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I'd add to Richard's mea culpa, in reply #67, re editorial style of presentation of haiku having perhaps to do with to its future as a genre, that this can be seen as a (creative) kind of criticism -- with a role to play in haiku criticism. Whether, for instance, a normative 3-line haiku appears among similar haiku or juxtaposed with a long-lined short poem in stanzas with a title may affect the kind of attention you pay to it. The change of pace will give you pause; the formal differences might make you consider the choice of form -- its appropriateness or limitation -- more carefully than you would otherwise; at the same time you might read with a keener eye for what the two poems have in common, how they relate thematically and play off or deepen one another. On a larger scale, this may touch on a new sense of poetic community (or commonality), which may in turn shift the critical mindset or frame of reference.

Re. reply #68 from Jack Galmitz:

For what it's worth, Jack, I wasn't presuming anything about what you were or weren't aware of, in connection with the Riding Graves passage; just took a thought you posed as a question as such. And as I wrote, in quoting I wasn't subscribing to their view of "dead movements" -- agree that there's nonsense in that -- but was trying to focus on what struck me as interesting rather than nonsensical in their argument. Okay, what was meant as a side-note has taken us off-topic, so enough of that.

All the best,
Philip

To attempt to answer Richard's questions in reply #64:

I'm afraid I can't really "scope out the situation" re mainstream anthologies and haiku (at least, not without more thought than I'm capable of right now), though when it comes to anthologies focused on short poems, tend to think that the omission of haiku is largely due to lack of awareness on the part of the editors, or their being biased towards recognizable (well-known) names.

When I wrote,
"My guess is that haiku – perhaps groups or sequences of haiku that resemble average-length or longer poems – will creep in to such anthologies where it forms part of the work by poets who write in other forms as well"
I didn't have any particular poets in mind, was thinking of possible future scenarios, though yes, Ashbery first published his "37 Haiku" as a group in the magazine Sulfur, and Martone tends to present his poems in clusters. I guess I was also thinking of how some poets, notably Rae Armantrout, often construct poems from several very short pieces separated by asterisks or such, that connect in ways that are quite oblique.

Where I wrote of the desired
"wider appreciation of the best of haiku in English by other poets and readers of poetry, even if that's mostly in the realm of little magazines and small press publications (as is the case for most contemporary poetry),"
you asked,
"Would it be possible -- here (or elsewhere on the THF site) -- to present a cogent shortlist of those online and print magazines you are thinking of?"

This will be eclectic rather than cogent – I tend to follow my nose, and to think that poets who write haiku should try submitting to whichever magazines they enjoy reading or are interested in (after all, if you like some of the work that the editor has chosen, perhaps s/he might like yours as well) – but off the top of my head, some poetry mags that have been or might be open to haiku (though don't quote me!) are:
Print: Shearsman, Versal, CLWN WR, Poetry Salzburg Review, HQ Magazine (not sure if that's still going), Longhouse (prolific publishers of booklets), Inch, Bongos of the Lord (defunct?), Vallum, Hummingbird, Lilliput Review, Poetry Kanto
Online: Big Bridge, Ekleksographia, Otoliths, Oyster Boy Review, Cordite
and of course there's always (touch wood) Noon: journal of the short poem...

As for 'how haiku might be "sequenced" within stories which contain "non-poetic" information'
as compared to more traditional modes of presentation, it's a case of both/and, if possible, I hope.

Karen Cesar rightly points out that the haiku anthologies published by commercial publishers are reaching a wider audience. But perhaps a distinction needs to be made between attracting a popular audience (to a small but presumably not unprofitable extent) and serious recognition by "official verse culture" (as Bernstein has called it). How many reading lists for higher educational courses in modern and contemporary poetry are any of those haiku anthologies on, for instance? Which poetry journals, other than specialist haiku ones, have they been reviewed in? Where are the haiku in other, widely respected poetry anthologies – except perhaps the token sample by poets represented mainly by the other kinds of poetry they wrote? Haiku does sometimes put in an appearance under broader cultural headings, e.g., What Book?! Buddha Poems from Beat to Hip-Hop, and occasionally a sequence of haiku by a poet whose take on it bears little resemblance to that esteemed by the "haiku community" makes it into the pages of The Best American Poetry or the like. Whether any haiku that has come out of the community merits inclusion in anthologies like The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry or The Oxford Book of Short Poems is another question. (I do think an anthology such as the latter – which was reissued, unrevised, in 2003 – should have included some haiku, by the way.) My guess is that haiku – perhaps groups or sequences of haiku that resemble average-length or longer poems – will creep in to such anthologies where it forms part of the work by poets who write in other forms as well. But the more immediate, desirable thing, in my view, is simply the wider appreciation of the best of haiku in English by other poets and readers of poetry, even if that's mostly in the realm of little magazines and small press publications (as is the case for most contemporary poetry).

