Features

Moon and Finger 12- Unfamiliar Words in Haiku

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 Orense Nicod

Meeting A Word:

The Uses and Costs of Opacity

 

A reader raised the following question through our proposals form:

“I would like to see a discussion about using Japanese words in English-language poems where possibly the reader has to look up the words to understand the poem. Would also appreciate talking about using technical names (for birds and wildlife, clouds, etc.) that the majority of readers would have to look up. To me that makes a poem almost inaccessible.”

At first, I thought the question might be appended to an existing essay. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to require a space of its own, because the implications reach well beyond the question of whether a poet should make a reader reach for the dictionary.

The position expressed by the author of the comment is not an isolated one. It reflects a real tendency in English-language haiku (ELH), where “complicated words” are often regarded as obstacles to a haiku’s effect. The assumption is that if the reader has to stop and work out a word, the poem’s immediacy has been compromised.

There is, indeed, a strong ideal in ELH of simple, direct language. One need not look far for confirmation. The Haiku Foundation, in its introduction to contemporary haiku, notes that haiku “often use simple, direct language.” A curriculum unit from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Asian Studies has students test poems against this very standard, asking whether each one is “about ordinary things (written) in an ordinary way using ordinary language.” The same principle appears on the composing side of the ledger too: a Yale Teachers Institute curriculum on haiku tells students that haiku language should be straightforward, naming it among the core elements it teaches as “common language.”

These are only a few examples, but they reveal a significant norm in ELH: language should not make unnecessary demands on the reader.

The ideal is readily understandable. The words should be simple enough that the reader can move through them almost immediately to the thing observed. The less language calls attention to itself, the more directly the reader seems to encounter the world. We might call this the ideal of transparency: the words become unobtrusive enough for the reader to see through them to what they present.

This ideal has deeper roots in haiku poetics as well. Bashō’s late-style principle of karumi, or “lightness,” is notoriously difficult to pin down, but it is consistently associated with plain, unforced language and ordinary subject matter over conscious cleverness or elevated diction. Shiki’s advocacy of shasei two centuries later extended a related value into direct observation and accessible expression.

Perhaps this is why unfamiliar words can so easily be treated as a problem in haiku. A foreign, technical, regional, or otherwise opaque word seems to interrupt the directness of the encounter. Instead of seeing the thing, the reader suddenly sees the word.

But perhaps that is not always a loss.

There are plenty of haiku in which the reader does not understand every word at first encounter. The word may be foreign, technical, regional, scientific, archaic, rare, newly coined, or simply unfamiliar. Sometimes its meaning can be inferred from the surrounding poem; sometimes it cannot.

Transparency is not the only value a haiku can have. Nor is opacity a single phenomenon. An unfamiliar word can obstruct perception, but it can also slow perception down, introduce precision, preserve cultural specificity, create estrangement, prevent familiar images from becoming stale, invite the reader’s participation, or make the physical qualities of language newly apparent. Sometimes, more radically, opacity can enact the poem’s subject matter: the reader’s difficulty in understanding becomes part of what the poem asks the reader to experience.

The important question, then, is not whether opaque words belong in haiku. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what the poem does with the opacity it creates—and whether what it gains is worth what the reader is asked to surrender.

Freshness vs. Déjà-ku

Once Keith and I started actively looking for examples of opaque words, they appeared everywhere. Foreign words, technical terminology, proper names, scientific classifications, regional expressions, fragments of other languages: contemporary haiku is full of moments where the reader encounters a word that resists immediate understanding. I had to recognize that I had underestimated how widespread the practice is. And I think the reader’s proposal stems from a recognition that this tendency may be becoming more pronounced.

This is not an entirely modern problem. Shiki himself was remarkably open to expanding poetic vocabulary. In his 1898 Sixth Letter to a Tanka Poet, he wrote that he intended to use elegant, colloquial, Chinese-derived, and Western words “as necessary.” His point was not that unfamiliar words were inherently desirable, but that poets should not be artificially restricted by inherited conventions of diction. One of Shiki’s baseball haiku makes this principle concrete:

夏草やベースボールの人遠し

natsukusa ya bēsu bōru no hito tōshi

summer grass
baseball players far off
in the distance

Masaoka Shiki

A word that would have been startlingly modern to his contemporaries in 1898 could belong in haiku precisely because the modern world itself had entered the poet’s experience.

The tension becomes particularly visible because haiku is so vulnerable to familiarity. Certain images, gestures, and motifs recur so frequently that even good poems can begin to feel interchangeable: another bird, another flower, another moon. Shasei, with its emphasis on direct observation, has obvious virtues, but the very familiarity of its materials can become a problem.

Rare or specialized words offer one way of resisting that drift. They can make a poem singular. They can introduce a particularity that a more familiar vocabulary has already worn smooth. An unfamiliar plant name, for example, may prevent “flower” from becoming a generalized poetic object. A regional name may keep a landscape rooted in its particular place.

Opaque words can therefore function as a defense against cliché.

But novelty by itself is not enough. A rare word that contributes nothing beyond the appearance of rarity merely imposes a cost on the reader.

The question is always: what does the unfamiliarity do?

Shades of Opacity

Before looking at the particular uses of opacity, it is useful to recognize that opacity is not necessarily a binary condition—understood or not understood—but a matter of degree.

A reader may know a word completely. Another may recognize its general field but not its precise meaning. A third may infer its meaning from context. A fourth may recognize that it belongs to another language or discipline without knowing what it means at all. The same poem can therefore contain different degrees of opacity for different readers. Roberta Beach Jacobson’s haiku discussed in re: Virals 543, offers a useful example.

kuma in a coma in a cave

Roberta Beach Jacobson

ASAHI HAIKUIST NETWORK January 30, 2026

For a reader who does not know Japanese, kuma initially creates uncertainty. But the poem gradually supplies a semantic environment in which the word can begin to be understood. The cave, the coma, and the surrounding language create a field of enclosure, suspension, and altered consciousness that can bring hibernation to mind, which we readily associate with bears. The reader may not know that kuma means bear, but neither are they left completely stranded. The poem teaches the word as it proceeds.

This distinction matters. There is a difference between opacity and unsupported opacity. A poem does not have to define every unfamiliar word for the reader. It can provide enough context for the reader to participate in the experience even when exact comprehension remains incomplete.

The reader knows less than they would if they opened a dictionary, but they may experience more: hesitation, inference, association, and the gradual emergence of significance. A word does not necessarily need to reach the level of a dictionary definition to function poetically. It can remain partly opaque while still being poetically legible.

Opacity is also relative—not only to the reader’s language, culture, education, and prior experience, but to the historical moment in which the poem is encountered.

Shiki’s baseball haiku offers a particularly interesting example. For Japanese readers of his time, baseball was still a relatively new and foreign cultural presence. Its opacity gives words such as “faraway” a resonance that exceeds their literal meaning. Baseball is not yet fully transparent to the reader; it carries the distance of something culturally unfamiliar. The poem can therefore make that cultural distance reverberate through its language.

For us, much of that opacity has disappeared. Baseball has become familiar, and with it some of the distance that “faraway” once carried. The word remains unchanged, but one of its resonances has been erased. What has been lost is not information but a relation between the word and the world: the foreignness of baseball that once made “faraway” feel, in a sense, farther away.

This is what makes the poem valuable as evidence rather than merely illustration. We do not have to speculate about what opacity contributes to it; we can feel the contribution by its absence. Distance, here, is constitutive of novelty. Baseball did not first seem new to Shiki’s readers and then, separately, seem far off; it seemed new because it was still far off, not yet closed into familiarity. And distance creates awareness: it is the very fact of not having fully arrived that makes a thing visible as itself, rather than passing unnoticed as something already known.

Tōshi, “far off,” names the players’ literal position on the field, but the same word carries a second, unspoken distance: the cultural remove that baseball had not yet crossed. The two senses are not two effects of the word but one, since the awareness the poem records has no existence apart from the distance that produces it. Once baseball became familiar, that distance closed, and with it went the very condition that had made tōshi mean more than it says.

The movement can also occur in the opposite direction. A word that seems needlessly obscure to us may have been perfectly ordinary to the audience for which a poem was written. What looks like deliberate opacity from a distance may simply be a word whose transparency we have lost.

Opacity, then, does not reside permanently in the word. Nor does it belong entirely to the reader. It emerges from a relation among word, poem, reader, and historical moment.

It can travel. It can also be worn away. And when it is, something more than difficulty may disappear. A poem can become more transparent while becoming, in some respect, less rich.

Cultural Specificity and Foreignness

Haiku itself is a form that comes to English from another language and culture. English-language readers have inherited from Japanese a vocabulary that may be unfamiliar outside haiku: hanami, tsukimi, kigo, yūgen, wabi-sabi, and countless seasonal and cultural references.

A word such as hanami can be translated as “flower viewing,” but the translation does not reproduce the accumulated seasonal and cultural resonance of the Japanese term. If immediate transparency were always the highest value, translation would necessarily be preferable. Yet retaining the Japanese word may preserve something that translation would erase.

This reveals that opacity can sometimes be the price of fidelity.

A poet may choose an unfamiliar word because a familiar substitute would actually be less accurate—not factually less accurate, but less capable of carrying the particular associations, history, or cultural context that matter to the poem. Sometimes what is lost in translation is not information but foreignness itself.

And crucially, foreignness need not remain merely a background condition of the poem. It can become part of what the poem enacts.

Polona Oblak’s haiku offers a particularly striking example:

the moment the doe’s gaze meets mine komorebi

Polona Oblak, Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, Volume 8 (2025)

The poem’s presentation matters. Komorebi is not set apart on another line but embedded within the same visual field as the encounter. For an English-language reader who does not know Japanese, komorebi creates a small zone of opacity within an otherwise transparent line. This is enactment: the word is visually and semantically inseparable from what the poem describes. Komorebi—light filtering through leaves—names a phenomenon of illumination interrupted by obscurity. The word therefore reproduces something of its own meaning in the act of reading: the reader can see through most of the line, but encounters darkness at the word’s edge.

That darkness is not simply an obstacle. The poem itself stages a moment of contact. The doe’s gaze meets the speaker’s, creating an encounter, perhaps even communication, but the animal remains irreducibly other. The foreign word reproduces that relation at the level of language. We come into contact with it without fully possessing it.

Light and darkness, understanding and not understanding, contact and otherness are not separate effects here. They are different aspects of the same encounter.

Translating komorebi into “sunlight filtering through leaves” might make the poem more immediately transparent, but it would also alter what the poem is doing. The English phrase tells us what the word denotes; the Japanese word allows the reader to encounter, however faintly, another linguistic world. More importantly, its opacity preserves the distance within the contact that the poem itself describes.

We have already seen that opacity is not an inherent property of a word. It emerges from a relationship between word and reader, and that relationship is situated in a particular language, culture, and historical moment.

And that relationship can itself become poetic material.

Opacity and Cutting

Let us return to Roberta Beach Jacobson’s haiku, which—like Polona Oblak’s—embeds a Japanese word inside an English line:

kuma in a coma in a cave

Roberta Beach Jacobson

ASAHI HAIKUIST NETWORK January 30, 2026

As we established, kuma means “bear” in Japanese. For the Anglophone reader who does not know this, the word arrives as pure opacity: strange, dark, unresolved. But that opacity is not merely an obstacle to understanding. It participates in the poem’s atmosphere of estrangement. The bear is sleeping; the reader, too, is briefly unable to recognize what the word denotes. Meaning is present but not yet legible.

Kuma therefore becomes part of a larger network of estrangement: the darkness of the cave, the altered consciousness of sleep, the suspended identity of coma, and the unfamiliarity of a foreign word. The familiar becomes strange at several levels at once. Even winter is implicitly present through the hibernating bear, bringing another form of suspension and estrangement from the ordinary world.

The repetition in kuma in a coma in a cave deepens this effect. The three k sounds create a sonic enclosure, while the repeated “in a” continually places one thing inside another: bear inside coma inside cave; consciousness inside sleep; meaning inside unfamiliarity. The poem does not merely describe enclosure and estrangement. It enacts them.

The humor participates in that estrangement too. Kuma in a coma in a cave is almost absurdly recursive, and the repeated sounds give the line a playful, slightly comic quality. That lightness prevents the enclosure from settling into solemnity. More importantly, the humor belongs to the reader’s estrangement from the word: before kuma is recognized as “bear,” its sound can be heard as something strange and even faintly ridiculous in this context. The poem makes us laugh, or at least smile, from a position of partial misunderstanding. Once the word becomes clear, that initial mishearing does not simply disappear; it becomes part of the poem’s movement between the familiar and the strange.

This is also why the opacity of kuma matters to the poem’s cut. We have to cross a zone of uncertainty before the word becomes available. And what is a cut, after all, but a zone of uncertainty that the reader must cross? Here opacity does not simply obstruct the crossing; it embodies it.

With the transparent paraphrase:

bear in a coma in a cave

the basic content survives, but most of the poem does not. The foreignness of kuma disappears, the cut itself is almost erased, and the sonic enclosure loosens. The paraphrase tells us what is there rather than making us undergo something of the estrangement the poem describes.

Sound carries this enactment further. The echoing consonants and vowels make us navigate acoustically before everything is conceptually clear. In darkness, sound becomes a means of orientation; the reader is, in a small way, inside the cave. The unfamiliar word is first encountered as sound before it becomes a definition.

And this points toward another possibility: an opaque word can draw attention not only to what language means, but to language as material.

The Materiality of Language

There is a further use of opacity that is less concerned with what a word denotes than with what it is.

When semantic recognition is delayed, the word itself can come forward. The reader may attend to its sound, rhythm, shape, texture, or relation to neighboring words. Language ceases, temporarily, to be transparent. We notice the material through which meaning is normally conveyed.

This is already evident in kuma and John Pappas takes this possibility further with:

more dilaudid
she conducts an orchestra
I cannot hear

John Pappas, haikuKATHA #19

Dilaudid, the brand name for hydromorphone, is a powerful opioid analgesic. In a hospital or palliative setting, “more Dilaudid” can suggest severe pain and its treatment, as well as sedation or altered consciousness. But the poem gives us little to settle the situation. We do not know who is receiving it, why, or exactly what the orchestra is.

For a reader unfamiliar with the drug, Dilaudid is therefore highly opaque. The capitalization gives us a small point of orientation: it suggests a proper name, and in the context of “more” may lead us toward a medication. But it does not tell us what the drug is, why it is being given, or what significance it has in the poem. Even its pronunciation is not immediately obvious from its spelling. Before we know what the word denotes, we encounter it as a strange sequence of sounds.

