Moon and Finger 16 – Simile Part 2

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.

Simile and the Mechanics of Ma
Part II: The Honest Device

Last week, the comments on Adam’s essay repeatedly returned to the question of authenticity in haiku. But what does it mean for a poem to be honest?

The question sounds simple until we ask what, exactly, poetry can be honest about. It cannot be reduced to factual accuracy, since poetry routinely invents, imagines, exaggerates, and transforms experience. And haiku is no different. Nor can it mean simply saying what the poet sincerely feels. A sincere perception can still appear inauthentic to a reader.

I think the answer is that authenticity is not a fact about the poet but a property of the reader’s encounter with the poem. A poem is authentic when its experience is inhabitable, when the reader can enter it and believe in the experience it offers, whether or not what it describes is literally true.

This shifts the question of honesty from the truth of the event to the truthfulness of the experience. A poem may invent what happened while remaining faithful to how something was perceived, imagined, remembered, or felt. What matters is not that the poet gives us the world exactly as it was, but that the poem gives us an experience we can inhabit without feeling that the poem has deceived us about what kind of experience it is offering.

This distinction will matter for simile, which turns out to have not one honest job but two — and haiku, with its demand for a believable moment to enter, has use for both.

The proscription of simile in English-language haiku is often presented as an extension of shasei‘s minimalism — the principle of direct observation associated with Shiki, with its emphasis on fidelity to the seen world and minimization of traces of subjectivity. Besides Shiki himself, few poets are more closely identified with shasei orthodoxy than Takahama Kyoshi, who codified and defended it throughout his long editorship of Hototogisu. And yet, in Part I, we discussed not one but two poems in which Kyoshi reached for simile.

This is not a contradiction. As we saw in our introduction to the series, simile can serve shasei’s objectives by preserving space and preventing the unsubtle identification that metaphor — or, differently, juxtaposition — can sometimes impose. But there is also a deeper compatibility: simile’s refusal to assert identity where identity does not exist can itself be a form of fidelity to the world. Call this its  ontological honesty — not a claim about what was truly experienced, but about what kind of statement is being made at all. Metaphor asserts identity outright; simile, marked by like or as if or other simile markers, offers a resemblance instead and lets the reader see it as one.

The second job is narrower and concerns experience rather than statement. When a haiku’s content is an imagining rather than a direct perception, the poem needs some way to tell the reader what mode of experience is on offer — call this its epistemic honesty, the marking of the boundary between what was seen and what was imagined. This is the sense of honesty that will occupy most of what follows.

Haiku is famously suspicious of the poet’s ego imposing itself on the thing perceived. The fear is always of the mind colonizing the object, substituting its own categories for the thing’s actual presence. But haiku’s demand for sincerity is not a demand for literal factual truth. It is a demand for epistemic honesty about the mode of experience being reported — a demand for believability that allows the reader to enter the poem’s moment. An imagining is a perfectly valid subject for a haiku, and in reading the Masters one finds many haiku of that variety, with a caveat: what the poet presents must seem true to how it was experienced, whether seen, remembered, or imagined, and the reader must be able to feel the difference.

For direct perception, haiku’s innate situatedness usually provides that framing on its own. The seasonal word, the present-tense immediacy, the concrete particularity of the image — many common characteristics of haiku signal without effort that what is being offered is something witnessed. But when the content is an imagining, this situational anchoring is unavailable by definition.

Here three possibilities open up. Sometimes the haiku frame is strong enough to contain the imagining on its own — the poem’s situatedness absorbs it without strain. Sometimes the ambiguity between the real and the imagined is itself what the poem seeks, that hovering uncertainty becoming a source of resonance rather than a problem to be resolved. But when the poem needs to present an imagining with full epistemic honesty — when the frame cannot situate it alone, and the ambiguity feels dishonest or confuses rather than deepens the poem — simile can become structurally necessary. Far from weakening the image, simile in this function is a form of intellectual integrity: the poet’s honest marking of the boundary between what was seen and what was imagined, offered not as apology but as precision.

