The Shape of Things to Come: Form Past and Future in Haiku

ABSTRACT: Everyone knows what haiku look like: three lines of five, seven and five syllables. And so they are — except when they’re not. In fact, haiku in English (more than any other language) has expressed itself in a wide variety of forms, ranging from one to four lines, myriad syllable counts, and a plethora of typographical and linear arrays. In this article, Jim Kacian, a poet known for his innovative approach to haiku form, explores the history of haiku as it has appeared over its first hundred years, and argues for one particular innovation as a viable “second norm.”

__________

by Jim Kacian

I’m a strong believer that art gets you through periods of no money better than money gets you through periods of no art. It may seem a luxury to hold such an opinion, but many who have faced far greater adversity have spoken eloquently of how art in the face of privation and repression was a force that inspired them and helped them make it through. So it is not a small thing that we have all made some sacrifices to be here today,<fn>This paper is a version of a talk given at Haiku North America, on August 4, 2011, in Seattle, Washington.</fn> to support the poetry we love, and to allow it to nourish and encourage us as we move forward into an uncertain future.

That being said, I think it’s probably safe to say that none of us has relied entirely on art for our personal economic security. Even I, who more than most have engaged haiku in economic as well as artistic terms, have kept my day job. As perhaps some of you know, I’ve been involved in tennis on a professional level, both as a player and teacher, for more than four decades now. Tennis has been bery bery good to me, and has supported all my artistic work, paying for the activities of Red Moon Press, for instance, and making travel in the name of haiku possible for me.

I mention this because I feel that I might draw a useful analogy from my forty years of tennis to our topic here today. When I first connected with tennis, one of the first things I remember learning was how to hold the racket: for the forehand, all the experts said, shake hands with the racket. How perfectly simple. And of course I did. This is what is called an Eastern forehand, the classic shot of the game. That’s what all the forehands I saw looked like, and when I started teaching, it’s what all the students wanted. And to this day, you still might hear parents telling their kids at the public courts at their first lesson, shake hands with the racket. Perfectly normal.

Except that now, almost no one who plays the game at a professional level uses the Eastern grip. Many factors have come to influence this: racket and string technologies have improved dramatically, and so more power and spin may be imparted to the ball, while courts have systematically been slowed down, favoring a style of play that features long rallies from the baseline and few ventures to the net. All of these things make the Eastern forehand grip slightly less important. There are still some things best done with an Eastern grip, but they are not as often encountered in today’s game, so it doesn’t favor a player to use it, or a student to learn it. Today nearly everyone uses what is called the Western grip, which is about as unnatural a handling of the racket as could be imagined, but which makes better use of these changes in technology, strategy and style. Even I, when I need more topspin on a particular shot, will Westernize my grip. It’s simply taking advantage of something you can’t get with the old system.

Here comes that haiku analogy I warned you about. We might liken the old Eastern forehand to the classic model for haiku, the one everyone knows, the good old 5-7-5. Like the Eastern forehand, it’s what we were taught at the beginning, and like the Eastern forehand, it might still be taught by parents on the equivalent of the public parks of haiku. Like the Eastern forehand, it has had its heyday, and was strong and serviceable, if a bit stiff and not always in tune with how the body, or the language, moves. It did some things particularly well, but gradually style and practice evolved away from these strengths. And now, the 5-7-5 is as rare as the Eastern forehand, except among amateurs. They are both classics of another era. And it proves so: seeing one in any of the better journals now is a remarkable thing.

What has replaced it? What has become the Western forehand of haiku? Well, it’s so common now we hardly bother to think about it. Normative haiku today are three-liners, usually in a short-long-short pattern. It’s what everybody plays now. It’s a direct descendant of the 5-7-5, and it’s our norm. It’s what we do, what we think in. Certainly none of this is news to you.

But there’s more. As important as grip changes to the forehand were to the game, an even more important development took place just as I was perfecting my game — that is, just a bit too late for me to take to it naturally. The most elegant and archetypal stroke in tennis, the one that raises tennis from a brutal power sport to an art of finesse and cunning, is the one-handed backhand. Those very rare backhands that equal a player’s forehand are things of sheer beauty, but they are extremely difficult to master. They require strength at maximal exertion from very small muscles — that is, they are at odds with the physiology of the human body. Some bright teachers and players recognized this and came up with a better idea: the two-handed backhand.

