Richard Gilbert1) Concerning haiku, how do you regard the current state of criticism? That is, criticism of individual poems and poets, of collections, anthologies etc., and also of the genre in general?
So little of it, so few places for it.
2) What more or different, if anything, would you like to see?
More thinking out of the box; open-mindedness. Fresh criticism that
inspires poets and readers to compose freely, and read with newfound passion, interest, intensity; to witness critical ideas presented through new media as creative genre expressions; the THF forum, its various blogs and their comments, represent one example; criticism may also extend to poetry, video, documentary, biography; greater academic rigor.
3) As you see it, what role does the “haiku community” play in criticism? Would you like to see it play a different role? How so?
Blinds > mysterious mirrors. Words are also things, in a way. Substances, forms, shapes. Often half-hidden, yet revealing, even as they limit. It's thought that nouns may be the last parts of speech to evolve. Nouns seem the most concrete things, yet conceiving a symbolic-represented engram (word) for the thing is an exceptionally abstract act; a cognitive tour de force. Who speaks, and to what world, and for what cause, what reason, with what evidence, to what effect? Paz wrote that the poem is minimally “two.” Audience, even as dream, is a noun, that is. Don’t we struggle with invisibility, questions of home, past and future, societal eventualities, and increasingly, planetary ecology? Haiku community isn’t unitary: diverse groups worldwide share this common interest.
One question is how haiku-critical exploration might enlarge its scope to reach beyond the genre, to speak to those interested in poetry, full stop. Will “haiku community” as such recede into mouse-holes of somnolence? To see things fresh, having something to push against: enervations inherent in “tradition.”
3+ (Earlier written to Peter in a chatty letter): I’ve been musing lately that:
There are readers
There are poets
There are critics
There is community
There is sociality
There are group networks
There are group functions.
Among these, participants have differing needs, goals and expectations. For instance:
If you are fractured, do haiku represent:
Sanity, purity, healing, therapy?
If you are urgent, do haiku represent:
Social challenge, exploration, agon?
If you are tired, do haiku represent:
Freshness, re-invigoration, novelty?
If you are bored, do haiku represent:
Surprise, delight, reversal of expectation?
If you like language-interaction with consciousness, do haiku represent:
Novel language use, coinage, neologism, experiment?
If you like lineage and form, do haiku represent:
Continuity missing in culture, or in life at large?
If one is relatively socio-economically stable, do haiku represent:
A lifestyle choice, a set of values, mores, an ethical base?
Some of the above queries may fit for poetry in general, yet others seem more genre-specific. This itself is critically interesting, don't you think? As a community, visiting various groups and symposia, are we overwhelmingly white, middle-class, bourgeois? Or should that read "of the well-educated professional class ,and successful"? Would the average age of our community be somewhere north of 50? Should we take an interest in new poets who are 20—30 something? Where are they, where’s the new talent? By all means let’s invite them in. I sometimes think we are really going somewhere, but then have doubts.
Actually, my thoughts and planned campaign of a haiku sailing pilgrimage around Japan is a critical response (and performance art piece) relating directly to all of the above. I hope to reach a larger audience; to connect more expansively: haiku < > society.
4) Can you recall a review or any piece of critical writing which stands out for you as a model for what you might like to see more of?
Good criticism feeds mind and soul! Kermode, Perloff, Bloom, Benjamin, Vendler, others. Now and again, The London (and NYT, and LA) Review of Books—all have enriched my life. The essays and prose works of Octavio Paz, “Testaments Betrayed” by Kundera, many additional works.
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Alan Summers"What really constitutes good writing in haiku as poetry?"
