Features

Moon and Finger 11 – the past part 3

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Keith.

The past is never dead…

In the previous two posts concerning the past and the past tense in haiku, we looked at first, the immediate past leading to a present moment of awareness on the part of the poet (and thus of the reader), and then, ways of marking a past that was often more distant. In almost all the examples, it was/is possible to connect that part of the verse that was expressed in the past, with a present moment: be it awareness, or a conversational question, or a seasonal or key word that we might take to approximate the present—even if that “present” is a period longer than ‘a present moment.’ As long as snow may remain on the ground, as it were.

I’m now going to look at quite a few haiku, and also senryu, from Japanese and from anglophone poets, where events are wholly in the past and the verse is all written in the past. Yet even so, they can be seen as re-lived moments as the poet, in the present, recollects, draws insight, and communicates them. And in the present for the reader who is reading them, and likewise reflecting.

1.
いにしへに踏みつぶしし蝸牛かな
inishie ni / fumi-tsubushishi / katatsumuri kana
—Uejima Onitsura
in the long-ago / I stepped on and crushed / a snail !
or:
Once in the past I stepped on a snail and crushed it
—tr Hiroaki Sato

Not only is there a clear marker of the distant past with “inishie” (“the long ago,” “bygone times” or “once upon a time”), the conjoined verbs fumi (“step”) and tsubu (the stem of tsubusu, “crush”) are each put in the past tense by the past tense auxiliary “shi”し which also attributes the action to the person, in this case the poet. Hence the first person. At the end we have the cutting-word “kana” that is not an auxiliary as “keri” can be, but nevertheless also marks an emphatic moment of emotion that invites the reader to pause, return, and contemplate this confession of the poet. In case of doubt, in Sato and Watson’s Eight Islands anthology this verse is preceded by a short preamble: “Remembering with feeling.” Although the text is in the past tense, a single continuous sentence with the exclamatory cut at the end, the “kana” can be seen as keeping the past moment ‘alive.’ The poet revisits the moment of long ago, and now confesses. Perhaps,  we could read this cut as  an “arrgh” moment instead of an “aha” moment?

2.
ある月夜 ことごとく籠の 虫を放つ
aru tsukiyo / kotogotoku kago no / mushi wo hanatsu
—Shiki
one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free
or:
One moonlit night / I released every last bug / From its cage
—tr Keene
or:
On a certain moonlit night I set all the insects in their cage free
—DeepL

The verse presents some problems for a translator. “Hanatsu” is the dictionary form of the verb, no tense. In classical Japanese, it appears that this form can be used to end a sentence definitively. There’s no kireji in this verse, so the ‘hanatsu’ does the work of closing the sentence, and in effect, is a cut at the end.

There is no indication of person in this verse, as far as I can see. To assume “I” looks like an interpreter’s choice. That presents a difficulty in that the tenseless verb isn’t in the past, but would be a Damon-Runyon-like present: “one moonlit  night I release every last bug….”.

So I like it without the first person. In a way, “one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free” becomes timeless.  However, it is pretty clearly a recollection, so someone has to be having the recollection. Hence Keene’s translation, and DeepL’s. The verse documents a past moment. The sentence seems complete but nevertheless, across the implied cut at its end, inviting awareness and completion by the reader who on contemplation deduces the reason and emotion behind the release of the bugs, most likely singing crickets. Almost certainly (because there is a dated version of a related verse) Shiki wrote this while he was bedridden. I read into it that Shiki, conscious now of his approaching death, in his own ‘confinement, is retrospectively glad that he set the crickets free. Or is he also contemplating the future?  For if we take my provisional version “one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free” —could Shiki have been numbering himself among the “bugs set free” on a moonlit night soon to come?  The haiku not in the past, but in the future?…

Another by Shiki using “aru”:
shirobotan aru yo no tsuki ni kuzurekeri
white peony / one night of the moon… (and) / crumbled—ah!
or:
The white peony; / At the moon, one evening, / It crumbled and fell.
—tr Blyth

This one has “aru:” “a certain…” “one” or “once upon…” and also “keri,” the functions of which, as a verb modifier for a completed action, and as a cut indicating sudden awareness, are by now well appreciated.  So there’s little room to escape  the past tense in this one, I suggest.  Again, we have a recollection wholly in the past. It is being revisited by the poet, which leads to an implied (and indeed, this time to a marked) moment of awareness: cf. in the last post, the Past Part 2, Shiki’s “a poppy blooming / and by the wind of that day / it was scattered.”

3.
春の山のうしろから烟が出だした
haru no yama no ushiro kara kemuri ga dedashita
—Hõsai Ozaki
spring mountain / back-of-from smoke (ga→subject marker) / began to emerge
or:
from behind / the spring mountain / smoke began to emerge
—tr. Susumu Takiguchi

Here, the key part for the tense is “dedashita” — the past tense form of the compound verb 出だす (dedasu), assembled from two elements: the stem of “deru,” to come out, emerge, and “dasu” meaning to begin to. Thus 出だす means to begin to emerge, and 出だした with -shi し and -ta た puts it in its past tense: began to emerge.

This is believed to be Hõsai Ozaki’s death poem. Although it is wholly in the past tense, a reader can suppose that the poet is imagining his future as the smoke (perhaps as he is cremated)… and that the “spring mountain” was there, is there, and will still be there. Rather a collector’s item.

4.
新年の 柩にあ ひぬ夜中頃
shinnen no hitsugi ni ahinu yonaka goro
—Shiki
new year / met with coffin / about midnight
or:
in the New Year / about midnight / I met a coffin
—tr. Blyth

The tense here is governed by the past perfective “nu” of ahinu, modifying the stem of “to meet.” If this was a real encounter, the coffin at midnight is suggestively linked with the death of the old year. It is difficult to manufacture any link or leakage to the present, as the whole tone of the senryu seems somewhat final. All the reader can do is to supply a present: that Shiki is telling us in the now about this recollection of the recent past; life continues in this new year.  Or, could it be that Shiki, the champion of realism, has composed a haiku entirely from his imagination?

5.
蝿打つまで蝿叩なかりし
hae utsu made haetataki nakarishi …
—Kawahigashi Hekigodõ / Hekigotō

This verse has now been covered in Orense’s close readings of it, to which are appended my comments from May’s Haiku of the Day, so is repeated here as a reminder that it is completely in the past as written:

until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter
or:
Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist.
— tr. Makoto Ueda

In effect, the reader is invited to complete it:
“until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter… ”
“…but there is now!”

Which reminds me of another verse, entirely in the past tense:

6.
Two flies locked in love
Were hit by a newspaper
And died together
—Richard Wright
Haiku: This Other World: The Last Poetry of Richard Wright

This time written by a poet in English, and indubitably wholly in the past tense. A narrative, to boot. Season word, continuous sentence… There’s no obvious invitation for a reader to complete the poem in the present, unless we respond “Aww.” An Aww moment instead of an Aha! moment? Otherwise we are driven either to Orense’s framework that any haiku, in whatever tense it’s written is essentially and always speech in the present. Wright is telling us about it. Or to the idea that any memory of the past occurs in the present as a mental event, the poet’s and the reader’s.

7.
ポケットからキャラメルと木の葉を出した
poketto kara / kyarameru to / konoha o dashita
—Kawahigashi Hekigodõ / Hekigotō
pocket from / caramel and / tree-leaf took out
or
from my pocket
I took out a caramel
and a leaf
or:
He took a piece of caramel and a leaf out of his pocket.
—tr. DeepL

One of Hekigotō’s later haiku. Here the tense in English is unequivocally the past: “dashita” is the past perfect everyday form of 出す (dasu – to take out) with its ending た, “-ta.” There’s no indication of becoming aware, and nothing to indicate whether this was in the last few minutes, or a story from the more distant past. It’s a clip of narrative expressed as a single sentence (with three separate noun images). No cutting word and no clear semantic cut (just an inversion).

The use of two gairaigo or foreign loan-words, pocketto and kyarameru, together with a rather formal poetic Japanese word for leaf, konoha, and the plain form of “I took out” lends a little quirkiness to this verse, the resonance of which arrives on contemplation: gold-brown caramel, the leaf now clearly autumn (Hekigotō valued fresh encounter with the season rather than inherited formulae from classic saijiki). Caramel made by heating sugar until it browns, the leaf by the heat of the sun for a season. The poet sensitive to nature has thought to preserve the leaf awhile in his pocket along with the sweet; the sweet and the leaf are things of transience—and so, one may add, is the poet. The poet’s recollection and telling us about it, and the reader’s contemplation and decoding of it, are mental events in the present.

9
戦争が廊下の奥に立つてゐた
sensō ga rōka no oku ni tatte iwata
—Hakusen Watanabe (1913-1969)
war / in the innermost corridor / it stood
or:
War stood / at the end of the corridor
—tr Ban’ya Natsuishi
or:
The War / in the dark at the end of the hall / it stood
– tr. Dhugal J. Lindsay
or:
war was standing / at the end / of the hallway
—tr. Alex Fyffe

“Senso” is a combination of war and conflict/struggle. “Oku” is inner part or depth. The tense is determined by the perfective aspect marker つ and た (ta), the past tense ending. The past perfect, as Natsuishi and Lindsay have rendered it.  The full breakdown is given in Haiku of the Day of May 31.

It is a famous haiku in Japan and beyond. As a one time lesser habitué of the corridors of power, this verse speaks to me. Wars are begun in prestigious offices these days, not in hot blood in the field. That war, World War 2, began at home for Japanese poets. Hakusen Watanabe (the pen-name of Takenori Watanabe) was among those poets arrested in 1940 for “home front” and anti-war poetry. Indeed for him, war stood in the depths of the corridor. As it stands today in the offices where power is seated.

For our purposes this verse is perhaps the closest we can get to an acclaimed, fairly modern haiku by a Japanese master that is quite definitely all in the historic past. The question is whether it is sealed off from the present, or does anything “leak through” to now? There is no marker nor cutting word for “sudden awareness” in the present moment, scarcely anything except that the verse ends, to invite the reader to meditate. Yet meditate in the present moment, we do. And we arrive at Watanabe’s awareness and insight when he penned it.

For the rest of his life Watanabe wrote in private and refused to publish. His former students rectified that on his death in 1969.

10.
In the beginning
he was just pretending
to sound grumpy
— John Stevenson, Frogpond 45.1 Winter 2021/22

One of my favourite examples. This single-sentence, one-theme senryu is wholly expressed in the past. But “in the beginning,” plus the cutoff at its end, invites the reader to supply the ending, the missing part, the juxtaposition, the present, the denouement: “but now, he really is grumpy!”  An act of co-creation, in the present.

11.
gone from the woods
the bird I knew
by song alone
— Paul O. Williams
Frogpond 12:2 (1989)

The poet’s tribute verse to the late Nick Virgilio (1928-1989). The verse is expressed in the past, the bird has gone. However, use of the adjectival past participle makes the state of absence timeless (like “an old olive tree / listed / among the dead” that we had last week).  Once gone, it has gone, and it is gone now, and forever.

12.
I whispered of death
one winter night in a voice
we both never knew
—Raymond Roseliep, Haiku Journal 1977

Wholly in the past: but wait…at least one of the interlocutors remains alive, and at the time the verse was written, is telling us about it.

13.
I turned round to see
if my shadow was still there
it, too, had turned round
—James Kirkup
Blithe Spirit vol 7:3 1997
Picked as favourite haiku by Yasuhiko Shigemoto, a Japanese stamp of approval. Again, written wholly in the past tense.

14.
the old concrete pipe
we called the tunnel of love
first kiss
—Louise Hopewell
Failed Haiku vol 9 issue 100

Although, if you wish, you may suppose that the old concrete pipe is still there today, or even that the poet is physically revisiting the site, or only now getting her first kiss there, that’s up to you: there is nothing to put the whole verse definitively in anything but the past tense. Yet it is clearly a personal recollection, of which the poet is now ‘speaking’ to us, or to old friends. Full of amusing irony as well as nostalgia, and a thought-inducing comparison of the youthful “tunnel of love” with what is now an “old concrete pipe.”  This contemplation and drawing of inference or insight is an awareness, a mental event happening in the present moment.

15.
the mother my summer died
—Susan Antolin
Mariposa #49, Winter Issue 2023

A Touchstone Award winner.  Written in the past simple perfect tense.  A recollection, happening as the poet speaks her grief and enduring confusion. A present (and continuous) mental event.

And lastly, if you grant me an indulgence after all that work:

16.
the girl next door
how sweet she was
had I noticed
—Keith Evetts, Asahi Haikuist Network, 4 March 2022
This is entirely in the past… but only in the now am I recollecting and musing on it to reach an ironic insight, and telling you about it. This is our ‘present moment.’

In conclusion:

The subject of the past in haiku and senryu, from classic Japanese pedigree precedents to the modern era, and to verses in English, has been explored in three consecutive parts, working from examples.

Part 1 considered classical haiku, that some have translated to English in a simple past imperfect or perfect, where the action is in the immediate past—the immediately preceding moments—and is completed. These can generally be rendered in our present perfect “has been…” They end in a present moment of awareness. The auxiliary verb modifier “keri” for the recent past, a completed action, and simultaneously a cutting word indicating sudden awareness, is often encountered.  On scrutiny, therefore, they can be seen as a completed action leading to the contiguous present moment in a broad sense.

Part 2 moved on to haiku that have some other marker for the past, sometimes in addition to keri, sometimes without keri.  The exclamatory “kana” is sometimes used.  When keri is used, it is still a marker for a present moment of ‘awareness,’ but from context or the tense of earlier verbs the action may now be in a longer or more distant past. To render it into English a past tense verb, or a formulation such as ‘long ago’ or ‘that day when,’ seems right. But when keri (or, at a pinch, ‘‘kana’) is not used to flag awareness, we may have nothing in the text that indicates arrival at ‘a present moment’ except our instinct or our conditioning

In the absence of a definite marker or clue in the text, if we feel that a present moment is necessary, even obligatory, in haiku, we have to hang the argument on either:

— a kigo or keyword image that is taken to be ‘present’ and acts as a frame or a prompt for a phrase in the past, a memory or historical reference;
or :
— the position that it is the very act of recollecting that is ‘the present moment,’ when what is recollected and written is all in the past. Revisiting the moment, if you like. Re-living it. Re-evaluating it.

This seems notably the case in several haiku in English.

Part 3 today brings in haiku and senryu in Japanese and ELH that are clearly all in the past and a past tense. In contemporary Japanese verses ‘keri’ has all but been relegated to the archaic, except where a classic ‘feel’ is sought (e.g. “I cleaned the house like a matador” in Pt. 1). The past verb modifier is usually the た (ta) form.  In English verses we do not have to take into account translation, of course.

If these verses too are to be seen as ‘in the present moment’ to meet a wish for some unifying principle then we are left with ‘the present moment’ as either:

— the present moment of recollecting/revisiting/re-living the past, or even being in essence invited to complete the verse in the present.
or:
— the present moment of enunciation i.e. the poet ‘is now speaking’ to us of the past
or:
—the moment, the flash, of awareness, of the insight itself, that occurred in the poet’s ‘present’ in experiencing and writing, and occurs in the reader’s ‘present’ on reading.  A memory, and for that matter a thought of the future, are mental events happening now.

Naturally, editors are of course entitled to have their own preferences where tense is concerned.  The bulk of verses in English are written as if in the present, in a present tense.  That lends freshness and immediacy.  Yet there is abundant evidence both from tradition and from current practice to show that it is not the case that haiku *must* be written in the present, and *cannot* be written about the past, in a past tense, even wholly in the past tense. For in these examples we have arrived at a present moment of recollection, awareness, communication, reception and insight nevertheless, whether it has taken centuries, a lifetime, a season, a night of sleep, or the minute it takes for a horse to have just eaten a roadside flower.

—Keith Evetts

 

Footnote:

Again, my thanks to Shoko Kanenari for proof reading.

Well, those are my findings, based on studying what’s actually “out there,” with an open mind on theory. Now shared with you.  If you spot any errors, or make different determinations from the material supplied, do comment with reasons and evidence.

A comment I added in Part 1, drawn upon here:

けり (keri) is no longer used in everyday speech or in haiku,  having been replaced as auxiliary by the modern verb ending た (-ta) to indicate past completed action. But keri had its other role as a cutting word, the ‘moment of awareness’ – Ah! As did かな (kana) -Exclam!