In the thirty-five years that have ensued, virtually every great player has used the two-handed backhand. There have been exceptions, but that’s what they’ve been. A two-hander has a different, though not lesser, grace and line, and also more power and repeatability. This new shape of tennis suits how the body works, as well as the demands of the modern game.

So, does haiku have an analog to the two-handed backhand? What’s the new shape of haiku?

Haiku, like tennis, has evolved beyond its early stages into something leaner, stronger, sharper. It requires a better poet to write good haiku today, and more often what a poet chooses to write is less likely to be normative. Or put another way, what was normative to the best poets of previous generations is no longer competitive for the best poets of the current generation. Journals and websites are gradually discovering this, and slowly accommodating the new practices. Increasingly we find more different kinds of haiku in these places, and readers are learning to parse them in new ways, just as poets are learning to exploit the new possibilities inherent in the new shapes. Not all will work — some will flare briefly and disappear forever. But by having a look at what’s being tried, it may be possible to deduce what the new shape of haiku is likely to be.

The remainder of this presentation will be in two parts. To begin we’ll consider a very brief history of haiku form. This will in no way be exhaustive, but suggestive as well as cumulative. We’ll follow with a more detailed study of the form I feel is likeliest to be the shape of things to come.

Let’s begin with the elephant in the room. It will be a long time, if ever, before the three-liner is displaced as the primary shape of haiku in English. There are many reasons for this: history, tradition, mimesis, not to mention the way the three-line haiku continues to supply a useful combination of technical opportunities for the poet to exploit. Haiku work well in three lines in English, and that first inspiration to render Japanese haiku in this fashion was a gift. The first three-liners in a Western language may date back to the 1600s, in Dutch, but we have no records to prove this. We do know that three-line translations were being made no later than the 1870s, and we must regard this as somewhat serendipitous, because it was no sure thing. The Japanese originals were, of course, single vertical lines, and if that verticality was certain to be adumbrated by our own horizontal writing process, the choice to mimic the tripartite internal organization in three lines was not so obvious. And, despite some other early contenders, the three-line model proved to be the most generally accepted, and so is the great-grandfather of contemporary haiku practice in the west.

Since the three-line haiku has become normative practice, any other form must be considered aberrant. The onus is on the outlier to prove the efficacy of its novelty: of course any variant form will provide a different experience — the question is, is it a better one? If any poem can be shown to work just well in the normative shape, then all the variant shape is doing is calling attention to itself, and to its author. Part of our consideration should always be, how does the shape chosen by the poet enhance the poem? And if it doesn’t, we must consider this to be a decision error on the part of the poet. I urge you to experiment with all the poems that follow, to see if their success is dependent on the manner of presentation, or if they might have been just as well served to begin life as more normative poems.

We needn’t reiterate the history of the three line form here, since it is primarily the history you already know: from Aston to Blyth to Hass, from Lowell to Hackett to Herold, up to and including the current journals. So let’s agree to simply use the three-line form as the backdrop against which we might consider other shapes which have arisen.

Just as reasonable a choice in those first days of translation was a two-line, symmetrical or asymmetrical arrangement such as that employed by Basil Hall Chamberlain as early as the 1880s:

Haply the summer grasses are
A relic of the warriors’ dream.

Another important Japanologist, editor and anthologist, Asataro Miyamori, also favored the two-line rendering of Japanese originals in the 1930s:

A fallen flower flew back to the branch!
Behold! it was a flitting butterfly.

Two later Western poets and anthologists, Kenneth Rexroth and Harold Stewart, also adopted the two-line format. Where the former achieves a very sharp lucubration, as in

Summer grass
Where warriors dream.

the latter chose to make something more appetizing to middlebrow taste, rhyming the poems and pulling the teeth of their observations:

Illusion:
The fallen blossoms which I saw arise,
Returning toward the bough, were butterflies.

In truth, the two-liner has never really caught on in the West, perhaps because it too much resembled the rhymed couplets of Augustinian poetry without its familiar philosophical trappings. We do find the occasional exception, such as work by John Gould Fletcher in the 1930s:

Snowflakes rise and fall on the wind:
Even Winter has her white flocks of silent birds.