And that matters because the poem itself is built around dissonance and inaccessibility. Dilaudid belongs to one semantic world; orchestra belongs to another. The drug suggests pain, treatment, sedation, perhaps a hospital; the orchestra suggests music, performance, coordination, perhaps beauty. The poem places these worlds beside one another without explaining how they connect. Then the final line introduces another disjunction: she conducts an orchestra, but the speaker cannot hear it.

For the reader who does not know Dilaudid, the opacity of the word enacts something of that inaccessibility. We cannot immediately get at what the word refers to, just as the speaker cannot get at the music being conducted. The poem gives us an inaccessible object at two levels: the speaker cannot access the orchestra, while the reader cannot initially access the word. The resistance we encounter in the language therefore mirrors the resistance encountered by the speaker.

Once semantic recognition is delayed, the word becomes available for another kind of attention. It can be heard as sound before it is securely grasped as meaning. One might notice its repeated syllables or hear fragments and echoes within it—die, laud, loud, law, lord, id, did, deluded. These and more are not hidden meanings of Dilaudid, nor need they have been intended by Pappas. They are possibilities made available by the word’s opacity.

The unfamiliarity of Dilaudid adds yet another layer. Before its meaning becomes available, its sound can seem strangely musical—its repeated l and d sounds, its syllabic pattern, even its resemblance to playful nonsense syllables such as la-di-da. The word can therefore momentarily seem to belong with orchestra at the level of sound while belonging elsewhere at the level of meaning.

The resulting dissonance is not simply between pain and music. It occurs within the word itself: between sound and meaning, between what the reader hears and what the reader eventually understands. The reader experiences, in miniature, the poem’s larger structure of cognitive dissonance.

There is also a reversal in the final line: the speaker cannot hear the orchestra, while the reader is made to hear the word. The represented music is inaccessible, but the language becomes unusually audible.

Words do not just have meanings; they have bodies—sounds, rhythms, textures, shapes, histories, and resistances. These do not merely carry meaning; they participate in making it. An unfamiliar word can resist disappearing into what it denotes long enough for us to encounter the body of the word itself.

The Value of Specificity

This point becomes even clearer in another haiku by John Pappas, published on Charlotte Digregorio’s blog:

new soil
our names
sprout schwas

John Pappas

“Schwa” is a technical linguistic term for the unstressed, often reduced vowel sound represented by /ə/. For a reader unfamiliar with the term, it is highly opaque. But here the technicality is not ornamental. The poem asks us to imagine our names changing as they take root in new soil. Their vowels shift; familiar pronunciations become unfamiliar.

A more transparent substitution would be:

new soil
our names
sprout different vowels

The meaning is immediately available, but the poem has become both less precise and less poetic. “Different vowels” tells us only that the names have changed. Schwas gives the change a particular character: the vowels have been reduced, softened, brought toward a less distinct sound. The word gives the metaphor something specific to work with. Names do not simply become different; they sprout schwas.

That specificity is important because sprout is not merely a decorative verb. It asks us to imagine a linguistic change as something organic and almost visible. A generic phrase such as “different vowels” cannot quite sustain that image. Schwas, precisely because it names something concrete within the otherwise invisible workings of speech, can behave like a thing that grows from the names.

The technical word therefore does not make the poem less accessible simply by making it harder to understand. It gives the poem something that accessibility alone cannot provide: a particular object for the metaphor to act upon.

Schwas also makes the reader attend to language as an object. And this redirection of attention is organic to what the poem is about.

Most of the time we inhabit our language without thinking about how its sounds are produced. Learning another language changes that. We become conscious of distinctions we previously passed over: vowel qualities, stress, aspiration, the position of the tongue, the sounds that exist in one language but not another. Language ceases to be simply the medium in which we live and becomes something we can look at, listen to, and analyze. Schwa requires precisely this kind of knowledge.  Our names change as the language around them changes, and in learning that language we become newly aware of sounds that had previously remained beneath our attention. The opacity of schwas thus mirrors the experience it describes: the word makes language strange enough to become perceptible.

There is humor in schwas as well. The word itself has a slightly comic, foreign sound. It could almost be mistaken for the name of a flower or some unfamiliar botanical species—something like phlox. That possibility is particularly apt in a poem beginning with “new soil”: the reader may momentarily hear schwas as another thing that might sprout there.

The mishearing also hints at the small misunderstandings through which a foreign language is learned. When we encounter an unfamiliar word, we do not simply fail to understand it; we make provisional guesses about what kind of thing it is. Is it a name? A place? A plant? We construct possibilities from what we already know. In that sense,  schwas performs another aspect of linguistic foreignness. It is not only opaque; it is misrecognizable. Its strangeness invites the wrong associations before the right one arrives.

There is also a subtle tension between “sprout” and “schwas”. Sprout suggests growth and emergence, while schwa names a reduced vowel, often produced when a more fully articulated vowel loses its stress. Yet reduction is not necessarily loss: vowel reduction is often a product of linguistic familiarity and fluency, when speakers no longer need to fully articulate distinctions that have become habitual. The names therefore “sprout” something that is both a diminution and a form of ease. They are altered by the new linguistic environment, but may also be becoming at home in it. The poem leaves the relation between loss and adaptation unresolved.

This poem presented an interesting encounter for me as a reader because I am familiar with the word schwa. On my first reading, I therefore found the poem somewhat too clever, perhaps precisely because the word offered me no opacity to inhabit. I could move immediately from schwas to its definition, and the poem’s mechanism seemed to be sitting there waiting to be decoded.

Strangely, it was only when I approached the poem as though schwa were opaque to me—when I temporarily suspended what I knew the word meant—that I began to appreciate it differently. My first response was shaped by knowing the word; my later response came from recovering, imaginatively, the position of not knowing it.

In doing so, I discovered something that the poem itself had been demonstrating: sometimes we need a little distance from language before we can perceive what language is doing. The path toward understanding can itself become part of the poem.

The Cost of Opacity

Opaque words can create valuable poetic effects, but they also ask something of the reader. The reader may need to pause, infer, tolerate uncertainty, or even reach for the dictionary. Whether that effort is rewarding depends partly on the kind of opacity the poem creates and on how much other uncertainty the reader is already being asked to carry.

A useful limit case published on the blog Five Fleas Itchy Poetry is:

calls to prayer
smoke from a crater
thurifies the dawn

John Hawkhead

“Thurifies” is unlikely to be familiar to most readers, and the poem gives us little basis for deducing its meaning. The reader therefore has to stop and reach for the dictionary.

The dictionary tells us that thurify means to perfume or cense with incense. The word derives from thurible, the vessel used for burning incense in Christian liturgy. This gives “thurifies” a distinctly Christian liturgical association. Calls to prayer, meanwhile, may evoke the Muslim adhan. The collision of these two religious vocabularies is immediately suggestive. The smoke from the crater becomes something like incense, and the dawn something that can be censed or consecrated.

But the dictionary has not made the word fully transparent. The dictionary can supply a definition. It cannot supply familiarity. It has resolved one uncertainty only to open others. What does the incense mean here? Is it carrying prayers? Sanctifying or purifying? Marking the dawn as sacred? Is it an offering? Is it simply a figurative image for the smoke? Incense has several religious and symbolic dimensions, and the poem does not tell us which of them are operating.

This is where unfamiliarity matters. Figuration exceeds definition. A word used figuratively means more than its dictionary definition: its associations, habitual contexts, tone, register, and history all participate in what the figure can do. But thurifies is not a word most readers have encountered often enough to have a settled sense of how it behaves in actual use. We may know its dictionary definition without knowing its full range of associations or habitual figurative possibilities. The word is being used figuratively here, but without that familiarity it can be difficult to know which dimensions of the word the figuration is drawing upon.

This is one of the particular costs of an opaque word. The dictionary can tell us what the word means; it cannot give us the accumulated experience of having encountered the word in use. We can recover denotation without necessarily recovering connotation.

The uncertainty extends further to tone and register. If we were familiar with the word, its habitual uses might help us narrow down how it is being used: solemnly, straightforwardly, ironically, critically, lyrically. Tone and register normally help constrain figurative possibility. Here, because the word itself is unfamiliar, that calibration is less available to us. We may understand what the word denotes while remaining uncertain about how the poem wants us to take it.

And yet this very uncertainty may be what makes the choice of “thurifies” feel deliberate. Its specifically Christian associations become conspicuous beside “calls to prayer”, with its possible Muslim resonance. The tension between the two religious vocabularies makes the opacity and resulting awkwardness feel potentially meaningful. The poem may be asking us to notice what happens when different religious vocabularies are brought into contact.

It may even evoke the cycles of violence in the Middle East, where religious language and acts of destruction have repeatedly become entangled. Read this way, the awkwardness becomes more than an unusual juxtaposition. It can be a comment on the inadequacy of religious justification itself. The language of sanctification seems unable to make the violence before us meaningful or sacred; its very strain exposes the gap between religious justification and what has actually happened.

But that is not the only possible response. The same unfamiliarity that makes the choice seem deliberate to one reader may make it feel strained to another. It can be a comment, or it can just be awkward. This is the unavoidable ambivalence of opacity: it can be an effect, just as much as it can be the failure of an effect.

This is where load management becomes important. The load a poem places on a reader is not simply the sum of its difficult words. Every haiku asks us to manage some degree of uncertainty: what is being observed, where the poem is happening, who is speaking, how images relate to one another, what is literal or figurative, what has been left unsaid, and what tone we should adopt. A poem can leave some of these questions open while giving us firm points of orientation elsewhere. What matters is the total uncertainty the reader is being asked to carry.

An opaque word therefore enters an existing field of uncertainty. Sometimes it adds only a little to an otherwise highly oriented poem. Sometimes it compounds uncertainties that are already present. And sometimes it can actually help organize them, giving several unresolved elements a point around which they can gather. Load management is not simply a matter of counting difficulties. It concerns whether the different uncertainties in a poem support and constrain one another, or whether they accumulate without enough points of purchase.

“Thurifies” shows how quickly that load can grow. The reader has to recognize that the word is unfamiliar even in context, consult the dictionary, work out what aspect of incense is relevant, determine how that figurative relation operates, and decide how to hear the word’s tone. At the same time, other things in the poem are also unresolved: where the poem is happening, what exactly the calls to prayer signify, what kind of violence the crater evokes, and whether the religious imagery is straightforward, ironic, critical, or some combination of these. The uncertainty surrounding the word therefore does not occur in isolation. It enters an already uncertain poem and interacts with its other unresolved elements.

That chain of uncertainty can make the poem very rich. Each unresolved question can open another dimension: lexical, religious, figurative, geographical, tonal. But it can also be alienating. For some readers, the different uncertainties interact productively and generate possibilities that a more transparent word would close down. For others, they may simply accumulate until there is too little purchase on the poem.

I don’t mean this as a verdict on Hawkhead’s poem. Rather, it seems to me a particularly useful example because it brings the upside and downside of opacity unusually close together. The obscurity of thurifies does real poetic work that a more transparent word cannot, but it also imposes a substantial cost on the reader. Some readers will find that additional work richly rewarded; others may not.

This danger is not unique to Hawkhead’s poem. None of the examples we have considered completely escapes opacity’s dangers. Their strategies can make opacity productive, but they do not eliminate its cost. In each case, the reader still has to decide whether the unfamiliarity is doing enough work to justify the additional effort it creates.

But transparency has costs too. A transparent word may make a poem easier to enter while making it less precise, less distinctive, or simply less alive. It may sacrifice specificity for familiarity, foreignness for accessibility, or the material presence of the word for the smoothness of its meaning. Sometimes what is gained in immediate comprehension is a poem that is flatter, more predictable, even completely bland.

The poet therefore asks something of the reader whenever a word remains opaque: patience, attention, perhaps even research. That is a cost, but potentially a gain. The question becomes whether the reader will judge it worthwhile.

Conclusion

There are, of course, many bad poems that use opaque words. Most readers who have spent enough time with haiku will have encountered them: the technical term that seems to have been chosen only to display knowledge, the archaic word that contributes little beyond an antique air, the exotic word that asks to be admired rather than experienced. Opacity can be precious, pedantic, or simply unnecessary. A difficult word is not made poetically valuable by being difficult.

The more useful question is what the opacity does. Does it make us hear the word? Does it make language itself visible? Does it enact a foreignness, uncertainty, estrangement, or historical distance that belongs to the poem? Does it preserve something that a transparent substitute would destroy? Does the reader’s effort open the poem, or merely demonstrate the poet’s vocabulary? A good opaque word does not merely make us stop. It gives us somewhere to go when we do.

The answer will not always be clear. Nor does it need to be. Opacity is a risk. Sometimes it creates another dimension of the poem; sometimes it creates only an obstacle.

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that the poet does not owe us transparency. Words are not merely containers for information. They have sounds, histories, textures, associations and shapes, and poets are inevitably tempted by them.

Yamaguchi Seison, a contemporary of his, claimed that Awano Seiho would often read the dictionary looking for new, unusual, or simply beautiful words to use in his haiku. There is something refreshingly un-haiku-moment about the image: the haiku poet not patiently waiting for the right ordinary word to arise from experience, but rummaging through the dictionary because he loves words.

And perhaps that is worth remembering. Poets will be poets and poets love words.

Some words will be transparent. Others will be foreign, technical, archaic, beautiful, or simply odd. Some will earn their opacity; others will not. And they will shift with the light and with time.

The poet chooses the word. It is up to the reader to meet it.

Orense Nicod

 

We keep reader proposals anonymous so there is no pressure on those who contribute ideas but if the author of the proposal wishes to reveal they suggested the topic. That is, of course, welcomed.

 

References

The Haiku Foundation. “Contemporary Haiku.” The Haiku Foundation. https://thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/1121

University of Colorado Boulder, Center for Asian Studies. “Japanese Haiku and Haiga: A One Week Unit Plan.” Program for Teaching East Asia. https://www.colorado.edu/cas/outreach/curriculum-units/middle-school/japanese-haiku-and-haiga-one-week-unit-plan

Katz, Judith. “Haiku: An Introduction to Writing and Discussing Poetic Form.” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 2001.

Masaoka Shiki. “Sixth Letter to a Tanka Poet” (Mutabi Uta-yomi ni Atauru Sho / 六たび歌よみに与ふる書). Nihon, February 28, 1898

Masaoka Shiki. 夏草やベースボールの人遠し (natsukusa ya bēsu bōru no hito tōshi). 1898. Translation Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura, Baseball Haiku: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Kirkup, James. “Obituary: Awano Seiho.” The Independent, January 15, 1993. Reproduced in “Awano Seiho,” WKD: Introducing Haiku Poets and Topics, World Kigo Database, March 5, 2010. https://wkdhaikutopics.blogspot.com/2010/03/awano-seiho.html. Anecdote originally attributed to Yamaguchi Seison.

