Moon and Finger 13—the dog’s bollocks, and kigo

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 will accommodate a variety of occasional guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Keith Evetts.

Lost in Translation — the dog’s bollocks

Last week, Orense set out the many aspects of using or encountering unfamiliar words in a haiku in English.  This week, some familiar words but in an unfamiliar conjuncture, leading to a discussion of various aspects of kigo.

A divagation:

One of over six hundred kigo for Spring in the saijiki of Japan’s Modern Haiku Association is “dog’s testicles,” more commonly “dog’s bollocks.” (いぬふぐり / inufuguri). This is, extraordinarily enough, the Japanese name for blue speedwell, Veronica persica, from the tiny, twin, hairy fruit:

The wild speedwell is one of the first flowers of spring.

Japanese haiku are full of double meanings. It’s several centuries since bawdy punning was quite prevalent in haikai, with some notable exceptions. And some in the anglophone haiku community nowadays might be a little put out by it. A translator writing “dog’s bollocks” in English would likely meet with mock horror or bewilderment. Most English translations of verses with that kigo are rendered sedately as “spring speedwell” or “blue speedwell.”  There’s little option, but that can leave out rather a lot of association.

The poetic essence of inufuguri, a classic early spring kigo, rests primarily on the delicate or joyful rediscovery of life and vigour against a  landscape emerging from winter:

— the sudden spark of early spring: because of its small flowers, its hon’i carries a comparison with stars (inufuguri hoshi no matataku gotoku nari “the inufuguri blooms look just like twinkling stars” —Kyoshi).  Use of simile with gotoku:  “like; as if.”

— resilience: creeping flat against the ground, it recovers from being stepped on.

— transience: its one-day flowers need the warmth of the spring sun to open.

— its vulgar name, which haiku poets also exploit as part of its essence, in various ways…

There are several examples in the saijiki:

魔女消える径いっぱいの犬ふぐり
majo kieru michi ippai inufuguri
—Nobuko Chiba

the witch disappears—
the path is filled with
blue speedwell

A mystical image where the witch is, by implication, disappearing winter.

Nobuko Chiba is a contemporary Japanese gendai haiku poet in a mode that came after the Hototogisu school – everyday weeds, domestic life, but intruded on by surreal or feminist figures.

There is a modern thread of zassō haiku (weed haiku), Taneda Santoka’s second favourite subject (“Sprouting, growing, blooming, seeding, and withering, just as weeds, nothing more—that is good.“).  In 1936, he published Zassō fukei (Weedscapes).  We have a recent “zassō haiku” by Peter Yovu, which was the subject of re:Virals 491.

While Santoka’s weeds are generally austere, lonely, resilient, withering, trampled, urinated upon, Chibo’s weeds here are energetically vigorous — but combined with folklore. It’s not just the return of natural growth in spring.  There’s a human element in it—the path—and the vigorous speedwell fills it as the spirit-witch Yuki-onna, ethereal spirit of the snowstorm and freezing mountain heights, melts and vanishes with the spring thaw.  Santoka’s zassō-damashii, the weed-spirit, diehard,  resilient, and a little mischievous, takes over. Lost in translation is “dog’s bollocks”, which lends fertile vigour and maybe a touch of mischief to this haiku. The rites of spring: “the witch disappears / dog’s bollocks fill the path” doesn’t work for a reader in English.  DeepL doesn’t do well with this one either: “Dogs and Scrotums All Along the Witch’s Vanishing Path”, although it might delight some readers with its seeming surrealism.

I think the matter might be partly solved in translation thus:

“the witch has vanished—
the path fills with
fertile speedwell
Note: inufuguri, speedwell: lit. ‘dog’s bollocks’ or ‘dog’s testicles'”

It is for consideration here whether the translator’s problem might be met by simply letting the unfamiliar word “inufuguri” stand:

“the witch has vanished—
the path fills with
inufuguri”
As we are translating, rather than creating anew, it seems to me preferable to give the reader a note rather than make them hunt down the Japanese word to make sense of the verse.