Robert Grenier, in his experiments with short lines which are not necessarily haiku, offered this poem in the 1970s:

PULSE
how big a gap can a line contain & go on

He seems to be asking what exactly are the believable parameters for kire — how far afield can a poem go on the other side of the break? This is an age-old question in haiku, and the answer is always exactly what the poem supplies — in this case, all the way from the range of possibilities of “pulse” to a disquisition on the nature of . . . what? poetic practice? blood pressure? heredity? the universe? A most challenging poem.

Slightly less challenging but no less terse, and even tangier, is M. Kettner’s 1980s poem

your hair drawn back
the sharp taste of radishes

Two lines seems exactly right for this: no three-line arrangement approaches its strident acerbity.

Karen Sohne penned this classic senryu in the 1990s:

androgynous stranger
winks at me

and Michael Facherty’s terse

in the wood pile
the broken ax handle

dates from the middle of that decade. And from this new decade we have John Carley

sunlight spills along the canal
another breath of solvent

and this from Jörgen Johansson

a ladybird
b5 to c4

The two-line poem derived from the essentially two-part (content-wise) Japanese haiku makes some sense, even if it hasn’t enjoyed much popularity with poets in the West. The four-line version, however, doesn’t have the same easy continuity, and we should perhaps view it as an idiosyncratic product of Western haiku practice. Not surprisingly, it also has not been much favored. A number of early American haikuists used four lines on occasion, notably Virginia Brady Young, whose first lines end in a colon and read like a title, L.A. Davidson, and Alvaro Cardona-Hine. Only one poet that I know of has made it his trademark form — Stephen Gill, who publishes under the name Tito:

Further down the cobble beach
the face of another
sunset watcher
loses its copper glow

It is debatable what the four-line array accomplishes, beyond airing the poem out a bit. Tito’s poems do tend towards a greater syllable count than the prevailing norms, and perhaps the fourth line helps make them feel less weighted, more free-flowing. In most instances, the four-line efforts we might find published are aberrations from usual practice by their authors, and the lineage employed seems directly aimed at arriving at specific sorts of timings for the readings of the poems. Here, for instance, is an early example (1970s) by Larry Eigner:

w i d e - r a n g i n g
    cloud over
         sunlit
                somewhere enough for a storm

Eigner didn’t call his poem a haiku, though it is clearly related. Virginia Brady Young’s, also 1970s, was clearly in the genre:

at twilight
hippo
shedding
the river

There is certainly something gained with each line break, not to mention a slight suggestion of the hippo’s shape, in this poem, so we might decide the four-line solution here seems aptly chosen for the content. Shape also seems to be central to Robert Spiess’s poem (early ’80s):

a               square
of               water
r  e  f  l  e  c  t  s
the               moon

LeRoy Gorman’s self-deprecating four-liner from the same time also seems to use the form to advantage:

     between
Goethe & Graves
            summer
       shelfdust

In Dee Evetts’s haiku (late ’80s), the motivation wasn’t so much a four-line result, but a more organically pleasing presentation:

the river
   going over
the afternoon
going on

And perhaps Martin Lucas’s poem (2000s) is something of an anti-haiku, and so deviation from the norm feels appropriate:

     somewhere
between
Giggleswick and Wigglesworth
          I am uninspired

Perhaps the least practiced shapes haiku have taken are specific to individual poems, shapes we might term “organic.” A simple example is L. A. Davidson’s

beyond
stars beyond
             star

from the early 1970s. Another famous stellar poem, by Raymond Roseliep a couple years later, approximates this same shape:

he removes his glove
      to point out
                         Orion

This shape perhaps suggest vastness, the third line moving away from the rest of the poem, the rest of what is known. The delay of the third line increases tension, especially when read. A more complex sort of order, but even earlier (early 1970s) is called upon in William J. Higginson’s

  sky-black gull
                skims
      the wave inland
against the cliff
           whitens

One could mention Nick Avis, who is perhaps the most careful of haiku poets in placing words on paper, and Marshall Hryciuk, who is about the least careful!

Organic shape is not easily discoverable, and even when a success doesn’t automatically suggest “haiku” to a reader, particularly one not versed in the genre. Instead it conjures the realm of the short poem, and perhaps this is one argument that haiku is indeed simpatico with “mainstream” short-form poetry.