Ron Silliman's recognition (as judge of the William Carlos Williams award for that year) of The Unworn Necklace was great news, though it seems to have been a bit of a one-off. It's not as if Silliman has followed through by promoting other fine collections of or with haiku, though he did post a joint review of Haiku 21, Jim Kacian's long after and John Martone's Ksana on his blog. So perhaps I'm being unfair: that's a fair bit of interest shown by a critic who covers such a wide range of work. But where are the others?

Revisiting Silliman's comments on The Unworn Necklace... the following paragraph sums it up:
"If slam poets & visual poets go around thinking that nobody takes their genres seriously as literature, haiku poetry has been off the map altogether – a genuinely popular literary art form that receives no attention whatsoever from what Charles Bernstein would call Official Verse Culture unless it is for a new translation of one of the classics, or work by a poet, such as Anselm Hollo, already widely known and respected for writing in other forms."

To respond, first, to Jack's thoughts on the Riding and Graves extract from A Survey of Modernist Poetry: when they write (disapprovingly) of "a natural separation" being assumed (by Imagists and the like) to exist "between the reader and the subject," by "subject" I think they just mean "what something is about." Yes, they were proposing an alternative "modernism" (though keep in mind that this – in 1927 -- was an early use of the term); and they do discuss poems by Eliot, Pound, et al critically in light of their view. Needless to say, in quoting I'm not subscribing to their view of other modernist movements as "dead" (valuable as it is to critique their limitations, as did the Objectivists with respect to Imagism, for instance) or to the ideal of poetry as purely self-referential, though don't we always try to let a poem as far as possible "interpret itself" (as R & G suggest) in trying to make sense of it? Isn't the extent to which, in dwelling on a poem, we keep finding layers or webs of interrelated meaning one measure of its excellence?
     
At any rate, it's an interesting "ideal" (as well as a kind of antidote to Imagism etc.) to which some of Riding's poems in particular come close. Hard to locate, for instance, much "outside" reference in the poem of hers they quote as an example of "what might be called a modernist poem," "The Rugged Black of Anger" -- which, they claim, seems difficult only because it so straightforwardly "says what it means." Here's the first stanza:

The rugged black of anger
Has an uncertain smile-border.
The transition from one kind to another
May be love between neighbour and neighbour
Or natural death; or discontinuance
Because, so small is space,
The extent of kind must be expressed otherwise;
Or loss of kind when proof of no uniqueness
Confutes the broadening edge and discourages.

I suppose part of my point in quoting from Riding and Graves was (on the topic of criticism) to raise the question of whether "the principle that poetry was [merely] a translation of certain kinds of subjects into the language that would bring the reader emotionally closest to them," which R & G consider to have been taken "for granted" by "dead movements" such as Imagism, has tended to be taken too much for granted by writers of haiku in English. Perhaps one could say (to adopt R & G's terms) that an excellent haiku does much more than "render a poetical picture or idea existing outside the poem"; that it has more of "the character of a creature by itself." Examples, examples, I hear Peter say... so here, on the basis of this rather eccentric criterion for excellence, are a couple of haiku that spring to mind (from the latest issue of NOON), by Peter Yovu and Cherie Hunter Day, respectively, both of which seem more creaturely-by-themselves (and more self-referential) than most:

words furred over my awkward animal toward you now

an ashen language in the drive-by of our bones

And here are a couple of excellent 'oldies' in the same line of the tradition as the above, by Martin Shea and Robert Boldman:

Moving
     through the criteria –
                           a breeze

leaves blowing into a sentence

Then I think of Mark Harris's "burl bark grown into a wound a word"... Eve Luckring's "the metallic taste / of what / I can't imagine / negative tide"... (It seems there's been more recurrence of language "itself" as subject-matter in contemporary haiku over the past 10-15 years, giving the impression that it's been catching up, as it were, with developments in the wider scene of postmodern poetry.)

Jack also commented on WCW'S "no ideas but in things," an idea that relates closely, of course, to haiku. To follow up briefly, here's George Oppen interpreting it in a way I find helpful: 
"I have always wondered whether that expression didn't apply to the construction of meaning in a poem—not necessarily that there are out there no ideas but in things, but rather that there would be in the poem no ideas but those which could be expressed through the description of things." (from an interview with L.S. Dembo in 1968).