1. The Honest Imagination 

Our first example, by Bashō, is a perfect illustration of this function of simile:

木枯しや竹に隠るるごとくなり
kogarashi ya / take ni kakururu / gotoku nari

winter wind—
as if hiding
in the bamboo

Matsuo Bashō

The poem opens with kogarashi — the winter wind, a classical seasonal word carrying centuries of poetic association. It is literally the tree-witherer: cold, relentless, stripping. The wind that unmasks, that takes away cover, that reduces the landscape to its bare essentials. The ya that follows is a cutting word, a caesura that holds the wind in isolation before the rest of the poem arrives.

Then take ni kakururu — hiding in the bamboo. Bamboo in East Asian thought is never merely botanical. It is admired for its hollowness, its capacity to bend without breaking and its ability to remain green through winter when everything else has been stripped bare. The word kakururu — hiding — is the poem’s first surprise. It imports something psychological into a phenomenon that classical poetry traditionally treated as impersonal force. But it is worth pausing over what kind of interiority this might be. To call it straightforward personification may be too quick, too anthropocentric. What it may be recognizing is something older — an animist perception in which hiding is not borrowed from human experience but native to the wind itself, a mode of being proper to wind as a living presence in the world. Or something zoomorphic — the wind as creature, going small and still in the way an animal does, through instinct rather than intention. The poem does not resolve this, and the openness is part of its meaning.

Bashō uses gotoku to mark the boundary between what was perceived and what was imagined. The wind moving through bamboo — that is the perception, the physical event in the world. The sense of hiding, of a presence withdrawing into concealment — that is what the perception called forth in the mind. “As if” holds these two things apart with precision. It refuses to assert that the wind actually hides while refusing equally to dismiss the imagining as mere fancy. It says: this is what the wind’s movement through the bamboo summoned in the speaker’s mind. The comparison is offered as a record of experience, not a claim about reality. And by tying the imagining to the perceiving body, gotoku invites the reader to consider in precisely what manner the wind’s movements and sounds created this impression — a question full personification makes less available by asserting the hiding as simply there, leaving the reader no threshold to cross, no movement of perception to retrace.

The significance of gotoku becomes even clearer when this poem is placed alongside what seems to be  a companion piece :

木枯しや竹に隠れてしづまりぬ
kogarashi ya / take ni kakurete / shizumarinu

winter wind—
hiding in the bamboo
and becoming quiet

Matsuo Bashō

This version uses full unqualified personification — kakurete, hiding, without the as if of gotoku — and the wind does not merely seem to hide but actually hides, and stills. The difference is not just stylistic but epistemological, and it is explained by a single fact: this poem carries the preface chikugasan — a tribute to a painting of bamboo. It is an ekphrastic poem, written in response to a painted image rather than a lived encounter with wind and bamboo in the world.

The distinction is exact and illuminating. When Bashō responds to a painting — to an image already existing in the domain of representation — unqualified personification is appropriate. The wind in the picture is not the wind in the world; it is already a figure, already mediated, held within the frame of art. Asserting that it hides, that it stills, does not falsify a perception because no perception of the world is being reported. But when Bashō encounters the actual kogarashi moving through actual bamboo, the honest form is as if. The wind is real, the bamboo is real, and the sense of hiding is what the poet’s mind found there — not a fact about the wind but a fact about this particular encounter between a perceiving consciousness and the world. Gotoku marks that distinction with fidelity. The simile is not a weaker form of the metaphor. It is the form demanded by the difference between responding to a painting and responding to experience.

And that difference is not a fact about what Bashō was doing when he wrote each poem — we have no privileged access to that, and the poem doesn’t ask us to. It is a fact about what each text tells its reader. The companion poem carries the preface chikugasan, a tribute to a painting of bamboo: the poem announces its own domain, and within that domain — an image already mediated, already a figure — unqualified personification asserts nothing false, because no perception of the world is being reported. Kogarashi ya / take ni kakururu / gotoku nari carries no such preface. Whatever occasioned it, the poem itself must supply its own framing, and it does: gotoku marks the boundary the missing preface does not.