Then we have:
地球にも拍動のあり犬ふぐり
chikyū ni mo hakudō no ari inufuguri
—Seiichiro Watanabe

Earth too
has a heartbeat
spring speedwell

Seiichiro Watanabe b. 1950 in Shiogama, Miyagi, is a disciple of Satō Onifusa. Former editor of Ogumaza, author of several haiku collections and recipient of the Modern Haiku Association Award.

Again, lost in translation is the seminal notion of the fertile earth that might be inferred from inufuguri— these tiny vigorous wildflowers.

Another use:
老人性鬱的敬語いぬふぐり
rōjinsei utsuteki keigo inufuguri
—Yoshihiro Ishida (1924-2015, a prominent avant-garde poet)

senile melancholy
a polite form of address
spring speedwell

The melancholy of ageing is minimally compensated by formal respect for age, and possibly by the blooming of tough, resilient weed-flowers; yet lost in translation is the rueful, ironic “dog’s bollocks” that serves only to point up a loss of vigour,  and in its rude good health contrasts with “honorific speech,” politeness.

senile melancholy
a polite form of address
dog’s bollocks!

And then:
いぬふぐり百年後にも基地置くか
inufuguri hyakunen go ni mo kichi oku ka
—Hiroko Yoshimi

spring speedwell—
a hundred years on
will the (military) base even stand?

Contrasting the fragility of this resilient, enduring little flower with the seemingly solid, massive force of military occupation, here the somewhat derogatory, mocking and resentful connotation of the “dog’s bollocks” is lost in translation, leaving only the somewhat cliché’d trope that nature continues renewed while human buildings crumble.  There’s a semantic cut after “inufuguri,” dog’s bollocks.  And a terminal cut with the interrogative kireji “ka.”

“dog’s bollocks / a hundred years from now / will there even be a base here?”

A frankly political haiku, mocking and (I sense) with a deliberate note of obscenity.  Moreover, a fairly rare one extending into a future tense:  “oku” — “to put or place”, with the ‘ku’ ending being the plain form, accommodating present and future.  “A hundred years from now” forces the context into the future. Hiroko Yoshimi is an active contemporary haiku poet.  She has several works in the database.

And so we have various uses of this one curious kigo:

—Fertility and renewal

—Irony and loss

—Mocking and derogatory, hinting at the obscene

…and there are several more uses in other examples, some of which do mean dog’s testicles or dog’s scrotum proper. All illustrating the power of association of a season word or term. And besides, the latent irony or humour that lies behind many a good haiku.  Lost in translation.

The above serves for an illustration of awkwardness that can arise in the use of kigo from another culture.  Although some readers of haiku written in English might study kigo and look up their hon’i or poetic essence, few in my experience actually do that, particularly if the extensive saijiki from which the kigo are drawn is in Japanese.  Anglophone lists of season words tend to be much smaller and more limited, without the weight of example verses that develop their hon’i. To write a haiku in English that used “blue speedwell”  or “spring speedwell” as a kigo might be technically “correct”, but for anglophone readers it would carry little or nothing of its poetic essence in a Japanese saijiki.  Even though speedwell might appear in many of our lawns in spring and summer, it doesn’t strike me as a word bearing many pronounced associations in our own culture.  Indeed, on looking that up, I get:

“In anglophone folklore and the language of flowers, blue speedwell symbolizes fidelity, loyalty, and safe travel, acting as a good luck charm meant to “speed you well” on a journey.  Alternative folk names in regional British and Irish traditions include “bird’s-eye,” “cat’s-eye,” or the “eye of Christ”. Northern English superstition warned that picking them would provoke a bird to peck your eyes out.”   Quite different.

I go on below to look at a reader’s specific question about double kigo, and then to think about more general questions concerning the use of kigo in English Language haiku.

—————-

Kigo questions—more than one per verse?

A reader writes in: “Recently, I noticed some haiku receiving awards in a competition that contained two similar kigo. I almost didn’t notice because the haiku flowed well and the images were vivid. Should it matter, or is redundancy an acceptable matter of choice?”