I've just seen Peter's latest post; very much agree with his statement: "I suspect many editors [of publications not specialized in haiku] are most open to work that, while it may have a clear form, plays with that form and also tests it. In a sense this is what poetry (or any creative act) is – a pushing against (womb, world, reality) until something is born." Surely "excellence" is hardly possible without some sort of "testing" of the genre in which one is writing.

Speaking from my own little patch, certainly these are qualities that I'm looking for in choosing what to include in NOON: journal of the short poem, in which none of the haiku are labelled as such; nor, in my opinion, need they be. I want readers to encounter them as poems; and it's always pleasing when poets and readers who have had, to my knowledge, little or nothing to do with the haiku scene, mention having found certain haiku from an issue particularly interesting and want to seek out more of that poet's work.

Also good to find Peter's "answer" to the question I mentioned hoping to raise in connection with the Riding and Graves passage, where he suggests that "Qualities such as attention to the sounds and rhythms of words or to the image as act of imagination rather than reported picture [the latter akin to Riding's and Graves's "rendering of a poetical picture ... existing outside the poem"] ... are rare in haiku." I would hope, however, that many of the poems in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years do show "such attention"; likewise, some "testing" (even, subtly, in many of the more "normative" haiku therein).

Richard cited Helen Vendler among other inspiring critics; problems with anthologies have also been mentioned—omissions from the new edition of Postmodern American Poetry; in an earlier thread, HIE. Peter Yovu also said something interesting (though I can't find it now) about Craig Dworkin's reading of a haiku by Cherie Hunter Day (looking "into" her words). All of which reminded me of some comments on Vendler's editing of The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, by another fine critic, Charles Bernstein. His argument (against, in part, complacency in the judging of excellence) seems relevant to some aspects of the discussion here. This is from his verse-essay, "Artifice of Absorption" (in A Poetics, Harvard University Press, 1992):

... As Vendler puts it,
"When we first read a poem we read it
illusionistically; later we may see its art."
Vendler's selections, insofar as they
do display linguistic self-consciousness, are
restricted to doing so in terms of discursive
stylistic practices. Disjunction
is almost entirely absent from the poems selected.
...
Vendler is very much under the spell of
realist & mimetic ideas about poetry. In this
sense, she still has much to learn from Stevens &
Ashbery. ...
... But perhaps the most irritating thing about
Vendler's manner of argument is that it is always
referring to what "all" poems do, making it
impossible for her to even consider that some poems
may come into being just because they don't do what
some other poems have done. Vendler says
she hopes readers will be provoked by some of the
anthologized poems to say—"'Heavens, I recognize
the place, I know it!' It is the effect every poet
hopes for." I would hope
readers might be provoked to say of some poems,
"Hell, I don't recognize the place or the time or
the 'I' in this sentence. I don't know it."

Earlier in this thread, Michael Dylan Welch and others argued for promoting the work of the best haiku poets so as to reach a wider audience. I'd add that it might be as important for the poets themselves to reach other audiences by reading and submitting their poems to publications that don't specialize in haiku (but might, judging from the poet-reader's interest in the work published there, be interested), despite the reduced chances of acceptance. This process could also be seen as a useful kind of criticism, especially if one agrees with the idea that "Poetry has no intrinsic categories," as Laura Riding and Robert Graves state in their Pamphlet against Anthologies (1928).

Now I can't resist sharing a provocative passage from their closely related Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), in which they present their idea of an "ideal" or "genuinely modernist" poem:

"The ideal modernist poem is its own clearest, fullest, and most accurate meaning. Therefore the modernist poet does not have to talk about the use of images 'to render particulars exactly', since the poem does not give a rendering of a poetical picture or idea existing outside the poem, but presents the literal substance of poetry, a newly-created thought-activity: the poem has the character of a creature by itself. Imagism, on the other hand, and all other similar dead movements, took for granted the principle that poetry was a translation of certain kinds of subjects into the language that would bring the reader emotionally closest to them. It was assumed that a natural separation existed between the reader and the subject, to be bridged by the manner in which it was presented."

Cherie – many thanks for your response to "breeze a synonym for ash", much appreciated (esp. as one reviewer gave it as an example of my being sometimes "too cryptic" – which perhaps goes to show how subjective these things can be). I also appreciate that you quoted the poem as it first appeared, rather than in the misjudged, slightly revised form in which it appeared in my collection before music.

