Features

Moon and Finger 17 – Simile Part 3

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

Simile and the Mechanics of Ma
Part III: The Humble Device

 

At this midpoint in the series, some readers may wonder why so much scrutiny is being placed upon simile, a modest device, a simple way of saying that one thing resembles another. Is like really that deep?

Yet if haiku teaches us anything, it is that what is simple is rarely simplistic. The attention I give simile in these essays is proportional to the assumptions surrounding it. Because simile is so accessible, it is often seen as common or crude, and even treated as a beginner’s device. But its very simplicity conceals its complexity. The humble like does not merely connect two images. It establishes a relationship, a perspective, and a particular way of communicating experience.

Simile is one of the most familiar figures of speech, yet perhaps precisely for that reason it is one of the least examined. The same small word belongs equally to the language of everyday conversation and to the highest literary traditions. It appears in a text message and in Shakespeare. It is therefore often caught in an uncomfortable position: too ordinary to feel elevated, and too elevated to feel ordinary.

Simile’s double nature as elevated and ordinary is peculiarly congenial to haiku. Haiku has always had a particular affinity with the ordinary, while also being capable of making the ordinary strange, luminous, or profound. The fact that like can move so easily between everyday speech and literary art, between ordinary and extraordinary, is surprisingly aligned with haiku’s deeper nature.

Simile’s ubiquity also points towards a fundamental function of the device. We are used to thinking of metaphor as the more fundamental device, more powerful, more sophisticated, more immediate. Metaphor seems cognitively primary: it can shape the categories through which we think. We understand time as money, arguments as battles, people as animals. But simile may have its own form of primacy: communicative primacy. Comparison is among the most basic ways we make sense of experience. Before we classify something, we may recognise it by relating it to something already known. And when we try to communicate an experience that resists direct description, we most often reach for simile. We say that something was like something else.

Simile communicates the movement by which one thing came to resemble another in a particular moment of perception. It was like… is not a conclusion about what something is. It is an invitation to see how it was experienced.

That route is necessarily situated. A comparison comes from somewhere. It belongs to a particular observer, at a particular moment, under particular conditions. This situated relation inevitably discloses a perspective. That is simile’s strength and irreplaceable function, and ironically it may also help explain why it sits uncomfortably in ELH. This acknowledged situatedness clashes with a major aesthetic ideal in English-language haiku: the minimisation of the author’s subjectivity or visible presence. The premise is that the poet should step back, allowing the thing itself to occupy the foreground, with as little trace of the perceiver as possible.

But this assumes that subjectivity is something that gets in the way of experience rather than an integral part of it.

What shasei sketches is never only the thing seen, nor only the person seeing, but the encounter between them. Simile makes that encounter visible without turning the poem into commentary or confession. The poet’s perspective is not an addition to the experience being communicated. It is fully part of the experience.

 

1.  A Meeting 

Our first poem, by Imai Sei, makes this apparent:

入道雲恩師の如き牛に遇ふ
nyūdōgumo onshi no gotoki ushi ni au

thunderhead—
I meet a cow
like my old teacher

— Imai Sei, 九月の明るい坂 (Kyūgatsu no akarui saka, 2020)

The comparison is unmistakably personal. The cow reminds the poet of his old teacher, his mentor. We cannot know exactly what prompted the association, nor do we need to. Perhaps it is something in the cow’s expression, its manner, its stillness, or simply its presence. The particular reason belongs to the poet. Yet the perception itself is not private.

This distinction is crucial. A private association would require us to know something about the poet’s personal history in order to understand the poem. A personal association does not. We may never have met the teacher, or understand exactly what the poet saw in the cow, but we can recognise the experience of suddenly seeing one thing through another. The comparison communicates not the biographical content of the association, but the act of recognition itself.

In this sense, simile does not communicate a private association. It communicates the experience of having an association.

The poet’s subjectivity becomes part of what is being shared. We do not have to share his particular association for the perception to become available to us. What is universal is not the resemblance between this cow and this teacher. What is universal is the experience of resemblance arising in the mind.

This is one of the ways in which simile can be communicatively generous. It acknowledges the difference between poet and reader while giving the reader something through which that difference can be crossed. The comparison remains the poet’s, but the experience of comparing is offered to the reader.

What exactly is being compared remains open. The cow may resemble the old teacher in manner or presence: something impassive, inscrutable, immovable, unbothered. Yet the comparison can also be read more dynamically. Confronted with the enormous presence of the thunderhead, the cow simply remains where it is. In that sense, it is almost like a teacher in another role: not someone who resembles the poet’s old teacher, but something that teaches by showing how to remain oneself in the presence of forces vastly greater than oneself.