I think my personal opinion on this, for haiku poets writing in English, is that like any word, space, or punctuation mark in haiku, everything should carry weight. If removed, would that significantly detract from the verse? The difference might not be limited to meaning, but include rhythm or musicality. In some verses, repetition is deliberate and accumulates meaning.  So, if you almost didn’t notice two kigo because the haiku flowed well and the images were vivid, that seems fine, at least to me, and evidently the judges thought likewise.    Real redundancy is usually a flaw.  But was there really redundancy in the verse that won an award, apart from using two words that happen to be formal kigo?  Were they charged with different loads that made sense together?

Here’s a neat pedigree example from a renga:

Hokku (the opening verse):
蚤飛べよ おなじ事なら蓮の上
nomi tobe yo / onaji koto nara / hasu no ue
—Issa

jump flea!
might as well be
on to a lotus

Both flea, nomi, and lotus, hasu, are summer kigo.  Both carry weight, for as David Lanoue, whose translation this is, comments in the journal Presence: “For a Pure Land Buddhist like Issa, a flea jumping onto a lotus blossom is symbolically realizing his own most deeply desired, most devout aspiration: to be reborn in Amida’s Pure Land and, once there, to achieve enlightenment. Even a flea, Issa suggests, can become a Buddha.”

The second verse, the wakiku, without a semantic break in it, should complement and buttress the first while moving the subject on a little.  It should stay in the same season and tone as the hokku:

すずみ筵に入相の月
susumi mushiro ni / iriai no tsuki
—Kibõ

so cool on a straw mat
watching the sunset moon

Again, Lanoue’s translation.  The straw mat suggests Buddhist meditation or zazen, often in the lotus position, consistent with the hokku but not repeating anything in it. There are two kigo here too, “cooling off” (susumi or suzumi) and “moon”, which without further specific qualification would default to autumn (ruled out at this point in the renga).  “Cooling off” is the dominant kigo, and so the moon at sunset becomes just the ordinary moon that can be seen at many times of the year.  Sunset is not of itself a kigo, although “sunset glow” (yūyake) is a summer kigo, so the inclusion of sunset modifies the default season of “moon” and slightly reinforces the essential summer season here.  Kibõ is showing his haikai smarts.

Nothing in the above two verses seems redundant.

There is also the inescapable fact that while some teachers of anglophone haiku decree that you can’t have more than one kigo in a haiku, this ignores many famous hokku or haiku in Japanese, and some celebrated infamous ones, that do just that. Returning to the opening theme of this post, we have:

柿もぎの　きん玉寒し　秋の風
akimogi no / kintama samushi / aki no kaze
—Ryokan Taigu

picking persimmons
my balls are cold
autumn wind

or:

Picking persimmons —
My testicles are frozen
By the autumn wind.
Tr. John Stevens

Persimmon is an autumn kigo, so is autumn wind, and so is “cold” —all consistent with autumn.  (Stevens’ “frozen” would be winter, on its own). Three kigo in one verse.

Lost in translation is that “kintama” is literally “golden balls” —like the persimmons—and jocular slang for testicles. The Zen monk Ryokan had a mischievous sense of humour.

Not to mention Bashõ’s “Ah spring, spring / great spring! / And so forth“,  a famous haiku in Japan with multiple kigo is:

目には青葉 山ほとゝぎす はつ松魚
me ni wa aoba / yama hototogisu / hatsu-gatsuo
— Yamaguchi Sōdō
the sight of green leaves
a mountain cuckoo
the first bonito
Three kigo for early summer. None redundant. Three parts, no kireji, two semantic cuts. Every word counts. This one appeared with a commentary in Haiku of the Day here.

Bashō has no compunctions about double kigo when it suits:

uguisu no / kasa otoshitaru / tsubaki kana
bush warbler’s / hat to drop / camellia!

or:

bush warbler
has dropped his hat
camellia
—tr. Reichhold

The bush warbler and the camellia are both early spring kigo.  This is one of his later works (1689). Reichhold comments: “In earlier poetry, a favorite cliché was that the bush warbler was stitching a hat of plum blossoms. Camellia plants drop whole flowers rather than petals. The fallen flower seems as if it has been stitched together and therefore must be the hat of a bush warbler“.