Probably the best-known advocate of this organic form is Marlene Mountain. In addition to her shape poems, for example the typographical exercise she employed around the word “labium,” and her process poems, such as the leaping frog, she has created what is perhaps the best and best-known organic haiku, from the mid-70s:

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

The felicity with which this shape causes the reader to re-enact the content of the poem is uncanny, and stands as a model for those seeking similar effects.

There are still occasional attempts at rather free-form haiku, as anyone who has had a look at the HaikuNow! Innovative category results from the past couple of years will note. But not many of them have been compelling in their execution. An interesting recent effort is Eve Luckring’s²³

Another branch we might consider is concrete haiku. After a flurry of activity in the late 1970s to early 1980s, especially in Canada, concrete haiku have not been much practiced in English. The first efforts perhaps were by Paul Reps, whose earliest work dates from the 1930s, of which this is characteristic:

  !
rain

Two decades later the most famous concrete haiku was penned by Cor van den Heuvel:

tundra

There have been other one-word efforts, though none perhaps quite as successful, and certainly none so iconic.

The greatest early exponent of concrete haiku was Larry Gates. His series “Test Patterns” in the 1960s included such work as

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
RRRRRRESRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
AAAAAKSNAAAAAAAASNAAAA
SSNSKESSKESSSSSSNAKESS
SSAKESSSESNSSSSSAKESSS
GGGGGGGGNAKGGGAKEGGGGG
RRRRRRRRRKESRAKERRRRRR
AAAAAAAAAASNAKEAAAAAAA
SSSSSSSSSSSSSAKESSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSKSSSSSSSS 

Then there are the oddities and the one-offs, most of which have had a single champion and no adherents. We can perhaps so consider this poem, considered the first successful haiku in English:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd :
Petals     on a wet, black bough .

Ezra Pound published this in Poetry in 1913, and it’s full of interesting quirks: a title, for instance, and is it meant to be counted as one of the lines? What of those spaces that separate the various phrases within the lines themselves: is this simply a guide to reading, a timing device, or is it following some supposed model? In the latter case, with its five sections, could it be — a tanka? But it has the unmistakeable feel of haiku, whatever its vagaries.

The same can be said of Wallace Stevens’s response to encountering haiku. What he wrote he would not have called such either, but it feels like a robust, aerated, Americanized version of it long before there was anything like a haiku community to say nay. Here’s one section from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

   XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Elsewhere I have made the case that we might consider this poem the first sequence in English-language haiku.

Once journals and organizations had come to the West, and a normative practice began to be established, experimentation took more the shape of a response to the norm. Larry Gates, for instance, took the standard haiku model and rotated it ninety degrees, attempting to combine the three line norm of the west with some feeling of the verticality of Japanese poems, as in this one from the 1960s:

As         a              flashes
the        little         white
falls      water-thrush
darken

In this case, Gates actually had a follower, as the poet Evelyn Tooley Hunt, who often published under the name Tao-Li, employed this shape in many of her poems. More idiosyncratically, Martin Shea used spaces and lines to create quite different layouts — and consequent emotional responses — to what usually were three-line haiku, as in this one from the mid-70s:

bolted              space
the lights on the corners
click and change

At about the same time Alan Pizzarelli was working with a flexible lineation that followed the flow of the idiom, resulting in a seemingly artless, colloquial effect:

   a spark
lights up
       darkens
that’s it

At the opposite end of the theoretical, anne mckay was seeking anything but a casual effect on the reader, organizing her material for artistic impact, as in this poem from the late 1980s:

a clarity
            astonishing
                  the night
rising
       slow
                  and
    sweet
             suddenly
her voice
          . . .  singing

Another Canadian with a penchant for formal experimentation is Michael Dudley. This poem from the 1990s is one of his most unusual:

a            purple           sky
     dim             on the
     figures         drive-in
     appear          screen

The most recent attempt at fashioning a compelling new shape while keeping a traditional haiku feel and content has been made by Lee Gurga. The possibility his cruciform shapes contain is only beginning to be explored, but one of the more successful of his early efforts is the following, from 2010:

       not
       the
      whole
      story
but probably enough
      fresh
      snow