To feel the full weight of what gotoku does, it helps also to consider what the poem becomes in a version using juxtaposition:

winter wind
something hiding
in the bamboo

Consider what happens if we remove gotoku. This is not simply a weaker version of Bashō’s poem. It produces a different kind of uncertainty. The phrase “something hiding” leaves open the possibility that an actual presence is concealed in the bamboo: an animal, perhaps, or some other thing the reader cannot identify. The poem therefore makes the reader decide whether the hiding is literal or figurative.

The interpretive energy disperses rather than concentrating. And paradoxically, this dispersal, which appears to be openness, produces less resonance — because ma requires edges that remain distinct.

In Bashō’s original, that uncertainty is located differently. Gotoku tells us that the wind is not literally hiding. What remains uncertain is not what is in the bamboo, but how the wind’s movement and sound have been experienced: why does it seem to be hiding? The simile transfers the poem’s uncertainty from the status of the thing perceived to the character of the perception itself.

The qualification does not therefore reduce the poem’s imaginative openness. Paradoxically, it creates the conditions for it. The reader is free to inhabit the wind’s imagined hiding precisely because the poem has marked it as an imagining. Because simile closes off the literal reading entirely, it creates the conditions for complete imaginative commitment — and it is only through that complete commitment that the poem’s deeper ironies become perceptible.

Kogarashi is the wind that reveals by stripping — that is its nature, its seasonal role, its entire classical identity. The great uncovering force that leaves things exposed and bare. And yet here it hides. The revealer concealed. This is the first irony.

It hides in bamboo — one of the very few things it cannot strip bare. The wind finds shelter in the one thing that resists its own work. This is the second irony — the stripping force taking cover in what cannot be stripped.

Taken together, these first two ironies illustrate the yin-yang dynamic so often found in Bashō’s poems: what is great becomes small, and what is small becomes great. The great winter wind, the force that strips the landscape bare, is reduced to something hiding within a bamboo grove; the seemingly fragile bamboo becomes large enough to shelter and contain it. Each is transformed by its relation to the other.

And then the third irony, which contains and reverses all the others. The hiding reveals. The wind, by entering the bamboo, by concealing itself within its hollow green chambers, gives itself the form through which we can perceive it — sound, movement, the shaking of culms, the rushing through hollowness. The bamboo that shelters the wind simultaneously discloses it completely. The concealment is the revelation. The force that unmasks everything is known only when it masks itself. There is something almost Zen-like in this reversal: concealment becomes a mode of appearance, and what seems like absence becomes a condition of presence.

These ironies do not depend on gotoku — they are latent in the content itself, available in principle to any version of this scene. But they tend to recede into the background in the other versions, where nothing holds the reader at the threshold long enough to notice them. Simile makes them available. It is because the hiding has been marked as imagining, and the imagining fully committed to, that the reader is positioned to follow the logic through to its reversal: that this creaturely, imagined hiding is precisely what makes the wind perceptible, present, real. The juxtaposition version, busy deciding whether the hiding is literal or figurative, has little attention left over for what the hiding might mean once decided. The personification version states the wind’s interiority too directly for the reversal to register as a reversal — the reader is told the wind hides, and there is no threshold left to cross, no movement of perception to retrace. Nothing in either version makes these ironies impossible to notice. But simile is what brings them forward.

As if — the marking of an imagining that may be a deeper perception — is what makes it easiest to hold all three ironies together as a single paradoxical movement.

There is a further layer the poem holds in reserve — the subject of kakururu is unspecified. Japanese does not require it, and the absence is not accidental. The poem also contains the meaning rendered in another translation:

The winter blast—
as if I were hiding
in the bamboo.

Translation: Makoto Ueda

 The grammar leaves open the possibility that it is not the wind hiding but the speaker. That ambiguity creates a kind of fusion: the human impulse to seek shelter and the wind’s withdrawal into the bamboo become indistinguishable. The external and internal mirror each other.

And for the reader who is familiar with the Nozarashi Kikō — Bashō’s journey of 1684, in which he set out resolved to offer himself to the road, to exposure, to the possibility of dying in the fields — underneath everything, barely declared but impossible to miss entirely, is the biographical shadow.