One of Chiyo-ni‘s:

春雨や蓬を摘みに出たりけり
harusame ya / yomogi o tsumi ni / detari keri
—Chiyo-ni
Spring rain— / I had gone out to pick mugwort.
—tr. Donegan and Ishibashi

We had this one as an illustration of the English pluperfect in the Past Part 3.  There are two kigo here: spring rain and yomogi —mugwort. Yomogi (one of the Artemisia genus) is an aromatic herb used in traditional Japanese sweets, soups and tempura. Also in herbal treatments, aromatherapy, and moxibustion. Its green shoots symbolise the renewal of spring, warming, sweet and arousing scents. This reads as a line from a notebook or diary about an actual event: there was spring rain, and she’d gone out to pick mugwort. I suggest that it would be somewhat daft to argue that she “can’t have” the two things in the same verse “because they’re both kigo and there’s seasonal redundancy.” Whereas indeed the two things complement each other beautifully: the gentle rain of spring, the green shoots of yomogi, its emerging fragrance, its sweetness and healing properties. The verse is about more than getting wet.

Buson has quite a few with more than one kigo, sometimes in different seasons; but one season is clearly the key one. His famous “rape blossom / the moon towards the east / the sun towards the west” is keyed to a late spring kigo, the canola blossoms.  The sun would normally be symbolic of summer, the unqualified moon of autumn.  Yet here they are planets, ostensibly observed at the same time.

You can find others by Buson with two harmonious, or with mixed, kigo:

山蟻のあからさま也白牡丹
Yama-ari no akarasama nari hakubotan
—Buson

a mountain ant stark on the white peony
or:
mountain ant— seen so clearly on the white peony
tr. Addis, Yamamoto, Yamamoto

Ant is an all-summer kigo; the peony is early summer.  Addis and the Yamamotos have inserted an em dash, but there is no kireji or semantic cut in this verse, as far as I can see.  but there is no kireji and only the slightest of semantic cuts in this verse, changing the perspective. One sentence fragment, two images (nikku ichishō pattern).  Any gardener knows how attracted are ants to peonies! They go together.  I suggest that neither kigo is redundant; they complement each other.

Also by Buson, the very interesting:

菜の花や　鯨もよらず　海暮ぬ
nanohana ya / kujira mo yorazu / umi kurenu
—Buson
菜の花 nanohana rapeseed (canola) blossoms — a late spring kigo
や ya the kireji (cutting word), for emphasis
鯨 kujira whale (a winter kigo)
も mo even or also
よらず yorazu does not approach/come near (classical negative of 寄る, yoru)
海 umi the sea
暮ぬ kurenu has grown dark / dusk has fallen (classical perfect form of 暮れる, kureru)

rapeseed blossom — not even a whale comes near, dusk has darkened the sea.

or:

A field of mustard flowers
no whales passed today
night falls on the sea
—tr. Merwin and Lento

A glowing foreground of blooms is cut with the kireji ‘ya’ to the great sea beyond. The absence of the world’s largest creature accentuates the vastness of the ocean, undisturbed. The mood changes from light (accentuated by the yellow) to dark: dusk is falling or has fallen.

Essentially, there are three separate elements arranged here, with one formal kireji and another semantic cut between yorazu and umi. The phrase kujira mo yorazu is complete in itself — even the whale does not come near. Umi kurenu remains within the absent whale’s domain but is also a self-sufficient statement — the (empty) sea has grown dark; dusk has fallen. The three parts operate on different planes: bright, living foreground, vast unpopulated space, time of day passing to a night that has darkened all (ending in a past / perfective tense). Brimming with yūgen — that sense of mystery. Trying consciously or unconsciously to hold these three elements in the mind and relate them paints a picture and yields poetic effect.