One further correction: Scott Metz's poem reads:

the river entering the
sea a sheet of
paper

[no "as" -- a significant difference, I think]

Since Emma Bolden was mentioned, let me quote also the poem that immediately precedes/leads into Metz's (in the issue); juxtaposition being another kind of criticism, perhaps:

THE BEST I CAN SAY OF ANYTHING IS THAT IT WILL END

I am a liar. Look: under these clothes I am hiding
a body. I'm waiting for an axe, a ditch. I'm shopping

for cement shoes, a lake so dark that none
of its languages have words for surface or shore.

http://noonpoetry.com/issues/
(See also for correct lineation of Anna Arov's poem.)

Quote from: eluckring on January 26, 2014, 07:55:55 PM
Wow, there is a lot here to take in here,
from *bee-bucks* to quantum field theory.

I'm still wending my way through all this, but
grateful for all who shared their thoughts.

Tom, in your post,

the river entering the
sea as a sheet of
paper

This poem is by Scott Metz, not Emma Bolden.

It is elegant, I agree, and your notion of the
"non-identical return" ( if I am actually understanding what you mean by it)
expresses well how it works.

Many thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful comments -- much appreciated.

To clarify the following question of Richard's:   

"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."

In fact, I believe that there is only one longer work from which we extracted portions and presented them as haiku: Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". And Jim discusses this choice in some detail on pp. 316-17. There are other instances of "found haiku" in HIE, but they are complete poems.

To respond to Paul's: "Should our 'constructions' be more clouded to be taken seriously? But that seems to fly in the face of clarity."

Armantrout's suggestion, from Eve's post above, seems to help answer that question: "but clarity need not be equivalent to readability. How readable is the world? There is another kind of clarity that does not have to do with control, but with attention, one in which the sensorium of the world can enter as it presents itself."

If readability is not necessarily equivalent to clarity, a poem may appear to be "clouded" or difficult but prove, given our full attention, astonishingly clear.

Peter asked whether it's possible to give examples of 'haiku that derive from objectivism, and haiku that derive from imagism': Not sure that it is, clearly, except for the haiku written by poets directly involved in those movements – and even then, it's worth remembering that 'objectivist' was a name that Zukofsky suggested only at the request of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, for the 1931 issue in which Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Bunting, Williams, Rexroth et al appeared. (Zukofsky later wrote, 'I said objectivist, and they [the 'history books' writers] said objectivism and that makes all the difference.')

My impression is that Imagist haiku tended to be more literary, classicist or orientalist: e.g., Pound's metro poem and 'Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord' (beautiful poem) and Lowell's 'Autumn Haze'; Objectivist haiku or haiku-like poems to be more down-to-earth, urban and contemporary, e.g. Reznikoff's

Among the heaps of bricks and plaster lies
A girder, still itself among the rubbish

And 'About an excavation / a flock of bright red lanterns / has settled.'

A little-known poem of Oppen's – one that he didn't consider worthy of inclusion in his first collection Discrete Series – can be read as a response to Pound's metro poem:

The pigeons fly from the dark bough
              unleaved to the window ledge;
There is no face.

The 'precious' elements of Pound's poem are gone: the 'petals', 'the apparition of these faces', the poised tone. Oppen also wrote: 'The weakness of Imagism [is that] a man writes of the moon rising over a pier who knows nothing about piers and is disregarding all that he knows about the moon.' Does this stance align him more or less closely with ELH?

There have been many strands of later poetry that owe a lot to the Objectivists: hard to imagine Theodore Enslin or Harvey Shapiro (both of whom wrote some haiku-like short poems) without Oppen, for instance; or Creeley or Grenier (some of whose 'Sentences', esp., could well qualify as experimental haiku), without Zukofsky -- his play with sounds and attention/weight granted to the 'small words'. Richard Gilbert's haiku, 'as an and you and you and you alone in the sea' suddenly springs to mind.

Thomas A Clark, an inheritor of the Objectivists (Basil Bunting in particular?) has written many poems closely akin to haiku. And John Martone, whose careful weighing and fracturing of words and phrases in many poems (good examples of 'linking the phenomenal object with an experiencing, language-using subject'?) owes something to objectivism – more so than to imagism, I'd say. But this is not to claim that Martone's haiku are 'derived from objectivism', just that his work is entwined with strands of the Objectivist legacy.

On the other hand, I remember reading Rae Armantrout describe her early work as 'neo-imagist', and her giving the following poem (co-incidentally in 17 syllables?) as an example:

                VIEW

Not the city lights. We want

    -the moon-

                       The Moon
none of our own doing!