At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 6 questions).

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. 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.

TAKE THIS WEEK’S 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 children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short 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.

Orense Nicod

Comments (87)

  1. _________________________.
    An attempt to understand.
    ––––––––––––––––––––––––––

    What is difficult? Why opaque?

    _________
    OPAQUE:
    –––––––––
    The word opaque comes from the Latin adjective opacus, meaning “shaded,” “shady,” or “dark”. It entered Middle English as opake and was later shaped again by Middle French opaque. The earliest root origin in ancient Latin remains unknown

    (obsolete, poetic) An area of darkness; a place or region with no light. –wikionary

    Meaning Shift: Over time, the physical meaning shifted from simply “dark” to specifically “blocking light” (1640s), and later gained its common figurative meaning of “hard to understand” or unclear (1761)–Oxford English Dictionary

    *

    I watch a number of quiz games and almost always astonished that contestests who enter a general knowledge one, are stumped.

    I used to think a grounding in common and general knowledge was fairly normal. Perhaps a defence even from being manipulated.

    Are we going backwards, and celebrating lack of knowledge and love of words simple and complex?

    Do poets outside of the non-haikai arena eschew certain words? Are more haikai poets also avoiding the classic and traditional way of knowing tracts of literature such as with the discipline of Bashō himself.

    Have we grown too timid?

    “…the fact that a lot of people detest poetry…is very strange. It wouldn’t make sense to hate many other aspects of language. It would be bizarre to declare a hatred for paragraphs or dependent clauses.
    It is also unusual to hate specific uses to which language is put: like speeches, or stories, or essays. Poetry meets with greater resistance than these things. The question is, why? One possible answer is that people
    resist poetry, because poetry resists them.”

    The first form of opacity…: poems are often difficult to read.
    They do not wear their meaning on their sleeves; they take extra effort.

    Poetic Opacity
    How to Paint Things with Words
    Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum

    .

    Taking from the above, I’d say being [challenged] to read is the first kind of opacity. Just as learning a musical instrument was deeply opaque to me, and I gave up too quickly and too easily (my honourary aunts, really mother and daughter next door neighbours) were happy to teach the piano free of charge. I gave up on the second time to my shame. My parents were alarmed, social pressure I guess, that I couldn’t read at four years old. As working class parents there wasn’t really spare money, every penny had to work hard for itself, they taught me first though needed a private tutor. Thankfully I was reading Dickens and Shakespeare before I was six years old. Literacy was a gateway or a path to steady employment. After all my mother and her sisters had to start full employment once they were fourteen years old. Being able to talk, listen, write and read was vital as a trade not a luxury. It was communication more than empathy of course. It was a tool, and we needed to read well for any trade.

    .

    By learning language in its many forms because the foundation of those of us who were not gifted as plumbers, electricians, etc…

    Working class children with language skills sometimes became novelists and poets in the 1950s into 1960s anad 1970s:

    Alan Sillitoe: Explored working-class defiance in industrial Nottingham (UK); famous for “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1958) and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (1959); Nell Dunn who portrayed working-class women’s lives in post-war London with “Up the Junction” (1963) and “Poor Cow” 1967.

    Poets: The Liverpool Poets: Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten gained massive fame through the 1967 Penguin anthology The Mersey Sound, mixing working-class roots with rock-and-roll energy. Adrian Mitchell: A performance-driven poet who opposed war and social inequality with accessible, song-like verses, and the first to publish an interview with the Beatles.

    Tony Harrison: Who broke the Sonnet ceiling, began writing powerful reflections on class divides, language, and his regional upbringing during this era.

    The 1960s was a dynamic decade for poetry, defined by the rise of confessional verse, the counterculture Beat movement, the New York School, and politically charged anti-war writing. Major figures broke traditional rules to write about raw personal trauma, social rebellion, and daily life. 
    poetryfoundation dot org
    From the Pulitzer files Poets of the ’60s, established and new
    The Nineteen Sixties: A Long, Strange Trip (Hoover dot org / Hoover Institution)

    ***
    __________________________________________
    What is Poetry? Echoes Through the Ages
    ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

    “Every author has the whole history to contend with, all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American poet)

    Poetry is a form of literature that is often associated with beauty and emotion. It has been a part of human culture for thousands of years, with examples of poetry dating back to ancient civilisations like the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks.
    A poem is a form of artistic expression that uses language to convey complex emotions, ideas, and experiences. A poem can be written in a variety of forms, such as free verse, sonnet, haiku, or ballad, but what defines a poem is not its structure, but rather its ability to evoke thoughts and feelings in the reader.

    At its core, a poem is a distillation of language, a way of using words to create something more than the sum of its parts. This is achieved through the use of literary devices such as metaphor, simile, imagery, and symbolism. These tools allow the poet to convey meaning in a way that is both concise and powerful.

    superprof dot co dot za

    ***

    Actually, many poets do use difficult or opaque words when it serves their artistic vision, but those who avoid them do so because complicated vocabulary often breaks rhythm, feels fake, or blocks the direct emotional connection with the reader. – various sources

    ***

    Why Some Poets Avoid Opaque Words
    Fake Emotion: Heavy or obscure words can feel like a trick to sound smart instead of sharing a real feeling.

    ***

    Haiku poets use allusion—referencing older classical verse, myths, or historical texts—as a tool for intertextual dialogue. Inherited from classical Japanese traditions like waka and renga, this practice (often linked to honkadori or allusive variation) allows a brief 17-syllable poem to echo centuries of cultural meaning without explicitly explaining it.
    SOURCES: THF; wikipedia; NZhaiku etc…

    ***

    It is surprising that there is not more duplication in our haiku by accident as we mostly use simplistic words to attempt to capture complex thoughts in ourselves or others, at least I hope we consider that option in our writing.

    Though why don’t we follow in the footsteps of the world’s first named poet and author in recorded history is Enheduanna, a Sumerian high priestess and princess who lived in ancient Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE. And Homer, Sappho, Valmiki (c. 5th to 3rd century BCE) credited as the author of the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana; Langston Hughes: Central pillar of the Harlem Renaissance and jazz poetry; Gwendolyn Brooks: Became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Annie Allen in 1950; Robert Penn Warren: Named as the first U.S. Poet Laureate in 1986 and so many more.

    _______________________________________________________________________________________________
    I’d like them and many more to be my spirit guides In all their word-guises simple and complex.
    –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

    brightness
    of a 3-5-8 rule
    Lencten

    Alan Summers
    EJCA Spring Haiku Poetry Contest 2026 Anthology
    (Edmonton Japanese Community Association)
    Judge: Shajin Watanabe (Japan)

    1. Alan, I think you’re raising a much larger question about poetry and language, and I’m not sure we should assume that haiku behaves in exactly the same way as poetry at large. Do you think it does?

      I don’t mean that haiku is entirely different in kind. Haiku can certainly make use of difficult words poetically, just as poetry at large does. But I do think such words behave differently in haiku and have to be negotiated with more care, precisely because of haiku’s compression and enunciative structure.

      That doesn’t mean poetry at large should use difficult words indiscriminately, nor does it mean haiku must avoid them. The question for me is what the particular word is doing in the particular poem, and what its register does to the communicative situation.

      And I don’t think questioning such words from the position of a haiku reader is unreasonable. The reader’s question that prompted the inquiry represents, in my experience, a significant portion of the ELH readership: what happens when an unfamiliar word enters a haiku, and when does that unfamiliarity become productive rather than merely obstructive? Asking that question isn’t an argument against difficult words. It’s part of taking the reader’s encounter with the poem seriously.

      But, as the sensibility of your take shows, there is also a danger in the opposite direction too. I think for some readers and writers, questioning an unusual word in haiku has become almost reflexive, and that can impoverish the poem’s possibilities just as surely as indiscriminate obscurity can. We should be able to write about unusual subjects, bring unfamiliar registers into the poem, and pursue poetic effects that aren’t immediately transparent.

      As so often, I suspect the workable position lies somewhere in the middle: neither protecting the reader from difficulty nor assuming that difficulty is automatically productive.

      For me, haiku is the art of the necessary. A surprising number of questions in haiku can be approached by asking simply: is this necessary?

      Is the unfamiliar word necessary? Is its particular register necessary? Is the proper name necessary? Is the difficulty it creates necessary to the experience the poem is trying to transmit?

      If it is, then I don’t think we should remove it merely because some readers may have to work for it. If it isn’t, then looking it up isn’t going to rescue it.

      That seems to me a more useful test than either “avoid difficult words” or “embrace difficult words.” The issue isn’t difficulty itself. It’s necessity.

      1. Dear Orense,

        re:
        “Alan, I think you’re raising a much larger question about poetry and language, and I’m not sure we should assume that haiku behaves in exactly the same way as poetry at large. Do you think it does?”

        It was about language and opacity, and degrees of it, and how we background ourselves with language and literature, as any poet would do, I feel, whatever the chosen or perceived genre.

        A kind of effort and understanding, perhaps it was my schooling from 4-11 where spelling was important, and it seemed at 8-12 that storytelling was a main focus with its integral spelling and writing composites.

        We are storytellers of course, though often vocal rather than scripted, or more broadly, text that has been composed, drafted, or penned, though still a skill unless someone isn’t naturally gifted or disciplined.

        .

        “”But there is a danger in the opposite direction too. I think for some readers and writers, questioning an unusual word in haiku has become almost reflexive, and that can impoverish the poem’s possibilities just as surely as indiscriminate obscurity can. We should be able to write about unusual subjects, bring unfamiliar registers into the poem, and pursue poetic effects that aren’t immediately transparent.”

        Using the examples of quiz shows, that I watched at childhood with my parents, where adults and child contestants knew more knowledge regardless of their background, and now today where adults mature or younger are stumped by everyday words or slightly less but not overly less everyday words and questions, I’d say we should not be automatically reacting negatively to a word just because it’s not “simple”.

        My working class father read the dictionary every night he was home (he was a troubleshooter) and learnt and understood a new word each night. He wasn’t a writer or a big on reading although I remember he was okay with biographies and autobiographies.

        .

        After all there two main types of lexicons, one is the mental lexicon (the internal store of words in the human brain) and the other one is the printed or written lexicon (external reference works like dictionaries).

        I would have 4-6 reference books, dictionaries, OED and Longmans English Usage, a big Thesaurus, and one that focused on Synonyms and Antonyms, and often purchase something else or wait until the morning or weekend to visit the library.

        And that’s despite being sporty! Reading was like taking in nutrients, though I loved swimming, rugby, long distance running. In fact when I was older part of my training was running a half-marathon before every breakfast, and also physical exercise for 30 minutes after the half-marathon, and if I failed that, I failed the overall training and would be sent home on the spot. Reading is both a gift and a discipline and not limited to class or income bracket.

        .
        re:
        “For me, haiku is the art of the necessary. A surprising number of questions in haiku can be approached by asking simply: is this necessary?”

        I think that’s different, and not does not automatically mean simple instead of complex words.

        I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Brad Bennett writes about in his essays, though they can be fun, for instance:

        Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
        Bennett, Brad. “Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia.” Modern Haiku 52.1, Winter-Spring 2021.

        He says:
        “The title of this article means “fear of long words” and appears to have more than
        one spelling. I chose the one I liked best! ”

        I like this one as ‘old’ is so lazy and vague. I remember being 12 years old and two 20 year old teachers visited our school and talked to me and I felt they were so old. It’s a very vague and subjective adjective:

        octogenarian swimmer his long, long wake
        Brad Bennett
        failed haiku, February 2017

        An octogenarian is a person who is between 80 and 89 years old. That’s reasonably precise and we know it’s not a 20 year old either!

        I write a lot about snails, those seemingly slow creatures, though if you placed them several hundred miles away from your home, they’d turn up again unexpectedly quickly, try it! Paint ‘Orense’ on one or another chosen name. (smiles)

        .
        CHOSEN EXAMPLE:
        .
        Using a long and bulky word in a poem can force the reader to slow
        down, even when they are reading the word in their head. In the follow-
        ing poem, navigating the word “circumnavigation” deliberately slows the
        reader to a snail’s pace.
        takes all day
        snail’s circumnavigation
        of a stone
        Jeannie Martin
        Previously unpublished
        .

        pull of stars turning cold the snail’s navigation

        Alan Summers
        Blithe Spirit (February 2013)
        Collection: Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012)
        [monostich]

        .
        This is one where once it would be no problem, as so many people watched Natural History programmes, either BBC ones or ones that my wife Karen Hoy worked at, with Partridge Films etc…:

        .

        the jellyfish
        and their bioluminescence
        a long summer dusk

        Melissa Allen
        Melissa’s Red Dragonfly blog, Sept. 1, 2013

        .
        I’m amazed it wasn’t picked up, at least for an anthology!

        Brad Bennett simply says it lingers like summer dusk.

        Nowadays people don’t engage with documentaries like they did before, and even reality fly on the wall was as deep as a Ken Loach film. I bet a lot of people would shrug that word off as if it was a flea or mozzie.

        .
        NOTE:
        Bioluminescence as a dedicated main subject was first comprehensively explored and featured in Sir David Attenborough’s 2016 feature-length documentary Attenborough’s Life That Glows (also known as David Attenborough’s Light on Earth). However, specific glowing organisms like fireflies and deep-sea creatures had been briefly mentioned in his earlier broad-scope series (such as The Blue Planet) decades prior.–wikipedia

        .
        You said:
        “Is the unfamiliar word necessary?”

        I’d argue it is.

        Synonyms for bioluminescent:
        They include glowing, phosphorescent, luminescent, and luminous, though none of these other words specifically mean that a living thing makes the light. COLLINS DICTIONARY/Power Thesaurus.

        .
        I set a challenge in Pan Haiku Review Issue 2 (New Year’s Eve, Winter 2023) – The Kigo Lab Special
        I wanted Natural History haiku not nature haiku, and it was a fascinating exercise to work with some poets to avoid vague phrasing and stock phrases and words.
        https://www.callofthepage.org/the-pan-haiku-review/

        .

        You said:
        “If it is, then I don’t think we should remove it merely because some readers may have to work for it. If it isn’t, then looking it up isn’t going to rescue it. That seems to me a more useful test than either “avoid difficult words” or “embrace difficult words.” The issue isn’t difficulty itself. It’s necessity.”

        Perhaps we should also pre-look things up, and engage with knowledge more. In many countries, including certain Western countries too, knowledge is disproved of and actively removed, it helps the voting system for certain political groups. Being Dumb or Stupid is the New Clever as evidenced by alarmingly by celebrities such as Joey Essex:
        “‘I want to show who I really am,’ he admitted ahead of his stay in the Australian Outback show. ‘I come across as very stupid and I’m not going to disagree with that, as I’m not academically clever.’”
        .
        There’s a mixture of fear and laziness. Back in the day we’d work hard to gather and retain knowledge now we don’t, or pretend.