In their beginnings, English haiku often tried to mimic the effect of keri or kana with words such as ah, oh, lo, or exclamation marks. These were not ‘wrong’, but clunky. More recent haiku in English generally avoid these explicit signals. Moreover, it is the fashion now to avoid punctuation, which may well have deprived us of something useful.

Nothing as far as I know has directly replaced keri or kana as cutting- words that signal awareness. Modern Japanese haiku have evolved from grammatical markers towards structure and context as ways of indicating or producing awareness in the reader, rather than devices for “and now I realise…ah!” This may stem in part from Shiki’s inheritors (here are the real and present images → discover their meaning → draw the insight). But also there is “the cut” which has morphed from specific markers to clear or subtle semantic cuts. Connecting across the cut is a moment of active, live awareness.  There is plenty of scope in anglophone haiku. We have line breaks, punctuation, semantic or grammatical ‘cuts’, juxtaposition by break or by preposition, white space, brackets, various means of distinguishing parts of a verse by manipulation; and sometimes an abrupt ending, or a hanging one, that invites the reader in to contemplate and sometimes to co-create by supplying the intended ‘missing part’ that completes a verse. I have been collecting forms of ‘the cut’ in anglophone haiku for a number of years, and a piece is in preparation, though it is unlikely to get a slot for some months.

A few weeks ago, Alan Summers kindly posted some of his published verses in the comments, that make use of a past tense.  When this post appears, I’ll add them in the comments below to see how, in the light of these three posts, you read the written tense and the overall sensed tense of them.

 

There’s a poll this week on the three posts that considered use of the past and the past tense within the tradition and in anglophone haiku and senryu now.  See below.

Please take the anonymous poll concerning use of the past tense.  It covers these three posts, so it’s a bit longer than usual.

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether the poems do what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve learned. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.

Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.

PLEASE TAKE THE POLL

Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:

Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.

Introducing the hosts:

Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.

Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).

A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group.   Married with five grown children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short haiku bio is here.

Comments: further discussion is invited below. Comments will close when this post is automatically archived.

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator (the host of this post) or the President here.

Keith Evetts

Comments (73)

  1. S-L-S FORMAT

    Aidan & Alan,

    With regard to haiku in English, format is not form. The layout on the page is not—and never was—diagnostic.

    Personally, I have not given much thought to what seems to me just one more element on the extensive list of variables we have available in our practice. I let the rhythm of the poem determine line length. If that rhythm happens to be S-L-S in terms of syllables or accents or just the length of the lines on the page, then I let it stand. I still manage to compose 5-7-5s in terms of syllable count every so often, but it isn’t on purpose; they just pop up now and again.

    Once, I had an editor inform me that haiku do not have capital letters or punctuation and that they must be as short as possible regarding syllable count—no more than 10 or some such nonsense. Well, you know what they say: De gustibus non est disputandum. I never sent him another poem.
    Plenty more editors, plenty more markets.

    I have found that very little of our lore is grounded in fact. Perhaps one day that will change.

    Thanks,
    M

    1. .
      Dear M,
      .
      Alas I’m no James Bond though! (smiles)

      As an editor for various journals over the last quarter century, I’m often delighted to accept with no or little editing many haiku, and haibun, that have been rejected by other editors!

      Like you, I look to the poem itself, or self-perceived rules and restrictions, or otherwise dictated restrictions.

      Yes, of course haiku can easily be pushed into some other genre or general one such as micro-poetry, but there are some great journals for both haiku and other short verse too.

      My first experience of being turned down was that there was no such thing as ‘Far North Queensland’ but thankfully the wonderful Bob Spiess trusted me and it might even be my first one in the Modern Haiku journal.

      Similarly, sort of, the equally wonderful Brussels Sprout editor Francine Porad said to me she’d love to publish my haiku, though could I bear to remove the title! Of course I said yes, and gently I learnt I need not title my haiku, duh! That haiku was published in May 1994 and was very first haiku ever published. It not anthologised or in a collection, as it’s a bit twee now, yet it was so important to my haiku journey and that’s why NHK (Japan) insisted I include it:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VS36AGVI6s

      Rejections can be useful, I once got paid US$200 for a haibun that was rejected elsewhere.

      I love dialogue with poets who I feel are 95% there in their haiku etc… or it’s a goodish haiku/haibun that could be nudged to excellent instead.

      I love the fact that Blo͞o Outlier Journal (now absorbed into The Pan Haiku Review) and PHR itself, have a number of works rejected for some reason or another.

      5-7-5s can be great of course, though I’ve had 5-7-5 purists dislike one of mine as it’s not OBVIOUS it’s 5-7-5 in syllables, go figure! That controversial one has been anthologised many times, so boo sucks to the rejectioneers! [sic erat scriptum]

  2. POTATO
    August 16, 2026 at 6:47 am

    Adam,

    It appears you misunderstand what you have cut and pasted.

    Perhaps this will help:
    Every speaker speaks in a Present. Every reader reads in a Present. When you wrote your comment it was written in a Present. Later, when I read it in my Present, I knew it had been written in a Past of my Present reading which was a different Present for the writer—you—who had written it. Later, when you read this comment, it will be in a Future of my having written it, but that Future reading will be a reading in another Present.

    Language has no effect on time. Whenever I speak or write or read, I do it in a Present. Tomorrow, if I decide to re-read what I write today, I shall read it at a Present that is later than the Present at which I wrote it, but both acts shall have occurred at a Present. And even if I decide today to re-read this in some Future, that reading shall occur in another Present.

    How could haiku—which are made of nothing but language—function any differently to what I describe?

    Later you realize it was never not the case that a speaker spoke in any time other than a Present, even if she were looking backward from the Future of an event that had happened in the Past when she spoke.

    Thanks,
    M

    1. M.R.

      Am I correct then that you are sort of splitting the temporal-ness of the experience of reading into a (a least) dual experience.

      (1) You write, “Language has no effect on time. Whenever I speak or write or read, I do it in a Present.” As such reading the Great Gatsby will also be read in the Present for any reader whenever it’s read. If this is your menacing the def no misunderstanding there, as this is a common enough understanding.

      (2) In your earlier post, when you wrote that Gordon’s “later you realize” haiku is “merely evidence that in English we can think, speak, and write things without the order in which we address time needing to be fixed.” This statement seems to indicate that a piece of literature can be written in different tenses, i.e. there’s a temporal situation OF the story, no matter when or if a reader reads it. Another common enough understanding.

      For example, the Great Gatsby is written in the Past tense, and the story took place in the past, while the narrator is narrating past events in the Present OF the novel (though the narration too could be past). If one were to ask, “When does the Great Gatsby take place?” A proper enough answer would be, “Well, the narrator tells the story in the novel’s Present, but the story being told is not a Present story, it took place in the Past.”

      However, I don’t think anyone would say the novel is taking place in the Future. And that’s where, I think, the situated-ness of the Gordon haiku entangles things. In that haiku the speaker IS having a realization regarding the body part in the present moment Now, i.e. it’s not that the realization WILL occur in the future, it’s happening right Now….but in the future. The speaker is having a future realization in the present NOW. If the speaker were having the realization in the present moment NOW, in a simple un-entangled manner, the haiku would read something like,

      NOW AT THIS MOMENT you realize it [THE THING YOU SAW YESTERDAY] was actually a piece of your own body

      And if it was a simple future tense orientation it would be something like,

      YOU DON’T REALIZE NOW BUT later you WILL COME TO realize it [THE THING YOU SAW YESTERDAY] was actually a piece of your own body

      But even this reading, if the haiku is more than a self-imperative command, which such a reading is very interesting, and certainly stabilizes the temporal moment into the present NOW, but if the haiku acts as a declarative or descriptive gesture, even the simple future orientation becomes problematic when it comes to explain the temporal situated-ness of when the speaker is within the haiku (and even more problematic if the speaker is understood to be the reader)

      So, when I mentioned wrote “To see this displacement of time and situating the speaker within all three “times” at once is something different than has been discussed in past weeks (or maybe not?)

      IF one reads the poem in this way (and one doesn’t necessarily have to, e.g. the above self-imperative reading), but if one does, then in the haiku the speaker is paradoxically having a future realization right now in the present moment about a past event that has not yet occurred, i.e. the speaker has not yet experienced the body part.

      1. Typo Edits above:

        “As such reading the Great Gatsby will ALWASY be read in the Present…”

        “If this is your MEANING the def…”

        Sorry hehehe

    2. Who says that a haiku needs to have a tense? Or even a narrator? How about my

      Black sky
      blackbird
      black

      (Mainichi 2015)

      1. If we look at beyond molecular structure with a microscope the action has an effect, and I’m guessing with haiku it’s nigh impossible to be 100% narrator free as their presence is still felt.

        It feels like it’s in the present tense, it is difficult to get away from that in any ‘verbless’ and ‘tenseless’ exercises:

        Black sky
        blackbird
        black

        John Hamley
        https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20151119/p2g/00m/0fe/133000c

        I still miss Isamu Hashimoto!
        .

        I could read this as:

        Black sky
        the blackbird
        is black too

        etc… as reader becomes narrator in most poetic genres and especially haiku….

        OR

        The Reader As Second Verse
        https://britishhaikusociety.org.uk/04-reader-second-verse/
        Slightly amended:
        https://nzhaiku.wordpress.com/essays-articles/the-reader-as-second-verse/
        .

        Most of my blackbird haiku contain a visible verb, perhaps these count as verbless.
        Though which verb tense shows through?

        .

        hedgerow song ब्रह्म मुहूर्त the blackbird hour 

        Alan Summers

        Award credit:
        Whiptail journal ISSUE 6: Inaugural Readers’ Choice Award
        Runner up

        Issue 6: Cloudbreak (February 2023) ed. Robin Smith, Kat Lehmann & Marcie Wessels
        WILD COSMOS section

        .

        A verbless blackbird haiku?

        glints
        in and out of potentilla
        a blackbird’s beak

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Azami ed. Ikkoku Santo (Japan 1997)

        .

        the names of rain
        a blackbird’s subsong
        into dusk

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Haiku News Vol. 1 No. 35 (September 2012)

        Features:

        Cornell University USA (Cornell University, Mann Library haiku showcase March 2013)
        Brass Bell: Alan Summers curated by Zee Zahava Wednesday, July 1, 2015

        .

        a people’s moon
        the song of blackbirds
        in every trench

        Alan Summers
        Publication Credit:
        Ticking Moon sequence:
        Bones – journal for contemporary haiku no. 7 (July 2015)

        .
        Thanks John, I’ve been learning a lot from my foray!

        1. .
          Going through what I’d considered were verbless haiku was educational. I removed at least a couple I had considered verbless, and others felt in the present tense regardless of no visible sign of a verb.

          .

          Of course a hidden verb, not unusual in a haiku, still makes it verbal in my opinion. Revisiting certain haiku, they don’t feel as verbless or lacking in a verb tense as I first thought.

          e.g.
          The word “almost” is an adverb meaning “nearly” or “not quite”. It goes right before most main verbs, adjectives, or adverbs, or goes after the verb “to be”.

          Even more fascinating was that it when it was translated into Japanese all sorts of things happened which suggests we don’t use the word kigo for ourselves unless we are in Japan when we write a haiku! Somehow “Tiger’s Rain” entered the translation:

          “Tiger’s Rain” (Tora ga ame, 虎が雨) is a Japanese seasonal term (kigo) for rain that falls on the 28th day of the 5th month of the lunar calendar. It originates from the legend of Lady Tora (Tora Gozen), whose tears for her slain lover, Soga no Jurō, were said to turn into rain.

          Art and Poetry: The theme appears in traditional Japanese poetry (haiku) and classic ukiyo-e woodblock prints, such as Utagawa Hiroshige’s famous post-station print series depicting Ōiso.

          A kigo of early summer rain. “Tora” is a name of a woman whose lover died The rain is falling as if in sympathy with people in sorrow. One of the very famous poetic words for a “sad rain”.

          My haiku had been kidnapped by a kigo from Japan!

          Perhaps we should state: index temporis
          .
          Mine was during a season, and yes it was Summer, I’ve attended more funerals in the heat of Summer than in the Autumn.

          My haiku may appear seasonless as funeral or grave in Japanese haiku are not kigo.
          Verb tense? It appears basic simple present tense despite no visible verb though almost points to one behind the scenes.

          If I added “it was” to the beginning of the middle line? It still feels oddly present tense. Of course the memory is rooted in the present tense of the moment.

          The moment was also broken up into stages, yet I picked up a double moment, first the realisation and recognition, escape and relief, and then the embracing for a few minutes before I was called away for the next stage indoors.
          ,

          The haiku in question?

          .

          the rain
          almost a friend
          this funeral

          Alan Summers

          .

          First publication credit: Azami #28 ed. Ikkoku Santo (Japan, 1995)

          Award credits:
          Highly Commended, Haiku Collection Competition, (Snapshot Press 1998)
          Joint 9th Best of Issue, Snapshot Five (1999)

          Feature/Interview:
          Meet… Alan Summers Interview by Gilles Fabre Seashores Issue 9 (November 2022)

          Other publication credits:
          Snapshots 4 (1998); Birmingham Words Issue 3 (Autumn 2004); tempslibre (2010)

          Feature: Analysis of the Haiku structure (tempslibre, 2001)

          Anthology credits:
          First Australian Online Anthology (October 1999)
          The Omnibus Anthology, haiku and senryu (Hub Haiku series 2001, Hub Editions)
          Hidden (British Haiku Society Anthology 2002)
          The New Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2002)
          First Australian Haiku Anthology (Paper Wasp 2003)
          The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss and Change
          ed. Robert Epstein (Modern English Tanka Press 2012)

          Articles:
          On minimalism and other things DJ Peel Blithe Spirit Vol 9 No.3 (1999)
          Travelogue on World Haiku Festival 2002, Part 2 (Akita International Haiku Network, Japan 2010)

          Collection credit: The In-Between Season (With Words Pamphlet Series 2012)

          Featured Poet:
          Cornell University, Mann Library, U.S.A. Daily Haiku (Oct 2001)

          Magazine feature: Seven magazine: “Three lines of simple beauty” (2006)

          online feature:
          Blogging Along Tobacco Road: Alan Summers – Three Questions (2010) ed. Curtis Dunlap

          Is the present ever present? Is the past ever present?

      2. John, this concern was discussed a bit in a previous moon and finger thread, with the concept of a “default” situating into the Present when no tensed-verb marker is present in a haiku’s language. In a reply Orense captured some of the possible reasons why: (https://thehaikufoundation.org/moon-and-finger-9-the-past-part-1/#comment-168924

        I think unless if language doesn’t hint at when its referring to, or when it’s taking place, the default to a present tense makes sense because, as M.R. is apt to point out, we’re always in the Now.

  3. It occurs to me that a haiku or any poem written in the past tense will have or imply a stronger authorial presence than one written in the present tense. The present tense poem, of course, will echo, to one extent or another, the presence of the writer/experiencer, but immediacy will subsume it, perhaps more than will happen in a poem located in the past, which will sound out the fact that it is coming from *someone’s* memory.

    I only say it because for many, an ideal is that the author not intrude on the haiku. This ideal may make some people uneasy about using the past tense.

    Perhaps this has already been spoken to. I have not read through everything.

    1. I do feel there are so many presumptions over both Japanese and non-Japanese haiku that I worry people couldn’t get through the pain barrier that I endured while deep diving into haiku the first five years.

      I am honoured that so many people who go onto Call of the Page courses do not let any fear stop them from completing assignments for my feedback. In fact I love learning from people’s different ways they bring to haiku, tanka, haibun etc… that not only myself but others may never get to witness.

      As they, and myself, are not the big cheeses of haiku, we don’t have ‘the name’ to push our own style through.

      Of course there is not always strong work featured in haikai-focused or haikai-friendly journals but I see that in any kind of poetry or Flash or Short Story edition or anthology.

      I don’t see tense as a problem, even if there is any perceived bias, something will always push through that bias, even if we are not one of the big cheeses.

      Are we Vintage Cheddar or Old Winchester anyone?

      Vintage Cheddar: Aged for 24 to 30 months (such as Lymn Bank or Quicke’s Vintage), developing a crumbly texture and crunchy calcium lactate crystals with a massive, sharp tang.

      Old Winchester: A deeply aged Dutch-style Gouda-relative packed with crunch and heavy savory umami depth.

