practitioners whose haiku risks being needlessly boring) can be a marriage between a fine word and precise meaning (whether metaphoric or not).  Probably my own "fine word" bias is the result of all the poetry I've read and loved, predominantly contemporary mainstream & other, in my endless search to find thrilling poetry (and to sell the books of poetry that fall out of the thrilling dimension).

For some time, I was rather scornful of the mainstream magazine POETRY, but several years ago, it began to change.  That change resulted in my discovering some poets whose work thrilled me—sometimes foreign & in translation, sometimes "names" in mainstream poetry, some busy in their MFA degrees but without a book yet. I've paid attention to the MFA students & the poetry instructors.  Diane Di Prima strongly dismissed writing programs as regimenting factories—yes, teaching people to write, but is it worth reading?  Rather, she suggested getting a degree in anything—geology!--& it would be better than a MFA.  But, there are exceptions!

In my personal pantheon of contemporary poets, my favorite is Anne Carson, a classicist, doing her own ancient Greek and Latin translations, as well as all her contemporary poetry, prose poems, plays, and two remarkable books, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986) and Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan), (Princeton, 1999).  Her unique "novel in verse,"  Autobiography of Red (1998), tells a contemporary coming-of-age of a young, tormented soul who is also  "Geryon," a winged red monster. A luminous moment occurs when the adolescent Geryon for the first time meets Herakles:

Herakles stepped off the bus from New Mexico and Geryon
came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments
that is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.[italics added]

For me, that description in italics is what would characterize any momentous meeting with a fated love, a love that might be called "the love of one's life."


"The God Fit"  [Glass, Irony and God. [New Directions, 1995]

Sometimes God will drop a fit on you.
Leave you on your bed howling.
Don't take it meanly.

Because the outer walls of God are glass.
I see a million souls clambering up the walls on the inside
to escape God who is burning,

untended.


Anne Carson's recent Antigone (Sophokles) is presented in Antigonick [New Directions, 2012]:

Chorus:
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
                           But if some God shakes your house
                                                                    Ruin arrives
                                                           Ruin does not leave
                       It comes tolling over the generations
It comes rolling the black night salt up from the
Ocean floor
                    And all your thrashed coasts groan

Archives of grief I see falling upon this house
Death on birth birth on death there is no end to it
Some god is piling them on
One last root was reaching up for the light in
                                             The house of Oidipous
But the bloody dust of death
Hacks her down mows her down
All the tall mad mountains of her mind

                               Zeus you win you always win
                                 The whole oxygen of power
                                                        Belongs to you
                                              Sleep cannot seize it
                                               Time does not tire
     Your Mt Olympos glows like one white stone
        Around this law:
Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin

Chorus:
                      Eros, no one can fight you
   Eros, you clamp down on every living thing
      On girls' cheeks on oceans, on wild fields
        Not even an immortal can evade you
         Certainly not a creature of the day
                                 Why,
                           They go mad
 
   You change the levels of a person's mind
       This Haimon crisis is all your doing
                     You shook his blood
              You glow on girls' eyelids
        Who cares about the laws of the land
                 Aphrodite, you play with us

                                   You
                                         Play
   
                                 Deeply

Chorus:
Here we are
In a song about joy
Here we are in a day about dust
                           The dust it takes to house enemies
                            The house it takes to dust justice
                       The justice it takes to dodge a bullet
                         The bullet it takes to justify lovers
         The love in which to delete your own darling
The darling you dust
The dust you disperse . . .

(If these chorus excerpts should interest you, there is something else remarkable about this book: the astounding drawings on translucent vellum pages by Bianca Stone, to overlay the text—thrilling imaginative drawings to complement this unique version of a Greek tragedy.)
Hopefully these excerpts demonstrate the leaps of her imagery, the precision of her descriptions, the irony that tinges her work. On she goes, inventively.