        It’s now become a necessity to appear a little bit stupid almost like Laurel and Hardy and the piano. I had a builder mate, who once I befriended told me he couldn’t appear knowledgeable as he’d lose his friends. That is fear, and I see it everyday in one context or another in life one way or another.

        Words are words, we don’t use ALL of them in any poem unless it’s the 10,000 poem I did once just to prove to a lecturer I did only write short verse (he hated haiku though grew to like haibun apparently).

        I’m sure we’ve all done this at least once, jamming words together:

        jampackedelevatoreverybuttonpushed

        John Stevenson
        Frogpond 25.2.

        trialengthypotheticalstrainerves

        Emily Romano
        Modern Haiku 27:1

        Or:

        tintinnabulation—
        shadow puppets dance
        across a blank white wall

        Angelee Deodhar
        “Mindfulness” (haibun), Kernals 2, Summer 2013
        United Haiku and Tanka Society

        Would this haiku honestly be better without its ‘long’ word?

        bringing soft things
        into the hibernaculum
        solstice sky

        Julie Warther
        Hedgerow 126

        Julie Warther (now Schwerin) is exceptionally naughty and defiant with more long words in the essay:
        https://www.modernhaiku.org/issue52-1/MH52-1-Hippo-Bennett.pdf

        And elsewhere!

        I’d say it’s ‘craft’.

        And I hear she is a mighty fine Heron’s Nest editor too!

        I feel there is a lot more to it than just allergy keeping it simple in haiku for various reasons.

        I need to take my lexicon out for a walk now, perhaps a coffee at the end of it, sitting down with six or 6,000 virtual reference books swirling around in my laptop.

        Alan

        1. 🆕️Alan, I think we are probably closer in agreement than it might first appear. I certainly don’t mean that haiku should restrict itself to simple or familiar words.

          I think the first distinction to make is between unusual, difficult and opaque. These aren’t synonymous. Your examples actually demonstrate this well. Circumnavigation and bioluminescence are unusual or marked words, but they aren’t opaque in the relevant sense. Their place in their respective poems is legible. The question becomes much more difficult when the reader cannot establish not only what a word means, but why this particular word belongs to this particular poem.

          Circumnavigation is an unusual and rather bulky word, but I wouldn’t call it opaque. Its meaning is perfectly recoverable, and in Jeannie Martin’s snail haiku its length and movement actually participate in the poem. Likewise, bioluminescence has a marked scientific register, but it is perfectly legible. It isn’t an opaque word simply because it isn’t ordinary everyday language. And its scientific precision matters: a living organism producing its own light is not quite the same thing as something that merely glows.

          This is what I mean when I call haiku the art of the necessary. I’m not using “necessary” to mean indispensable in some narrow sense, or “the simplest word that works.” I mean it in relation to what I see as haiku’s fundamental poetic logic: compression.

          Haiku’s brevity isn’t simply a matter of having fewer words. Its movement is one of subtraction. Every word is a subtraction from the infinite of the white page. In a poetic logic that works through elaboration and expansion, another image, qualification, metaphor or description can enlarge the poem. Haiku moves in the opposite direction. It asks what can be removed while leaving the poem fully itself.

          That is why every word has to earn its place. Not because every word has to perform some obvious function, but because there is so little language available to the poem. A word can earn its place through denotation, sound, rhythm, register, association, ambiguity or poetic charge. It can even create productive friction. What matters is that it participates in the poem’s own logic—or at the very least is neither extraneous nor discordant.

          Therefore, for me, the test isn’t simple or difficult, familiar or unfamiliar. It is whether the choice belongs to the poem’s particular logic.

          And that is why I keep returning to necessity. A necessary word can make the poem. An unnecessary one can kill it—not because it is difficult, but because in a form built on compression, it occupies precious space without becoming part of the poem.

          So the question isn’t:

          Will the reader know this word?

          It’s:

          Does this poem need this word?

          1. .
            🆕️And apple snails,
            .
            “Alan, I think we are probably closer in agreement than it might first appear. I certainly don’t mean that haiku should restrict itself to simple or familiar words.”

            That’s great, I’d like to think I’m a poet and that I’m in some kind of concord, however different I might be to others.

            “That is why every word has to earn its place. Not because every word has to perform some obvious function, but because there is so little language available to the poem. A word can earn its place through denotation, sound, rhythm, register, association, ambiguity or poetic charge. It can even create productive friction. What matters is that it participates in the poem’s own logic—or at the very least is neither extraneous nor discordant.”

            We all commit to this in our own way though we have to remember that are different types of poets. We cannot actually control them and nor should we really.

            And poetry has often been banned, from before Barbara Bush and right now with too many to recount, so yes all words count, they matter, whether clear, ambiguous, opaque, they are all dangerous to some authority. And if we lose sight of language and its intricacies, and don’t allow censorship to curtail us, we may still have some skin in the game.

            _____________________
            Some banned books:
            –––––––––––––––––––––

            Milk and Honey
            2014·Rupi Kaur

            The Poet X
            2018·Elizabeth Acevedo

            Brown Girl Dreaming
            2014·Jacqueline Woodson

            October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard
            2012·Lesléa Newman

            ___________________
            Past books banned:
            –––––––––––––––––––

            Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

            Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

            ________________________________________
            A fuller banned books list then and now:
            https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-poetry
            ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

            It can be healthy to include determinologisation, as more than ever we should all elevate our skills. And loss of Monosemy, that should not be feared either, these technical terms usually meant to have only one meaning, may gain multiple everyday or slang meanings, where the linguistic process where a specialized technical term moves out of a restricted professional domain and becomes part of everyday general language.. Haiku has been changed and adapted to rapid change after all, mostly war, and more to come our way again, and other great social changes with science, and on the cusp of tomorrow we may all have to learn even more uncomfortable technical and opaque terms. I see military connections now NATO and EU is changing. It’s scary though exciting for poets.

            We have Elemental haiku by Mary Soon Lee (Aug. 4, 2017) including this one:

            .

            Xenon

            First noble compound?
            Hexafluoroplatinate?
            Making history.

            .
            Mary Soon Lee (b. 1965), Master of Arts in mathematics, diploma in computer science from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Master of Science in Astronautics and Space Engineering from Cranfield University, poet and speculative fiction writer. An award-winning poet she authored the viral Elemental Haiku collection, providing a distinct three-line verse for every element in the periodic table.

            Then there is Sam Illingworth (AI systems that claim to know his precise birth date have been documented as hallucinating) is a Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy at Edinburgh Napier University, Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation scholar, studying science and theatre, poet whose work has been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Green Man festival and presented for the BBC. Also PhD in Atmospheric Physics, University of Leicester, MPhys Physics with Space Science and Technology (First Class, 87%, top of cohort), MA in Higher Education, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (the highest teaching excellence recognition in UK higher education). One haiku was not possible to replicate on this blog.

            ________________________________________________________________
            We might not be the vanguard though we can maintain the rear.
            ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

            Alan

            “”
            It can be healthy to include determinologisation, as more than ever we should all elevate our skills. And loss of Monosemy, that should not be feared either, these technical terms usually meant to have only one meaning, may gain multiple everyday or slang meanings, where the linguistic process where a specialized technical term moves out of a restricted professional domain and becomes part of everyday general language.. Haiku has been changed and adapted to rapid change after all, mostly war, and more to come our way again, and other great social changes with science, and on the cusp of tomorrow we may all have to learn even more uncomfortable technical and opaque terms. I see military connections now NATO and EU is changing. It’s scary though exciting for poets.

            We have Elemental haiku by Mary Soon Lee (Aug. 4, 2017) including this one:

            Xenon

            First noble compound?
            Hexafluoroplatinate?
            Making history.

            Mary Soon Lee (b. 1965), Master of Arts in mathematics, diploma in computer science from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Master of Science in Astronautics and Space Engineering from Cranfield University, poet and speculative fiction writer. An award-winning poet she authored the viral Elemental Haiku collection, providing a distinct three-line verse for every element in the periodic table.

            Then there is Sam Illingworth (AI systems that claim to know his precise birth date have been documented as hallucinating) is a Full Professor of Critical AI Literacy at Edinburgh Napier University, Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation scholar, studying science and theatre, poet whose work has been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Green Man festival and presented for the BBC. Also PhD in Atmospheric Physics, University of Leicester, MPhys Physics with Space Science and Technology (First Class, 87%, top of cohort), MA in Higher Education, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (the highest teaching excellence recognition in UK higher education). One haiku was not possible to replicate on this blog.

            We might not be the vanguard though we can maintain the rear.

        1. (My remark made in approximate response to Orense’s “For me, haiku is the art of the necessary. A surprising number of questions in haiku can be approached by asking simply: is this necessary?”

        2. 🆕️Peter, I suspect we may be using “unnecessary” in slightly different senses. I’m not using it in a narrow, utilitarian sense, as though every element of a haiku has to perform some identifiable function.

          The ordinary definition of necessary is “required to achieve a particular result” or “essential or indispensable.” But it also has the sense, particularly in logical and philosophical usage, of unavoidable or unable to be otherwise, as opposed to contingent. The word comes from Latin necessarius, “unavoidable, indispensable,” from necesse, “unavoidable.”

          It is that second sense, together with the first, that I have in mind. In my formulation, “necessary” is closer to belonging—even to a sense of being fated. A word or image can be unnecessary in the ordinary practical sense and still be necessary to the poem because, once it is there, it feels as though it could not have been otherwise.

          I think poets understandably resist anything that sounds like a restriction. But I don’t really mean “necessary” as a rule imposed from outside the poem. I mean it more as a condition of the form. You can work against the compression of haiku, of course, but when you do, I think you risk making a lesser haiku—not because you’ve broken a rule, but because you’ve worked against what gives the form its particular force.

          And rather than being prescriptive, I think this conception can actually be quite liberating. It relocates the criterion from a set of predetermined rules to the poem’s own logic. A rule might tell us not to use unfamiliar words, technical terms, foreign words, rhetorical devices, or whatever else is deemed insufficiently “haiku-like.” Necessity tells us none of that. A word, image, rhetorical device, unusual register, or indeed any poetic choice can belong if the poem’s own logic makes it necessary.

          So necessity isn’t minimalism as prohibition. It is closer to freedom constrained by the particular poem. The white page gives us infinite possibilities; the poem’s emerging logic determines which possibilities belong.

          And by compression I don’t mean reducing language to its smallest possible unit. I mean reducing experience to its smallest poetic unit. The language is the means by which that compression takes place.

          I think Polona Oblak’s komorebi illustrates this perfectly. At first glance, komorebi might seem unnecessary. A reader might reasonably ask why not replace it with “dappled sunlight” or something similar. But without komorebi, the poem dies. The paraphrase may give us some of the denotation, but it doesn’t give us the same experience. The word itself—its sound, register, associations and particular way of naming the phenomenon—is part of the poem.

          That’s what I mean by a word being necessary. It has to belong to this poem’s particular compression of experience.

          Perhaps your “smuggling” is exactly the point. 😄 An element may look unnecessary from outside the poem, yet become necessary once it is inside it, if it belongs to the poem’s own logic. Sometimes the most conspicuous choice is precisely the one that makes the poem. The question isn’t whether the choice attracts attention, but whether the reader can eventually inhabit it. Does the poem allow us to enter into the logic of the choice, so that what initially seemed conspicuous comes to feel inevitable? Or does it simply remain conspicuous—something we notice but cannot make part of our experience of the poem? Necessity isn’t always what disappears into the poem, but what makes the poem possible.

          In that sense, necessity isn’t a prohibition. It is the condition by which the poem becomes fully itself.

          1. 🆕️Thanks, Orense– yeah I was pretty sure you were not speaking in simple utilitarian terms. For me, the best haiku risk not being haiku. And yet . . .

  2. Re Examples of unusual words.

    Keith Evetts says: “If we like komorebi, how about:

    tapophilia the ageing haiku poet

    a slight stir in the bare apple tree apricity

    eudaimonia the temptation of chocolate

    a trace of a tear
    in the young bride’s eye
    serein

    a day wasted in bed dunkelflaute

    Hmnn…”

    Keith, I think your list is useful precisely because it shows that familiarity or unfamiliarity isn’t the most useful question to ask. Before looking at the examples, I’d bring register back into the discussion.

    An unfamiliar word can still communicate quite a lot even before it communicates its denotation. We may not know what it means, but we can usually tell something about the kind of word it is: archaic, elevated, scientific, technical, colloquial, foreign—and, if foreign, we can often make a rough guess at its origin. So an unfamiliar word isn’t a blank. Even before the dictionary gives us its denotation, its register is already speaking.

    I think this matters particularly in haiku because of its enunciative structure. The haiku reader doesn’t merely read for effect; the reader reads for relevance. We are reconstructing a communicative situation from very little. So when an unfamiliar word appears, we don’t simply ask, “What does this mean?” We may also ask, almost instinctively, “Why this word? Why to me? Why now?”

    And this is because the haiku reader is especially primed to respond to the cut. What is a cut, communicatively, if not an address? The cut is structurally the place of the addressee. It is where the poem stops telling us exactly how its elements relate and requires us to participate in establishing that relationship. We don’t merely encounter the cut; we are addressed by it.

    That makes register particularly active in haiku. A sudden shift into scientific, elevated, archaic or foreign language can alter our sense not only of the word but of the speaker and the situation in which the utterance is taking place. We are hardwired to notice such shifts.

    I’ll repeat my earlier example. We normally say, “Hey, look at that cloud,” not “Hey, look at that cirrus,” unless the technical distinction is relevant to the situation. The word cirrus isn’t wrong, and it isn’t inherently unsuitable for an utterance about a cloud. Its technicality simply creates an expectation that the technical distinction matters.

    That is the point about register in haiku. When a poet chooses the marked word rather than the ordinary one, the reader is entitled to wonder why. The question isn’t merely “What does cirrus mean?” but “Why are you calling it cirrus here?” In ordinary communication, that difference is already meaningful; in the compressed communicative situation of haiku, where every word carries more weight, it can become especially consequential.

    This is also why I think Japanese words occupy a somewhat different position in English-language haiku. Because of haiku’s origins and subsequent history, we are accustomed to encountering kigo, Japanese aesthetic concepts, technical poetic vocabulary and culturally specific terms in their Japanese form. Their foreignness has become, to some extent, part of the expected register of haiku. Not all foreign words therefore produce the same degree of disruption.