      Or Liederkranz (USA cheese but a German word that translates to “wreath of songs” or “garland of songs”)
      Or:
      Limburger (American-made): Produced heavily in the American Midwest (like Wisconsin), its surface-ripening bacteria (B. linens) create an infamous, socks-and-earth smell paired with a strong, meaty tang
      Or:
      Red Hawk: A triple-cream cow’s milk cheese from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheesemaking Company in California, washed in brine for a deeply savory, pungent, and salty punch
      Or:
      Another variety.

      Still can’t get into my head how Cheddar isn’t copyrighted as many French cheeses etc… are!
      https://www.cheddargorgecheese.com/gifts/
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Gorge

      Non-Cheddar Gorge/non-UK ones should really call it something else.

      Cheddar Gorge is a limestone gorge in the Mendip Hills, near the village of Cheddar, Somerset, England. The gorge is the site of the Cheddar show caves, where Great Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, Cheddar Man, estimated to be 9,000 years old, was found in 1903. It has been suggested that the caves were used for maturing cheese in prehistoric times.

      I miss themed haiku anthologies, there aren’t as many around as in the past.

      Perhaps a multi-tense themed anthology could be a project out of this, showing haiku from 1960s to late 2020s?

      1. Hello Alan,

        I am relatively new to haiku, but I have published haiku and haibun in a few places and even have a couple in Haiku 21.2, (Gurga and Metz, eds.) as do you (all of which are evocative and admirable). I am certainly not a big cheese in this world, nor would I care to be, but I guess there are people who are quite well known, who have won awards and all that, who might be considered big cheeses. I am acquainted with a few of them, and I don’t have the impression that any of them are trying to push their style through. Lee Gurga, who is not an acquaintance, does talk about expanding one’s toolkit and trying out new things, but he is also careful to say he values “normative” haiku and writes them, as well as haiku that fit into the category of exploring “what haiku can be.” I think that is true of other well-known haiku poets as well.

        The impression I get from my own studies is that things have loosened up a lot in the haiku world. I am sure there are some writers who feel that writing in the past tense is a wrong turn to take, just as there are some who feel that not following the 5/7/5 pattern is wrong. Even so, someone whose first contact with haiku is the Haiku 21.2 anthology, or even the more conservative Red Moon anthologies, or an issue of Modern Haiku will quickly see that many styles are available to consider.

        For me, too, the past tense is not a problem. For me, the only problem is clichéd writing, imitative writing, or writing that is not a bit of a wake-up call.

        Aidan

        1. Hi Aidan,
          I’ve been around over 30 years so sadly I know a few skeletons and unseen stuff. Ah well, moving on though…
          (smiles)

          You say:
          “I am relatively new to haiku, but I have published haiku and haibun in a few places and even have a couple in Haiku 21.2, (Gurga and Metz, eds.)”

          And this was chosen in the Frogpond sampler:

          .

          mushrooms
          
emerging—

          the widow lifts her veil

          Aidan Breare Portland, OR
          https://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2024-issue47-3/haiku.html

          .

          It looks like you are a well-established haiku poet!

          ..

          I’m not an advocate of one tense over another or one style over another. Either someone like me with 30 plus years of reading and writing haiku is a stick-in-the-mud or someone wanting to to write better haiku however they take me. I hope I’m the latter.
          .

          Fay Aoyagi’s blog is incredibly useful as it reminds us, if we are interested, in what the Mother-genre is up to in Japan:

          .

          あの時も沈黙の神長崎忌　　
          蟇目良雨

          ano toki mo chinmoku no kami nagasaki-ki
          Ryōu Hikime

                      at that time
                      God keeps his silence
                      Nagasaki Anniversary

          English version: Fay Aoyagi

          Ryōu Hikime
          Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), November 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Japan
          https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/2026/08/09/todays-haiku-august-9-2026/

          .

          An internet ‘translation’ has this:

          even then,
          the silent god of Nagasaki
          Memorial Day

          .

          Nagasaki, City of Silence—even then
          Memorial Day

          English version: Alan Summers

          I prefer Fay’s version and yet the tense is what? Before the then-present into future? What does it really matter?

          I find the verse startling and spine-tingling as I do with this Western haiku:

          .

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

          Don Baird
          Winner of the 2013 Haiku Now! Contest
          And:
          Per Diem Archive: A. Summers January 2014, Slip-Realism
          https://thehaikufoundation.org/per-diem-archive-details/?IDcat=277

          Slip-Realism: https://area17.blogspot.com/2018/01/slip-realism-haiku-about-lives-and.html

          .
          Okay so we are fairly regularly instructed that haiku must be only in the present tense, contain ‘kire’ and ‘kigo’ or it’s not haiku. Even if Japanese haiku break one or more of those rules, we non-Japanese cannot, or so by some. I learnt the confidence over five straight hard years to smile all of that away.

          “Lee Gurga, who is not an acquaintance, does talk about expanding one’s toolkit and trying out new things, but he is also careful to say he values “normative” haiku and writes them, as well as haiku that fit into the category of exploring “what haiku can be.” I think that is true of other well-known haiku poets as well.”

          I still continue to write ‘normal’ haiku even many 575 haiku, and also not just old or new experimental work.

          After all haiku really started to move away from hokku just before WWII, and then the ever-changing consquences of the Industrial Revolution, and break up of countries such as Yugoslavia.

          .
          You say:
          “The impression I get from my own studies is that things have loosened up a lot in the haiku world.”

          Sorry to hear that.
          .
          In my case I witness both poor writing, template writing, and writing that could have gone through another revision or two. Those who send work to The Pan Haiku Review often know I can offer suggestions and not simply reject or accept something that is not quite there, in my opinion.

          .

          But what do you consider as loosened up and quite a lot?

          .

          You say:
          “For me, too, the past tense is not a problem. For me, the only problem is clichéd writing, imitative writing, or writing that is not a bit of a wake-up call.”

          That’s good to hear. Not everyone wants to progress while for others it’s vital.

          As for:
          “first contact with haiku is the Haiku 21.2 anthology, or even the more conservative Red Moon anthologies, or an issue of Modern Haiku will quickly see that many styles are available to consider.”

          It’s surprising how first contact can be the most obscure and not very good books etc… too.

          If we are poets or aspire to be one, then navigating for strong sources on haiku whether print books in a library or indie bookshop, or internet sources, we need to learn to curate for our betterment.

          .

          No one source is ever enough.

          .

          I regularly check Fay’s blog, and other places every single day. If that’s not possible, then on a weekly basis, monthly if someone isn’t that serious.

          just an online check on good haiku anthologies
          and not even inverted commas “good haiku anthologies” will give material for research and curating.

          Plus so many journals are online now and free to view.

          I can’t expect anyone to be as Virgo as me, though a slow steady careful search and even basic curation.

          1. Aidan,

            BEST OF ISSUE
            FROGPOND AWARDS 2025

            Each issue of Frogpond features a $100 “Best of Issue Frogpond Award” sponsored by the Museum of Haiku Literature Award “For the best previously unpublished work appearing in the last issue of Frogpond as selected by vote of the Haiku Society of America Executive Committee.”

            This award is made possible by the generosity of the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, Japan.
            https://www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/museumawardscollection.html

            Even I’ve not received a Museum of Haiku Literature Award from Frogpond or Blithe Spirit!

          2. By “loosening” I mean the “rules” or “norms” are less rigid. There is a greater variety of approaches. And yet . . .

            Last night I picked up a copy of Modern Haiku— a friend passes them along to me so I get them a little later than most people— Summer 2025. Brad Bennett has an article in it about line structures in haiku, the predominant one being short/long/short. He says: “for English language haiku, the classic SLS structure can create effective asymmetry in a three line, two part haiku that helps to enact the poem’s all important juxtaposition. But perhaps we rely too often on this structure in the English language haiku world. For instance, when I first started writing haiku in Ernest about 15 years ago, I remember one journal only accepted SLS poems. And to this day, some of my colleagues have expressed anxiety about experimenting with other haiku structures. Has SLS become too much of a default structure? Have our brains become overly wired to organize our haiku moments into that specific arrange arrangement are we missing opportunities to explore other structures?”

            This surprised me a little, and made me wonder if things have loosened up all that much.

            I believe what he says here applies to other aspects of haiku creation as well, including the use of past tense— for how many, I wonder, is there “anxiety about experimenting with other haiku structures.”

            Maybe someone with longer and deeper experience with haiku can say whether or not this is a significant problem. Does it have a negative effect on the genre as a whole? Or is it just something a portion of those who write haiku would benefit from considering?

          3. mushrooms
            
emerging—

            the widow lifts her veil

            Aidan Breare Portland, OR

            I’m wondering whether this is Lacrymaria lacrymabunda, known as the weeping widow mushroom? A quick search produces: “When the mushroom first appears, its cap is covered in delicate, dark, woolly fibers. As the cap expands, these fibers break apart and leave a dark, frayed, fringe-like rim around the edge that strongly resembles a traditional black lace mourning veil worn by a widow.”

          4. .
            Hi Aidan,
            Just a quick note:
            .
            Aidan said:
            “Has SLS become too much of a default structure?”

            Well it might be a bit lazy just to do SLS all the time, and even if we all like comfort food, it shouldn’t be our main menu go to default, should it?

            I wrote a piece on duostich, as it’s quite a challenge, to really properly pull it off:

            Duostich: Navigating Unicorns by Alan Summers
            with Michael Lindenhofer
            Pan Haiku Review issue 1 the single line haiku & two-line haiku special plus haiku sequences (Spring 2023)

            .

            Setting aside other approaches that don’t entail 1-4 lines left to right, or vertical presentations of haiku, Johannes S. H. Bjerg and Hansha Teki’s have done parallel forms of haiku, and Johannes S. H. Bjerg’s Flash Haiku, and brilliant Marlene Mountain has brought so much innovation with great and uncomfortable depth.
            .
            I do experiment from time to time including fire flies or is it fire flies or fireflies?
            zoom in:
            https://whiptail.weebly.com/issue-5-without-a-why-micros-challenge.html

            .

            Aidan said:
            “Have our brains become overly wired to organize our haiku moments into that specific arrange arrangement are we missing opportunities to explore other structures?””

            If we look at The Haiku Handbook by Bill Higginson and Penny Harter back in the 1980s it has great examples of experimentation. A book still ahead of its time.

            .
            If you mean by haiku moments via the author complex cascades of electrochemical signals, neurochemical releases, and physiological adjustments, of course there are many ways to commit haiku verse to them.

            Those cellular processes, receptor bindings, and nervous system activations within the human organism have brought us great and unusual art, and haiku is no different.

            .
            Aidan said:
            “This surprised me a little, and made me wonder if things have loosened up all that much.”

            Exactly!

            .
            Aidan said:
            I believe what [Brad Bennett] ]says here applies to other aspects of haiku creation as well, including the use of past tense— for how many, I wonder, is there “anxiety about experimenting with other haiku structures.”
            .
            That’s why RAW NerVz edited by Dorothy Howard was a great eye opener when I was just starting out, and chuffed I appear in it. It was like not only Punk Music (UK etc…) that shook up comfort music, it got the creative juices working in preference to formula and peer pressure from both fellow poets and editors and anthologists.

            I guess haiku poets can be skittish, and there’s not enough of a support network for really pushing boundaries and not into gimmick or merely innovation, but stuff that can be shockingly reminders of raw aspects of life in its messiest.
            .
            Though innovation is useful: such as the one word “COBWEB: Single-word Shisan” renku invented by H. Gene Murtha, with Paul MacNeil and William J. Higginson, see issue XXX:3, 2010 p65-9, of frogpond.
            .
            There is a lot of experimentation, perhaps sometimes it’s difficult to technically incorporate it in some journals?
            .
            Aidan said:
            “Maybe someone with longer and deeper experience with haiku can say whether or not this is a significant problem. Does it have a negative effect on the genre as a whole? Or is it just something a portion of those who write haiku would benefit from considering?”

            On Instagram a post about haiku generated around 1,800 hits although many comments were about 575 haiku which seems cemented into people’s brains alas, thinking it’s a great challenge, when that argument is very hit and miss. People do turn to conservativeness and we don’t always self-educate or enough, to fill in the gaps left by institutional education.
            .
            Something continually radical can help even if it goes back to stronger haiku in the SLS mould. It can be scary to some.

            .
            This wasn’t written long ago, and perhaps being around on the planet for a long time I can absorb so much from embryo to developed organism!

            e.g.

            .

            recurringdream#16.333iso/overbreakfast


            Alan Summers
            Publication credits:
            fox dreams (April 2012) ed. Aubrie Cox
            The Whale’s Alibi (December 2024)

            .
            Aubrie Cox, a former Frogpond editor, loved and accepted this haiku in its own right:

            “I’m also really fond of this one. I’m still mulling over this one; I keep coming back to it.”

            She really wanted to know more so I did break it down. And I guess you’ll be able to do so too. As haiku can mean a light playful stanza, so my paronomasia haikai verse feels fine to join the stable.

            .
            It’s healthy to turn to other ways of presenting haiku, it can strengthen the more ‘regular’ writing via osmosis.

    2. AUTHORIAL PRESENCE
      PAST TENSE

      Peter,

      I think you make a good point here about the felt presence of the author.

      I can imagine some writers, perhaps even a majority, may indeed find it uncomfortable using the past tense in haiku, but is this only because of the difference between the overwhelming volume of present tense haiku versus the lesser volume of past tense haiku available to us as example?

      Personally, the present tense-is- less-authorial-presence angle doesn’t work for me as I view a haiku in the present tense as no less a made thing than a haiku in the past tense. In other words, the textual artifact I read has obviously been composed by somebody no matter what literary or linguistic choices have been deployed to elide or massage that fact. No use of tense can remove that knowledge from my mind when reading.

      Regardless of my own view, it is very easy to see that if an overwhelming majority of poets believe that immediacy is essential to haiku function, then we’ll have an overwhelming majority of poems using the present tense to demonstrate that. It seems the issue may not revolve so much around an authorial presence/absence either/or relation to an event, thought, or realization, but rather around an authorial distance/nearness continuum in relation to an event, thought, or realization. Hence, the more we feel an authorial presence in haiku, the farther the reader is from the event, thought, or realization that is the haiku. And, conversely, the less we feel an authorial presence in haiku, the closer the reader can be to the event, thought, or realization that is the haiku.

      This sort of explanation—which you point the group toward here—does not appear to require an appeal to prescriptivism to explain the observable dominant pattern of present tense composition in ELH.

      What evidence might the example of haiku without tense—which I have tried to get this forum to examine—provide in favor of or against the above?

      And what about future tense constructions while we’re at it?

      Thanks,
      M

  4. I’ve only ever written one one-liner, but now you have provoked me to do another:

    Fields and forests rooster strides

    1. Great!

      I love one-line haiku as it also makes me think of the poetic line in general.

      forest each Shakespeare a windflower we evade gods
      Alan Summers

      The Moon is in my Torch
      PRINT: Rattle Spring 2025 issue Tribute to the Haibun issue #87 March 1, 2025
      AUDIO: June 2025 https://rattle.com/the-moon-is-in-my-torch-by-alan-summers/

      .
      And just an experiment and to show a verb is far more than just about tense(s);

      .

      Fields and forests rooster strides
      fields and forests rooster strides
      a rooster’s field the forest strides

      ––––––––––––––
      Why the shift?
      ––––––––––––––
      In prehistoric times, roosters resembled the modern Red Junglefowl of Southeast Asia
      They lived in tropical forests and bamboo thickets. . Moving further back, their theropod dinosaur ancestors possesse long balancing tails and a more upright, hip-driven stride.
      –University of Wisconsin-Madison

      A haiku is never finished, it pauses…

      Alan

      1. Thanks Alan. Coming from you the compliment counts. They have a saying in Finland, and possibly elsewhere in Europe too, that in springtime a rooster strides on the horizon to mark where on each day the sun will rise.

        1. Hi John,

          I was inspired to write this from both your poem and your notes above.
          .
          A method to pull out potential haiku whether one or more lines is a kind of erasure, but from our own written thoughts:
          “They have a saying in Finland, and possibly elsewhere in Europe too, that in springtime a rooster strides on the horizon to mark where on each day the sun will rise.”
          .
          I can’t show the actual method as this site doesn’t seem to allow colour, so I’ll just use SQUARE BRACKETS for now:

          .

          [They have a saying in Finland, and possibly elsewhere in Europe too, that in] springtime a rooster strides [on] the horizon to mark where [on] each day the sun will rise[.]