The simile does not ask us to accept that the cow is, in some essential sense, a teacher. Nor does it ask us to discover some objective correspondence between the two. It simply tells us that, in this moment, one was seen through the other. The comparison remains visibly situated in an act of perception. Like also preserves the distance between cow and teacher. If the poet were to identify the two, the teacher would risk becoming a joke, while the cow would become merely a substitute for a human figure. There is humour but  simile keeps the movement subtler than mockery. The cow remains a cow, the teacher remains a teacher, and the poet’s perception moves between them.

And this is precisely what can be lost when the simile is removed. The subjective perception does not necessarily disappear. It may simply become harder to see. A juxtaposition can make a subjective relationship appear to belong to the things themselves, as though the connection between them were an objective property waiting to be noticed. Simile leaves the trace of the perceiver in place.

The kind of relationship created by simile also touches on a larger question about what it means to represent experience in haiku. If the thing observed cannot be entirely separated from the person who encounters it, then shasei need not mean simply sketching an object as though it existed independently of the observer. The encounter itself can become part of what is represented.

This question became particularly important in the development of modern haiku. Imai Sei studied under Katō Shūson, an important figure in the ningen tankyū-ha, usually translated as the “Human Exploration school” or “Humanity Pursuit School.” The movement pushed shasei towards a greater recognition of the human encounter with the observed world. The point was not simply to abandon observation, but to recognise that what is observed is experienced by someone. But what appears as a later theoretical development is present in haiku from thd start and can already be found in much earlier haiku.


2. Grasping the Wind 

Issa’s mountain-temple poem is a striking example. Here the subjective experience is not merely present within the comparison. It comes much closer to being the subject of the poem itself:

 山寺や木がらしの上に寝るがごと
yamadera ya / kogarashi no ue ni / neru ga goto

mountain temple —
as if sleeping
on winter wind

 —Kobayashi Issa

Most previous examples in the series have used simile to compare two external things: sake and rope, highways and intestines, a cat’s cry and a temple bell, a cow and a teacher. Here something different is happening. The simile, marked by ga goto, a contracted form of ga gotoku, meaning “like” or “as if,” is not comparing two observed phenomena but reaching inward, toward a physical and emotional experience that has no visible external correlate.

The temple is elevated and exposed. The kogarashi, the winter wind that strips the last leaves from the trees, is among the most desolate of seasonal markers in the Japanese tradition. The poem is about radical exposure: the absence of shelter, the body without protection against the elements, the impossibility of rest in such a place. The simile does not compare one visible thing to another. It conveys an inward, bodily experience that would be almost impossible to express otherwise. It creates a subjective atmosphere around the temple, telling us not what the place looks like but how it feels to inhabit it: exposed, precarious, restless, stripped of comfort.

Without ga goto, the poem would become a much stranger thing. The temple sleeping on the winter wind could read as surreal, or as a form of personification that overwhelms the emotional register, pulling the poem towards the fantastical when it wants to remain bodily and immediate. The simile preserves the instability of the image without collapsing it into literalism. There is also a productive grammatical ambiguity that the simile creates and protects: it is never entirely clear who is trying to sleep on the wind, the poet, the temple, or both. That ambiguity is not a weakness but a resonance, the kind of uncertainty that juxtaposition might produce but that here is generated and sustained by the simile itself.

So far this is the clearest example in the essay of simile not merely as the best among several available devices, but as the device that makes this particular kind of representation possible. Juxtaposition here would be not just insufficient but structurally impossible. There is no second external image to place beside the experience because the experience itself has no visible external correlate. The poem has an external scene, but its subject is the experience of that scene. Like is what licenses that interiority within the form.

Juxtaposition is not always simpler or more immediate. Sometimes forcing an experience into juxtaposition can produce the opposite effect, making what would naturally be expressed as a comparison feel more constructed and less direct. In ordinary speech, when people reach spontaneously for a comparison to describe a sensation, explain how something felt, or capture an impression they want to share, they reach naturally for like: it was like being underwater; she looked like she hadn’t slept in days; the whole thing felt like trying to hold smoke.

Simile is communicatively direct. It says: I cannot give you my experience directly but I can give you the means to approach it.

When haiku uses simile, it can tap into this quality of ordinary perception and ordinary speech, the sense that the poet is simply reporting how something appeared to them in the most direct available language. It can feel less like the deployment of a literary device and more like someone telling you what they experienced. Issa exploits this quality repeatedly. His similes often sound like conversation: intimate, unguarded, the comparison arriving as naturally as conversation but still extraordinary.

In the mountain-temple poem there is no second image to juxtapose with the experience. There is only the experience, and the like carries it towards the reader with the directness of someone simply saying what it was like to be there.