At the beginning of the journey in the opening hokku Bashō writes:

野ざらしを心に風のしむ身かな
nozarashi o / kokoro ni kaze no / shimu mi kana

A skeleton exposed in a field
Comes across my mind,
A piercing cold wind blows.

Translation: Toshiharu Oseko

This is the wind Bashō once walked into. Here it is hiding. Vulnerable. Creaturely. Seeking the one green shelter remaining in the stripped winter world. The poet who offered his bones to the wind watches kogarashi take cover in bamboo.

As if is what keeps the personal meaning present in the way that matters: felt rather than declared, hiding in the poem in its ambiguous subject, the way the wind hides in the bamboo, known to be there precisely because it cannot quite be seen.

This final layer reveals not just the flexibility of simile in context, but its necessity in certain kinds of haiku: of all the poems offered as examples, Bashō’s poem using simile, the poem that most carefully distinguishes perception from imagination, is also the one that most deeply dissolves the boundary between self and world.

2. The Hesitating Eye

Bashō’s kogarashi poem shows simile at its most philosophically charged: the comparison allows an imagined perception to deepen without pretending that the imagining is a fact about the world. But the same honesty can operate in a much quieter way. Sometimes the imagining lasts no longer than the instant it takes the eye to mistake one thing for another.

名月の花かと見えて綿畠
meigetsu no / hana ka to miete / wata-batake

Makoto Ueda translates it:

looking as though
the harvest moon has blossomed
a cotton field

L. P. Lovee gives:

looks like flowers
under the full moon
a cotton field

John Carley makes the hesitation more explicit:

the harvest moon
in bloom? — or so it seems
this cotton field

Gabi Greve pushes the image further:

As if blossoms have fallen
from the harvest moon—
the cotton field

The range of these translations reveals something about the poem. The Japanese original contains a hesitation that English translators must decide how to render. Hana ka to miete can be understood in terms of appearing or seeming to be flowers, while ka to marks the perception as tentative rather than simply asserting an identity. Ueda’s “looking as though” preserves that distinction, while Carley’s “in bloom? — or so it seems” makes the hesitation more conspicuous. Lovee’s “looks like flowers” retains the comparison in a more colloquial form. Greve’s “as if blossoms have fallen” moves further toward an imagined transformation, but still explicitly marks it as an imagining.

A Doshisha University translation takes a very different path:

the full moon
turned a cotton field
to flowers

Here the comparison has disappeared altogether. The moon does not merely appear to have blossomed; it actually transforms the cotton field into flowers. What the Japanese presents as a moment of uncertain perception becomes an assertion of transformation. This is precisely the distinction that concerns us. The translation demonstrates, almost by accident, what is lost when the qualification is removed: the distance between the thing perceived and the image it evokes.

Another ambiguity lies in the comparison itself, one that the first four translations variously preserve or resolve. Are we looking at a cotton field that resembles flowers beneath the harvest moon, or at a harvest moon that appears to have blossomed over the field? The Japanese allows both readings. The moon and the cotton are not simply two objects placed side by side; their resemblance is reciprocal, and the direction of the imagining remains unsettled.

There is a biographical layer here too, lighter than the one held in reserve for the kogarashi poem but worth naming. Bashō’s writings contain several encounters with the harvest moon, including journeys undertaken specifically for moon-viewing. Even if we cannot securely identify this hokku with a particular occasion, that tradition of seeking the moon forms part of the poem’s background. A reader aware of those journeys might hear in hana ka to miete something more than a meditation on perception in the abstract: the response of a mind already prepared to receive the moon, already shaped by the desire to encounter it, finding an unexpected version of that vision in the field before it.

The hesitation in ka to would then carry a particular poignancy. It is not only “is this the moon or is this cotton?” but perhaps “is this close enough to what I was seeking?” The poem does not tell us this, and nothing depends on attributing such a state of mind to Bashō himself. What such biographical knowledge offers, if a reader brings it, is the same kind of unclaimed resonance that the Nozarashi kikō echo offers for the wind in bamboo: not an explanation of the poem, but an additional depth of experience.