          .

          springtime a rooster strides the horizon to mark where each day the sun will rise

          .

          springtime a rooster strides the horizon [to mark] where each day the sun will rise

          .

          springtime a rooster strides the horizon where each day the sun will rise

          .

          springtime a rooster strides the horizon where the sun will rise

          springtime a rooster strides where the sun will rise

          springtime a rooster strides the sun will rise

          .
          I felt ‘strides’ was too important to edit it out, as it does more than just active as a verb adding a description. It’s good to allow the vertical axis of nodding to literary figures and their works as is/was traditional in Japanese haikai verse:

          ___________
          For example:
          ___________

          Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Roosters’ there are certain parts that are very striking:

          At four o’clock
          in the gun-metal blue dark
          we hear the first crow of the first cock

          — — —

          the day’s preamble
          like wandering lines in marble.
          The cocks are now almost inaudible.

          The sun climbs in,   
          following “to see the end,”   
          faithful as enemy, or friend.

          Elizabeth Bishop, “Roosters” from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979

          .

          And this mesmerising line, at least by me, and the partnership of Edip Cansever brought to us in English by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast:

          The bright red of a whistle makes the child a child.

          From the “The Rooster & the Stairs”
          https://www.guernicamag.com/two_poems_6/
          .

          And both the comfortable and controversial Shakespeare:

          William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II

          Cassius speaks to Brutus

          Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
          
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
          
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
          
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

          https://poets.org/poem/julius-caesar-act-i-scene-ii-why-man-he-doth-bestride-narrow-world

          .

          I feel haiku, even if outside of Japan, we see it as a sub-set, can be very powerful if it’s spinning on its axis of what came before (known or famous works) and what will follow (our own writing, and writers of the future near and far and even too close for comfort). We are vibrating with other writers.

          The sun will rise, it’ll be another day, a new day, though it carries both good and horrendous acts through time and times yet to be as we hurtle lovingly into hate mostly, I hope sun up one day sees all that end and start something far less inhumane, as we scramble out of our own dirt.

          So you see, verbs are verbs yet also engines of memory if we see them as more than just verbs.

          Alan

          1. Thanks Alan,
            Lots of food for thought in what you just said. The “strides” is important in my haiku because the springtime saying is that days are getting longer by rooster’s strides.

          2. I learnt from being a renga poet-in-residence for a city that what’s said can be great kernels for haikai verses. I learn to be quick enough to write down directly what was said (useful transferable skills).

            Using that:

            [Lots of food for thought in what you just said. The “strides” is important in my haiku because the] springtime [saying is that] days [are] getting longer by rooster’s strides.

            springtime days getting longer by rooster’s strides
            springtime the days getting longer rooster’s strides

            Or from one old literary term (springtime)

            reverdie the days getting longer rooster’s strides

            etc…

  5. .
    As Richard Gilbert’s name has been invoked…

    This is about the haiku in this past and also about my wolf verse indirectly:

    This haiku could have been, or can be for this post:

    night of small colour
    a part of the underworld
    became one heron

    Became is the simple past tense of the irregular verb “become”.
    It shows a completed action or change that happened in the past.

    Also see:
    Become vs Became: The Ultimate Guide to Using These Verb Forms Correctly
    Aiden Brooks
    https://grammarreader.com/become-vs-became-2/

    I can, perhaps very incorrectly, see ‘became’ as both past and present completed and also unfolding.

    I had chosen to write it with the verb ‘becomes’ because the bird emerged from the darkness, almost mythically, my Greek and Roman tales coming out perhaps, and to my retina it was still unfolding even after the bird was realised. Almost like an oscillating of past and present never just one.

    And isn’t haiku a little like that, capturing something that “was” now and cannot ever be fully reported although illustrated as it’s now, and now, and now, several nows evoked each time a reader is activated.

    Oscillating between the past and present describes a mental rhythm where focus swings back and forth between old memories or regrets and current reality. This back-and-forth movement can trigger nostalgia or rumination, pulling attention away from what is happening right now.
    https://readtowritestories.com/2013/10/01/how-to-move-between-past-and-present/

    ––––––––––––––––
    ORIGINAL:
    ––––––––––––––––

    night of small colour
    a part of the underworld
    becomes one heron

    Alan Summers
    Haiku 21.2: an anthology of contemporary English-language haiku
    ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press 2025)

    –––––––––––––––– ––––––––––––––––
    BEST HAIKU ANTHOLOGY (shared)
    Haiku Society of America
    Merit Books Awards for 2026
    –––––––––––––––– ––––––––––––––––

    ––––––––––––––––
    Judges Comments:
    –––––––––––––––––

    The second installment in the 21st century anthology of “notable” haiku by thoughtful and daring editors. Whereas Haiku 21 covered 2000-2010, H21.2 attends to the years 2011-2020, thus offering a totally new selection of open, allusive, challenging haiku that run the gamut from concrete to abstract expression, contemporary to avant-garde form. For those who wonder what else can haiku be, look no further for fresh use of conventional imagery and new amalgams of minimalist disjunction. H21.2 is chock-full of poetic energy and innovation.
    ––––––––––––––––
    Essay commentary:
    ––––––––––––––––
    Poetry as Consciousness – Haiku Forests, Space of Mind, and an Ethics of Freedom
    Author: Richard Gilbert Illustrator: Sabine Miller. ISBN978-4-86330-189-4 pub. Keibunsha (2018, Japan)
    –––––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––– ––––––––––––––––
    2019 Haiku Society of America (HSA) Merit Books Awards
    (Prose category Tie for Best)
    –––––––––––––––– –––––––––––––––– ––––––––––––––––

    This haiku is classified as mythopoetic reality. The mythopoesis [is] evident in the semantic twist of “small colour” of night, a part of which “becomes one heron.”

    What lies between realism and imagination, between living and dreaming, [as] a particular form of sanctuary; a space of poiesis. It seems most fragile and nuanced, insignificant and ephemeral—yet it calls or we call, in seeking deeper, more enriching, increasingly multiple, multifarious dimensions of knowing in psyche.

    Wallace Stevens refers to this poetical process as “enlargement”.

    —Professor Richard Gilbert, Japan

    –––––––––––––––
    COMMENTARY:
    –––––––––––––––
    Richard Gilbert
    (Kumamoto Studies in English Language and Literature 61
March 2019, Japan: Kumamoto U., 1-27)

    General:
    Haiku Presentation
    Distance

    General:
    Invoking a “third” reality or poetic space occurs frequently in poetry. [This haiku] points to a “third” realm of being in consciousness…the mythopoesis evident in the semantic twist of “small colour” of night, a part of which “becomes one heron.” –Richard Gilbert

    ––––––––––––––––
    FULL CREDITS:
    ––––––––––––––––

    First publication Credit: Modern Haiku Vol. 45.2 Summer 2014 ed. Paul Miller

    Anthology credits:
    Haiku 21.2: an anthology of contemporary English-language haiku
    ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz (Modern Haiku Press 2025)
    Haiku 2015 (Modern Haiku Press, 2015) ed. Lee Gurga and Scott Metz
    Poetry as Consciousness – Haiku Forests, Space of Mind, and an Ethics of Freedom
    Author: Richard Gilbert Illustrator: Sabine Miller. ISBN978-4-86330-189-4
    pub. Keibunsha (2018, Japan)
    Yanty’s Butterfly Haiku Nook: An Anthology (2016) ed. Jacob Salzer & Nook Editorial Staff

    Features and Interview:

    Meet… Alan Summers (interview by Gilles Fabre) Seashores Issue 9 (November 2022)
    Brass Bell Showcase: Alan Summers (July 2015) curated by Zee Zahava

    Essay:
    Haiku Sanctuary, Between Living and Dreaming by Richard Gilbert (February 2019)
    Published:
    Kumamoto Studies in English Language and Literature 61
March 2019, Japan: Kumamoto U., 1-27

    Reproduced: Under the Bashō (2019) Don Baird, Editor-in-Chief

    1. Alan, when you change your verse to:

      night of small colour
      a part of the underworld
      became one heron

      ..then I think a journal editor picky about haiku being in the present, might see the first line “night of small colour” as being in the present ‘now’ if she wanted the poem, or ‘of no tense, hence the following phrase determines the time, the verse is in the past, ruled out’ if she didn’t.

      The example could be developed to illustrate the present perfect, which might be better except it wrecks the 5-7-5…
      night of small colour
      a part of the underworld
      has become one heron

      This again is a perfected action but it leads directly to the present moment, assumed.

      As was discussed in an earlier post, even though a verse or a line may have no definitive tense, we tend to default to the present perhaps because haiku readers are conditioned to assume that haiku are ‘supposed’ to be in the present, and the verse is presented as a haiku or similar. But of itself, the kigo “moon” for example, while it may be taken as “the moon now, in the present” by our conditioning, is not fixed in the text as ‘now’ but as written, is just the moon whenever.

      where they think
      great Caesar crossed the Thames
      …just the moon

      Cold Moon Journal 13 July 2024

      A notable and difficult achievement at the time, with horses, chariots and all, there is no historical record of exactly where Caesar with his army crossed the Thames. There are three candidates, based on circumstantial evidence of where it might have been easier to ford and other inductive reasoning. And in the case of the candidate a few miles upstream from us, just above the present bridge at Walton on Thames (concerning which the above was written), remnants of a few rotting oak stakes in the Thames mud. Meanwhile one of the alternatives, Brentford, has staked its claim with a monument. At the time, any ordinary illiterate legionnaire could have told you where.

      The exact date isn’t known either (just the year). So much for that, Julius!

      And of course it is without fixed time, while seeming to be in the default present (‘they’ think today, the moon of tonight or today crossing the Thames) to a haiku reader. And containing, indeed dependent upon, the distant past.

      1. I’ve only written one haiku that touches on the Roman Empire:

        tasting smalti

        byzantine child-demons
        
shine

        Alan Summers
        Publication Credits:
        c.2.2. Anthology of short-verse ed. Brendan Slater & Alan Summers
        (Yet To Be Named Free Press 2013)

        And yes, of course I’ve tasted smalti, both literally and manually as a former mosaicist, being one of a few to receive a treasured sample pack from the Orsoni brothers! Not to be confused with the other Orsoni brothers of course!

        I feel that this one might tip it over to another poetic genre:

        night of small colour
        a part of the underworld
        has become one heron

        It feels like it’s trying to say:

        It is night of small colour
        and a part of the underworld
        has become one heron

        Now that is a lovely supporting stanza of a longer genre or formal poem perhaps.

        .

        “…even though a verse or a line may have no definitive tense, we tend to default to the present…”

        Although to me it has a suggestion of:

        It was a night of small colour…

        Though Christmas is always about the present of course!

        I guess we shouldn’t underestimate a childhood of reading for some of us!

        “of itself, the kigo “moon” for example, while it may be taken as “the moon now, in the present” by our conditioning, is not fixed in the text as ‘now’ but as written, is just the moon whenever.”

        Intriguing! It was definitely not a full moon night, and a town that can feel like a village with low-lighting. Not Lacock but Bradford-on-Avon this time.

        LACOCK:

        deepening dusk
        the stir of stargazers
        behind the Red Lion

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Blithe Spirit vol. 20 no. 4 (2010)
        Lacock, Wiltshire
        https://www.redlionlacock.co.uk
        https://gostargazing.co.uk/events/locations/lacock-playing-fields/

        And did I really see the guy?

        field of stargazers
        I’m the one who waves
        at the Chinese satellite

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Presence 41 (2010)
        Featured Poet: https://haikupresence.tumblr.com/tagged/Alan%20Summers
        Haiku of the Day: Per Diem feature: Lyn Reeves Sky theme October 2020
        https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/per-diem-archive-details/?IDcat=392

        I still remember a Brentford Nylons on Fairfax Street in Bristol, looking very 1960s during its era in the 1970s, though I don’t feel there was ever a tense moment. Oddly though it felt anachronistic to me, I’ve missed its passing. Time has its own verbs I guess.

        The daft thing is, I’d have loved this as:

        where they think
        great Caesar crosses the Thames
        …just the moon

        I wonder why you went for ‘crossed’ instead. Or perhaps because I was a big Roman Republic/Empire and Byzantine Era buff!
        I can see Jules and later Claudius vividly in my mind.

  6. re:

    was it dark inside wolf
    Alan Summers
    Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
    From the haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte

    Peter Yovu said:
    “I don’t know when the highly compressed single line haiku first appeared— with Marlene Mountain?”

    .

    First of all a few extracts from The Pull of the Single Poetic Line of Haiku:

    “What is about any single line of poetry that might appeal to us, and how does that transfer to the single line of haiku.”

    “A line is…a moment…intrinsically non-narrative…and stopping is the friendly nemesis of narrative. The moment has only itself.”
    Some Thoughts on the Integrity of the Single Line in Poetry©2011 Alberto Ríos
    A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line ed. Emily Rosko & Anton Vander Zee (University of Iowa Press)

    Shouldn’t all lines, or as many as possible, be “holding lines”?

    Holding the tension, the drama, the hidden as well as the visible texture of a line holding words both in sight and “out of sight,” the backstory, and the “front of house” diction and intent, of purpose, meaning, emotion. Where the final creation is in sight with hopefully the reader also in sight, with the creative spilling along a line as an interlocutor, weaving in and out of dialogue with itself and anyone who will pause to “listen”?

    The Pull of the Single Poetic Line of Haiku
    Alan Summers, founder, Call of the Page
    2021 Japan Writers Conference

    Next I’ll go into other single line haiku.

    For me it would seem obviously to have been Marlene Mountain (1939-2018), of course, but then there’s also Ruby Spriggs (1929-2001), and again of course Janice Bostok (1942 – 2011), my oppo! Just for starters.

    I really want to look into Ruby Spriggs and fall in love with her work again. Her one line haiku may be classified as “highly compressed single line haiku” but then isn’t any type of poetry? I personally feel her various one-line haiku are expansive, they just happen to be of few words and big heart, bite me!

    .
    SIDE NOTE:
    Peter mentioned about the term ‘vocative’
    I had to look it up!
    It’s a word used to directly address a person, animal, or thing. In a sentence like “John, please help,” the word “John” is in the vocative form because you are speaking directly to him. –wikipedia.

    As I’ve mentioned in other comments, it came to me, perhaps it changes in nuance and intent taken out from the “Mistero una volte” series perhaps. And who or what is ‘wolf’ plus it’s often subscribed to dubious men, maybe almost all men, maybe I’m addressing myself, so it could be ‘vocative’ although there was no conscious manipulation of the phrasing.

    What is pleasing, whether deliberate, wolf is a winter seasonal marker, though extinct, in Japan. And wolves make me mostly of wolves in winter, hungry and scrawny. Who knows what rattles around my brain box.

    .
    Back to Ruby who is obviously astute with compressed yet expansive single line haiku and might well have been my first inspiration:

    .

    my head in the clouds in the lake

    Frogpond, 6:2 1983

    .

    I couldn’t work out how it worked but it did!

    It may be that I’m a different sort of reader to be so moved by these single line haiku, including this one:

    .

    moment of birth new shadow

    Ruby Spriggs
    From William Higginson and Penny Harter’s The Haiku Handbook (Kodansha 1985)

    .

    “A wonderful, experimental haiku by Ruby Spriggs, which clearly shows how haiku poetry is not just form, but, most of all, the spirit and dynamics vehiculated by that particular form in relation to the contents depicted. With just a few words, two little great phenomenons (completely physical and material at first sight), which, author subjectively absent, delves into the ultimate realities of human life and the universe. A newborn; a new shadow. Nothing subjective; all objective. In Latin: three words; the world.”
    –Jacopo “Flaminius” Rubini known for composing and adapting classical poetry, particularly writing haiku and tanka in Latin as part of the living Latin poetry movement, and associated with the Opaca Fronde cultural project.

    .

    Under the Ginkgo Tree: Essays on Female Pioneer Haiku Poets in Canada
    Part six: Ruby Spriggs by Terry Ann Carter
    HAIKU CANADA REVIEW vol 13 number 2 October 2019
    EXTRACTs:
    Ruby Boyce was born in a small working class village near Leicester, England, April 25th, 1929 then moved to Canada in 1957 living in Montreal, Toronto and finally in Ottawa. She became Ruby Spriggs who held a strong Buddhist belief, along with Grant Savage, in the transience of all living things.

    .

    by the lake twice the moonlight

    Ruby Spriggs
    (Switching Off The Shadows, King’s Road Press 1996)

    .

    Grant Savage says: “Ruby was the snow, then the summer, then the
    summer snow that stayed.”
    https://haikucanada.org/publications/documents/archives/2019/Haiku Canada Review OCT 2019.pdf

    .