Another mainstream poet I have found enthralling is the elder British poet Geoffrey Hill.  Though often unable to fully grasp his extensive literary and historical allusions, I can be thrilled by the almost visceral weight of his language and his trenchant phrasing.  Interestingly, the most compacted language appeared earliest in his career and to some extent persisted until his chronic depression was more adequately treated.


--excerpt: "Metamorphoses" [For the Unfallen, 1959]

4  Drake's Drum

Those varied dead. The undiscerning sea
Shelves and dissolves their flesh as it burns spray

Who do not shriek like gulls nor dolphins ride
Crouched under spume to England's erect side

Though there a soaked sleeve lolls or shoe patrols
Tide-padded thick shallows, squats in choked pools

Neither our designed wreaths nor used words
Sink to their melted ears and melted hearts.


--excerpt: "Two Chorale-Preludes"  On melodies by Paul Celan [Tenebrae, 1978]

I
AVE REGINA COELORUM
    Es ist ein Land Verloren . . .

There is a land called Lost
at peace inside our heads.
The moon, full on the frost,
vivifies these stone heads.

Moods of the verb "to stare",
split selfhoods, conjugate
ice-facets from the air,
the light glazing the light.

Look at us, Queen of Heaven.
Our solitudes drift by
your solitudes, the seven
dead stars in your sky.


--excerpt: "Two Formal Elegies" [For The Unfallen, 1959]

For the Jews in Europe

Knowing the dead, and how some are disposed:
Subdued under rubble, water, in sand graves,
In clenched cinders not yielding their abused
Bodies and bonds to those whom war's chance saves
Without the law: we grasp, roughly, the song.
Arrogant acceptance from which song derives
Is embedded with their blood, makes flourish young
Roots in ashes. The wilderness revives,

Deceives with sweetness harshness. Still beneath
Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play,
Fierce heart that is the iced brain's to command
To judgment—studied reflex, contained breath—
Their best of worlds since, on the ordained day,
This world went spinning from Jehovah's hand.


Haiku poets—a few of them—can uplift me as effectively as my favorite mainstream poets.  In this select group of thrilling haiku poets, I would say that each of them has a style—and that style is the vehicle of their inquiring minds. In the realm of style, there seems no difference between mainstream & haiku poets, but how would the mainstream poets know this?  One of the popular "styles" in haiku right now is a kind of excess of metaphoric cleverness—which can breed a low-level metaphoric churning.  Some "successful" metaphoric poets (winning competitions, etc.) seem to drop out of the publishing scene. Having seen this happen more than a few times, I wonder if their brains have tired of the game.  A kind of reduction of life into the clever metaphor possibly burns out as a trajectory sooner than the poet ever seeking the way to entrust experience to a newer grid. Scott Metz, profiled in MODERN HAIKU some years ago, could be immediately recognized as a haiku poet following his own private aesthetics—and this singular devotion has persisted to the present. [Regarding my own submissions to 
ROADRUNNER, I feel that I never know what will be accepted, that only by reading a new posting will it become clearer—the ever morphing grid.]  The following ku by Scott Metz appear in: lakes & now wolves [Modern Haiku Press, 2012].


fallen, trampled moss. The month then the year got away   


without child
       I find my wife inside
an inedible mushroom


walrus with its mouth wide open war statistics


Perhaps those haiku poets with clear and recognizable aesthetics would most easily be recognized as kindred poets by mainstream poets.  This has been demonstrated within Roadrunner's "Scorpion Prize," a prize that is chosen by some haiku poets but a by majority of mainstream poets and literary critics and theorists.  So it may not be the whole vast field of haiku that warrants equalizing with mainstream poetry, but those exhibiting most creative aesthetics truly would offer an exchange of valuable models.



Philip Rowland

Haiku offers poets the chance to engage with a contemporary, cross-cultural tradition. It also offers distinctive kinds of concision or cutting as means of compression. ('Mind,' as they say, 'the gap.')