There may be a further, quieter substitution folded into the comparison. Hana — blossoms — belongs properly to hanami, spring’s great viewing occasion, not to tsukimi, autumn’s, which is what has actually gathered the speaker beneath the meigetsu tonight. For an instant, looking for the moon, the eye reaches for the vocabulary of another season’s delight, as if what belongs to one occasion could momentarily be supplied by the image proper to another.

The substitution runs deeper still. Cotton flowers belong to summer; by the time of the harvest moon, what stands white in the fields is not the blossom but the boll — the fiber that opens only after the flower has fallen and its flowering is complete. What the eye mistakes for bloom is therefore not simply the wrong season’s image borrowed to console for this season’s occasion. It is a plant caught in the visible aftermath of flowering, briefly resembling, under this particular light, the very thing it no longer is.

But ka to does not simply retract the image once the eye corrects itself. It preserves the blossoming as something genuinely seen, even as it withdraws the claim that it is literally there. Nothing is discarded. What is withdrawn is only the poem’s right to assert the vision as fact — and that withdrawal is precisely what allows the image to survive its own correction.

A field of cotton, already past its true flowering, appears for an instant to bloom again under a moon it was never entitled to bloom for. Tsukimi borrows, for a breath, the image of hanami, and the poem neither pretends that this happened nor allows the vision simply to disappear. The simile is not essential because it decorates the scene. It is essential because it is the only device that can admit an image was never literally true while refusing, in the same motion, to relinquish its truth as an experience.

The simile is central to the poem because the poem is not simply about the moon and the cotton field. If the poem’s purpose were only to place the two images in relation, unqualified juxtaposition might be sufficient. But the poem is concerned with something more fleeting: the hesitation between seeing the cotton field and seeing the moon blossom, the flicker of recognition followed by the return to what is actually there. Its true subject is the movement of perception, and simile is precisely the form that can give that movement a verbal shape.

3. The Frame of Perception

A further example comes from the contemporary Japanese haiku poet Imai Sei. The poem has circulated in French translation in Francophone haiku anthologies and online resources, appearing as:

Les autoroutes de Tokyo
ressemblent à des intestins
sous la pleine lune

French translation:  author Sei Imai , plus Ryū Yotsuya and André Duhaime

Rendered into English:

Tokyo highways
like intestines
under the full moon

I have not been able to securely ascertain the Japanese original; the transcriptions I could find are inconsistent, and I make no claim about what the source line does or does not do. But this does not matter for what follows, and I have chosen to study the poem regardless, because it is an especially useful example for the question this essay is asking. The poem reaches us in French, made with the poet’s own participation, and it is in French and English that we will read it here — what will concern us is what the marker accomplishes for the reader actually holding these words.

Here the like is useful to clarify the poem’s register as the alternate version makes clear.

Tokyo highways
intestines
under the full moon

Without it, the highways can become a place of literal death— intestines suggesting roadkill, murder, visceral fact. What the simile does is make clear that this is a personal image stemming from the haijin’s imagination, that it does not belong to the realm of the literal. This is ontological honesty doing work we haven’t yet seen it do. Against metaphor, it withholds an assertion the metaphor would otherwise make. Here there is no metaphor to compare against — only the bare identification a stripped-down version of this poem offers instead — and the marker’s job is different: not refusing a claim, but telling the reader, before any question of truth arises, what domain the image belongs to at all. Without that signal, the reader has no instruction about which register to inhabit, and in a short form with no surrounding context, the darkest or most concrete reading can easily dominate. The like frames the image as an act of vision, shielding it from literalization while leaving its implications open.

The simile narrows the focus of the poem, making clear that the relationship starts with a visual parallel. Yet that the two images are explicitly linked does not diminish the ma, because the leap between them is large enough that the reader still has to do the work of understanding how they fit together. The simile initiates the comparison; it does not complete it.