    So there you go, 1983 started it, maybe, and I arrived later reading the lake with my own head in the clouds.

    But I haven’t mentioned other things, I hope to get around to it before too late.

    1. re:
      was it dark inside wolf
      Alan Summers

      Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
      From the haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte

      .

      Peter Yovu said:
      “In most instances that one sees, as with Alan’s piece, all spaces and punctuation have been squeezed out.”

      There is no deliberateness on my part to commit “all spaces and punctuation have been squeezed out”
      To be honest I don’t quite understand this phrase.

      I have done maybe two like that, for instance:

      moviescreenflickerfullolifecanvasthin
      Alan Summers

      Publication credit: Paper Wasp (mid-1990s)

      Paper wasp, a quarterly journal of haiku, and Australia’s first dedicated haiku journal, was been part of the Australian literary landscape for over twenty years. Its journey towards publication began in Brisbane, with John Knight, Jacqui Murray and Ross Clark as the founding editors. Subsequently Janice Bostok and Katherine Samuelowicz joined the editorial team.

      .

      This one is also scrunched up although it does contain punctuation:

      .

      train sitting:facingpeoplei’drathernot

      Alan Summers
      Publication credit:
      RAW NerVz (Summer 1995)
      ed. Dorothy Howard

      Interview feature:
      Whiptail contributor interviews Meet Alan Summers 10/19/2022
      https://whiptail.weebly.com/contributor-interviews/category/alan-summers

      I believe they are the only two, early experiments with both one line haiku and just experimenting as I’d only just started studying haiku in 1993, and writing haiku in 1994.

      .

      Peter Yovu said:
      “To me, it doesn’t always work. I am most taken by very short poems when they feel “right” to me immediately, without my knowing why. I may not even need to know why. Some compressed poems can have this effect on me. Or in me.”

      .

      Not all poems of any genre always work, whether a so-called traditional approach or an off-traditional approach. It’s quite often down to purely personal taste and application of a viewpoint. No one is entirely objective, even those of us who have been editors of various publications:

      co-founding editor of:

      Haijinx – haiku with humor
      and 
      Bones journal for contemporary haiku 
      renamed as Bones – a journal for the short poem

      Now sadly both gone.

      A founder of haikai journals: Blo͞o Outlier haikai journal; MahMight haiku journal and the Babylon Sidedoor platform for haibun, Flash and CNF. All absorbed into my Pan Haiku Review (ongoing).

      Alongside journals I’ve founded or co-founded, I’ve previously been the Linked Verses Editor (renku etc…) for Notes from the Gean; Special Feature Editor (haiku and tanka) of Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts (Runner up, Saboteur Awards 2013 for Best Magazine category including my essay on Gendai haiku); and haibun editor for the British Haiku Society’s Blithe Spirit journal for a few issues. As well as co-editor of a number of haiku-based anthologies, and art gallery catalogue sections.

      It’s very difficult to be objective though I try to keep any potential subjectivity to a minimum as best I can! (smiles)

      1. Peter Yovu said:
        “Other times, the compression can seem like code, saying: here is a make your own poem kit. Choose which of multiple possible readings work best for you, insert your own punctuation or spacings if that helps, etc.”

        .
        Ah, there’s the rub (Act III, Scene I) and we must reach the 5th act if possible.

        This is not a “reader’s” poem or so it seems, once controversial as the most difficult poem to understand, to get into:
        ______________
        BRIGGFLATTS
        ______________
        Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1966:
        https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/apr/20/poem-of-the-week-from-briggflatts-by-basil-bunting

        Do we deny poets that are not easy to read? I hope it’s not a personal thing for anyone:

        In 1964, Basil Bunting, as old as the century, was living near Newcastle in grinding poverty and obscurity, an extinguished star of the Modernist era who’d barely written a poem in 30 years, now working as a sub-editor on a local paper.
        And yet it also became a play during June 2026!

        A poem compared favourably to Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Pound’s Cantos, by the poet Thom Gunn no less!

        Dead Poets Live have established a cult following at The Coronet Theatre for their dramatised readings of classic poetry, attracting some of Britain’s finest actors
        https://www.thecoronettheatre.com/whats-on/dead-poets-live-briggflatts-an-autobiography/

        I feel we narrow haiku to a novelty act if we constantly state each and every reader has to complete the poem in order for it to be a haiku. I feel we need to get over ourselves, and dive deep into the literature of haiku.
        ___________________________________
        Former BHS President David Cobb:
        ___________________________________
        …reportedly said … that the aim was to breathe fresh life into the form without trivialising it.
        “One walks a very sticky path between elitism and populism. I would be very unhappy if we were the cause of the dumbing-down of the haiku,” he said.
        https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jun/12/education.poetry

        I loved David Cobb, and I loved working with Susumu Takiguchi as both of us were Committee members, and my organisation Naked Haijin Productions often worked with Susumu’s own organisation World Haiku Club as much as it did with the BHS.

        .Regarding Peter Yovu:
        “It may be a matter of preference or taste. For some, this is all part of the process of “completing” a haiku. Others may feel they might as well go ahead and write their own poems to begin with. I’m being a bit facetious, but it’s how I see things sometimes.”

        Sometimes poets have to go their own way if not supported by other poets. Perhaps a mix of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” [film] or “Long Distance I” by Tony Harrison, both men from The North (UK) or “Room” by Scottish/British poet Carol Ann Duffy who lives in the North via Manchester:

        ______
        ROOM
        _______

        One chair to sit in,
        a greasy dusk wrong side of the tracks,
        and watch the lodgers’ lights come on in the other rooms.

        No curtains yet. A cool lightbulb
        waiting for a moth. Hard silence.
        The roofs of terraced houses stretch from here to how many
        months.

        Room. One second hand bed
        to remind of a death, somewhen. Room.
        Then clouds the colour of smokers’ lungs. Then what.

        In a cold black window, a face
        takes off its glasses and stares out again.
        Night now; the giftless moon and a cat pissing on a wall.
        £90pw.

        Perhaps some of us are the cat pissing on a wall.

        ___________________________________________
        I’ll step back with I believe is a tanka poem:
        ___________________________________________

        a cat picking
        at discarded fast food
        this night without you
        filling with the hum
        of regular rain

        Alan Summers
        The Strand Book Of International Poets 2010 (ed. Imran Hanif and Jane Lee)
        Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka Vol. 3 (MET Press 2010)
        Bright Stars: An Organic Tanka Journal, Vol 1 (2014)

        The poem was also composed in the North of England (Hull to be precise).

        1. was it dark inside wolf
          Alan Summers

          –––––––––––––––
          Peter Yovu said:
          –––––––––––––––
          “I’m mixed about Alan’s haiku. If both he and Keith (unless I’ve been careless in my reading) both see this as “vocative” with a wolf being addressed, why not make that clear?”

          ––––––––––––––
          Alan response:
          ––––––––––––––
          As there seemed a long pause in any comments, I proposed one interpretation, almost as a reader only and not as author.

          OPEN INVITATION: The verse is open to interpretation.

          No one version will be wrong, just additional.

          Poetry is afloat with metaphorical language whether we are aware of this sometimes.

          It’s interesting that there might be a situation where you are at odds with my work. Okay, it’s sad, but okay, your decision. I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time:

          a falcon dives 

          how completely
          
I surround my bones

          Sunrise, by Peter Yovu (Red Moon Press, 2010)
          https://www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/Yovu2010.html

          a fork in the
          
the road turning into a
          
a clock

          I like the enjambment which is often what poetry is about, yet if we look at this as a single line, for itself:

          a fork in the the road turning into a a clock
          a fork in the road turning into a clock

          –––––––––––––
          VERB TENSE:
          –––––––––––––
          “Turning into” is the present participle form of the phrasal verb “turn into.” It means to change, grow, or transform from one thing or state into another. –Wiktionary.

          And of course it can be hesitating decisions in various contexts, or while driving, and we are often “driven” by the clock.
          .

          I found these intriguing, I can’t pretend to understand or deconstruct them properly, it feels more of a language poem maybe, or again maybe not:
          .

          that we could flower where the earth is so
          .

          a new day I don’t know you anything

          .
          https://isletpoetry.wordpress.com/tag/peter-yovu/

          But it’s my job so here goes with the second one:

          a new day I don’t know you anything

          ––––––––––––––––––––––––––
          verb: simple present tense
          ––––––––––––––––––––––––––

          For me, I can read different or missing words or:

          a new day I don’t owe you anything
          a new day I don’t know you or anything about you
          a new day I don’t know you, anything

          So it feel like squeezed syntax, surely we all do it, but we might not like how others do it.

          .

          up at dawn
          blue windows
          return from the stars

          Peter Yovu
          https://heliosparrow.com/2025/04/38-5/

          I do love it.

          Interesting choice of line break, I guess this would immediately give a different take on the poem:

          up at dawn
          blue windows return
          from the stars

          “return from the stars” is a phrase that I could personally read as a return from a rural low-light pollution visit, or someone who feels as if they have returned as an astronaut and everything is different.

          Perhaps the windows appear blue from outside, lots of windows in our street have hues of blue.

          I may be denied my own personal reading even though I’ve released it publically here, yikes. But some of us readers don’t complete haiku, we engage or at least circle them one at a time.

          Alan

          1. Alan,

            was it dark inside wolf

            Alan, I like your poem. I can get a lot out of it. (All I have is the words on the page, so anything I say about it is not a reflection on all that went into your writing it. Just to be clear about that up front.) My reservation is largely based on second thoughts I have been having about what I am calling the highly compressed poem— a poem in very few words written in one line without punctuation or spacing which is left up to the reader to determine how it may be read. So it may be unfair of me to apply those reservations to this particular poem— yours.

            Seems to me there has to a reason for the use of compression. Especially for writing in a way that creates multiple possible readings, which seems to be a frequent aspect of very short one-line poems. Why, in a particular instance, is it the right way to go? It needs to be based on a good artistic choice, or so I would assume. (And I most certainly am not saying here, or implying, that you did not, or do not make careful artistic choices in your work– with this poem, or in general.)

            I don’t know if you intended to write a poem which invites multiple readings, or, if having discovered that you did so, felt that it worked, meaning it opened something unexpected up in you. In your poem I happen to think that two primary readings are evident— one in which an actual (or actually imagined) wolf is being addressed; the other in which a mythical or archetypal Wolf is being evoked. These play off each other and with each other well. The compression forces them to happen simultaneously and to create an uneasiness which one must look into.

            But maybe your poem happens too fast for me. I find myself wanting to create a separation between the word “wolf” and the rest of the poem. I can envision it being read aloud with a pause of maybe one second between the first five words and the “wolf”. I don’t know what is gained by not allowing some space.

            What I often find when I look hard at a poem is that I work hard to see it clearly and for what it has to say; for what it is; I consider that I may have filters up that prevent clear seeing. But what I often end up with is all my hard work replacing the poem.

            So I need to step back. Take another look.

            And in response to your saying that I am “at odds with your work” I say– don’t be daft.

          2. Thanks for the response!
            A lot to respond to…

            was it dark inside wolf
            Peter:
            “Alan, I like your poem. I can get a lot out of it.”

            Peter, good that you can get a lot out of it. I don’t know if you read it as a series too?

            .

            Mistero una volte
            bruises the yellow bowl’s forgotten sell-by date
            in the circle of fifths moonshine
            easily under the carpet elephants dwell
            spring equinox a mother unfurls her son
            Mare Nostrum we didn’t tell you too
            bubblegum injection the PEZ codes are lost status
            the gerund of hunger is not thinking
            painting the window portraits of those gone
            was it dark inside wolf

            Author: Alan Summers
            haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte
            Publication credit:
            Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
            https://weirdlaburnum.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/mistero-una-volte/

            Peter said:
            “(All I have is the words on the page, so anything I say about it is not a reflection on all that went into your writing it. Just to be clear about that up front.) My reservation is largely based on second thoughts I have been having about what I am calling the highly compressed poem— a poem in very few words written in one line without punctuation or spacing which is left up to the reader to determine how it may be read. So it may be unfair of me to apply those reservations to this particular poem— yours.”

            .

            Below I’m giving a few short haiku examples, while perhaps they are a sub-genre of a genre, and maybe some poets dislike any poetry that is overly short, words resonate for many writers from poets, novelists, journalists, whether we are long-form writers or not, some will stand out more, whether opening or closing words. re very short haiku I have to declare that I used to love tundra (one word haiku by Cor van den Heuvel) though now feel it doesn’t quite work for me as a word on a stark white page, even before all the climate changes. I wonder if it would better suit an ambient page?

            tundra
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNxgY4Ru3gs

            ___________
            SIDE NOTE
            ___________
            If anyone has a copy of that one-word renga which included Gene Murtha, and John Stevenson and others, I’d still be interested, I lost my copy!

            .

            Well, haiku is a highly compressed poem, or technically we could continue to call it a brief opening stanza of a longer [non-linear/anti-narrative] poem. Hence many ‘haiku’ in Japan and outside of Japan are incomplete precisely because of that, or embrace that aspect, that issue.

            In a discussion at Under the Bashō I included this haiku, which has a verb that might be past and present at the same time due to reverberations of recovery from illness:

            Hi e yamu
            陽へ病む
            Ōhashi Raboku (1890-1933)

            Alan Summers:
            “With all the pressure that haiku has to be, a form or a genre … I embrace Richard’s or perhaps my take on it, that haiku simply opposes all that is static and higher echelon and elitist, and controlling. When even our way to freedom is disputed and bombarded there should always be haiku to come back to in the wee small dark hours, as well as the light of day.”

            Richard Gilbert
            “Hi Alan — I like the way you knit the world together, that way. From the historical-Japanese, right to the present perspective of gendai (modern) Japanese haiku, Basho’s phrase “haiku jiyu” or “Haiku is for freedom” [“Haikai” at the time] is one that seems revered. I’ve heard it pronounced in such a variety of contexts. Most lately, from Kaneko Tohta, describing the “intellectual wildness” of his father’s Chichibu mountain village haiku group, in his boyhood.

            There is much to draw on, historically, with reference to your thought, that “haiku simply opposes all that is static and higher echelon and elitist, and controlling.”

            Under the Basho 2014 ed. Don Baird, Seánon Forbes, Kala Ramesh and Johannes S.H. Berg

            .

            Richard mentioned a few very brief haiku including this one starting with “ly”:

            ly in the body
            Jack Galmitz

            .

            and

            .

            anchor
            i
            tic

            Philip Rowland
            Awarded the Scorpion Prize by Joseph Massey

            This ku by Philip Rowland was selected by Joseph Massey, author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009) and At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011); Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton, 2013), and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015): https://www.josephmasseypoet.net/
            _________________________________
            Roadrunner’s 23rd Scorpion Prize
            _________________________________
            https://roadrunnerhaikublog.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/scorpion-prize-23-joseph-massey/

            .

            There is also the very famous haiku which might break all the Western rules, and a Japanese one or two maybe. (smiles)

            .

            せきをしてもひとり
            — 尾崎放哉

            even if you cough, alone

            Hōsai Ozakii (1885-1926)
            English version by Alan Summers 

            In Japanese it’s a 3-3-3-on pattern instead of the commonly perceived 5-7-5-on.

            Romanised version:
            Seki o shite mo hitori

            .

            I always think of Ozaki when I read this one, and vice versa:

            .

            alone tonight a single malt 

            Margaret Walker
            The Blo͞o Outlier Journal Winter Issue 2020 (Issue #1)
            ed. Alan Summers (Touchstone nominated)
            Featured:
            Schrödinger’s Ma [間] and the Segue Axis | Alan Summers
            Haiku North America Virtual Conference (October 2021)

            To express being alone tonight using only the main verb (without helper words like will or am), it’s the simple present tense (stay) or the simple past tense (stayed). However, because “tonight” points to the future, using a barely present verb for a future plan sounds unusual unless it is part of a scheduled event, which it is, so perhaps “Natural Future” tense?

            Is my own haiku (plus it has a kigo) this tense or an oscillating tense?

            Past continuous (e.g., was it raining) or a haunting memory that continues to be in the present (continuous) as much as it was in the past too.

            Past, Present, Future by Emily Brontë
            She compares the past to a smiling child, the present to a swift hour, and the future to an endless sea, reflecting how yesterday shapes today’s fleeting moment. And yes, wolves frequently travel across the open tundra day and night particularly from twilight hours.