Perhaps what haiku poets can learn most from other poets' work is to stay hungry, i.e., not to get too much of a hang of haiku. The broader the poet's (any poet's) acquaintance with the art form in general, the better the chances of his/her own writing staying fresh.

Peter Yovu

Are there poets who do not write haiku?

From Don Paterson's "Renku: My Last Thirty Five Deaths:"

I.

Blossom-snow.
By noon the pear tree stands
in its white shadow.

VII.

It wasn't death
fogging the window;
it was my breath

Dorothea Grossman:

Children's Department

The library always smells
like this:
an ancient stew
of vinegar and wood.
It's autumn, again,
and I can do anything.


Humberto Ak' abal

Early Hours

In the high hours of the night
stars get naked
and bathe in the rivers.

Owls desire them,
the little feathers on their heads
stand up.


Rae Armantrout

Last lines of "Circuit"

"That's a beautiful truck;
that would cost a lot,
            wouldn't it?"

The silver tanker
leaving the station.



Shinkichi Takahashi

Last lines of "Wind"


I'll live gently
As the wind, flying
Over the town,
My chest full of sparrows.



                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Salvatore Quasimodo

Everyone is alone at the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sunlight:
and suddenly it's evening.

(That last line also serves as the title of the poem).


Marya Rosenberg from ""If I Tell You You're Beautiful, Will You Report Me?": A West Point Haiku Series"

the delicate pinkish
late-afternoon light shines through
the bullet holes.

***

under her muddy
battle-dress uniform--an
orange push-up bra

(This series was chosen by Heather McHugh for The Best American Poetry
2007).


Ko Un

I'd like to buy her some toffee
but I don't have a daughter

as I pass a sidewalk store in autumn

***
Exhausted
the mother has fallen asleep
so her baby is listening all alone
to the sound of the night train

(These are two of four short poems published in the 9/25/06 issue of The New Yorker).


*******************
Did these poets study haiku? Yes. No. Maybe. . . but I'm pretty certain that Poetry, from the very beginning, has studied Haiku. I imagine a woman slowly, carefully, brushing her hair, bringing its shine out, its nuanced tones.

As George Oppen writes: "consciousness// Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,/ which loves itself"

******************

Light within light. Did Roseliep say/imply that-- about haiku?

******************

It is not as clear to me that Haiku has studied Poetry--  going down to the roots. No, haiku is root, approaching, bowing down to and dissolving into the unknown by way of the known.

***********************

You cannot be good by doing only what you are good at.

***********************

At the zoo. A great silverback gorilla sitting alone, at rest, perhaps at peace despite the bustle around him. The shine of his fur, a dull shine on his leather chest. His eyes. Though he is denied the strengthening environment from which he originated, one senses the enormous power of the animal.

"But why doesn't he do something?" a child asks and walks away.


*********************

Buddha.

*********************


A strength of haiku, and of all poetry, all art, a strength some poets and artists often ignore, resides in limits. The first limit imposed on haiku, or perhaps the most obvious, is length. Can anyone doubt the power of brevity?

********************

Restraint is only meaningful when it has the full force of what is withheld behind it.

********************

If one is going to avoid using certain poetic "techniques"-- metaphor, simile, enjambment, rhyme, etc., one had better learn to use them first.

*******************

One of the limits inherent in such a short genre is in the development of sound. Of course, sound can be, and sometimes is, skillfully used in haiku. The sound of a drop of water on a hot wood stove as it seizes up, skitters a bit, and dissipates. Quick like that.

************************

I discover that I've written a haiku that has two or three "ah" sounds in it, and I sense that they somehow encourage an image that has emerged. And I'm pleased about that. 

In a longer poem, I might see the same thing, and I might be compelled to explore those sounds further-- what do they want to say? What other vowel sounds do they want to hang out with? How are they different in the middle of different consonant clusters, or propelled by gutturals and fricatives?