    And foreignness itself isn’t fixed. Dunkelflaute is an interesting case: it is a German word, but it is gaining traction because the phenomenon it names has become increasingly relevant in a world preoccupied with energy generation. English borrows words constantly. Schadenfreude didn’t begin as a natural English word either; repeated use has made it increasingly ordinary. What sounds conspicuously foreign at one moment can become perfectly unremarkable later.

    In this particular example, though, I don’t think the problem is the word dunkelflaute itself so much as its integration into the poem. Its associations aren’t being used to maximal effect. There is also a mismatch between the highly specific word and the very general phrase preceding it, without enough in the poem to allow us to move meaningfully between the two.

    Something of the same mismatch occurs with the eudaimonia example:

    eudaimonia the temptation of chocolate

    The philosophical register beside the very ordinary chocolate creates a conspicuous shift. The reader can look it up, of course. But that answers “What does this word mean?” The more essential question is “Why is it being said here?” Why this philosophical word? Why this register? And that question can be much more consequential—and damaging—than simple unfamiliarity. A dictionary can repair an unknown denotation. It cannot tell us why the poet has chosen to speak to us in a particular register.

    Thurifies, from the essay, is worth reconsidering here. The difficulty isn’t just unfamiliarity—the word sits at the intersection of at least three registers: technical/liturgical, elevated/lyrical, and archaic, each licensing a genuinely different reading of the poem. Nothing in the surrounding words tells us which is operative. And if we take them as all operating simultaneously, that creates a lot of complex interactions that can be difficult for the reader to hold at once.

    I don’t mean to say that register violations cannot be used in haiku. They can. Jiro Oba’s cumulonimbus haiku is a masterful example of negotiating such a shift. But the shift has to do something, and the poem has to give the reader some means of negotiating it. Oba’s colon is crucial: it allows the register shift to become part of the poem’s movement rather than simply leaving the technical word stranded as an oddity.

    Of these examples, I think apricity is the one that works best:

    a slight stir in the bare apple tree apricity

    The poem is deliberately low-energy: a bare tree and a slight stir. Apricity gives that quiet scene some poetic charge. There is also a sonic affinity between apricity and apple that makes the unusual word resonate within the poem rather than simply stand out from it. Winter sun is more ordinary, and here it would feel slightly underwhelming by comparison.

    Compare that with:

    apricity
    three turnips glow
    on the windowsill

    Here the word feels much more conspicuous. Winter sun seems more organically at home:

    winter sun
    three turnips glow
    on the windowsill

    The point isn’t that the familiar expression is automatically better. It is that the word has to earn its place within the particular communicative situation. In the apple-tree poem, apricity seems to do something that winter sun doesn’t.

    As for serein, I have to confess that I can’t really evaluate the word from that particular example because rain and tears occurring in the same poem is like nails on a chalkboard to me. That’s a matter of my own poetic taste rather than a judgment about the word.

    I don’t think serein is inherently unsuited to haiku. In fact, I don’t think any word is inherently unsuited to haiku. There is no fixed vocabulary of “haiku words.” What matters is what the word does in the particular poem: its denotation, its register, its sound, its associations, and its relationship to the cut and to the other words.

    Some will object that haiku is poetry and there is such a thing as poetic license. Of course there is. The poet is free to pursue poetic imagination, subversion and register violation. But poetic license doesn’t absolve the poem from consequences on the reader’s end. In fact, because haiku imposes such severe structural constraints, I think individual choices can have greater consequences than they might in a longer poem. There is less surrounding language to absorb, contextualize or counterbalance a conspicuous word. And just because two words are synonyms doesn’t mean they are interchangeable: they may differ in register, sound, rhythm, associations, specificity and the kind of communicative situation they create.

    So I wouldn’t want to ask simply whether a word is common or uncommon, foreign or native, transparent or opaque. The more interesting question is what happens when this particular word enters this particular communicative situation?

    The reader’s initial “Why?” or “Huh?” is not necessarily a failure to appreciate unfamiliar vocabulary. It is the natural response of a reader trying to establish relevance within the very compressed act of communication that is a haiku.

    1. Agreed, Orense. If the reader has to make an effort to trace an unfamiliar word, they are likely to be twice as miffed if it doesn’t add something critical to the meaning.

      The same applies to layout. Some of the ‘concrete’ verses with letters sprayed around out of sequence require the reader to decode them in some way. Quite often, unless the effort is minimal, I can’t be bothered. Or, if I do sort them out, find it wasn’t worthwhile.

      1. I was slightly disappointed that the two parts of anhedonia couldn’t be switched in a meaningful way 😂

        1. 🆕 The more I thought about the anhedonia one, the more I got out of it.

          First, it’s the kind of verse I would never use as an example to my non-haiku-literate but well-read friends, lovers of ‘the poets’. They would likely scoff at the idea it is poetry as they know it.

          Second, I had no problem with understanding the word on encountering it. However, I did look it up to see what the clinical symptoms (and treatments) were. That gave the other half of the line some more meaning. Anhedonia, the inability to experience joy or pleasure, is a common symptom of many mental health conditions like depression. In the clinical state, subjects are not responsive to any joy ‘switch.’ Treatment attempts to turn that on.

          Mental health and depression are topical subjects. Beyond that, I am often urging haiku poets to write more about the joys of being alive and conscious in this universe and less about dying, loss, grief and the morbid (viz. tapophilia). They seem to find it hard to ‘let go’ the morbid! So for me, the verse played to that aspect.

          Lastly, the structure of the reversed brackets around )switch( appealed, and I have clipped it to my file on cuts-and-clever-cuts. Brackets round a word or phrase in a one line verse are quite common, but I don’t think I’ve seen reversed brackets before. If they are indeed novel, they make an interesting visual separator or ‘cut,’ almost brutally forcing apart the two sections of this verse, which seems appropriate to the ‘inability’ aspect of anhedonia. Joy and anhedonia – never the twain shall meet.

          A verse of the intellect, perhaps?

          1.  🆕Oh, I don’t mean that the reversed brackets don’t work. I simply mean how satisfying if the poem’s two parts could swap places with switch as the hinge in the middle 😁

  3. ON “The Uses and Costs of Opacity”

    In this month’s kukai ( subject is “air” ) voting, there is a lovely haiku around a simple beautiful experience. However, the poem uses one phrase unique to the activity and which I was not familiar. My adult son is involved in that activity, so I sent him the haiku, asking for help with the phrase. He answered right away with the meaning. Then we discussed how the term worked in the haiku. My son does not normally read haiku. This was a lovely moment to share and discuss something out of the norm. To share a quiet poetry moment. I loved the moment and the haiku.

    1. A great anecdote which demonstrates that it is not words that are opaque, but rather that OPACITY is in the mind of the beholder (or the eye of the reader).

    2. Linda, thank you for sharing this — it’s such a sweet story.

      What you’re describing is a form of opacity that the essay didn’t really get to: not simply a word whose meaning or register eventually resolves through context or a dictionary, but a gap in lived experience. You already knew that the phrase belonged to the activity; what you didn’t have was the experience of doing the thing it named. No definition could quite close that gap, because what you needed wasn’t just information. You needed someone who had actually lived the thing the word names.

      And I love that the poem didn’t simply lead you to look the word up. It led you to your son. The opacity became a reason for a conversation between two people who wouldn’t ordinarily be discussing haiku together. What came back to you wasn’t merely a dictionary definition but his knowledge of the activity, and then the two of you could return to the poem together and think about what the word was doing there.

      I think this touches something larger about reading. We sometimes read as though a poem’s value lies in how readily it mirrors what we already know — recognition as the measure of success. “It speaks to me…” “I resonate with…” But a poem can also give us access to something genuinely other, an experience we don’t already carry. Sometimes the opacity isn’t an obstacle to be eliminated; it is what makes the encounter possible.

      The poem couldn’t give you your son’s experience directly, because that experience wasn’t already yours. But it gave you a reason to ask, and the answer came through a person rather than simply through a dictionary.

      That feels like one of the best uses opacity can have: not always a private puzzle to solve, and not merely a mirror held up to what we already are, but a door into someone else’s world — and sometimes, unexpectedly, a door into a relationship.

  4. not like me—
    again, landing on his feet
    my gomboc cat

    mathematicians
    happily huddled under a
    vinculum ceiling

    Buddha’s cat
    sitting his nine zen-
    zizenzizenzik lives

    zenzizenzizenzic an old math word that means the eighth power of a number

    vinculum a horizontal bar drawn over math symbols to group them together acting like parentheses

    gomboc a unique 3D shape that always returns to its upright resting position no matter how it lands

    I fully expect these words to appear now multiple times in all the usual places, written by all the usual suspects.

    1. Actually it’s spelt:

      Gömböc

      I love a Gömböc Cat!

      As there are new breeds happening, why not:

      _____________
      Gömböc Cat:
      _____________
      “… a playful crossover concept linking the self-righting mathematical shape called the Gömböc with the liquid-like, gravity-defying balance and posture adjustments often joked about in internet cat culture.”

      .
      And of course in Japan:

      Winter Cat Terms

      Kajikeno or Kajikineko (寒じけ猫) — Shivering cat huddled against the cold frost of deep winter.

      Kamadoneko (竈猫) — Stove cat resting on top of a kitchen cooking range to absorb residual warmth after the fire goes out.

      Haineko (灰猫) — Ash cat burying itself inside warm fireplace or stove ashes to escape the freezing winter chill.

      1. OK Alan, let’s get this straight–

        If you mean the Hungarian mathematical object, the standard spelling is Gömböc—with two umlauts, over both o’s. In Hungarian, ö is a distinct vowel from o, so omitting them changes the spelling and pronunciation.

        That said, Gomboc is commonly used as an ASCII fallback where diacritics are unavailable, and it is recognized as an alternative form in English-language usage.

        1. A cat is a mathematical object, so deffo going for umlauts as posted! My mother-in-law’s is a Gömböc cat in my experience with the universal laws. I’ve only ever played Rugby so not a fallback, more a No. 8

          Alan

    2. Love your mathematical words !! Particularly love the Mathematicians under their vinculum ceiling.

    3. Thanks for these wonderful words!

      I did know gömböc (I have written at least one haiku with that word) but not the others.

      Great inspo for the Buson 100 I am doing now,

  5. I surrender. The justification of using or not using unusual words is too complicated for me, so I simply use them if they feel right, and don’t if they don’t. Except that I have trouble with proper names because of the huge amount of information they can carry.

    I could write

    Eiffel Tower
    at the base of it
    my first Coca Cola

    (that was in 1952). But most of the named things I want t write about are such that most ELH readers have never heard of them.

    So what should I do with them? Up to now I have generally left their names out, with the result that I have some haiku with good second and third lines but a wimpy first line that holds them down. Perhaps I should be encouraged by what you have said above, and bravely write, for example, “Algonquin Park,” thinking that if the readers won’t like it, who cares. They can just skip over to the next haiku.

    1. .
      John,

      This is great!

      Eiffel Tower
      at the base of it
      my first Coca Cola

      John Hamley

      .
      I don’t remember the first Coca Cola, I probably had Pepsi in France, though never got to visit the tower!

      .
      Find a phrase to go with Algonquin Park. It’s a famous place, people need to learn more geography and history, and literature etc…

      And the phrase doesn’t have to enlarge upon, or explain about the park!

      1. Thanks for the encouragement, Alan. I will change

        The end of time
        deep beneath the lake
        all the million stars

        (Mainichi 2015)

        to

        Algonquin Park
        deep beneath the lake
        all the million stars

        That’s where I saw it, canoeing on a cloudless, windless night.

        1. John,

          Great!

          uta-makura — places that almost any educated person is likely to know something about and that are definitely iconic

          hai-makura — places that are lifted into that aura by their mention in a well-known poem.

          e.g.
          In English poetry we have an example in Adlestrop, where the poet Edward Thomas wrote:

          Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
          
The name, because one afternoon

          Of heat the express-train drew up there
          
Unwontedly.

          .
          I’m sure we can all relate at least once turning up an unknown tiny station. I remember one well where it was a request stop! You literally had to stick your hand out as if was a bus or coach on the road. Thankfully the train wasn’t Shinkansen (bullet train) as my hand would be waving at the driver 200 miles or klicks further along!

          ______
          NOTE:
          ______
          As Algonquin Park has over 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometres of streams I wonder about removing one ‘the’

          ___
          e.g.
          ___

          .

          Algonquin Park
          deep beneath the lake
          all one million stars

          .

          or even:

          .

          Algonquin Park
          deep beneath a lake
          all one million stars

          .

          Just a thought!

          Or even further away from your published poem version:

          .

          deep under the lake
          the other million stars
          Algonquin Park

          .

          Then you have two fairly different poems!

          Alan

          1. Thanks Alan,

            I’ll sit on it, but I think I’ll stay. I like the way the “the” on the last line echoes the “the” on the line before, and to me “all the million stars” is the punch line.

    2. John, I think that place names can indeed carry a considerable weigh of association, but like customs or apparel particular to a culture, some are familiar to a wider circle outside the place or culture concerned, and some much less so. Meaning is likely to be lost the more obscure the reference is. It’s the poet’s choice whether to go for a wider readership or a narrower.

    4. John, I’m glad you are inspired to free yourself up a little here. From the haiku of yours I’ve read, you clearly have a good instinct for what belongs in a poem, so I wouldn’t let the imagined reaction of the hypothetical ELH reader become too much of a constraint on your writing. And I don’t think “I use them if they feel right” is surrender, either—that’s most of what any of us are doing, dressed up afterward in more analysis. 😄

      A proper name isn’t opaque in quite the same way as an obscure term. Even if we’ve never heard of Algonquin Park, Park already tells us something: protected land, likely something more natural or wild than a manicured urban space. And Algonquin gives us further geographical and cultural clues. We may not know exactly where it is or what it looks like, but we can form a provisional sense of the place.

      What we don’t get is the specific park—its particular character, whatever your own memory of it holds. That’s a narrower gap than it might feel like from the inside, where the name is doing so much more work for you than it can for a stranger.

      And a reader can look up Algonquin Park as easily as they can look up a dictionary word. What differs is how much the name gives someone who doesn’t bother. Park and Algonquin already give us something to work with before anyone reaches for a search engine.

      That doesn’t mean I’d use the name simply because it’s accurate, though. The question for me isn’t “Is this the precise name of the place?” but “Is the particularity of this place meaningful to the experience I’m trying to transmit?” If it is, whether the reader happens to know Algonquin Park shouldn’t be the deciding factor. If it isn’t, the proper name may just be unnecessary precision.

      So if Algonquin Park is integral to what the poem is doing, I wouldn’t replace it with something generic simply to make the poem more immediately accessible. You may be solving a problem for the reader by creating a problem for the poem.