A final anomalous shape I’d like to mention is the overlap haiku, what Nick Virgilio named the “weird”:

fossilence

This technique has not been used very often to my knowledge: perhaps a couple of dozen poets have published them in the past 20 years. A related style overlaps words to create compression. One of the best is this one by John Stevenson:

jampackedelevatoreverybuttonpushed

The newest shape to make a bid for permanence in haiku practice is the vertical array. It’s not exactly a new idea: besides being the usual shape for Japanese haiku, we can find it in English as early as the 1950s, being the regular shape employed by Michael McClure, as in this example:

    NOTH
     ING
    NESS
     of
intelligence;
   silver
  sunlight
   through
   closed
  eyelids

And the verticality of Japanese haiku certainly inspired this poem by John Tagliabue from the early ’70s:

Ancestral Portraits
the
mark
of
leaves
in
the
flying
air

Alan Pizzarelli in 1970 offered a chunkier version of this idea:

rain
floating down the gutter
a crimson leaf
a popsicle stick
a . . .

And Marlene Mountain in 1976 provided this version:

 beneath
leaf mold
  stone
   cool
  stone

But it wasn’t until Robert Spiess that the vertical form was explored in depth:

crescent
moon
a
bat
loops
and
twists
among
wild
plum

One poet who picked up on the possibilities that might be found in what Spiess was exploring was vince tripi:

Looking
up
at
the
giant
sequoia
woodpecker
fledgling

With the regular publication of the poems of John Martone, beginning in the mid-’90s, the full range of possibilities of the vertical array began to come clear:

here-
there-
si-
lence
ap-
pro-
xi-
mate-
ly-
fern

Another poet quick to realize the potentials of this shape was Scott Metz:

a
not
her
drop
&
it’s
raining44. Modern Haiku 38.3, 85.]

All this by way of prelude: if something is to upend the hegemony of the three-line haiku, the clear favorite is the one-liner, which, if the pitch I’m about to make for it is true, is due for a term of its own. I would like to suggest: the monoku. In the short time since this article first appeared, the term monoku does seem to have been adopted by the haiku community, if not yet by the larger world. What recommends it is its clarity: it says what it is. I also like its brevity, and the hybridity of its origins: a Greek prefix wedded to a Japanese suffix to create a new English term.

Haiku is not the sole province of one-liners in English poetry, but it is nearly so. Almost all examples of monostich are imported from other languages — the Russian of Bryusov, the French of Apollinaire. The practice of rendering links of renga in single lines (for space considerations, perhaps) may well have influenced poets writing haiku in English, especially those offering sequences, which have often had their individual elements arranged in single lines.

Like all these alternative shapes, monoku must be considered against the success of the normative three-line haiku. While some of these alternative shapes have specific applications, others seem simply idiosyncratic. Monoku, however, have not arisen out of a need simply to be different: they actually offer a range of technical and stylistic opportunities that are not available to the three-line haiku, nor even, so far as I am able to ascertain, to the Japanese single vertical line form. It offers resources that one just can’t find elsewhere in haiku, and where there is new territory, poets will colonize. I will detail some of these advantages as we proceed, but first I’d like to offer a brief history of the monoku.

Monoku have been offered as an alternative normative version of haiku from the beginning. One of the first translators of classical Japanese haiku, Lafcadio Hearn, working in the 1890s, proffered one-line versions such as:

The voice having been all consumed by crying, there remains only the shell of the sémi

As we have observed, competing models were also offered, and of these, the three-line form gained the most traction early on, and this has affected practice ever since. But not everyone was entirely convinced. In his seminal volume The Country of Eight Islands (1968), Hiroaki Sato, in collaboration with Burton Watson, supplied single-line translations of haiku and tanka, arguing that such versions provided a closer experience to the Japanese originals. Though Sato is less prolix than Hearn, we can feel a certain kinship in poems such as this:

The sea darkens, and the voices of ducks faintly white

However, poets writing haiku in English were not quick to follow these examples: normative practice for haiku in English for the first half of the 20th century was decidedly three lines. Jack Kerouac, as was so often his wont, was the first to experiment with a single line format in the 1950s. His comrade-in-arms Allen Ginsberg, seeking to incorporate a Western attitude into an eastern genre, created what he called “American sentences,” 17 syllables punctuated as usual. This was as much an outgrowth of his own work with long flexible English poetic lines as any theoretical statement of what lay inherent in haiku itself. Here’s a typical example:

A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.