Nanohana, the canola blossom, is a late spring kigo; the whale a winter one. It doesn’t look like some direct observation from the notebook (any number of kigo from any season might be “absent”). The absent whale looks entirely like an imaginative compositional choice.  Buson often composed imaginative verses at leisure away from the field.  Now, it could be argued that the ‘absence of whale’ is not a kigo at all, and therefore there’s no double kigo and so no clash of seasons. However, we have no less an authority than Shiki, commenting on a different haiku: “it is also acceptable to treat the topic as a purely imaginary concept that does not exist in reality. For example, when given the autumn topic “covered in ivy”…as in

At the torii gate of the shrine in the fields, there was not even a trace of ivy　—Ryōto

...it is acceptable not to include the actual object—in this case, ivy—in the haiku itself. This still qualifies as an autumn haiku.”

So, this is a verse where Buson deploys two kigo ordinarily from mixed seasons, expanding the boundaries of their use, using the blossom to fix the season and the poetic essence of the huge and absent whale in a non-seasonal way. Again, not redundant: each part adding to this complex verse, which would be diminished were any part taken away.

——————

Kigo from the perspective of haiku in English:

Seasonality and season-words (kigo) play a central role in classic Japanese haiku, but less of a role in anglophone haiku in the rest of the world. In Japan, a kigo gives both an anchorage in a given season or date —ideally the season in which the haiku poet is writing in the present moment— and some connection with past poems of various kinds stretching back to antiquity and which have used those kigo.

With each use, a kigo accumulates associations to go with its hon’i or ‘poetic essence.’  For example, the moon, snow, withered grasses, cherry blossoms,  frogs, crickets, white chrysanthemums, and so forth, have acquired symbolic associations or “poetic essence” that can make a kigo a very economical means, in a very short form of poetry, of conveying a mood and a wealth of associations as well as setting a context.  Thereby adding scope to a verse, more so when the reader is well-read in those former poems and able to “decode” the haiku in those terms.  For less specifically educated readers, the poem may lose some intended meaning.

Kigo are not confined to seasons, nor to ‘nature.’ They may also be cultural: for example, marking various dates or celebrations, or domestic chores.

Some schools of haiku insist that to be a haiku, a verse ‘must’ contain a recognised kigo: that is, one that has been collected and codified in a saijiki. Strict adherence to codified kigo can, however, be very limiting for anglophone haiku and haiku poets, and sometimes verges on the absurd, particularly if borrowed from another culture or another time.  For example, the fulling-block traditionally used in Japan to soften fabric by pounding, is in the saijiki as an autumn kigo.  It would, I suggest, be of little meaning to a contemporary anglophone haiku poet and their general readers.

The establishment of a word — such as ‘moon’ — as denoting a single season (autumn in this case) is clearly at odds with the actual presence of the moon at all times of the year.  The attribution of autumn is said to be because the full moon is at its biggest and brightest, although supermoons can occur in late summer or early winter (in 2026 three full supermoons fall, on January 3, November 24, and December 24).  So we get devices such as ‘hazy moon’, assigned to spring, even though the moon may be veiled or hazy outside that season, and not ĥazy when the spring haiku is written.  And ‘cold moon’ and so forth.  The bones of a whale on the beach may be seen at any time of year.  Yet ‘whale’ is officially a kigo for winter (in Japan).  Off Cape Cod, it would be more likely to see whales in summer.  In spring and autumn, geese both arrive and depart at the same time, depending on where they are from, or to where they are heading. In Japanese saijiki, “departing geese” is a kigo for spring, and “arriving geese” for autumn. The Thames estuary to bird migration is what Clapham Junction is to railway travellers coming and going all year round. Arbitrary insistence that a particular phenomenon must always denote a particular season, or even a micro-season, can weaken the credibility of kigo as a ‘must have’ outside the rigorous and deeply-entrenched traditional haiku in Japan.