Perhaps this resonates interestingly, or ironically, with Oppen's point about the 'weakness of Imagism'. At any rate, when I read the poem, rightly or wrongly, I imagine the first mention of the moon - the oddly hyphenated, lower-case one – as the actual moon (as it's noticed, the speaker not sure at that point where the poem's going to go, or what her 'view' is), re-appearing all too soon capitalized, beginning to be subject to our 'control', which (as the last line exclaims) is not what she wants at all.

I very much agree with what Peter says in his last post about wanting, mostly, just 'to write poetry', and starting upon a poem (with some sort of seed in mind) as a 'process of discovery,' working towards rather than writing 'from' clarity.

Excuse the mess!

Thanks, Eve, for reminding me of that Armantrout quote. It's a useful distinction (between clarity and readability; or attention-based vs. controlling clarity), which chimes with Oppen's thought and, in a way, with the general relation of Objectivism to Imagism, which Michael Davidson sums up neatly: "Objectivism served as a corrective to (not a repudiation of) Imagism's faith in the visual by linking the phenomenal object with an experiencing, language-using subject" (Oppen, New Collected Poems, xxxvi). As Oppen himself wrote, his intention was to "construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry, from the imagist intensity of vision."

Constructing a method of thought may not sound very haikuey, and as Don says, "the intellect is a fuzz ball – a theory mongering absence of clarity – a co-creator of chaos". I imagine Oppen would largely agree, aware of the dangerous power of the mind and the "frightening" aspect of words. But his response would also seem to be that the chaos (so much a part of our world) must be faced, and that if one keeps striving "out of poverty / to begin // again     impoverished / of tone of pose ..." ("Song, The Winds of Downhill"), thinking and speaking ("constructing") with great care and sincerity, clarity might be achieved – the words "earned," truth restored to them. A previously uncollected poem in the New Collected articulates this faith:

A poetry of the meaning of words
And a bond with the universe

I think there is no light in the world
but the world

And I think there is light

Much as Tom describes haiku as "ultimately open to mystery of finite existence, that there is anything at all," Oppen's writing is marked by a strong sense of awe or amazement. His well-known "Psalm" begins:

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!

And ends:

                                     The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

The poem also serves as a fairly straightforward example of his "linking the phenomenal object with an experiencing, language-using subject": "Their eyes ... The roots ... Their paths ... The small nouns ..."

My impression is that contemporary (roughly speaking, 21st C?) English-language haiku tend to involve the "experiencing, language-using subject" more often or more explicitly than used to be the case. I agree with Tom: "Perhaps objectivism rather than imagism provides the central discourse for the topic clarity." At least, I find it the more interesting and relevant discourse.

An all-too-brief comment, with so much opened up by these field notes, but Don Baird's topic of "clarity" – his thought being that "The art of writing haiku is the art of writing, living and speaking from clarity rather than chaos" – made me want to mention George Oppen, for whom, as Eliot Weinberger says in his Preface to Oppen's New Collected Poems, clarity "was a favorite word." In "Of Being Numerous," for instance, Oppen writes:

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,
I don't mean that much can be explained.

Clarity in the sense of silence.

And in "Route":

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful
            thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity

It seems significant that Oppen speaks of his "motive" to "achieve" clarity, as this implies the difficulty or struggle involved: that clarity must be earned. For (also from "Route"):

Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the
            'heartlessness' of words.

Thus – Weinberger again: "Oppen's struggle for 'clarity' ... did not result in the kind of small perfection of unadorned speech achieved by Reznikoff and Niedecker, poems that reached what Zukofsky called 'total rest.' Oppen's poems represent the struggle itself ..."

Which is too big a topic to go into here, but it could be interesting to reflect on where haiku comes into this (or to compare with Don's idea of speaking "from" clarity), as well as the question of clarity, in poetry, more generally.

And to put Oppen's sense of clarity into the perspective of the opening lines of "Of Being Numerous," which may resonate more clearly with haiku poetics:

There are things
We live among 'and to see them
Is to know ourselves'.

Peter's mention of Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" and photographs "with uncanny compositional qualities" reminds me of Roland Barthes' idea of the "punctum" in Camera Lucida; the punctum being the piercing quality of (from a detail in) a photograph, that which "escapes" language, a quality similar, perhaps, to what the best haiku possess.

"The decisive moment" also made me think of a title of a more recent book about photography by Geoff Dyer: The Ongoing Moment (which i haven't yet read, though I've enjoyed his other books). Decisive and ongoing... seems to sum it up.