Robert Bly says an interesting thing: "When we sit down to write, we often imagine that thoughts are coming, or feelings are arriving. But actually what are arriving are syllables, each a marriage or affair of vowel and consonant".

(A lot of haiku writers may not like that idea, but even sitting down in front of
a butterfly or a factory smoke stack brings "syllables" to mind).

And I would add that the sounds that come are carrying thoughts and feelings with them. A poem is the utterance of something-- a naming--  that could not be otherwise expressed. There are orphaned feelings, thoughts, ideas and shades of consciousness in our depths which long to be embodied, long for the mirroring validation of the poem, to be, in effect, carried out into the world and sung. To be tried out.

That may be asking too much of a haiku. In such a short genre, it is difficult to develop the metamorphosing qualities of sound. The great challenge of brevity is that it tends to favor wit and the associational mind. A longer poem, skillfully employing sound and rhythm, can counterbalance this. A haiku barely has a body.

Nonetheless I feel I must be ready for it-- ready for whatever sounds/thoughts/feelings/shades of consciousness come my way.


***********************
I've taken the following from Randy Brook's essay on (and here quoting) Raymond Roseliep. : (http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/BrooksRoseliepLoveHaiku.html):

"The poet is an animal with the sun in his belly. He is one breed of the species cited by Luke the Physician as 'a whole body ... filled with light' (11:36).... [H]e imitates the Creator. With language he puts flesh on ideas and feelings; to airy nothing he gives local habitation and name".

*********************


I want to say it is only possible with a serious study of poetry-- finding out what sound can do, how it feels, how it can be inseparable from meaning, as a Tyger is inseparable from the forests of the night.

Or how it can be meaningfully separable. 

*****************************

One way writers of haiku and very brief poems can develop the metamorphosing, echoing, dialectic, counterweighted, underpinning, overtonic, centripetal and centrifugal properties of sound (and rhythm) is through the composition of longer works, of a number of haiku which play with and off each other sonically and thematically, haiku which find themselves at times getting longer, which risk not being haiku, which call for additional, non-occasional, unexpected but necessary poems without which some depth would be denied.

Mark Harris has moved in this direction in his book Burl. John Martone has published numerous sequences which dance around and through single themes.


***************************


I enjoy the way Kay Ryan plays with rhyme.

Intention

Intention doesn't sweeten.
It should be picked young
and eaten. Sometimes only hours
separate the cotyledon
from the wooden plant.
Then if you want to eat it,
you can't.


The rhyming in this poem is obvious. It is a technique. Does it get in the way? Does it get in the way of Poetry, or does Poetry/Consciousness want to love itself like this?

A double, triple, quadruple helix of sound. Up and down Emerson's
"ladder of surprise".


But it's not a haiku.

I would contend, and maybe Kay Ryan would say "rubbish" and call me a nebbish, I would contend that the sounds here (I love "sweeten" with "cotyledon" metamorphosed to "wooden") brought forth the meaning as much as the meaning brought forth the sounds.

Exercise for PY: go through a bunch of your haiku or short poems. Is there a sound which occurs frequently and variously perhaps insistently? Just as Bly talks about "sounds calling to sounds" is it possible that haiku call to haiku, poem to poem?

And are they calling out for another poem, or two, or three? For their lost relatives, for their abandoned friends, for their shadows?

And what's it all about?

********************

Sound. Technique. One could go on in a similar way, with a similar understanding of the benefits of reading outside haiku, in regards to metaphor, image, simile, line breaks . . .

********************

Restraint is the not the same as rejection. Limits are not stone walls, or if they are, they allow me to see and converse with my neighbor. Or just to sense her presence.

There are techniques I may never use in haiku or in other poems I may write. But knowing them, and knowing the power of not using them, and also knowing the power of potential (helixed into the helix of limits)-- something in me stays open, and available to whatever wants to be written.

*********************

And then-- I suppose this is for another time-- there is Blake saying:

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

The power of brevity.

Yes.