            To Verb or Not to Verb, there is the rub…

          3. Peter said:
            “Seems to me there has to a reason for the use of compression. “
            .
            And of course equally there has to be a reason for the opposite which is expansion or elaboration. And elaboration can be a tricky thing for the haiku genre.
            .

            Peter said:
            “Especially for writing in a way that creates multiple possible readings, which seems to be a frequent aspect of very short one-line poems.”

            I feel metaphorical writing in any genre will present “multiple possible readings” and certainly is only one of many approaches to single-line haiku.

            What was an epiphany for me as I was being influenced far too much by those “multiple possible readings” that were peer-pressure, was the coming out of Stuart Quine’s first one-line haiku collection:

            .
            Sour Pickle – one-line haiku
            first collection by Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing 2018)

            Journal published version:

            winter moon a glint of wolf in the mongrel’s eyes

            .

            And keeping his original versions for the book:

            hidden and unseen the burgeoning life in buds and bellies
            .

            This reminded me of the sheep station dog and retired mouser that I’ve written about in a rural publication as well as in haiku tercets, and Quine magically says it so well, where mine was a green sunset (very Queensland) his was:

            .

            distant thunder the old mouser raises an ear
            .
            __________
            Two more:
            __________
            .
            winter solstice darkness gathers in the unrung bells
            .
            under mistletoe on her lips a tang of tamarind
            .
            Stuart Quine
            (3 November 1962 – 24 March 2020)

            .
            Now two of them appear not to visibly support verbs, using the noun version of glint and the “preposition, adverb, or adjective” of ‘on’ although colloquially “on” is used as a transitive verb meaning “to turn on” an electrical device or appliance.
            .
            ____________
            Just for fun:
            ____________
            .
            under mistletoe “to turn” on her lips a tang of tamarind
            .

            I mention in my presentation “The Pull of the Lonely Single Line of Haiku”
            [Japan Writers Conference 2021, Tokai University, Japan (October 2021)]

            This one work by Stuart Quine that appears to be one linear verse/thought and it can be, or many things for other readers:

            .

            almost weightless this empty skull that held the robin’s song

            Stuart Quine

            .
            I can’t and won’t emulate Stuart Quine though his work pushes me every time I write.
            .

            And this quote from my presentation:

            ____________________________
            A line is a unit of language…
            ____________________________

            “The poetic line” is the fancy term for a line of poetry; it can stop at a single word
            —an “of” or “the” or “hippopotami”—

            or keep going until it hits the margin, or, even, with correct formatting, go beyond the margin.

            The use of a line operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or single clauses in sentences.
            The Poetic Line (Part I) | The SparkNotes Blog (Emma W 2016)
            https://www.sparknotes.com/blog/the-poetic-line-part-i/

            And included in my presentation I couldn’t resist:

            桜散るあなたも河⾺になりなさい
            坪内稔典

            Publication credit:
            Haiku Shiki (“Haiku Four Seasons” monthly haiku magazine) December 2011 Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

            ______________________
            Romanised Japanese:
            ______________________

            sakura chiru anata mo kaba ni narinasai
            Nenten Tsubouchi

            ________________________________
            English version (Alan Summers):
            ________________________________

            you who fall cherry blossoms be hippopotami

            Note:
            Professor Tsubouchi Nenten (b. 1944) acclaimed gendai haiku poet, Emeritus Professor, Kyoto University of Education, and Professor, Bukkyo University. “[His]…unique and quirky poems have been featured in elementary school textbooks in Japan.” Dr Gabi Greve

            _____________
            Where I add:
            _____________
            “A wonderful way to entice youngsters to merge traditional themes with unusual sidesteps that appear to be surreal and fun.”

            And of course although early on I was wary of adding verbs to my haiku, though I discovered I did many times, and sometimes less so now, despite feeling how vital and almost integral, they do much more than show an action, they are time travellers in their own right.

            Alan

            .

        2. __________
          Peter said
          __________:
          “Why, in a particular instance, is it the right way to go? It needs to be based on a good artistic choice, or so I would assume. (And I most certainly am not saying here, or implying, that you did not, or do not make careful artistic choices in your work– with this poem, or in general.)”

          “I don’t know if you intended to write a poem which invites multiple readings, or, if having discovered that you did so, felt that it worked, meaning it opened something unexpected up in you.”
          .

          It might have the culmination of both the fugue writing state that I mention in another post, and it’s part of a series (not necessarily a sequence) though composed in real time in that order.

          It’s not a “hit point” if that question came up too.

          The title of the series is from the Italian for “A mystery from the past”:

          _________________
          Mistero una volte
          –––––––––––––––––
          bruises the yellow bowl’s forgotten sell-by date
          in the circle of fifths moonshine
          easily under the carpet elephants dwell
          spring equinox a mother unfurls her son
          Mare Nostrum we didn’t tell you too
          bubblegum injection the PEZ codes are lost status
          the gerund of hunger is not thinking
          painting the window portraits of those gone
          was it dark inside wolf

          Alan Summers
          Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
          https://weirdlaburnum.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/mistero-una-volte/

          .

          Not all of them are considered by me as work as individuals for a collection, perhaps the 1st, 4th (auto-biographical) and the last one. I’d be tempted by no. 7 and even no.8
          .

          None were written for multiple readings, though in the post-writing we can often see unconscious layers.
          .
          And yes, I guess it opened up something in me, and won’t for all poetry readers even haiku readers. Although the Christmas Market test is surprising, sometimes non-readers will see more than us. I certainly overheard a normal family discussing a haiku in such depth though said in an ordinary way, that I learned a lot. Sometimes we are our own audience.

          Alan

          1. .
            was it dark inside wolf

            Alan Summers

            Peter said:
            “In your poem I happen to think that two primary readings are evident— one in which an actual (or actually imagined) wolf is being addressed; the other in which a mythical or archetypal Wolf is being evoked.”

            If we really deep deconstuct we can make out multiple takes on the word ‘wolf’ and the phrase. It was an organic piece though through hypnosis I daresay some scary meaning or meanings lies behind the word and the phrase!

            .

            Peter said:
            “These play off each other and with each other well.”

            Thanks!

            .

            Peter said:
            “The compression forces them to happen simultaneously and to create an uneasiness which one must look into.”

            That’s a good and interesting point. And of course many non-haiku fans will feel unease or distaste because they might prefer a poem that repeats and elaborates and hopefully at least enjoy its own alchemy of language.

            .

            Peter said:
            “But maybe your poem happens too fast for me.”

            There’s never a need to gulp fast, it risks indigestion.

            I’ve witnessed some poets reading any kind of poem too rapidly, so it really doesn’t matter whether a haiku or an epic poem. In fact I’m still bemused that a poet familiar with haiku and the Beat Scene including Kerouac was reading in India, with Kala Ramesh, and I think the anthology was naad anunaad: an anthology of contemporary international haiku. Kala passed the anthology over to the poet who started to read, presumbly, and then page after page with no pause for breath or the poem, this highly experience poet rushed through a dozen or more pages. A haiku takes six seconds to read out aloud, she took a minute or two to read a hundred! I felt so bad for Kala!!!

            I don’t think anyone reading out aloud, or performing in front of a live audience (it wasn’t a zoom, just recorded) would read any kind of poem with timing but as if it was a 100 metre dash.

            .
            In fact Karen Hoy used nearly five minutes to read a single senryu especially as it started to get John Cage in a highly high volume packed room at the Poetry Society venue!

            It was a senryu published in ‘Hidden’ British Haiku Society Members Anthology 2002 (Hub Haiku Series); and “Another Country: Haiku Poetry from Wales” (Gomer Press 2011).

            I worry that the method invented speed rush is perhaps too influential.

            Even my very short monostich would take, performance wise, around 10 seconds which isn’t bad for a five-word verse!

          2. .
            was it dark inside wolf

            Alan Summers
            .

            Peter said:
            “In your poem I happen to think that two primary readings are evident— one in which an actual (or actually imagined) wolf is being addressed; the other in which a mythical or archetypal Wolf is being evoked.”
            .
            If we really deep deconstuct we can make out multiple takes on the word ‘wolf’ and the phrase. It was an organic piece though through hypnosis I daresay some scary meaning or meanings lies behind the word and the phrase!
            .
            Peter said:
            “These play off each other and with each other well.”
            .
            Thanks!
            .
            Peter said:
            “The compression forces them to happen simultaneously and to create an uneasiness which one must look into.”
            .
            That’s a good and interesting point. And of course many non-haiku fans will feel unease or distaste because they might prefer a poem that repeats and elaborates and hopefully at least enjoy its own alchemy of language.
            .
            Peter said:
            “But maybe your poem happens too fast for me.”
            .
            There’s never a need to gulp fast, it risks indigestion.
            .
            I’ve witnessed some poets reading any kind of poem too rapidly, so it really doesn’t matter whether a haiku or an epic poem. In fact I’m still bemused that a poet familiar with haiku and the Beat Scene including Kerouac was reading in India, with Kala Ramesh, and I think the anthology was naad anunaad: an anthology of contemporary international haiku. Kala passed the anthology over to the poet who started to read, presumbly, and then page after page with no pause for breath or the poem, this highly experience poet rushed through a dozen or more pages. A haiku takes six seconds to read out aloud, she took a minute or two to read a hundred!
            .
            I don’t think anyone reading out aloud, or performing in front of a live audience (it wasn’t a zoom, just recorded) would read any kind of poem with timing but as if it was a 100 metre dash.
            .
            In fact Karen Hoy used nearly five minutes to read a single senryu especially as it started to get John Cage in a highly high volume packed room at the Poetry Society venue!

            It was a senryu published in ‘Hidden’ British Haiku Society Members Anthology 2002 (Hub Haiku Series); and “Another Country: Haiku Poetry from Wales” (Gomer Press 2011).

            .
            was it dark inside wolf
            Alan Summers

            .
            Peter said:
            “ I find myself wanting to create a separation between the word “wolf” and the rest of the poem.”

            Well, that’s the way to read surely? Whether it’s a line from a poem, play, or film.
            .

            was it dark inside [PAUSE] wolf
            .
            wolf [PAUSE] was it dark inside
            .
            Peter said:
            “I can envision it being read aloud with a pause of maybe one second between the first five words and the “wolf”.

            .
            was it dark inside [PAUSE] wolf
            .
            Or with the best comic timing with or without comedy of course:

            was [PAUSE] it [PAUSE] dark [PAUSE] inside [2 x PAUSES] wolf
            .
            Peter said:
            “I don’t know what is gained by not allowing some space.”

            And then, who said no space was not allowed? I cut my teeth on live performing, starting in Australia and then in England two to three times a week from pub rooms, night clubs, noodle bars, a bordello, the usual really.
            .

            Peter said:
            “What I often find when I look hard at a poem is that I work hard to see it clearly and for what it has to say; for what it is; I consider that I may have filters up that prevent clear seeing.”

            The trick is to reduce as many filters as possible. My first five years of study I would have read over a million haikai verses from olden times to ones published between 1993 and 1998, everthing. And then being a Red Moon Press anthology editor I personally made sure I subscribed to everything between 2000 and 2005. And being an editor of many journals over the years, I read a lot in a lot of styles and voices.

            .
            Peter said:
            “But what I often end up with is all my hard work replacing the poem.”
            .

            Not sure I know what you mean, do you resent making an effort or do you rewrite the poem to your suiting?
            .
            Peter said:
            “So I need to step back. Take another look.”
            .

            Always. The risk is missing a gem, and to be honest, at least for me, I’ll lose learning something and bettering myself.

            .
            Peter said:
            “And in response to your saying that I am “at odds with your work” I say– don’t be daft.”

            That is a relief!

            .
            Well that took quite a while to respond to everything, phew!

  7. In Gilbert’s, The Disjunctive Dragonfly, which I’m certain we’ve we’ve all read, one of the disjunctive techniques he dubs “Temporal Displacement (Indeterminacy).” He describes the technique producing haiku that are “strongly deformative of time.”

    Further, in such haiku, “time displacement, or indeterminacy implies the time within the ku is uncertain, or paradoxical, or multiple… temporal deformation, resist attempts to place stable objects into stable scenes, or sequences of actions into a serial-time order.”

    He provides a smattering of examples of which a few are below,

    spring rain backwards until the beginning

    (Melissa Allen)

    her going in her coming the rain before it falls

    (Jim Kacian)

    returning quail
    call to us from the moment
    of which he speaks

    (Christopher Herold)

    later you realize it was actually a piece of your own body

    (Chris Gordon)

    I wonder how some of these poems and the concept of Temporal Displacement touches the conversation of the past few weeks.

    1. Adam,

      Does Keith have a single thesis that ties these 3 weeks of essays together? Does he have multiple, overlapping theses that knit the separate essays together? Does he have a thesis at all? Wouldn’t we need to have answers to such questions before we could answer the question of whether or not “these poems and the concept of Temporal Displacement touches the conversation of the past few weeks”? Of course, I assume that you mean meaningful rather than merely tangential touches.

      I feel such questions are warranted because of Megan’s comment in M and F 10, August 6, 2026 at 1:44 pm on Keith’s analysis of which she claims “the parts […] do get into the weeds.”

      As you make no attempt above to make any connection to Keith’s work, your comment may look like just one more weed among many to some. Maybe this is why no one has taken up your offer. Maybe there are other reasons.

      Personally, of you’re willing to get off the porch and back into the garden I’ll join you to do some spade work in this row.

      Thanks,
      M

      1. I hope it is clear that these three weeks have been an exploration that examines practice in the tradition, to the present day. The purpose was to test assumptions by some that haiku must be in the present, or even must be written in the present tense. With an open mind, I have mentioned several theoretical approaches, with caveats such as “if we feel that a present moment is necessary, even obligatory, in haiku” or “If these verses too are to be seen as ‘in the present moment’ to meet a wish for some unifying principle…”

        I’m not sure that a unifying theory is necessary (though it’s always enjoyable to consider). I find that in some instances, one theory may work well, in other instances, another. I have concluded to my own satisfaction that even a verse couched entirely in the past can have a presence in the poet and the reader, in the acts of writing and reading, and in particular in the mental act or moment of insight. That is, unless one is to rule out some of the verses as “not haiku” (which would not be my approach).

        I’m not by any means foisting any one approach as definitive, on any reader. I would not intend to do so even had I the authority, which I don’t pretend to have. It is enough to me to say “Here’s what I actually found, this is what I make of it, what do you think?” Hoping for a lively and good-natured discussion that takes us all forward.

        1. Keith,

          I am not sure why you are responding to a reply which I addressed to Adam. I mean, you didn’t really give him any time at all, did you? I am curious as to why you mention what you do rather than discussing how the poems he highlights from Gilbert’s work connect to the past few week’s discussions.

          So, in regard to what you do write:

          This column’s raison d’etre is founded on a complaint regarding a supposed “prescriptivism”—a “body of received teaching” which functions as a “gatekeeping apparatus”—that actively prevents certain moves in the language game we call English Language Haiku: “No metaphor. No personification. No simile. No past tense. No abstract language. No overt emotion. And many more no nos.” (see M and F 1, “Genesis,” paragraphs #3 and #4). But does your complaint—even if accurate of a past situation—actually reflect the state of affairs within the ELH community at present?

          Your 3-part series on the past tense narrows down the above complaint regarding prescriptivism to a single ‘rule’ within this conjectured “conventional orthodoxy.” You refer to this as the ‘”present tense”‘ restriction” (see M and F 9, “The Past part 1,” paragraphs #1-3). Yet, as for the larger list of “no nos,” you provide no evidence that such a restriction continues to exist.

          As I have pointed out elsewhere (see M and F 9, Comment, M.R. Pelletier, August 10, 2026 at 2:09 am) a comment by Alan provides evidence against such a claim. A comment by Adam (see M and F 10, Comment, Adam Graham, August 6, 2026 at 3:10 pm) provides additional evidence against the assumed continuing existence of a present-tense restriction. The analyses you provide regarding the use of past tense in Japanese haiku do not provide evidence in support of an argument against a present-tense restriction in the ELH community; such examples are simply not germane. But, each of the examples you provide of ELH in the past tense is evidence against that claim. When one attacks a rule or restriction that has already been defeated or abandoned, such an argument is in the form of what is called the “dead straw man” fallacy.

          When I encountered your claim that there is a present-tense restriction in the composition of ELH still functioning today, I wondered what evidence you would provide to support such a claim. As you haven’t offered any in 11 weeks of essays and comments, I decided to try to dig up at least a little for myself.

