The Haiku Foundation Forums

thanks, Jack, I'm not anywhere near as well-published as you. I'm amazed by the number of great poems you have to offer. Most of mine are unpublished, so I'm about out, but here's one more


burl bark grown into a wound a word

yes, Jack, thanks for existing with us through your poems, a valid way to participate in the conversation, and part of haikai tradition.

okay, here's one of mine that explores the different angle i've been trying without much success to elucidate.


moss in a fold of rock or round woman spring rain

Phantom limbs are a common experience for amputees, but we noticed something unusual in Humphrey. Imagine his amazement when he merely watches me stroke and tap a student volunteer's arm--and actually feels these tactile sensations in his phantom. When he watches the student fondle an ice cube, he feels the cold in his phantom fingers. When he watches her massage her own hand, he feels a "phantom massage" that reveals the painful cramp in his phantom hand! Where do his body, his phantom body, and a stranger's body meld in his mind? What or where is his real sense of self?
-- V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain

this business of "becoming" and "transformation" is more than a literary conceit, and that imagination is more real, and connected to the "real" world than we sometimes believe. --Peter

offering these because things are slow around here the past few days, and my thoughts and Peter's have been wandering along similar lines. We can return to poems now, if you like.

Inventions like tool use; art, math and even aspects of language may have been invented
"accidentally" in one place and then spread very quickly given the human brain's amazing
capacity for imitation learning and mind reading using mirror neurons. Perhaps any major
"innovation" happens because of a fortuitous coincidence of environmental circumstances —
usually at a single place and time. But given our species' remarkable propensity for miming,
such an invention would tend to spread very quickly through the population — once it emerged.
Mirror neurons obviously cannot be the only answer to all these riddles of evolution. After
all rhesus monkeys and apes have them, yet they lack the cultural sophistication of humans
(although it has recently been shown that chimps at least do have the rudiments of culture, even
in the wild). I would argue, though, that mirror neurons are necessary but not sufficient: their
emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step. The reason is that once
you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture
can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make
us human. And once this starts happening you have set in motion the autocatalytic process that
culminated in modern human consciousness. --V.S. Ramachandran, Mirror neurons and imitation
learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution

all this
time
slipping

in/
out of

focus
no

matter

no
    one

to see


        --john martone, scrittura povera

yes, John, that is my hope as well.

QuoteYes we can change what we are for periods of time, but whether this is acheived through the use of chemicals, environment, illness, or metaphor these transformations are usually fleeting or impossible to acheive. --John

John, if I understand myself as actually changing, all the time, my understanding of transformation poems might be different from yours.

Quote...instead of being one thing in particular we define ourselves in numerous ways...
--John

I agree, and don't, in that I don't believe we have selves, or at least not individual, fixed selves




grammatical edit

please carry on with your exhaust studies. In the meantime, I hope you don't mind if I return to an earlier thread of thought. Scott Metz wrote:

Quote(the failure to transform; equally, if not more, powerful):

New Year's Eve bath—
I failed to become
a swan

        --Fay Aoyagi

which brings to mind a few other poems that explore expectation and perception. Are they about failed transformations? They are not transcendent. Yet, such moments of awareness and transition can change us.

dropping stone after stone
into the lake    I keep
reappearing

        --George Swede

summer festival—
my Astro Boy mask
has lost its power

        --Fay Aoyagi

After a strip search
old inmates, new inmates
in blue prison garb

        --Johnny Baranski

no, wash the egg off, please.

I thought irreverence might provide insight into a Tohta poem circa 1961. Opacity, and subsequent misunderstanding, was an unfortunate byproduct.

"Although, I think your remarks in an a courteous spirit, I take issue in calling "cops" and "wolves" as a way of demonizing those of different opinions." --Chibi

I did not mean to offend you, and take care never to demonize (as if i had that power) anyone. By cops I meant literally the police in Japan who arrested and harassed (not in a metaphorical way) gendai haiku poets. I used the word wolf in reference to the haiku magazine and to Tohta's haiku group, and my intention was to include Tohta (the political side of him) in my statement.

For what it's worth, I enjoy traditional and modern haiku, written in any language.

"There is no one to one correspondence of language to world (Wittgenstein, Derrida, Barthes, et al) and so expressing a "truth" through the fantastical or metaphoric in poetry is in its very nature." --Jack

yes, did squids fluoresce above Tohta's head as he worked in the bank all those years ago? And on a different day, did he get into an argument about haiku, go out into the street, climb onto a bike and roar away? Did he see a motorcycle go by? Did he become one? Does he remember? We are discussing an act of creation. The end result is the words, and the author himself may not know all their sources.

and to become a motorcycle, to be one, is to become armored. To do battle?

to ride on a motorcycle or any open air vehicle at high velocity is a speedrush. A miscalculation in steering or leaning, a pebble in the road, a blink of an eye at the wrong moment . . . if you want to live, attention to the operation at hand is vital. Put out of your mind such minor matters as syllable counts and nationalism and warring saijiki and cops and wolves. Go, Kaneko, go, but remember to write the haiku down later.

we will have to ask her if her application was accepted. What ensued after can remain her secret.
I like both of your crab poems, parody or no.

As has been pointed out, Kacian's poem has multi-stops that inspire a variety of readings and evoke various responses. One, for me, is a shift that replaces the image of the author-in-a-tent-in-the-rain with the image of a climate that i see as an oblong roughly human-sized pinkish zone reduced to warm mist and atoms. A simple way of communicating the author's oneness with nature, and funny--the communion didn't happen on a mountaintop, but in a tent. Don't know if the rest of you read that as humorous, but in the context of that reading, the use of the word become becomes more fitting. Just my take.