      Looking at the two versions

      the end of time
      deep beneath the lake
      all the million stars

      (Mainichi, 2015)

      becomes:

      Algonquin Park
      deep beneath the lake
      all the million stars

      In the newer version, Algonquin points towards a particular relationship with nature that actually deepens the natural image. Even if the reader doesn’t know the place, the name gives the landscape a particular cultural and geographical framing. We don’t need to know everything that Algonquin Park means to you for it to alter the way we enter the poem.

      The name isn’t there merely to tell us where the poem happened. It can change what kind of place we’re encountering, and therefore what kind of experience the poem is transmitting.

      So I’d say: trust the poem, and let the name stay if the experience needs it.

      1. Thanks Orense,

        I was thinking along those lines, but not as clearly. That to a reader who knew about the park would connect the haiku with wilderness, which I would like, and to a reader who didn’t know, at least it shouldn’t sound belabored or trivial.

      2. P.S. — I did think of a better first line for

        Silent
        the frog’s eye
        on a fly

        It is

        Shh!
        the frog’s eye
        on a fly

  6. A fresh sample from the latest Blithe Spirit:

    as if joy is a )switch( anhedonia
    –Lee Hudspeth
    Blithe Spirit 36:3

    How do you see this verse, hive mind?

    1. If we like komorebi, how about:

      tapophilia the ageing haiku poet

      a slight stir in the bare apple tree apricity

      eudaimonia the temptation of chocolate

      a trace of a tear
      in the young bride’s eye
      serein

      a day wasted in bed dunkelflaute

      Hmnn…

        1. simonj: I would agree. But e.g. serein and dunkelflaute aren’t abstract, they (like komorebi) are words describing particular natural phenomena… How do you feel about ‘borrowing’ komorebi in anglophone haiku, or other Japanese words less familiar to non-haikuist anglophones? Some have passed into English, such as bonsai and kimono; others not so much.

          1. I beg*, borrow, and steal. *(make up)

            I occasionally use kanji in English haiku, not to be read but as a visual punctuation. Although I like them to be assonant and meaningful, which is why kuma works.

          4. Thank you Simon. A really interesting and fun cutting strategy. Two rooms and a choice 😀

    2. Alas I’m not part of a or the hive mind due to my biology.

      If it’s still okay to comment)?( …

      I looked it up: anhedonia

      Then I looked up:
      what is )( with a word inside

      I saw no clear answer

      as if joy is a )switch( anhedonia

      –Lee Hudspeth
      Blithe Spirit 36:3

      Lee often likes to explore very unfamiliar words which I feel exercises the reader in us!

      Others might have said why not say ‘joyless’ though we already have joy. We could have emotional numbness although that makes me think of Pink Floyd, and it’s not about them! . It’s not even Dysphoria despite labelled as a synonym.

      It’s about “inability”

      It included a feeling of sorrow/sadness:

      What is another word for anhedonia?

      It’s…
      –––
      unhappiness sadness sorrow despondency melancholy depression desolation dejection misery gloom despair distress dolefulness dispiritedness disconsolateness glumness despondence grief gloominess sorrowfulness mournfulness woe downheartedness joylessness miserableness forlornness pain wretchedness heartsickness dreariness agony doldrums blues heartache despond oppression dumps dolor mopes cheerlessness regret disconsolation malaise chagrin mortification infelicity misfortune discontent dysphoria down megrim worry low spirits blue devils broken-heartedness bleakness anguish discouragement moroseness melancholia woefulness moodiness hopelessness pessimism vexation desperation dourness dismals mourning pensiveness dismalness funk defeatism blahs heavy-heartedness heavy heart the blues blue funk dolour upset dejectedness tearfulness poignancy dissatisfaction discontentment heartbreak listlessness grieving displeasure downcastness uneasiness lowness abjection heaviness of heart abasement abjectness heavyheartedness broken heart a low the dumps misgiving bitterness demoralizationUS sullenness dismay disheartenment disappointment foreboding somberness weariness catatonia saturninity desperateness mope dullness heaviness sulks morbidity horror demoralisationUK mulligrubs mubblefubbles low-spiritedness the hump being bummed blue Johnnies the dismals the mopes torment suffering angst affliction torture anxiety hurt rue discomfort tribulation trauma disquiet lamentation sorriness straits excruciation travail trial pang hardship lamenting trouble bereavement ennui shock bummer bemoaning hurting lament throe rack remorse adversity letdown irritation ordeal mental suffering disillusionment dole mopery worriment grievance bewailing Weltschmerz agitation strain care disillusion devastation disenchantment difficulty stress disquietude headache downer burden cross tragedy unease ache problem deploring boredom purgatory tedium dysthymia resignedness disturbance annoyance lassitude emotional suffering harassment passion turmoil twinge discomposure concern discontentedness qualm weltschmerz martyrdom slough of despond perturbation aching hassle blow embarrassment world-weariness loneliness fretfulness weeping restlessness hell on earth ill-humor discord unrest grimness forsakenness strife scruple bale tumult painfulness issue dolefuls wistfulness resignation calvary dark night of the soul unfulfilment repentance scar bathos distraction perplexity stew unconsolability pining cynicism hell fear repining travails tension pressure apathy indifference slump visitation shame down trip agony of mind aching heart bleeding heart spiritlessness tenseness blue black mood test megrims low dashed hopes mental pressure dread trepidation hump vaporsUS vapoursUK lugubriosity troubles extreme upset clinical depression ill fortune infirmity disease sickness illness the doldrums ailment bother disorder endogenous depression weakness anger malady debility reactive depression frustration disgruntlement indisposition condition heartbrokenness negativity feebleness lugubriousness mirthlessness lypemania postnatal depression resentment aggravation disaffection one’s black dog decrepitude unhealthiness enervation malcontentment malcontent fluster derangement alarm sickliness languor disarray disruption queasiness unfulfillment infirmness ailments ills disaster calamity catastrophe cataclysm misadventure mishap blight debacle setback vicissitude apocalypse ill injury mischance unluckiness knock struggle reverse whammy wreck waterloo contretemps failure humiliation curse lot doom hard knocks sad event bad fortune bad luck serious accident grievous blow
      .
      “The Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale assesses symptoms of depression, such as depressed mood, anhedonia, and somatic complaints.”
      _____________________________
      Words etc… from Wordhippo.
      _____________________________

      Haiku is about a short cut where a single word be it Momochidori, as in a single word or a few characters, can mean so many things all at once.

      ______________
      Momochidori:
      ––––––––––––––
      a traditional Japanese poetic word meaning “hundreds and thousands of birds” or “all sorts of various birds” gathering and singing. A compressed paragraph in a few characters ももちどり [OR} 百千鳥

      .
      In short it’s incredibly moving. If we care about words we grow in empathy.

      The switch with the backwards brackets adds to the poignancy and of another human who may or may not be different though what’s wrong with different?

      Alan

    3. Keith, I’m going to deliberately resist looking up anhedonia before reading the poem, because I think this is an interesting case of a word that is unfamiliar without being completely opaque. Its construction gives us clues: the privative an- and hedonia, which we can connect with hedonism and hedonic, and hence with pleasure or enjoyment. So even without a dictionary, the poem gives us enough to begin.

      I find the as if and the brackets particularly interesting because together they seem to open two levels of reading. At one level, there is the ordinary alternation of emotional experience: we can experience both joy and sadness, and having the capacity for joy certainly doesn’t mean that we are always experiencing it. But anhedonia introduces a second level, where it is the capacity to experience joy that has itself been switched off.

      The two levels make joy seem strangely layered and fragile. We can lose the capacity for it altogether, but even when we retain that capacity, we may still fail to experience it. The haiku triggered a memory of an episode of House M.D. in which anhedonia is connected to an underlying medical condition, and treating the condition restores the patient’s ability to experience pleasure. So the switch may be off without being broken beyond repair.

      And then there is the wonderfully isolated word switch. I wonder whether it can be read almost imperatively: switch. If joy is something we are capable of experiencing but don’t necessarily experience, perhaps the poem is also a little prod to activate that capacity—to switch it on as much as possible while we can.

      That, for me, is where the poignancy lies. The )switch( makes the mechanism visible, but the as if keeps it metaphorical. The poem doesn’t tell us that joy literally works like a switch; it gives us a model through which we suddenly become aware of how precarious the capacity for joy may be.

      So I think this is a particularly good example of why unfamiliarity isn’t synonymous with opacity. Anhedonia is not the same as, say, widdershins. I’m not familiar with anhedonia, but its construction, the surrounding language, fragments of memory, and the visual form give me enough to begin reading without a dictionary. I may look it up afterwards, but by then I have already experienced the poem.

      As for my personal taste, I’m not the biggest fan of what I call “definition haiku.” That doesn’t mean I think they aren’t valid as haiku; they’re simply not always my cup of tea. But once we analyze and begin to understand what a poem is doing, we often find ourselves enjoying it more. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of close reading—the poem we initially resist can become a poem we appreciate once its workings become visible.

      Hive mind #2

    4. ANHEDONIA

      ‘The first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention, or the finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving, or moulding of that thought, as the judgement represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought, as found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words; the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression.’

      Depending on the particular nook of the “hive mind” consulted, some may find the example switches them off. But others may be turned on by the presence of eke-ku elements which ignore the ear. (A form of poenehedonia perhaps).

  7. OPACITY + CLOUDS + CLICHÉ

    It’s a shame that Alan (see August 19, 2026 at 8:28 am) fails to mention the feature ‘opacus,’ a term used for “an extensive cloud patch, sheet, or layer that is dense enough to completely mask the sun or moon” (see WMO International Cloud Atlas). Hence:

    stratus opacus
    their heads
    in the clouds

    1. Oooh, I can’t now!

      Why don’t you let CAS know, as I could only find this:
      https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/from-rochelle-bree-indiana-downing/

      It might be more of a coastal thing?

      A stratus opacus cloud is a low, uniform, and opaque gray layer (UK cloud base 0–2,000 ft) that completely hides the sun or moon. It frequently forms over UK coastal areas, high ground, and during calm, anti-cyclonic winter conditions when moist air is trapped under a low inversion. INTERNET SOURCE

      Although as mentioned in an earlier post, I can see that opacus can be added to other clouds:

      Opacus is a cloud variety that is found in stratocumulus, altocumulus, altostratus, and stratus cloud types.

      altostratus opacus
      I adjust both of us
      under canvas

      Alan Summers
      just now! Although actually we are in the Wine Monkey working!

  8. I remember my excitement when I heard the word “kuma.” The haiku was presented to us for commentary. I persevered and wrote a commentary. This experience allowed me to better understand myself. I usually cope well with situations where, despite incomplete knowledge, a problem requires a solution, but in this case, the stress level was higher than usual.

    1. Urszula, it’s lovely to hear this, especially since I’m the one who proposed kuma for commentary in the first place.
      I keep returning to that poem myself. It’s already done work for me here on opacity, and on the cut, and I suspect I’ll come back to it again for ichibutsu-jitate before I’m done with it. So it means something particular to hear that it gave you real difficulty and real reward as a commentator. Your experience is a good reminder that uncertainty is not just cognitive, it has stakes and is felt in the body.

      1. You’ve beautifully expressed the essence of the matter, Orense. Everyone understands another person’s haiku in their own way, but the problem begins when we begin with complete misunderstanding. Sometimes this can be irritating or discouraging, but in the case of “kuma,” it was pleasantly provocative.

  9. Words

    a few numbers:

    The Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current use, along with 47,156 obsolete words and over 600,000 definitions including derivatives.

    A native English speaker typically knows 20,000 to 35,000 active words used in speech and writing, and up to 40,000 to 50,000 passive words understood when read or heard.

    A core set of 2,000 to 3,000 words covers roughly 80% to 95% of daily spoken conversations and casual communication.

    Thank you, Google.

    In Japanese, Shiki was worried that mathematically haiku, being so short, would soon (in his day) run out of road.

    Taking the vocab for everyday speech, which ‘might’ best fit haiku:

    3000 factorial is an unimaginably large number. It cannot be written out fully in standard form here: 9,131 digits. Trailing zeros: 748.

    Even, say, halving it to limit word order to the comprehensible, and dividing again by ten to allow for a reasonable length of a verse, it’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to run out of new things to say, or new ways of saying the same old things in everyday speech.

    None of which argues against expanding the vocab of a reader interested in haiku by one word new to them, of course; but it is reassuring to those favouring plain speech…

    1. I’m surprised Shiki was worried as the Japanese systems of language (yes, plural, not our funny 26 letters only single system) must offer up even more than the English language?

      I touch on the number of characters in each system that a skilled poet can use for their haikai verses here:
      https://area17.blogspot.com/2013/08/extended-judges-report-for-2013-world.html

      Alas I’m unable to update my longstanding blog as software changes messed up my access.

      Here’s where the video is now:

      2013 World Monuments Fund Haiku Contest Results:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhwJL8WaVR0

      There are at least a couple of difficult words or phrases where the video really helps!

      .
      Plus there is enough going on in the world, more so than ever, so there’s little excuse of going over old phrases etc…

  10. Alan, I had one of your hundred cloud poems queued up for discussion 😅

    altocumulus
    black mountain sheep
    nibble more frost

    Alan Summers, Éminence grise, Presence #82 (July 2025)

    I found it interesting as an example because, at first, altocumulus may seem like a word a reader could reasonably judge unnecessary. But the specificity may matter because of the spatial relationship the poem creates. The black mountain sheep may be moving through cloud or mist, or the cloud may be close enough to the mountain that the boundaries between ground and sky become uncertain. The technical name gives us a particular altitude and a particular vertical atmosphere in which the sheep and cloud can almost occupy the same space.

    I would not claim that the cloud literally produces the frost. But the three elements—altocumulus, mountain sheep, frost—seem to belong to a single atmospheric system. And the word more makes the frost feel like something immediately available to the sheep, almost something they are grazing from the weather itself.

    What I like about this example is that we may not need to know the precise meteorological definition of altocumulus. The poem can work without that knowledge. But if we do know it, the spatial and atmospheric relations sharpen. This seems to me a useful example of specificity that is organic rather than ornamental: the technical word does not simply tell us what kind of cloud we are looking at; it helps establish the strange world in which the sheep are nibbling frost.

    1. Oh gosh!

      altocumulus
      black mountain sheep
      nibble more frost

      Alan Summers, Éminence grise, Presence #82 (July 2025)

      ORENSE SAID:
      “I found it interesting as an example because, at first, altocumulus may seem like a word a reader could reasonably judge unnecessary.”

      Blame Jane!
      Lovely Jane, I was a co-moderator with her for a while too, emphasised contrasts such as a big picture and zooming into a smaller image and vice versa.

      There’s nothing like noticing clouds and what types, even basically via shape (and composition) when in the wide open country though. (smiles)

      .