This model was largely ignored by other poets inside and out of the haiku community, which began organizing itself shortly thereafter. The first monoku that received widespread acceptance was Michael Segers’s

in the eggshell after the chick has hatched

in 1971. What it chiefly is noticing, seemingly, is an absence, though one might argue for shadow or whiteness or some other characteristic But the curiously truncated manner in which it presents itself, in medias res, is not to be found again until Robert Grenier:

except the swing bumped by the dog in passing

Once the idea of a single line containing the whole of a haiku came into consciousness in the haiku community, it spread quickly. George Swede took up the gauntlet, producing several monoku such as this, from 1978:

at the edge of the precipice I become logical

An atypical poem by Lorraine Ellis Harr from around the same time:

an owl hoots darkness down from the hollow oak

R. Clarence Matsuo-Allard was one of the first to go on record publicly espousing the single-line format, with poems such as this one, from 1979:

an icicle the moon drifting through it

The same year saw Marlene Mountain’s paean to concision:

pig and i spring rain

More efforts found their way into print in 1980, such as this one by John Wills:

dusk from rock to rock a waterthrush

and this from Robert Boldman:

leaves blowing into a sentence

Nearly all the leading haiku poets of the day found the single-line form worth exploring. At about the same time one by Peggy Willis Lyles:

Before we knew its name the indigo bunting

This from James Kirkup also in 1981:

the blood of my shadow poured up the steps

Elizabeth Searle Lamb tried her hand:

cry of the peacock widens the crack in the adobe wall

and Ruby Spriggs as well:

my head in the clouds in the lake

And, a bit later, one from Hal Roth:

dove song shortens the lane where she waits

All this occurred within the confines of the haiku community. At the same time, however, a very surprising thing happened: one of the major contemporary American poets, John Ashbery, inspired by Hiroaki Sato’s one-line translations from the Japanese, published thirty-seven haiku in his 1982 collection The Wave. These poems were quite different from the majority of poems being published in haiku journals, and indeed set a challenge to haiku poets to engage in a larger discourse with so-called mainstream poetry. Here’s one example:

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

No one immediately took up this challenge, perhaps because it was so daunting, but more likely because haiku poets were not even aware of it. In the following decade a handful of poets published monoku, most of them only occasionally. Since the beginning of the new century, however, all that has changed. Most major haiku poets since 2000 have tried their hand at monoku, and while some have decided it doesn’t suit them, most have included at least a few in their collections as well as in journals. In rough chronological order, the past decade has seen work by

Chris Gordon:

a love letter to the butterfly gods with strategic misspellings

Dietmar Tauchner:

deep inside you no more war

vincent tripi:

Ah water-strider never to have left a track!

Stuart Quine:

bolted and chained the way to the mountains

Allan Burns:

Kind of Blue the smell of rain

Jeff Stillman:

hazy moon hung over the new year

Lorin Ford:

their wings like cellophane remember cellophane

Karma Tenzing Wangchuk:

stone before stone buddha

Charles Trumbull

such innocent questions — sunflowers

Scott Metz:

only american deaths count the stars

Martin Lucas:

the thyme-scented morning lizard’s tongue flicking out

Giselle Maya:

the cuckoo’s voice has opened a white iris

John Barlow:

the wind being farmed the wind that isn’t

Eve Luckring:

cocktail party that one closed door

William Ramsey:

fate: a leaf falls but with improvisation

and Christopher Patchel:

we turn turn our clocks ahead

And of course I myself have found many resources in the monoku, writing my first at the end of last century (though not published until 2004)

a W of geese not quite the end of summer

and scores more since. In 2010, at the request of the Dutch publisher ’t Schrijverke, I wrote a monograph on the topic, entitled where i leave off, which seeks to identify several strategies that monoku employ, and provides examples from my work.

I would like to focus on three of the more interesting techniques readily available in monoku but only rarely, if at all, in normative haiku, or even in other formal schemes. Of course there are many more than three such techniques, and the use of one does not preclude the use of others in any given poem. Many of the poems above in fact employ more than a single technique to achieve their effects.