Kigo also present some practical difficulties around the world. They do not travel well. In tropical countries the seasons are far less distinct, perhaps marked only by ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ seasons, or in the Caribbean by the hurricane season. Fruits and flowers may appear at almost any time of the year, or all through the year near the Equator. The arrival and departure of migratory birds in Africa may have more to do with the onset of cold weather in higher latitudes than with any seasonal change in that continent. There are from time to time attempts to create saijiki for different regions of the anglophone world, but they do not seem to attract many poets, and writing to them can become a sterile exercise more suited to the classroom than to the natural environment.

In recent years there is also the problem of marked climate change: not only does the season shift, but there can be conflicting ‘seasonal’ phenomena at the same time. One haiku poet has described hollyhocks blooming amid large flakes of snow. Is she to be admonished for depicting what is actually seen simply because of some arbitrary ‘rule’ about kigo?

In addition to these practical considerations, there is less of a tradition in English literature of writing in strict accordance with the seasons. Also, although there is a measure of intertextuality in anglophone poetry, it is rarer that a poem consciously references an earlier one in the conspicuous and frequent way in which haiku and tanka or waka in Japanese poetry do.

There are still many words that we can use without formal ‘kigo’ status that carry a weight of well-understood symbolism and association.  There are many ways of referencing a season if a season is central to the poem. But why pin a verse arbitrarily to a season, whenever a season is not essential to the verse? Both in Japan and in the anglophone haiku community, the idea of ‘keywords’ has developed: that is, words or phrases that do not necessarily have to be seasonal, but which a majority of readers will recognise from their past usage, and that have some accumulated weight of symbolism or association. There is a newer tradition of ‘seasonless haiku’ (muki haiku) in Japan, although it remains controversial to inveterate traditionalists. Yet that led only to part liberation, and to five thousand codified expressions in a saijiki, many of them clumsy in English.

The essence, the ‘spirit of haiku’ prompts meditative perception in the poet, then the reader, usually through brief plain imagery, to arrive at some insight, revelation or reflection. The revelation may be one of beauty, or of humour; of sadness; or of fellowship, a novel view of a shared situation that others will recognise; and frequently but not always in a natural setting.  A kigo or keyword is part of the toolkit for the anglophone haiku poet, but only one of a selection of tools.  I contend that there should not have to be one as a matter of rule: only when it is important to the verse’s content — when it adds significance to the poem, or is needed as shorthand for a bunch of associations relevant to the poem. Short of a recognised kigo or keyword, a seasonal reference or allusion of some sort, if it is needed, may be perfectly adequate.  In any case, this is one of the ways new kigo come into being and get adopted. Simply shoehorning a ready-made season word into a verse because you are ‘supposed’ to have one seems to me to be misguided and inauthentic in this spare poetry. At least, as far as concerns English Language Haiku where the available saijikis are somewhat exiguous, rarely give past haiku exemplifying the kigo’s poetic essence, and often contain kigo borrowed from Japan or from another region alien to the poet.

In traditional Japanese haiku,  and more recently among authorities in the teaching of English Language haiku, having more than one season-word or image in a verse may be frowned upon.  This issue has been addressed at length above. If one of the words is clearly the dominant season word, then that is acceptable. If two (or more) words that happen to be season words add different, meaningful, associations to a verse and are not redundant, there are plenty of classic precedents.  Each adds something to the verse, which would be diminished if either of them were to be taken out.

There may also be cases when the poet observes things from different seasons in the same temporal context. These days we have asparagus tips in the greengrocer’s nearly all year round. We’ve had daffodils bloom before Christmas in our southern English garden, along with the last yellow rose of the past summer. Are we to say that the haikuist should censor a natural observation, experienced directly, to remove these supposed conflicts of season? Occasionally the very point of a haiku offering insight into climate change will be strengthened by a conflict of seasonal words.  If a poet writes from the real and present moment, when all the images around are consistent with reality, if not always with a doctrinaire abstraction of reality, that surely cannot be seen as wrong.