          I asked my administrative assistant if any of the markets where my work has appeared maintain such a present-tense restriction. (It’s been years since I read anyone’s submission guidelines and, although I could not recall any specific editor/market that took such a stance, I felt there must be some). My assistant replied immediately, “No more than one or two.” Well, as it turns out, she was wrong—there were 3. So, only 3 of 43 markets that have accepted my work maintain a policy or ‘rule’ requiring submitted work to be in the present tense. (I should add that one of the markets with such a restriction is no longer operating).

          The stance I have taken—and will continue to take—in participating in this forum is grounded in the following remarks:

          “[…] haiku in English has faced certain challenges that have marginalized its adoption, practice, and impact in the English literary tradition. […] “it has been unwilling in the main to engage in serious critical discussion of its poems published in its journals and books, opting instead for an amiability that has encouraged a clubby atmosphere” Kacian, An Overview of Haiku in English, pgs. 368-69. From Kacian et al., Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013.

          The work you have done on the past tense does not support either this column’s main thesis or its narrowed-down version. What sort of thesis that work does support remains to be seen.

          Respectfully,
          M

          1. M.R. Regarding your note that “When I encountered your [Keith’s] claim that there is a present-tense restriction in the composition of ELH still functioning today, I wondered what evidence you would provide to support such a claim. As you haven’t offered any in 11 weeks of essays and comments, I decided to try to dig up at least a little for myself.”

            I’m unsure what exact “markets” your work has appeared in, but while a majority of “markets” may not explicitly state that submitted haiku MUST be in the present, the absence of such a published prohibition is certainly not evidence that such a “rule” may be operational in the selection process of these markets. Nor are markets the only mechanism by which a rule arises or is enforced.

            A possible case in point, a vast majority of “markets” (who don’t have a published rule) publish haiku of which a vast majority are in the present tense. Now, more than likely this is because a vast majority of haiku submitted to them is written in present tense. There are reasonable causes of this:

            First, the norm of writing in the present tense has been internalized by a huge number of haiku writers. This first cause makes sense given how many “How-To” manuals/books/essays on haiku state or insinuate such a rule by either explicitly declaring it, or providing an overwhelming amount of examples written in the present tense.

            A Second cause may be that a huge number of haiku writers write haiku in all kinds of tenses equally. But, they ‘think’ the “markets” prefer haiku in the present tense, and so that’s what they submit.

            There may be other causes, but in the end a “rule” is either stated by a “market,” a “How-to” book, or some other “Authority,” OR a rule emerges from how haiku writers actually operate day-to-day in their writing.

            Either way, a “rule” or a “norm” or wutevah pops up on the scene. Challenging the “rule” or “norm” is, I think, a positive thing for reasons stated in the essay and throughout the comments of the essays.

            This is how I would explain it. How do YOU think the norm of present tense haiku arose?

          2. M.,

            Before I answer the substantive part of your argument, I want to address one aspect of your comment separately, because I think it concerns the conditions of discussion here, which I have already addressed in our exchange on The Past, Part 1.

            I was struck by your opening response to Keith: “I am not sure why you are responding to a reply which I addressed to Adam. I mean, you didn’t really give him any time at all, did you?”

            I don’t think this is an appropriate way to address the host of a discussion feature, particularly when the comment to which he was responding was itself made in a thread on his essay and concerned his work directly. But even if Keith were simply another participant, he would still be entitled to enter the discussion. A comment thread is not a private exchange between two people simply because one person initially addresses another.

            I am also uncomfortable with the way you frame his response as though he has failed to meet some prior obligation to you. There is nothing wrong with asking what thesis or argument you think a series of essays supports. That could be a perfectly worthwhile question. But there is a difference between asking that question in order to understand the work and posing it in a way that suggests the work may not have any coherent intellectual basis in the first place.

            I don’t think Keith is required to produce a thesis before he is entitled to participate. His three essays were an exploration. His posts were not necessarily argumentative in the sense of advancing and defending a single proposition; much of what he was doing was descriptive: looking at how tense and temporal orientation operate in different haiku, bringing examples into conversation, and asking what they might suggest. That is a perfectly legitimate way of conducting an inquiry. A discussion does not need to begin with a fully articulated thesis in order to be worthwhile.

      2. M.R., my apologies, I assumed connections to, or complications of, temporal issues that have been under discussion would be evident in this set of haiku that tinker with temporal issues. But, you know what they say about “assuming.”

        As such, I think the past few weeks’ exploration has been about the entanglement of past-and-present in haiku, with discussions of the various techniques used to situate a haiku at some distance in the past, and what this does to the sense of Presentness a haiku has. A component of that exploration has been a challenging and dismantling of the “rule” of absolute (and automatically assumed) Presentness in haiku.

        In my opinion, this exploration has presented haiku the have stable (linear) concepts of time, i.e. there is a Past being referred to and/or invoked, and there is a Present during which the Past is referred to or invoked.

        In Gilbert’s very brief discussion of Temporal Displacement as a technique generating disjunction he presents haiku in which the linearity of time is dissolved, the “sequences of actions into a serial-time order” is dissolved. Such that a stable a Past and a stable Present are not invoked or represented, time becomes “uncertain, or paradoxical, or multiple.”

        Some of this idea has been touched upon peripherally in the past weeks’ essays and discussions (e.g. the “timeless” haiku discussion).

        This displacement of linearity I think does something to the stability of Past and Present and Future. For example, in Gordon’s haiku,

        later you realize it was actually a piece of your own body

        The verb tense of “realize” is not future oriented (i.e. it’s not “later you WILL realize”). The verb is present, but a present OF the future, yet the act of viewing a piece of your body is Now AND in the Past. Which is activated by the fact that you realize that it WAS a piece of your body.

        The p.o.v. of the speaker (which is in second person, so the speaker is explicitly in the Now AS the reader) is in the Now, but also in Future referring to something that happened in the Past/Now. The speaker seems exist (existed, will exist) in some sci-fi quantum-infused Schrödinger-like state of being/becoming

        To see this displacement of time and situating the speaker within all three “times” at once is something different than has been discussed in past weeks (or maybe not?)

        So, again, my question from my original post, with a slight bracketed inclusion:

        “I wonder how [YOU think] some of these poems and the concept of Temporal Displacement touches the conversation of the past few weeks”

        1. Adam,

          Touché! ‘Tis no doubt we each can be an “ass” now & again. (It is also no doubt some in this forum think I am it’s biggest ass). Be that as it may, I really do appreciate you have taken my “porch” quip with both the levity and the seriousness owed it.

          I do not think the Gordon poem displaces anything. It is merely evidence that in English we can think, speak, and write things without the order in which we address time needing to be fixed.

          The Gordon poem as constructed is a complete sentence. It’s main verb, “realize,” is in the simple present tense. It’s secondary verb, “was,” is in the simple past tense. The poem includes the word “later” which is an adverb of time. Nothing metaphysical about it.

          I feel no sense of disjuncture or displacement when reading it in its given “later”-“realize”-“was” order. Let’s call that order FPrP. But there are also FPPr, PPrF, PFPr, PrPF, and PrFP as possible orders. Likewise I experience no feeling of disjuncture or displacement when thinking through it in any of its possible orders.

          I find I am unconvinced by the idea of a speaker situated in all three times. I don’t see how the actual language of the poem suggests that. I don’t see how a speaker’s situation could change simply because he or she uses words in a poem which indicate the three, relative notions of time Present, Past, and Future.

          I do not believe that haiku in English “entangles” our experience or understanding of the Past and Present at all.

          I just don’t see a there there.

          Thanks,
          M

          1. I think your note about the Gordon poem being “merely evidence that in English we can think, speak, and write things without the order in which we address time needing to be fixed” = Gilbert’s quoted material. Potato = Potato.

            You write, “I find I am unconvinced by the idea of a speaker situated in all three times.” If the speaker is not in all three “times,” in what stable moment(s), past, present, future, do YOU think the haiku takes place in?

  8. Alan Summers: “The famous twist in Roald Dahl’s famous 1982 poem features Red pulling a hidden pistol from underwear to shoot the wolf dead, then skinning and wearing his skin as a fur coat.”

    Ah, so comforting to read. As in our modern society we like everything appear to be. But in the original version, even in its original English translation, the wolf ate both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. It was written as a morality story, a warning for young girls.

    1. John Hamley:
      Agreed, the old model(s) were “morality” tales mostly for the era of huge forests and all the perceived and real hidden dangers.

      Now we have huge cities and new moralities, and it shouldn’t have to be “Ask for Angela” but rather all female genders learn self-defence, and if in the USA, gun skill and disciple, and I guess hunting/preparation skills if even only as a chef!

      Just as haiku jumped a notch before and after WWII, and the Industrial Revolution, we now have huge shifts in social movement, on so many levels.

      Red skins the wolf the wind flaring her nostrils

      Alan Summers
      Linkedin/uncurated

      1. The trouble is, when history is being laundered, often the readers/listeners aren’t told about it, with the result that what many people believe happened in historical past is as much of a fairy tale as anything that Mother Goose told us.

        1. Ah, but what is laundered both historically, and nowadays. A lot of history is inaccurate which helped me study history through different sources and not just one biased lens, for instance.

          Regarding my boyhood love of Greek mythology…

          ––––––––––––––––
          Is Nolan wrong?
          ––––––––––––––––

          Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey gives UK poetry sales an epic boost
          4th August 2026
          https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/04/christopher-nolan-the-odyssey-uk-poetry-sales-boost-homer

          Even Emily Wilson who has criticised his take on women has praise the boost in poetry and other literature because of it.
          In the past I saw what I never thought I’d see. BOYS, yes boys, running from bookshop to bookshop to grab the latest book in a certain series. Reading increases empathy, no bad thing presently.

          __________
          My haiku?
          __________
          It was created during my own take on a fugue state:
          https://haikucommentary.com/2019/02/18/interview-with-alan-summers/

          It’s open to interpretation, whatever makes a viewpoint.

          “When writers talk about a “fugue state,” they do not mean a medical memory-loss condition. They mean a deep psychological trance of intense focus. Time vanishes, outside distractions fade, and words flow automatically from the subconscious onto the page.” – Your Writing Fugue and You

          .
          –––––––––––––––––––
          Old Lamps for New
          –––––––––––––––––––
          Nothing is being destroyed in adding diversity and sexual equality to old stories
          https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/04/contemporary-values-no-place-in-fairytales-you-must-be-living-in-a-fantasy-world

    2. Around the time the story was written, In Europe wolves were a clear and frequent danger: children were vulnerable, and many thousands were killed by wolves.

  9. Vocative:

    No takers yet of the seed comment (first comment below) with some of Alan’s verses using past tenses. I’d like to single out this one:

    was it dark inside wolf

    —Alan Summers, Weird Laburnum (November 2019)
    Although referring to a past situation, I read the verse as in the present overall as for me, “wolf” is in the vocative: a question addressed to a wolf in the here and now. This would fit best with the notion that it is in the spoken word. An interesting variation. Don’t you speak to animals? I do. So did Issa. The question mode also has precedents (Bashõ’s “the snow we saw last year, has it fallen again this year?”) where the interrogative “ka,” also a kireji, puts a verse about the past firmly into the present mode. “Was it a wolf that ate your sheep last winter?” is a question in the present about the (closed) past. So is “was it dark inside.”

    I also happen to like it for several reasons. The wolf is one of those animals that has generally had a bad press over centuries past. Save for Kipling’s Jungle Book and perhaps Jack London’s White Fang, wolves have been presented as an evil and ruthless threat. The wolf at the door. Cry wolf. Pursuing girls through the woods. Threatening to eat an old granny. Slaughtering our farm animals… But a wolf has to do what a wolf has to do: does it feel malevolent inside? There’s also a hint of haikai humour in the way the verse is expressed. It is probably as dark inside a wolf as it was for Jonah inside a whale. Or was it dark in the winter’s den, a cave? Haven, or refuge?

    A good short verse for contemplation and meditation, for me a key part of the haiku essence, that particular part perhaps rooted in koans?

    1. First of all this verse comes from a series where at least one overall idea can be gleaned:

      .

      Mistero una volte
      bruises the yellow bowl’s forgotten sell-by date
      in the circle of fifths moonshine
      easily under the carpet elephants dwell
      spring equinox a mother unfurls her son
      Mare Nostrum we didn’t tell you too
      bubblegum injection the PEZ codes are lost status
      the gerund of hunger is not thinking
      painting the window portraits of those gone
      was it dark inside wolf

      Author: Alan Summers
      Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
      haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte
      https://weirdlaburnum.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/mistero-una-volte/

      One context can certainly be thought out, and back up the dual or more than dual, wolves’ interaction with the planet, and the planet’s other denizens, various critters, including the human kind!

      SIDE NOTES ABOUND–I cannot simply do basic linear!

      I’m painfully watching “Evacuation: The documentary” revealing the inside story of the deeply perilous British campaign to evacuate Kabul in 2021–including top-to-bottom access to the Ministry of Defence (UK). I’m also deep into the drama series “Kabul” covering the Italian and French embassies deeply heroic events to evacuate Afghans with respective passports of dual nationality.

      Both are deeply disturbing, something that wolves might not do but large elements of humanity consistently carry out.

      SIDE NOTE:
      Gray wolves around Kabul are generally shy and avoid humans. They are not typically aggressive toward people. However, severe winter weather, hunger, or rabies can occasionally drive desperate wolves toward rural villages to hunt livestock or, in rare instances, approach populated areas: https://wolf.org/headlines/7-injured-in-rare-wolf-attack-in-east-afghanistan/

      .

      Why am I saying all of this? For many reasons. Both hokku and haiku are often timeless as we repeat an endless cycle just as Bashō eulogised at least one battle: Hiraizumi (Takadachi), defeat and death of the 12th-century warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune, so I’m thinking of Afghanistan, and up to the second inhuman attacks on mostly civilians in West Asia or Southwest Asia (old term Middle East).

      Back to the Japanese hokku:

      夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡
      natsukusa ya tsuwamono domo ga yume no ato
      Matsuo Bashō, Oku no Hosomichi, June 1689

      natsukusa (summer grass) 
      ya (emphasis) 
      tsuwamono (a brave warrior, samurai) 
      domo (very)
      ga (but, used to show contrast)
      yume (dream)
      no (of, possessive showing a relationship)
      ato (left behind)

      Thanks to Anonymous of A Midsummer Night’s Dream feature.

      .

      summer grass
      each single soldier’s dream
      left behind

      version: Alan Summers

      .

      It’s a forever poem as we forever embrace war and violence.
      The final broad Kabul/Afghanistan pullout timeline started on May 1, 2021, and ended on August 30, 2021

      Season: SUMMER

      SIDE NOTE:
OVERALL re BRITAIN/UK
      A total of 457 UK service personnel and Ministry of Defence civilians died during operations in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.

      The Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate terrorist attack on August 26, 2021, killed 13 U.S. service members (11 Marines, one Army soldier, and one Navy corpsman) plus 2 British nationals among the dead.

      The other famous Kabul retreat:
      The 1842 retreat from Kabul was a catastrophic military disaster where a column of about 16,000 British and East India Company troops were slaughtered, missing, or captured. Capture meant death of course.

      .

      So, was it dark inside, wolf?

      .

      “Wolves do not see violence for its own sake. They lack the human capacity for abstract malice or cruelty.”
      – The Living with Wolves Museum/foundation of Living with Wolves comes from years spent living alongside the Sawtooth Pack. Ketchum, Idaho USA
      .

      My enduring and ongoing question is why why why and who to ask.

      When multiple small and global acts of horrific malice occur I cannot understand why in the broader sense. Watching the Kabul documentary and the drama, witnessing what seems like an entire country fleeing their own country is humbling and I am left bemused and ashamed.

      was it dark inside wolf

      was it?
      dark?
      inside?

      Can I ask you wolf as there are no good reasons forthcoming from my own race.

      Wolf symbolism in mythology is deeply ambivalent, representing loyalty, war, and divine guidance alongside chaos, destruction, and fate. Across different cultures, wolves embody both revered protectors and terrifying cosmic forces. In Japanese mythology and folklore, wolves (ōkami) are viewed not as malicious villains, but as sacred mountain guardians, divine messengers of the gods (kami), and protectors of travelers. They embody mountain worship, traditionally protecting crops from deer and boars while bridging the human world and the wild, untamed peaks of nature. –Internet results

      Humans appear to do the opposite, turn away from itself. Global conflicts of one kind or another have never paused, they just move around and always cycle back.