It’s my contention that early monoku, up until at least the Segers poem, and many after as well, employed no technique that is unique to haiku presented as a single line. The one-line translations seek to render a more just experience of the Japanese original, not to expand the range of technical advantage the monoku might offer in English; while poets writing in English seemingly didn’t discover these technical advantages until the form was much more established. If we consider the examples above by Hearn, Sato, and Ginsberg, we would probably agree that all might have been presented in three lines with little loss to the poem had the translator or poet chosen that form. And we might say the same of the original poems of Matsuo-Allard and Bostok.

But in the Segers poem, and many of those that follow, something else is happening: re-presenting in three lines becomes more problematical, and the results lose something of the effect of the original poem. Segers truncates the poem in such a way that we actually omit the fragment part of the usual fragment/phrase layout. The poem might have been more traditionally written with a first line of, say, “in the henhouse,” if aiming for one kind of effect, or perhaps “darkness” if aiming for another. But by dispensing with it altogether the poet forces the reader to do more work, more imagining, and this serves to open the poem to all sorts of interesting results. Rather than a piling up of images upon the imagination, what Pound called “phanopoeia,” a single image is extended or elaborated into a second context, often implied. This omission of fragment comes to be one of the most commonly utilized techniques in the toolbox of the emerging monoku. Other examples of it from our list include the poems by Boldman, Spriggs, Gordon, Lucas, and Ford.

The second technique we find commonly in monoku that differs from normative haiku form is sheer speed. The rushing of words past the imagination’s editor results in a breathless taking in of the whole, only after which the unexpected “sense” contained within the imagery asserts itself. The pivot of a poem might occur in the first word, but having met it so early in the reading the reader can hardly be blamed for not recognizing it as such. And another might work in exactly the opposite way, postponing its pivot for the last word, and then asking the reader to decide how to read it.

The first such poem on our list is Marlene Mountain’s “pig and i.” In five words she limns the entire scene, and the reader or listener really has no alternative but to take it whole. Only afterwards is it possible to unpack it, by which point the entire sensation of the poem is embedded within us. Boldman’s poem operates in a similar fashion, as do the poems by Lyles, Spriggs, Tauchner, Burns, Metz, and, in a slightly different way, Patchel.

There is no parallel for this effect that I can find in normative haiku. The line breaks ensure that the reader slows down, and momentum is lost, which for most poems is not a loss, but for these special kinds of poems, removes much of their impact.

A third technique endemic to monoku is the use of multiple kire, “cutting.” Some critics, such as Hasegawa Kai, feel that kire is the most critical poetic technique employed by haiku. The advantage this kind of monoku has is that the break can occur in one of several places, and each possible break point yields a different reading. Most often the sense of the poem remains similar, but different emphases create subtle shifts in meaning. We might think of such haiku as cut gems: each slight turn catches the light a bit differently; each facet contains its own inherent gleams and prismatic effects. Multiple possible caesuras yield subtle, often ambiguous texts which generate alternative readings, and subsequently richer poetic experiences. Each poem can be several poems, and the more the different readings cohere and reinforce each other, the larger the field occupied by the poem, the greater its weight in the mind. My poem is one such example, with others being the Metz, Wangchuk, and Stillman.

In addition to these three techniques let me briefly add the monoku’s ability to enact its content, a kind of shape poem, as in the Wills; a more direct imposition of images in Lamb’s; the creation of a kind of unexpected animism all the more direct for its form, as in the Roth; a vehicle for apothegm and epigram, in the tripi and Ramsey; and the irreducible, through-composed poem which a three-line treatment would render cumbersome, as exemplified by Lucas. There are special effects as well, such as Patchel’s word repetition which deepens the significance of the observation, and the management of disjunctive elements that might feel too loosely constrained in a less lapidary form, such as the Ashbery and Boldman.

And so on.

This is not advocacy for one-line technique for all English-language haiku. The needs of each poem must be determined individually, and those needs met. Nor is it any indication of all that’s possible within a one-line treatment — I believe we’ve only begun to explore how the monoku might expand the range of English-language haiku. But it is an argument that one-line form is no longer a variant form — the monoku is, and has been for some time, a fully-fledged form of the genre, and with an exciting exploratory period just ahead. I look forward to participating in that exploration, and expect many of you will be involved as well. It will not be the very distant future when we will define haiku as a brief poem, most often in one or three lines. Only then will our explanation have caught up with the reality.