George Szirtes had this to say about haiku (22 January 2014
“Haiku form, in the 5-7-5 syllable sense, is one of those readily fitted for Twitter with its 140-character limit. I rarely thought to write haiku before going on Twitter, but once on there I experimented a good deal, writing about the form itself before going to write seriously in it. I do now and compose ever more frequently in series treating each haiku as a self-complete poem that then joins with others in some narrative or dramatic form. The writing of haiku has brought out something in my work, possibly a kind of plain-spokenness and a greater willingness to engage with the abstract. I save the absurd and the tangentially poetic for prose.”I’ve met George Szirtes on a few occasions, but we never discussed haiku. He is also a fellow consultant on an online literary magazine which contained a substantial section on haiku including a short essay by myself. Many poets choose to go the 575 route, perhaps because it feels lyrical, without the extreme brevity that regular haiku writers use. The adaptation of the Japanese cutting technique called kire, in haiku, is not something that is easy for many poets to read into a verse, and understand, perhaps it’s too alien? I wonder if there are two main camps, haiku as haiku and haiku as poetry. Oddly I’ve rarely experienced difficulties with the general public understanding a haiku poem, but poets regularly writing outside the haiku market do appear to have some or great difficulty at times.
Why is this I wonder? I don’t have any ready or clever answers. I just know that haiku appears to be too sophisticated even for some poets regularly published in the best of literary journals. I experiment with various approaches to haiku, and the puzzlement however open appears the same: I feel that 575 haiku will always have a place in poet’s hearts, where they need more words, and at least have the equivalent to a line of poetry.
There are many people who only write haiku as tweets, and consider 140 characters just enough for a haiku, whereas for many here we could easily accommodate at least two haiku, and even start a third. Perhaps it is a combination of the attempt to utilise the kireji cutting, making a tiny verse into two smaller verses surrounded by an acre of white space that bamboozles many, including experienced close readers, and poets?
"What really constitutes good writing in haiku as poetry?" Is it engaging in more communication outside the regular haiku groups that we haunt? Does outreach, guest-readings, and talks, school, college and university visits, and performances help? How many regular haiku writers visit educational establishments?
Have we gone so minimalist that it is impossible for the public - who are aware of 575 verse, and also possibly read some translation versions of classic haiku from Japan - to be allowed on the same page any more? Are we in fact excluding the very people we wish to have included?
Before regular performance poetry events many page only poets grudgingly gave live readings, mumbling into their books, avoiding eye glance or eye lock, wary of those who even loved their work, and understood it or were prepared to. Is there a danger that we risk those dark ages, despite a huge movement of people enjoying live poetry?
In Bristol (England, U.K.) I remember having to do crowd control for a poetry slam. Bristol was the bigger scene, bigger than London, and poets were even interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight flagship program. I’ve even had to move two haiku poets to the top floor of a bookstore for health and safety reasons, due to popularity, excitement, overcrowding, to continue their book signings. So it can happen to haiku poets too.s
Poets should be communicators, surely? Are we front line reporters coming back with what we’ve witnessed, or not? Shouldn’t we be both across the page and across the room at the party? Something is missing, despite the recent surge of quality books around haiku that should appeal to the public. Nowadays there is more to poetry than just good writing, but it helps, if only to start from there, and then engage, not as soldiers, but fellow communicators. After all, the age of cellphone cameras, selfies, and constant social media interconnecting is upon us, and haiku has always embraced new media from Basho onwards.
It will be interesting to see the impact of the two recent books of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton) and Where the River Goes (Snapshot Press) this year into next year, plus more big books on the way.
Next time I meet George Szirtes I will certainly touch on haiku, maybe even have a haiku book to hand.
Alan Summers, With Words
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Kristen Deming Someone wrote that "Thoughtful criticism itself is an art and a creative act."
The question of criticism led me to think more about the role and responsibilities of the poetry critic/reviewer.
Literary criticism is about the reader: teaching him, guiding him, and putting the work being reviewed into some context or historical perspective. It is not about the critic himself or his ego.
I admire those in the haiku community who step forward to write criticism and reviews. We rely on them to be honest without causing pain; to tell us what works and what doesn't work in a constructive way.
In my opinion, haiku criticism/reviews have been excellent for the most part, and gently done. If there has been any hesitation in being more assertively critical, it might be worry about breaking the "wa" (harmony) of the haiku community. However, the open exchange of ideas is worth the risk.
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George SwedeScattering Amplitudes
Recent discussions here and elsewhere have attempted to provide explanations for the evolution of English-language haiku in the 21st century. They have been brave attempts to understand haiku that are often incomprehensible, at least in terms of established ideas about the form. Perhaps what we need are concepts from outside the realm of literary theory that can illuminate gendai or the new haiku.