      It’s why other apex predators have traditionally avoided us as they know from some deep instinct other humans will come and wipe their families out.

      Just some thoughts.

      Alan

      1. The internet took a long time to locate ‘was it’ as a verb tense, my bad, I’m only human!

        Yes, “was” is a verb tense. Specifically, “was” is the first-person (“I”) and third-person (“he”, “she”, “it”) singular past tense form of the verb “to be”. It places an action or state of being in the past.

        was it dark inside wolf

        But, it’s both was (past tense) and a current, ongoing, ever present question, just like the mythology of wolves, the endless question where 42 may or may not be the ultimate answer, is “ever present”.

        We regularly mix past and present, don’t we?

        1. Alan: “We regularly mix past and present, don’t we?”

          We do. T S Eliot:
          “Time past and time future
          What might have been and what has been
          Point to one end, which is always present.”
          (Burnt Norton)

          The still point of the turning world: our present.

          He could have written this essay ;-)

      2. I cannot offer anything to still this cry from the heart, Alan. All I can say is that what we call civilisation and reason is a thin veneer, so swiftly stripped by questions of survival, of dire hardship, of war. Of the prospect of power. Of not having water to drink. Of having our families threatened. All the fine learning and philosophy goes out the window and we are revealed again for the wolves we are. Is it dark inside, Alan Wolf? Is our present the same as our past? Savages in pinstripe suits?

    2. To me it came across as a rhetorical question in the present addressed to the long-ago Little Red Riding Hood who had been eaten by the wolf.

      1. .
        Dear John,

        re:
        “To me it came across as a rhetorical question in the present addressed to the long-ago Little Red Riding Hood who had been eaten by the wolf.”

        Do you mean inverting the fairytale where Red Riding Hood eats the wolf instead though, hence the haiku:

        was it dark inside wolf

        A suggestion of was it dark back then, inside [Red Riding Hood/winter/the real and the metaphorical forest/season etc…]

        Wolf, Japanese Wolf (ōkami 狼)

        ***** Location: Japan
        ***** Season: All Winter
        ***** Category: Animal
        https://worldkigo2005.blogspot.com/2006/11/wolf-ookami.html

        –––––––––––––––––––––
        VERB/PROPOSITION:
        –––––––––––––––––––––
        Perhaps it’s Past Continuous Conversation, and yes, possibly a rhetorical query posed in past tense of ‘was’ yet peculiarly we see this as present tense. A question in the “once-present-now-gone” about something in the past also “now-gone”.

        Perhaps A TALE OF TWO NOW-GONE(s)!

        re:

        was it dark inside wolf

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
        haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte

        1. Dear Alan,

          The wolf did eat Little Red Riding Hood. Just like the whale ate Jonah. And stayed alive inside it. These stories are so prominent in my tradition that no others could compete with them.

          Rather than posing it as a rhetorical question, I could also imagine asking the spirit of Little Red Riding Hood.

          1. I definitely prefer Roald Dahl’s version, as in the words of The Spice Girls, “Girl Power!” [paraphrasing] after reading various old versions predating The Grimms, as part of my role in The Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial. I think HC Andersen might have even approved of Dahl’s version and its twist!

            Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf
            Roald Dahl (1916-1990)

            The famous twist in Roald Dahl’s famous 1982 poem features Red pulling a hidden pistol from underwear to shoot the wolf dead, then skinning and wearing his skin as a fur coat.
            https://poetryarchive.org/poem/little-red-riding-hood-and-wolf/

    3. was it dark inside wolf

      I don’t know when the highly compressed single line haiku first appeared— with Marlene Mountain? In most instances that one sees, as with Alan’s piece, all spaces and punctuation have been squeezed out.

      To me, it doesn’t always work. I am most taken by very short poems when they feel “right” to me immediately, without my knowing why. I may not even need to know why. Some compressed poems can have this effect on me. Or in me.

      Other times, the compression can seem like code, saying: here is a make your own poem kit. Choose which of multiple possible readings work best for you, insert your own punctuation or spacings if that helps, etc.

      It may be a matter of preference or taste. For some, this is all part of the process of “completing” a haiku. Others may feel they might as well go ahead and write their own poems to begin with. I’m being a bit facetious, but it’s how I see things sometimes.

      I’m mixed about Alan’s haiku. If both he and Keith (unless I’ve been careless in my reading) both see this as “vocative” with a wolf being addressed, why not make that clear? Unless one wants the dual sense of an imagined wolf being addressed, along with the sense of a mythical entity— Wolf— being evoked, in which case a wolf is not being addressed but someone or something which had been swallowed by such a mythical/archetypal being and was released.

      Do the dual coexisting senses make for a richer poem? Perhaps they do. Do they function as a juxtaposition of two simultaneous images? That is something that compression can do at best. I have dived/delved a bit into the belly of the wolf with Alan’s piece and don’t come up with a clear sense of where I am, or where it is. Of course, the response to that could be: isn’t that what the poem is meant to do—give a sense of darkness and confusion? Isn’t that what makes it work? Maybe. Maybe I’m still in the wolfly acidic belly and the question, asked of one who has presumably emerged, does not apply to me. Yet.

  10. Orense, Keith,

    This exploration of past-n-present-ness has been incredible! Thank you so much for taking the time to craft such in-depth essays, as well as fielding questions/comments from readers. Absolutely wonderful!

    1. Thanks, Adam. It is quite a lot of work, as for all Haiku Foundation volunteers, but rewarded when readers appreciate the effort.

      For my part, with detachment, I’ve been collecting bits and pieces that do not seem to fit received wisdom for several years (filed under “haiku ramblings”). Now it’s time to write them up and share to see if they make sense..

  11. Oops: thanks to my fat finger, a post on kigo that was supposed to be scheduled later this month was briefly published today by mistake. I thought I had caught it in time, but on return from another activity, found that this was not the case. My apologies to all. I’ve removed the post, to which I’m putting the finishing touches, for it to appear in a couple of weeks as originally planned. Please ignore any (now) spurious messages.

  12. I felt that a few of the questions in this week’s poll required more nuanced answers than the multiple choice allowed. So:

    Q: Do you find past tense haiku harder to write?
    A: I don’t usually set out to write in the past tense; it is a tool that I use to achieve an effect or solve a problem. It’s a tool I use sparingly — one could say that it’s a more difficult tool to use than the more familiar present tense — but when a use case for it appears, I’m not racking my brain about how to make it work any more than I would for present tense.

    Q: Do you agree that as it ultimately derives from the hokku of classic renga, a gathering of collaborative haikai poets, a haiku embodies enunciated speech whether it is written or spoken, and is therefore always framed in the present?
    A: Haiku has evolved and expanded quite a bit from its origins; in particular, while it isn’t the norm, there is a substantial body of haiku that take specific advantage of the written form, defying speech. I’d also argue that the vertical axis of the haiku tradition (if I’m understanding the concept right) prevents it from ever being wholly contained in the present.

    Q: Can that real experience be one that is now over, being recollected and revisited?
    A: Not only do I think it can be, I think it must be. The practical reality of writing a haiku is that it must be done after the moment of inspiration, and is thus inherently an act of recollection; even when the haiku springs fully formed into the mind of its author, the act of committing it to paper shifts the author’s attention away from the moment and toward the poem — and such moments of pure inspiration are, in my experience and from what more experienced poets have expressed, quite rare. This creates a bit of a paradox, where the audience of a haiku often experiences the moment of the haiku as more real and present than the author. The immediacy of haiku is, thus, best understood as a crafted illusion (Ceci n’est pas une pipe.)

    1. Thanks, Sean. Helpful comments. We recognise the deficiencies of multiple choice questions. In the Shiki polls I tried checkboxes in an attempt to get a finer or more nuanced grain, but it’s not so easy to display the results. I never fit on forms! (I like to think that is a good sign…). Supplementary comments here are definitely encouraged.

      On what might be termed ‘the points of haiku philosophy’ I think that there is no one way of approaching these questions. The notion that in essence it is always ‘the spoken word in the present’ has attractions if you want to do away with all other ways of looking at it. Also “recollection is a mental event in the present” and “reading a poem is always a mental event in the present” seems to serve well enough, but may not get us to anything useful in practice. Personally I warm to what I might call ‘the spark theory’ — that is, the presence of insight first, in the poet, then, in the reader as the verse “clicks.” That can often (but not ‘always’) be related to a cut, if present.

      Concerning the ‘third axis:’ it’s not always present, but where it is, I think it’s arguable that it is still “connected to the present” by the fact that the poet is now invoking it, e.g. Basho summoning up old legends in the context of something he’s seen now (Fuji in snow, or white ash), or at least, something that can be seen ‘now’ even if as written, there’s no direct location in time. I agree it’s not wholly contained in the present. Indeed it seems often to be explicitly extending from a former time to the present. But what about a ‘third axis’ inclusion that simply picks up a past verse with no indication of ‘when’ (unless a reader knows the verse)?

      John Stevenson’s verse calls up the past with “in the beginning…” A keyphrase. When we considered it in re:Virals, some readers oriented to the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word….” which led their commentaries to focus on an increasingly grumpy God by virtue of humankind’s egregious sins in the present day. I read it as “to start with” and focused on the suggested progression to a truly “grumpy old man” in the present.

      Your last point: “The immediacy of haiku is, thus, best understood as a crafted illusion”… Excellent!

  13. In a comment to Moon and Finger 7 (Hekigoto part 1), Alan Summers generously offered some of his own published verses using a past tense. These are now repeated below to read in the light of exploration and provisional conclusions of this series on the past. It culminated in several examples that are written entirely in the past and where presence occurs only in that the poet addresses the text to the reader, or the reader reads, in their present. A mental event happening ‘now,’ that connects the past with the present. In some, the reader may be invited by omission to complete the verse with an extension to the present: an act of co-creation.

    In the majority of Alan’s verses here, as well as a past state or completed action the text contains a part that connects the past to the present, sometimes directly, as with “is” or “this,” sometimes by more subtle implication. In some cases there is ambivalence, and the reader has a choice. They make an interesting set to examine. How do you see it here, in each case? I suggest that, to make navigation of the comments easier, you pick one of the verses and start a comment thread for discussion.

    From Alan’s verses and his comments:

    The verb tenses in English-language are intriguing as some are obviously fixed in the past, some seem to waver as if rippling through or alongside the present, whether poetic or quantum science or both!

    Sometimes we can enter the perimeter of Japanese, perhaps, and the verb tense is both obviously set in one time line yet existing in another.

    A few of mine

    was it dark inside wolf

    Alan Summers
    Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
    haikai/monostich series Mistero una volte

    VERB:
    The phrase “was it” is in the simple past tense of the verb “to be”. [1]

    * * * * *

    creeping sepia
    a dog that outran
    the wind

    Alan Summers
    Publication credit: Presence issue #71 (2021) ed. Ian Storr

    Anthology credit:
    Fractured by Cattails
    The Haiku Society of America 2023 Members’ Anthology ed. Allyson Whipple

    VERB:
    Outran is the past simple tense of the irregular verb outrun

    * * * * *

    smell of watermelon…
    the high sun factor face block
    just purchased

    Alan Summers
    Publication credit: paper wasp journal (Queensland early 1990s)

    VERB:
    ”Purchased” is the simple past tense and the past participle of the regular verb “to purchase”

    * * * * *

    end of the day
    the bootlaces tucked
    into their own home

    Alan Summers
    Publication credit:
    tsuri-dōrō – a small journal of haiku and senryū (Inaugural issue, Jan/Feb 2021)
    ed. Tony Pupello

    VERB:
    “Tucked” is the past tense (specifically, the simple past) and the past participle of the regular verb tuck.

    * * * * *

    occluded moon
    was it the words
    she said

    Alan Summers
    haibun: Yakusokugoto
    Publication credit: #Me(n)too: A Men’s Only Issue of #FemkuMag December 1st 2019 ed. Rowan Beckett Minor

    The phrase “was it” is in the simple past tense. It is the past tense form of the verb “to be” used for singular subjects (like he, she, or it), often used to ask about a state, condition, or past event

    * * * * *

    I once was this stone home for another

    Alan Summers
    Publication Credit:
    Bones – journal for contemporary haiku no. 7 July 15th 2015

    * * * * *

    VERB:
    The phrase “once was” is in the simple past tense. It describes a state or identity that existed in the past but is no longer true today.

    Here is how the components work:
    Was is the simple past tense of the verb “to be” (for singular subjects).
    Once is an adverb that means “at one time” or “formerly”.

    * * * * *

    a wind battered fire
    another stick is added
    that was once a tree

    Alan Summers
    Publication: Troutswirl A Sense of Place: HIKING TRAIL – smell ed. kjmunro
    (November 2018, The Haiku Foundation)

    VERB:
    “That was” is in the simple past tense. It uses the past tense of the linking verb “to be” (“was”) to describe a state, event, or fact that has already happened and is now finished.

    1. WIND BATTERED FIRE

      As a preface: it can be tricky commenting upon a poet’s work with the poet in the room (sorta speak). Many times the poet is tempted to come in and do all the interpretative work of the reader, or provide background, etc. So with that caveat stated…

      a wind battered fire
      another stick is added
      that was once a tree

      There is an interesting progressive movement into a further and further away past that is traced in this poem:

      L1 = seems to very immediate past, so much so it’s essentially present. The fire is happening now, and has just now ‘been’ stokED by the wind.

      L2 = while occurring, like L1, in the present, the sense of the past is certainly an immediate past, but not as immediate as the wind that just blew by stoking up the fire in L1. The “stick” (trees) have been on fire for a while.

      L3 = a longer ago past rooted in referring to an object AS a particular object throughout a longer duration of time, ie while the “stick” is really a “tree,” it has been a tree for a long duration of time, longer ago than when the fire began and certainly longer ago than the gust of wind that stoked the fire.

      1. Reviewing my previous comment, I suppose I should have started a new thread, instead of Replying” Sorry :)

        1. .
          Adam,
          It seems to fit under the last haiku by me in Keith’s comment, so it has its logic! (smiles)

          re:
          “…it can be tricky commenting upon a poet’s work with the poet in the room (sorta speak). Many times the poet is tempted to come in and do all the interpretative work of the reader, or provide background,”

          Many haiku poets since the 1990s have jumped onto the internet which makes sense if we feel haiku is only written in the present, then the internet is also ‘instant’.

          I did attempt an interpretation as there were no comments for a while. And although the haiku was written quickly, without preparation, so even my interpretation is purely one of. many I could create from deconstructing the poem almost as if I’m not the author but a reader, but also the author discovering why I wrote it.

          Duality, thy intended…

          __________________________

          The Wolf as Internal Beast
          __________________________
          John Donne’s “wolf” might be the internal ecosystem of human vices, and his constant struggle between flesh and spirit, sin and grace, earth and heaven.

          In his verse letter “To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers”, Donne describes man as a “lump, where all beasts kneaded be”.
          and the “horse, goat, wolf, and every beast” as internal passions and aggressive drives residing within humans.

          .
          _____
          KIGO
          _____

          I’m pleased that it does contain a kigo (Japanese seasonal marker) of ALL WINTER via wolf, even though they are extinct in Japan, and in the UK except in wildlife enclosures.

          ,

          Because The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes was the strongest poem for me at school, he’s had a life-long influence as would be expected if started at childhood:

          –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
          The Howling of Wolves for instance opens with:
          –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

          Is without world.

          ––––––––––––––––––––––––
          And other lines include:
          ––––––––––––––––––––––––

          this forest of starving silences

          And:

          The earth is under its tongue,
          A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
          The wolf is living for the earth.

          And
          The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

          Subconsciously all that I’ve read and experienced in one way or another comes out unbidden though useful.

          .

          Wolf-Masks: From Hawk to Wolfwatching.
          © Ann Skea
          First published in Scigaj, L (Ed.), Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, G.K.Hall & Co, New York, 1992.
          https://ann.skea.com/Wolves.htm

          ,

          So, was it so dark, wolf[?]

Comments are closed.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Our mission is made possible by the generosity of others. Learn how you can provide vital support to our organization.

Donate | Volunteer

Questions, comments, or concerns? We’d love to hear from you!

Home | Policies, Disclaimers, & Terms of Use | Contact

The Haiku Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization proudly operating as an inclusive remote workplace and is staffed exclusively by community volunteers.

The Haiku Foundation
P.O. Box 2461
Winchester, VA
22604-1661
USA

Back To Top