      ORENSE said:
      But the specificity may matter because of the spatial relationship the poem creates. The black mountain sheep may be moving through cloud or mist, or the cloud may be close enough to the mountain that the boundaries between ground and sky become uncertain.

      I found this fascinating in high ground and brings to the mind the Lake District a different family stopover:

      Kirkstone Pass
      a sheepdog gathers
      its part of the world

      Alan Summers
      Publication Credit: Muttering Thunder vol. 1, 2014 ed. Allan Burns

      Kirkstone Pass, the highest mountain pass in the district open to cars, reaching an altitude of 1,489 feet (454 meters).
      https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/2/film?phrase=kirkstone+pass&tracked_gsrp_landing=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gettyimages.co.uk%2Fvideos%2Fkirkstone-pass

      It’s only plain words though making use of Bashō sense of places both known and not so known:

      utamakura
      haimakura

      In haiku, utamakura refers to place names that evoke specific images, emotions, or historical associations, acting as “poetic pillows” that add depth and resonance to a poem. These places, often rural locations, are imbued with cultural significance through repeated use in poetry, allowing a single place name to conjure a wealth of associated imagery and feeling. 

      ____________________
      Here’s a breakdown:
      ____________________
      Utamakura as Poetic Devices: 

      Utamakura are not merely place names; they are shorthand for a complex set of associated ideas, emotions, and historical contexts. 


      Sense of Place in Haiku: 
By using utamakura, haiku poets can create a strong sense of place without lengthy descriptions, relying on the reader’s familiarity with the place’s poetic associations. 
 Dr Gabi Greve, David Cobb, and THF Sense of Place etc…

      __________________________________________________
      haimakura, hai-makura 俳枕　haikai poetic places

      __________________________________________________
      Often situated in rural parts of Japan, where haikai poets lived a free life.
They are not part of the classical canon of Waka Utamakura, but became quite popular with the growing number of haikai poets. Dr Gabi Greve

      The Lake District, Cumbria, is a powerful place for my Welsh wife Karen Hoy as all the family have climbed all the peaks from babyhood onwards!

      The Lake District is famous for its mapper, as well as the poets, with Dorothy Wordsworth being the first to climb peaks and inspire her brother and others.

      Both of these place name techniques will bring up opaque or difficult words if someone has not travelled widely physically, or via book, internet or other means.

      __________________________***__________________________

      ORENSE said:
      The technical name gives us a particular altitude and a particular vertical atmosphere in which the sheep and cloud can almost occupy the same space.

      EXACTLY! It’s as if it’s one individual place at that moment, in a way. (SMILES)

      .
      ORENSE said:
      I would not claim that the cloud literally produces the frost. But the three elements—altocumulus, mountain sheep, frost—seem to belong to a single atmospheric system. And the word more makes the frost feel like something immediately available to the sheep, almost something they are grazing from the weather itself.
      .
      It was just the type of cloud that was over the land, along with frost, mist, and sheep, or dog in the other haiku. Though more and more we are seeing that the rest of nature is almost ONE ENTITY other than the human interlopers who mostly decide to be outsiders, almost as if we were aliens.

      .
      re:
      altocumulus
      black mountain sheep
      nibble more frost

      ORENSE said:
      What I like about this example is that we may not need to know the precise meteorological definition of altocumulus. The poem can work without that knowledge. But if we do know it, the spatial and atmospheric relations sharpen.

      YES! Thanks for stating this!

      .
      ORENSE said:
      This seems to me a useful example of specificity that is organic rather than ornamental: the technical word does not simply tell us what kind of cloud we are looking at; it helps establish the strange world in which the sheep are nibbling frost.

      Or the strange humans that look inside the other world we inhabit of course!

      .

      This is from my Welsh background though alas my adoptive parents, both Welsh, my dad went to school with Harry Secombe, are not DNA related, so I’m just English even with rellies in Bridgend and Swansea! Although I have so many US tags and not just the links to at least two families on the Mayflower, I’m more US in DNA than English, and never Welsh or even Irish, or Scottish unlike my wife’s family with their Scottish Douglas tartan! And very snazzy it is too!

      The Black Mountains are part of the Brecon Beacons National Park (officially named Bannau Brycheiniog National Park).and you can guess I did ‘training’ there, finding whatever shelter was around, and eating K-rations with no labels on the tins, so it was like a Lucky Dip!

      .

      There’s a rescued photo found in an attic of me at the bottom:

      Alan Summers and his childhood at St Brides Major near Bridgend, Glamorgan, Wales
      https://area17.blogspot.com/2018/04/haiku-art-of-implication-over.html

      ______________
      THE HAIBUN:
      ––––––––––––––

      Éminence grise

      Layers of gray buddha rays feed through. A man passes by with a child on his head. Poignancy ripples through headphones with Abba being honest all over again.

      boarded up rows
      the diner lingo memories
      of yesterwhen

      This part of Spring, not sure to leave Winter behind, appears to rock forwards and backwards on unsteady feet. I dream of headier times, C-rations thirty years after WWII, and what happens next.

      altocumulus
      black mountain sheep
      nibble more frost

      Alan Summers
      Éminence grise (haibun) Presence #82 July 2025
      ed. James Roderick Burns, Ken Cockburn and Becky Dwyer 
      Plus guest editor John Wall
      First Presence edition since Ian Storr stepped down.

      2. I love the Kirkstone Pass haiku, “a sheepdog gathers / its part of the world” is wonderful. Its part of the world seems to be the sheep themselves: the vast landscape of Kirkstone Pass reduced to the small world the dog is there to gather and hold together. The place name opens out the landscape, while the sheepdog gathers its world back in.

        And your mention of utamakura and haimakura has me thinking that place names might be another fascinating aspect of unfamiliarity. A place can be opaque to someone who has never been there, while for someone who knows it, the name can carry an extraordinary amount of compressed experience. There may well be a future Moon and Finger in that.

        1. Great!

          You might already know these links, but just in case:
          https://nzhaiku.wordpress.com/essays-articles/the-value-of-iconic-place-names-in-western-haiku/
          https://thehaikufoundation.org/the-haiku-foundation-lectures-david-cobb-on-place-names-in-haiku/

          And David was the first to publish the longer form of kikōbun (book length haibun) with the sublime and brilliant:

          The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore
          http://www.davidcobb.co.uk/b_spring.php
          http://www.davidcobb.co.uk/b_eden.php

          I don’t know if Thomas is running the website for orders though.

          .
          Haibun is often the refuge and repository .

          “Snow Hill to Selfridges”
          Contest Winner (Flash Fiction category)
          Bournemouth Writing Festival Flash Fiction and Poetry Competition

          Publication credit / Anthology credit:
          “Lines in the Sand –
          an anthology of poetry & flash fiction caught between the tides and terra firma”
          (pub. The Bournemouth Writing Festival and Dithering Chaps, April 2024)
          The Bournemouth Writing Festival, together with Dithering Chaps and Arts University Bournemouth

          This haibun needed a footnote which I instinctively included.

          The flash fiction judge said about my piece:
          “The note explaining Julefrokost adds a layer of cultural richness, enhancing the reader’s understanding of the narrative and further immersing them in the unique world created by the writer.”

          As this was an English UK judge and the piece was about Birmingham UK, not London, the words unfamiliar to some outside of the UK were not a barrier although I kept them at a minimum. Except this might be an issue for non-England UK residents!

          “Beyond the ticket barrier, the Dalek decals call out in B&W and silver halide ionic crystals, all atomic number 47.”

          Dalek
          decals
          silver halide ionic crystals
          Nordmann Fir
          Moor Street / Snow Hill

          .

          And of course Irish, Welsh, Scottish haiku will be immensely rich in names and words. One example, again from a haibun:

          .

          The fertile rock
          and somewhere beyond it
          Ootmama

          What’s in a Name
          Jim Norton (Ireland)
          An (Cottage) Prize

          Also a line:
          “I asked what it was called. Ootmama, he replied. The name rang in my mind like a sweet-toned bell.”

          https://hailhaiku.wordpress.com/genjuan-17-winning-haibun/

          Haibun is a great carriage for romantically diverse and unfamiliar words that are at the same time perversely dna-scented familial if only in an echo.

          .
          __________
          Ootmama
          ––––––––––
          Jim’s own name combining both?

          Oughtmama (spelled Ucht Máma in Irish) is a historic civil parish located in County Clare, Ireland, within the limestone region of the Burren. The Irish name translates to “the breast of the mountain pass” or “the breast of the high pass”

          .

  11. I think Jiro Oba’s cumulonimbus haiku is a useful example to add here, particularly because the proposal that prompted this essay specifically mentioned technical names for clouds.

    cumulonimbus:
    memory of a city
    lost in ancient times

    The colon is crucial. What follows feels almost like a poetic definition of what a cumulonimbus is. We see things in clouds, and the poem gives us something to see here: the memory of a city lost in ancient time. The city is not simply a metaphor for the cloud; it becomes a way of apprehending it.

    The cloud’s immense scale, towering form, turbulent shape, and potential destructiveness all become available through the image. The memory is nebulous and elusive, but also imaginatively huge. The suggestion of a lost ancient city may even bring to mind the forces that could have destroyed such a city. The qualities of the cloud therefore enter the imagined city, while the imagined city in turn gives those qualities shape.

    What is particularly interesting here is that we do not necessarily need to know the precise meteorological definition of cumulonimbus. The poem itself gives us a kind of experiential definition. Cumulonimbus names the phenomenon precisely; the lines after the colon tell us what it can look and feel like imaginatively.

    The tension between the technical, scientific word and the lyrical phrase that follows is especially productive. Cumulonimbus appears to classify and fix the phenomenon, while the poem immediately opens it back up to imagination. There is perhaps even a quiet comment on classification itself: we give a thing a precise name, but the name does not exhaust what the thing can be or what we can see in it. The technical word closes one kind of uncertainty while the poem opens another.

    The poem was published in the English section of the 3rd Japan–Russia Haiku Contest in 2014, where it received the Akita International Haiku Network Chief Director Award. Well deserved, I’d say.
    https://akitahaiku.com/2014/10/25/the-results-of-the-3rd-japan-russia-haiku-contest-3-the-english-section/

    1. I think that cloud formations are an excellent example of where precision can be useful. Technical terms, usually not wildly unfamiliar to many readers, but nevertheless not in the everday vocabulary of plain speech. From the wispy, curly patterns of high stratocirrus to the threatening, growling nimbus and the anvil-shaped cumulonimbus, they are admirable conveyors of mood and association as well as shapes. Yet I have had criticism in a workshop for using “stratocirrus” (juxtaposed with curved plough-lines round a skylark’s nest) on the grounds that it is an unnecessarily technical term.

      Then again, ‘cumulus’ doesn’t really convey the adorable little white fluffy clouds of a perfect summer’s day….

      hammock day
      little white clouds
      almost forever

      Year in year out / D’une année à l’autre, August 2024

      1. An adorable haiku for those adorable clouds.

        What I find interesting with cumulonimbus is that the word’s shape, its taking up a whole line brings the cloud’s scale to mind in conjunction with the image of the city. The opposite of adorable 😁

        1. For years and years I’ve recommended:

          The Cloudspotter’s Guide

          and then its travelling pocket-sized version:

          The Cloud Collector’s Handbook

          And still have my Cloud Appreciation Society badge!

          .

          Sometimes a bit of Latin, I might be one of the few who didn’t study it here, though I was fascinated with Roman Empire history from its origins to its “last outpost” today, although it mostly run by the Greek language once it finally moved to Constantinopolis.

          .

          cumulo, cumulo
          the rook and chimney
          gleam with dew

          Alan Summers
          Publication credit: Heliosparrow (April 2022)

          In cloud names, cumulo (or cumulus) comes from a Latin word meaning “heap” or “pile.” It describes fluffy, lumpy, or stacked clouds that grow upward because warm air is rising. 

          Key Meanings
          Puffy shape: They look like cotton balls, popcorn, or heaps of wool.
          Vertical growth: They form when warm air rises from the ground, building up tall instead of lying flat like a sheet. 


          ___________
          To English:
          ___________

          .

          the king of clouds
          hedgehogs feeding
          the blue night sky

          Alan Summers
          SHADOW POND JOURNAL ISSUE IV ed. Katherine E Winnick

          NOTES:
          Autumn clouds:
          Cumulonimbus clouds are known as the ‘King of Clouds’
          Hedgehogs are active in Autumn

          _____________
          Back to Latin:
          _____________

          .

          a single stretch of cirrus testing quietly the consonance

          Alan Summers
          NOON: journal of the short poem ISSUE 28 (March 2026) ed. Philip Rowland

          .

          stratocumulus clouds white to grey the gaps between

          Alan Summers
          haikuKATHA – Issue 54, April 2026   
          __________________________________________________________________________________
          From my writing picture window at home. I’ve seen this a few times over the years. 
          __________________________________________________________________________________

          High Stratocumulus have cloudlets with gaps in between – a variety known as perlucidus – not to be confused with the mid-level cloud Altocumulus. But Stratocumulus is usually less orderly in appearance and its cloudlets are bigger (appearing larger than the width of three fingers, held at arm’s length, when they are more than 30˚ above the horizon). 

          Due to its sun-blocking tendencies, Stratocumulus may not be the most popular cloud, but it is one of the most varied.
          https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/cloud-library/stratocumulus/

          1. .

            I have around a hundred cloud poems mostly haiku, some tanka, and it’s good to not always just say clouds, and learn their variety. Especially nowadays. Like this very old haiku:

            .

            leaves of the book…
            travelling the blue atlas
            
on ember clouds

            Alan Summers

            Cattails Premier Edition: January 2014
            Tribute Page John E. Carley (August, 1955–December, 2013)
            Principal editor an’ya, USA
            http://cattailsjournal.com/backissues/cattails141.pdf

            “An ember cloud is a technical term used in wildfire behavior modeling to describe a dense, airborne mass of glowing or smoldering wood fragments and burning embers lifted and transported by fire-induced winds.”

            Wildfire Ember Behavior Modeling for Home Geometries, Balcony, and Vegetation
            Kevin Gellerman , Nathan Aubry & Yu-Chien Chien (Apr 2026)

            .

            We need to know more and more what we are looking at whether types of sky and its contents, or the vegetation at our feet, or types of bees and wasps and other insects. There are over 20,000 species of bees worldwide for instance!

          2. .
            For fun!
            .
            clouds and clouds
            it’s not just the bees
            that outnumber

            There are 10 main types of clouds (called genera) defined by the World Meteorological Organization. They are grouped by their shape and how high they float in the sky.