I have found a recent discovery in physics that might help. It is the amplituhedron, ”a jewel-like geometric object” that greatly simplifies calculations about how particles interact. It seems to make unnecessary two bedrock assumptions of physics, locality and unitarity (Natalie Wolchover,
Quanta Magazine, 27Sep13):
"Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature".
Perhaps established ideas about the haiku are also not fundamental. Why not use the amplituhedron as a model for stimulating new and vital thoughts about what really is haiku’s true nature. But first, more from Wolchover:
"The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding".
Isn’t the collision of images the primary techniques of gendai haiku poets.? And, the concept of “scattering amplitudes” might be useful for explaining what happens when images collide.
(
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ , accessed January 22, 2014)
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Mark HarrisPoets are often leery of literary critics. People who write haiku have a pronounced aversion to “critical thought” and other such wordings that emphasize intellect over what you might call heart. At the same time, people want their work to be read with as much care as they gave to the creation.
To me, the sort of exploration and dialogue Peter encourages through Field Notes is inspiring. The ability to write critically about poems on a level that enlightens is rare. Few are so gifted. While that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from thinking through and writing down our critical impulses, we might do well to pause and remember kindness.
A friend and I touched on this topic in an email exchange a few days ago. I wrote:
“It is difficult for me to write about poems, in part because I am leery
about unbalancing the poet's words. You know, every sound and rest and
letter is creating a whole that can be changed by what the critic hangs
onto, or bolsters, or tears down. Violence can be done. Maybe more
insidious, the poem can be taken, made the critic's in a way. So, critical
writing that is constructive must be wrought with attention and
delicacy.
You have a special talent for that--I am not up to it.
When last year I tried to explicate to you a few of my own poems, I could
not get the balance right, and kept adding information, sapping energy
and mystery from the original until I regretted saying anything.
Comedians know this--once you stop to explain a joke, it's no longer
funny, the timing's shot and you might as well exit stage left.”
There’s the desire for silence, for leaving well enough alone. And yet, I often hear people talk about how they struggled to find just the right word to complete a haiku. What makes that word “right”? There’s the beginning of a conversation that may challenge our individual assumptions. The good critic can help us there.
After Seamus Heaney’s death this past August, I turned to my copy of his
Opened Ground: Selected Poems. The collection concludes with
The Nobel Lecture [1995], which I’ll quote here:
“Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly
realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. The child in
the bedroom listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish
home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up
from behind both the signals of some other distress, that child was
already being schooled for the complexities of his adult predicament, a
future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings variously
ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, skeptical, cultural, topical,
typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible.”
In my view, that’s an apt observation of how we navigate our worlds, so full of various and conflicting signals—as in the voices of critics, for example. Does it bother me that my own contending discourses are “impossible,” taken all together? On the contrary, that’s where I hope to begin.
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Don BairdIt is very difficult to write a critique whether it is in a genre of music, art, or poetry, et al. Creative art categories often have rules; they are just as often ignored - the artist's creative force looking for a way out - to be set free. A critic must understand the boundaries (if any) of the art form under his/her scrutiny before he/she can write even the first word. Haiku style has become wildly varied while contentions continue as to what it is - are there boundaries - is their structure? This atmosphere makes it nearly impossible to be a critic of haiku without sounding like a know-it-all-windbag of a pit-bull dog.
I imagine if a poet writes exactly the same style the critic enjoys, the poet will do well in the review. However, if the critic is of a different sort than the poet, the poet just might find the review contentious - even hateful.
Critics are forgotten, however. The poets and their work live forever. Beethoven was hated by a critic at the beginning of his career. Later, down the road, Beethoven won him over but not without taking a few beatings in the media. Today, Beethoven is a hero and almost as well known as God. In the meantime, his early critic goes unremembered - and will forever.
There are two things I suggest regarding critiques: 1) don't write them; 2) don't read them. However, if you decide to write one, be understanding, be as creative as the person you are critiquing, enjoy the process, find the good, be kind, and be honest. In case you decide to read a critique of your work, be brave.