In sum, I think that for haiku in the English language, understanding what kigo and keywords are for, and deploying them where they are truly useful as part of the content and add significantly to a verse (which they often do), but not otherwise, is a better approach than writing haiku strictly by long lists of such things required by formality, by doctrine. But I come from a society that has grown less hierarchical and orderly. I prefer to think that a notebook is all that should be needed to write haiku. Not an almanac.

If you’ve read this far, some fun:

世界中が五月だったぼくは無季
sekai-jū ga gogatsu datta boku wa muki
—Tsugio Kawana (b. 1935)
throughout the world / the fifth month it was / as for me, without a season

all over the world
it was May
I was kigo-less
tr. Alex Fyffe

“Lacking a season” is “muki,” seasonless, as in “muki haiku,” haiku without a (formal) kigo.

Interesting choice of the past tense (datta).  There’s a neat temporal asymmetry to go with the irony of it being May yet without a kigo. Although the first part is explicitly in the past “it was May”,  the second part, “as for me, muki” is without tense, leaving the temporal status open to either “I am…” or “I was…”

tax season
assuming that’s
a kigo
Sondra J. Byrnes
Failed Haiku vol 9 issue 100 June 2024

—–

Key points:

—kigo are natural or other words that fix a season or date, that appear in a saijiki with examples to illustrate their accumulated hon’i or poetic essence.

—they are not merely part of a tradition: they are an economical way of bringing a bundle of known associations into a very short verse and extending its depth.

—if the general readership is not acquainted with the same saijiki and examples of poetic essence, some intended meaning is likely to be lost.

—while in classic haiku normally there will be only one word or phrase that is a kigo, that is a pragmatic consideration but by no means an inviolable ‘rule.’

—there are impeccable precedents for more than one kigo. Where there’s more than one, one will usually be the dominant seasonal kigo by context.

—each word, space, cut, or punctuation in a haiku should be worth its weight, and essential in some way to the verse. This applies to multiple kigo as much as to anything else.

—the Japanese have a strong tradition of writing poetry tied to the season, and alluding to earlier works. Anglophone poetry much less so.

—kigo from one region, country or hemisphere don’t often travel well.

—attempts to compile saijiki for anglophone regions have been very limited in comparison with Japan. Usually a comparatively small number of approximate seasonal words are given without the accumulated examples of use that illustrate their ‘poetic essence.’

—climate change and international food and flower supply chains have complicated the seasonal situation.

—outside the classroom and the formalist community, there has been limited adoption by ELH poets of kigo specific to a region, despite worthy attempts. They are more likely to borrow Japanese kigo in lieu.  (That doesn’t always migrate well,  as with “inufuguri — dog’s bollocks”).

—some of the rigid aspects of formal kigo can call into question their credibility with anglophone poets.

—anglophones have taken more to key words and phrases that are fairly universal and have known associations, without the formalities of a saijiki, to anchor their verses and give depth to them. This is more flexible, much broader, allows more freedom, and invites creativity.

—writing from a notebook, recording real and present observations, is a good way of marrying accuracy to consistency with the time and season.  The notebook should take precedence over the almanac.

—Keith Evetts

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.

The polls on Past Tense in Haiku will close on Thursday. If you haven’t taken them yet we’d appreciate you adding your voice to next week’s Chorus.

Hekigoto 1 : TAKE THE POLL

Hekigoto 2 : TAKE THE POLL

The Past part 1, part 2, part 3 : TAKE THE POLL

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.

PLEASE TAKE THE POLL

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

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

Introducing the hosts:

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

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

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

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

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

A note on the comments: Once a discussion reaches more than 20 comments, we’ll use NEW tags🆕️ to make recent activity easier to follow. Keith and I will mark the latest comments so that readers who are following the conversations closely can quickly see where the discussion is currently active.

The tags are not personalized to individual readers; they simply indicate the most recent additions to the discussion. Because we’re doing this manually, there may sometimes be a delay before a new comment is tagged. Depending on how active a discussion is, we’ll generally mark the five most recent comments, and in more active discussions this may extend to the ten most recent.

The NEW tag🆕️ is a navigation aid, not an editorial judgment about the importance or quality of a comment.

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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.