The fact that the intestines can simultaneously evoke the visual geometry of highway systems, the ambivalence of modernisation, and the imagery of seppuku — a self-inflicted wound, a city gutting itself — demonstrates that the simile has not exhausted the poem’s resonance. Seen from above, elevated expressways genuinely coil and loop, ramps stacking and doubling back on themselves, protruding above the ground the way intestines protrude within a body cavity — the resemblance is not a stretch imposed on the city but something the eye could plausibly find there unprompted. The seppuku reading is particularly telling: it suggests not merely ugliness but a specific kind of ugliness, the voluntary and ritual destruction of something that was once whole — old Tokyo, the Tokyo of the samurai and the moon, disembowelling itself to make way for the modern. That the simile can hold this reading alongside the purely visual one — the aerial geometry of highways seen from above — without forcing a choice between them is evidence that the ma remains active.

The full moon is doing quiet but essential work. It provides the light source that makes the aerial vision possible — without it, the highways would not be visible from above in this way, the comparison would have no occasion. But it also frames the whole image within a tradition of moonlit contemplation, invoking centuries of Japanese poetry in which the moon presides over moments of beauty, transience, and reflection. That ancient light falling on the intestinal geometry of the modern city creates an ambivalence that neither element alone could produce. The simile is what keeps this contrast from tipping into provocation. It says: I am genuinely comparing, not equating the city with viscera. The like preserves enough distance for the moon’s quiet dignity to survive alongside the ugliness beneath it.

This example establishes a function of simile that goes beyond the visual and perceptual. By marking the image as personal vision rather than objective fact, the like introduces a consciousness into the poem — someone for whom the highways appeared this way, on this night, under this moon. The reader senses a subjectivity behind the comparison, and with it an emotion: something between ambivalence and elegy, the feeling of a poet who cannot look at his city without seeing both its necessity and its cost. The examples that will follow  in our next part take this one step further — from subjectivity marked by simile to subjectivity as the poem’s entire subject. That will be the concern of Part III.

Conclusion

But before that, as a conclusion: these examples answer one of the most common critiques of simile in ELH, exemplified by Paul Miller, writing in “Toolbox: Similes Real and Implied”:

“However, I think the real problem with the use of simile in haiku is that it is a complete thought, and doesn’t allow for any space (or ma) between any parts of the poem, thus not allowing the reader any active engagement with the poem. The reader is simply a passive observer, and all they can do is agree or disagree with the (essentially) poetic statement.”

Miller’s complaint assumes the comparison is the poem’s endpoint. Here it plainly is not — the examples by Basho and Imai Sei clearly how that simile did not exhaust these poems. If acknowledging a resemblance exhausts a haiku, the simile was never the problem — the image was simply not resonant enough to sustain attention, and the technique is being blamed for a poverty that was already there. The cases Miller references, where simile makes the poem lesser, only demonstrate that the image could not sustain the full weight of acknowledged comparison, or that the poem’s moment was not compatible with simile, not that simile inherently impoverishes haiku.

Returning to Miller’s words — he says all the reader can do is agree or disagree with the poet’s statement. I would say the reader can do considerably more. Haiku is not primarily a poetry of definitions or epistemological sketches. It is a poetry of moments and experiences. The reader does not have to agree or disagree with the comparison so much as inhabit it — entering for an instant into the poet’s way of seeing.

Imagination is not the opposite of experience but fully part of it. And simile is one tool that makes an integral part of human experience  available to haiku. That is the opposite of impoverishment.

— Orense Nicod

This exploration of simile will be an extensive deep dive, so rather than running its parts consecutively, we’ll be interspersing them with other topics along the way.

Next week, Chorus 3 will bring us back to the past.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

For the final instalment of our series on simile, I would like to turn to English-language haiku, after looking at examples from Bashō, Issa, Buson, Shiki, Kyoshi and many other Japanese poets. To help answer the question what does simile look like in haiku written in English today?, I would like to gather a wider range of examples—not only poems that support the arguments we have made, but interesting uses of simile of any kind.

If you have an example of a haiku using simile, preferably one published by yourself or another poet, please send it to us using the proposals form and include the poet’s name and where the haiku was published.

We look forward to seeing what you find.

At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 5 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.

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