            .
            High-Level Clouds (Above 20,000 feet)
            Cirrus: Thin, wispy, and feathery ice clouds.
            Cirrocumulus: Small, white, scaly patches or ripples.
            Cirrostratus: Thin, transparent veils that cover the sky.

            .
            Mid-Level Clouds (6,500 to 20,000 feet)
            Altocumulus: Gray or white rolls and patches.
            Altostratus: Gray or blue-gray sheets that dim the sun.
            Nimbostratus: Dark, thick gray layers that bring steady rain or snow.
            .

            Low-Level Clouds (Below 6,500 feet)
            Stratus: Flat, featureless, gray blankets that look like high fog.
            Stratocumulus: Low, lumpy, and patchy gray layers.
            Cumulus: Puffy, cotton-ball clouds with flat bases

            .
            Vertical Development Clouds
            Cumulonimbus: Massive thunderstorm clouds with towering, anvil-shaped tops

            .

            While there are 10 basic genera, combining them with different species and special features means meteorologists recognise over 100 variations total!
            https://wiki.ivao.aero/en/home/training/documentation/Types_of_clouds

            .

            p.s.
            And did you know sentient forms exist in clouds and when it rains it’s often their decision to come down.

            Operation Cloud Lab: Secrets of the Skies, a 2014 BBC Two science documentary series where a team of scientists used a giant lighter-than-air airship (often colloquially referred to as a blimp or zeppelin-style craft) to study the atmosphere:
            https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01hn0cq
            https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/operation-cloud-lab-episode-1

            .

            yakumo clouds
            a spider helps me
            keep house

            Alan Summers
            ‘Scattered Feathers’ 2015 New Zealand Poetry Society anthology

            “Yakumo” (八雲) translates to “eight clouds” or multiple layered clouds in Japanese.
            It’s an archaic poetic term for ‘gathering clouds’ and famously served as the Japanese pen name for writer Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo).

  12. Related to, but not the same as, this question of opacity is the matter of getting a reader’s attention in a tiny poem that, by its nature, unfolds in contemplation. One that is usually presented on a page with several others: readers can be inclined to read them quickly, pausing only on some that stand out for whatever reason (skipping through is understandable when faced with so many worn tropes and themes).

    In re:Virals, a reader skilled enough to write a winning commentary proposes someone else’s verse that is a favourite of theirs for some reason. The process often illustrates to me how a poem, that one may inwardly groan at on first reading, gains value through the discipline of having to think about it for several days, and write commentary on it. Its effect on other readers can also be informative.

    Quite often, a favourite poem proposed contains an arresting phrase or unusual word that gets attention and makes a reader stop and engage with it, spending a little more time on a tiny verse. That’s where this comment touches on the subject at hand.

    Of course, if on contemplation a rare and unfamiliar word does no more than force a reader to look it up, and turns out not to add anything more to a verse poetically than a simple one, it can be irritating to some who feel they’ve wasted their time.

    1. Keith, I think this is an important connection. An unusual word can do something before we even decide whether we understand it: it can interrupt the speed of reading. In a page of haiku, where familiar images and tropes can sometimes be absorbed almost automatically, an arresting phrase or unfamiliar word can make us stop and give the poem the attention it might otherwise not receive.

      But I think there is a qualification here that is important to the larger question of opacity: register matters in communication.

      We say, “Hey, look at that cloud.” We don’t say, “Hey, look at that cirrus,” unless the technicality of cirrus is relevant to the situation.

      A poet is free to use cirrus, of course. But the word brings its register with it. If its technicality has no relevance to the poem, the reader may reasonably experience it as an unnecessary and irritating demand on attention. If the technicality matters because the precise cloud type matters then cirrus may be exactly the right word. The issue is not whether the word is technical, but whether its register belongs to the communicative situation the poem creates, or subverts it in a meaningful way.

  13. I just did the Chorus survey which made me think of something else.

    Why are we writing poems? Are we writing for publication? Are we writing for maximum understanding? I would say no to both questions. The only way to write something worth writing is to do it first oneself and/or the sake of the poem. The audience will be found where it will—even if it is an audience of one. Writing a poem with according to some magical popularity formula that will appeal to the most people is not a recipe for memorable poetry.

    I’ll get off my high horse now :)

    1. Joshua, these questions of why we write poetry and for whom we write seem to me fundamental. I wonder how many think about this. I wrote occasional poetry, usually in the quiet of the night, for over fifty years, after being inspired by a schoolteacher. For myself. Because I always liked the music of words. Because things happened that I would reflect on. Because of that exalted feeling that can sometimes arise. Because the effort took my mind off anything else, and into pleasurable realms. Closest to my experience is this talk on ‘dictated poetry’ by Spicer.

      I never discussed it. I didn’t consider myself to be “a poet.” I certainly didn’t want my robust colleagues at work to know of this weirdness! I didn’t keep the results, for after a while inevitably I think my stuff’s rubbish. I never considered publishing, then. When email came in thirty years ago, I occasionally shared one with my wife, a brother, or close friend, and thus a few were kept. Finally, a Professor of poetry emboldened me to send one in, just to see, and then there was the first thrill of publication. That fades soon enough.

      I turned to haiku quite deliberately. My use of images needed to improve. Where better? And got hooked, fascinated.

  14. First, I want to say that I have the absolutely diametrically opposed view to the anonymous reader. I love encountering new words and new concepts in poetry. It makes things interesting! I make a habit of try to write a haiku using new words that I encounter.

    Second, who defines “unfamiliar?” I find great joy in finding out about new cultures through the use of culturally-specific concepts. What immediately springs to mind is the enormous amount of top tier ELH coming out of the Indian subcontinent. Should an Indian poet use “bread” instead of “roti” just because I might have to look it up? I think not.

    Next, consider this: the next haiku you write using a rare word might be the first one ever written in history. A millennium from now some adept grad student might be referencing your haiku using that word or concept.

    Also, as a poet, I won’t be constrained with others expectations and I freely coin words when I can’t find the exact right one.

    Additionally, “karumi” and “shasei” are perfectly wonderful haiku techniques but they are hardly exhaustive.

    I agree with your assessment of Polina Oblak’s haiku. “Komorebi” is simply the perfect word—and there is no English equivalent. What was she supposed to do? Not write the poem? Use an inferior word? Coin a new one—perhaps—but this would be more opaque than “komorebi.”

    I also agree that there are bad opaque haiku. There are also bad fully transparent haiku. I would rather swerve to the interesting and be a bit more opaque than go toward the humdrum, pedestrian, or quotidian.

    Thanks for the awesome article!

    1. Thank you, Joshua. I’m glad you found the exploration worthwhile. I agree with much of what you say, particularly that “unfamiliar” is always relative. Roti is a good example: why should an Indian poet replace a culturally specific word with “bread” simply because I might have to look it up? That would be impoverishment, not accessibility.

      But I think there is another dimension to the question, and it may get at another reason for the resistance to opaque words. An unfamiliar word can work in two opposite ways. It can be something withheld from the reader, leaving productive absence; or it can be something added to the poem, making the poem more expansive and lyric.

      This distinction may be easier to see against the background of Western poetry, which has traditionally tended toward expansion: filling, embellishing, explaining, saying beauty and truth. Haiku moves in the opposite direction. Its essence is to strip away, to pare down, to distill, to leave absence. It lets the image and cut reveal what cannot be said, until the barest trace of a moment remains, and through that bareness something vast can be glimpsed.

      Haiku is therefore not simply a short poem. Its brevity is not simply a format to fill, but the result of compression. We can see this especially clearly in beginners’ poems, where the short form can become a container into which the poet tries to fit as much as possible, to the poem’s detriment.

      So I wouldn’t want to replace an unfamiliar word merely to make a haiku more transparent. But neither would I want to add an unfamiliar word simply because it opens up an interesting area of knowledge. The question for me is what the word does within the particular compression of the haiku. Does it serve the image and the cut, or does it make the poem more expansive than it needs to be?

      And I very much agree with you that there are bad opaque haiku and bad transparent haiku. Transparency isn’t the safe alternative. Sometimes the interesting poem is the one that makes us swerve. The question is what happens after the swerve.

      I think at the most essential level the haiku poet isn’t choosing between common and uncommon words. The poet is choosing how much language the poem needs.

  15. It’s always wonderful when an editor or editors embrace words that are not apparent in everyday convo:

    .

    orographic nubibus: sea-coloured conscience apostrophes

    Alan Summers

    First publication credit:
    punctuation (haibun)
whiptail: journal of the single-line poem (November 2025)
    ed. Kat Lehmann and Robin Smith

    Collection:
    modŏ 50+ new & selected 1-line haiku by Alan Summers (CoTP Production March 2026)

    .
    A poet is by default a language poet and we be at equal ease with basic words and less common words. It only be me who had a dozen varieties of reference books to hand at home. Now we have perhaps a million reference sources at our fingertips in less than half a second. I should know, it was often .04 of a second in the old days on the internet, now it’s a second or two alas but still relatively quick!

    It’s a necessary discipline to know or want to know unfamiliar words. Tolkien is now one of many who didn’t do too shabbily from that discipline.

    1. I agree, Alan. There is something to be said for cultivating an appetite for words, rather than treating the unfamiliar as a special category.

      Tolkien is a wonderful example. His relation to words seems less like “knowing a lot of obscure words” than being curious about what words can do.

      Being equally at ease with common and uncommon words seems to me the wisest principle of balance. Otherwise it’s a bit like having a box of crayons and using only three of them. The point isn’t to use the unusual words for their own sake, but to have the whole box available when the poem calls for it.

  16. We do love words!

    One watchpoint seems to me to be that if an unusual word, what Paul Miller called “a ten dollar word,” is used effectively in a verse for the first time, it is quite likely that it will suddenly appear several times in other people’s verses; and very quickly , in losing novelty, lose nearly all impact.

    Quite often a haiku poet stumbles across words like petrichor, murmuration, murder of crows etc. for the first time, and flush with the discovery bangs out a poem before realising that there have been dozens and dozens of them over the past decade. Shiki advised very wide reading to be able to distinguish originality from ‘the trite.’

    On the other hand, when a fancy word that I don’t know is used, or likewise a foreign cultural reference obscure to me, I am likely to look it up out of curiosity. I find it interesting and worthwhile to learn of new things. It also helps to assess whether the word(s) are crucial to the verse or more of an affectation.

    For example, one I liked led me to while away some time happily. Time well spent:

    Thánatos
    slipping
    further
    into
    the
    dark
    nemerteans
    R.C. Thomas in his book Faunistics pub February 2024
    He is currently Plymouth, UK’s Laureate of Words, aptly enough.
    I didn’t know about nemerteans. They are kind of fascinating.

    1. I agree that fad words are common in haiku, and that an unusual word can lose its novelty very quickly once it starts circulating. But perhaps there is a poetic cycle to words. A word can move from unfamiliar to fashionable, from fashionable to familiar, and from familiar to cliché—but a cliché can then be renewed and heard again. In fact, I think clichés are the greatest reservoir of poetic potential available to a poet. Nothing is more powerful than a renewed cliché. The accumulated familiarity that makes a cliché a cliché is also what gives it so much to work with.

      So perhaps the question isn’t simply whether a word is fresh or stale, but where it is in its poetic life, and what the poet does with it.

      Maybe nemerteans will become the new trend 😄

      1. Granted, it’s what a poet does with a word. If a word is over-used, a poet has to be that much more creative to develop it into something new.
        murmuration
        the illusion
        you are the first…

      2. I remember when “constellate” made the rounds a few years ago. It stings me a bit on the rare occasions when that has been the mot juste. Keith is on the money pointing this out.

    2. One would have the choice of nemertean or ribbon worm in writing a haiku or any poem, perhaps to be determined by the sounds which work best or please most. Also, one could say– well, I *will* say it– that a nemertean is a creature that does not die, as in *je [ne meurs] pas*, which is very useful in a poem featuring Thanatos. (I am serious about Death, but not about this.

      Seems there must be a bunch of haiku about tardigrades by now– popular little guys. In that instance, one has the choice of tardigrade, moss piglet, or water bear. I read online that “tardigrades (water bears) are remarkably hard to kill when they enter a dried-out dormant state called a “tun,” but active, hydrated tardigrades are quite fragile and easily killed by normal hazards.

      1. Yes. In this case, for me it is the play between Thánatos and nemertians, the two “ten dollar words”, that makes this little poem, and one where the vertical layout is not a mere affectation, but complements the verse as a good choice of container complements an ikebana or a bonsai.

        I read that a nemertean was washed ashore in Scotland in 1864 measuring 55 metres long! That was before we had metres…. Yet it will fit into a seasonless haiku of seven words.

      2. Peter: re tardigrades. I sent one in about rotifers, once. They too appear as if by magic when a dry ditch fills with rain. They are wondrous to behold under the microscope. I don’t think there’s a common word for them. Google gives ‘wheel animals’ but hardly common (I’ve never heard or read anyone using that term). The verse was not accepted.

        On whether ribbon worms is better than nemerteans: might depend on context, yes; but ‘nemerteans’ fits nicely here, and has a sound to it that delights my ear.

        Personally, I think “the scent of earth after rain” is far more evocative than the Greek coinage “petrichor”, and a handly seven syllables, but then “petrichor” is shorter and has appeal for classicists.

        Google says: petrichor was coined in 1964 by Australian researchers Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas.
        Derived from Greek petra (stone or rock) and ichor (the ethereal fluid that flows through the veins of the gods in Greek mythology).

        It rolls off the tongue, but does it convey the sensory aspect as well as the plain English? Or is ‘rock ichor’ even accurate? Or does it matter, as ‘petrichor’ has acquired status and associations as a ‘haiku word’?

        On ‘komorebi’ we do have ‘dappled sunlight’ (Google: “Dappled means covered with spots of color or mixed with patches of light and dark shade. You often see it used to describe sunlight shining through tree leaves or the spotted coat of an animal”), or the haiku word ‘leaflight’ (Alan Burns). But I think Orense has acutely observed why ‘komorebi’ might have the edge in Polona Oblak’s one-liner.

        1. Well, with rotifer, one who has at least a microscopic sense of Latin will see that the word means “wheel bearer” which allows it to roll right along in whatever poem it appears in. Of course, it takes on a slightly different meaning if one is ordering bread in an Indian restaurant where one could think of the waitstaff as a roti-fers.

  17. It works the other way, too. You reminded me of this one in last week’s post:
    poketto kara / kyarameru to / konoha o dashita
    —Kawahigashi Hekigodõ / Hekigotō

    from my pocket
    I took out a caramel
    and a leaf

    “The use of two gairaigo or foreign loan-words, pocketto (pocket) and kyarameru (caramel (the sweet)), 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…”

    1. This one is new to me. And I love it😁

      Yes, I find the relativity of it all wonderful.

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