 

3. Grain by Grain 

Issa again gives us another kind of simile in:

夏のよや焼飯程の不二の山
natsu no yo ya yakimeshi hodo no Fuji no yama

summer night —
like a lump of fried rice
Mount Fuji

 —Kobayashi Issa
tr. David G. Lanoue

The haiku opens with the summer night, elevated into a ceremonial poetic object by the kireji ya. Its hon’i, the seasonal expectation of warmth, fullness, and contemplation, is comically deflated by what follows. Issa, it seems, was feeling peckish. Instead of attending to the beauty of Mount Fuji under the summer stars, what he sees is a lump of fried rice. It brings to mind the cartoon trope of the hungry character who begins to see roast chickens and whole hams everywhere: appetite transforming perception, the world reorganised around what the body wants. The moment is humorous and tender simultaneously, the comparison bringing the sublime within the compass of the domestic, the monumental resized to something you could hold in your hand and eat for dinner.

The simile marker here is hodo, a scalar expression of degree or extent. It measures Fuji against the fried rice, but the measure carries a visual comparison as a silent passenger. The resemblance has already been perceived: the conical mound of fried rice can correspond, in shape, in colour, and perhaps in its settled heaviness, to Fuji’s profile seen against the summer night sky. Hodo gives grammatical form to that perception without having to spell out every property that makes the two things resemble one another.

The heap itself is evocative. Fuji is conventionally imagined as rising: the iconic profile, the cone ascending, the peak reaching towards the sky. It is a vertical sublimity, a mountain that pulls the eye upward. But yakimeshi served on a plate is horizontal, heaped, settling under its own weight. It goes nowhere. The comparison quietly rotates Fuji from vertical to horizontal, from aspiring to satisfied, not reaching but simply sitting there: a very large mound of something, complete in itself and entirely unambitious.

There is something in the comparison that goes beyond hunger. Fried rice is nourishing. To see Fuji as food is not only to diminish it but to bring it within reach of a different kind of value: the value of what sustains, of what the body needs, of the homely and the sufficient. Even in the deflation there is a form of reverence. The mountain has not been mocked. It has been domesticated, brought into Issa’s intimate sphere, and made into something that feeds rather than merely overwhelms. Even if the poet is distracted by hunger, there may also be the suggestion that Mount Fuji’s beauty is itself a form of sustenance.

Hodo does something more precise than simply stating a comparison. It says, in effect: from here, in this state, under these conditions, Fuji appeared to have this degree or extent of resemblance to fried rice. It preserves the context-dependence of the comparison, keeping it tethered to a specific situated consciousness, embodied rather than allowing it to float free into a general statement.

Simile’s situatedness becomes particularly useful when the leap between two images is too great, too surprising, or too contingent to be left implicit. Many of the similes considered in this series are of this kind. By establishing a relation that juxtaposition could not reliably establish, simile can play a necessary role.

Consider a version with juxtaposition:

Mount Fuji
on a summer night
fried rice

The connection is not entirely unavailable. A reader might notice the visual correspondence: the shape, perhaps the pale colour in the darkness. But it is far from guaranteed. The reader might instead understand the two things simply in terms of simultaneity: Issa is eating a midnight snack while looking at Mount Fuji. That is an entirely different poem. Because the poem was never about the bare resemblance but instead about the conditions that would make Fuji appear like this to the poet. The like supplies what the juxtaposition withholds: the information that these two things are being brought together by an act of perception.

A useful way of understanding simile’s effect is therefore in terms of fragmentation. Simile does not necessarily compare things in their entirety. It selects a collection of properties, behaviours, or relations and allows those to correspond while leaving the rest of each thing intact. Metaphor can encourage us to experience the two terms as wholes brought into a new identity; juxtaposition often leaves the relationship to be inferred from the whole images placed beside one another. Simile, by contrast, can explicitly limit the comparison to what is perceived as corresponding.

This is why simile can tolerate strangeness to a degree that metaphor cannot. Strange comparisons are strange precisely because the properties being compared do not usually travel together, because the collection is unexpected, because it is true now and from here and might not survive a shift in perspective. The highways and the intestines. The mountain and the fried rice. The temple bell and the cat’s cry. As metaphors, these would make much larger claims: the identity would be too strange, too totalising, the assertion too large for what is actually perceived. As similes they work because they make no claim beyond the collection: these specific properties, these particular behaviours, this manner of being, correspond here, now, contingently, provisionally, in this act of perception.

But simile’s fragmentary nature does more than tolerate strangeness; it can also make the experience of perception more dynamic, as our next example shows.

 

4. A Letter Read Many Times

Iida Ryūta gives us an especially rich example because the simile is not visual in any simple sense:

 雪の日暮れはいくたびも読む文のごとし
yuki no higure wa ikutabi mo yomu fumi no gotoshi

sunset in snow
is like a letter read
many times

— Iida Ryūta
tr. Gabi Greve

A sunset in snow does not literally resemble a letter. What the comparison evokes is not shape or colour or motion but emotional texture, something resembling what the renku tradition describes as nioizuke, or fragrance-linking: the connection of two images not through logical analogy or direct perceptual correspondence but through a shared atmosphere, a tone that passes between them like a scent. The distinction between such linking within a single verse and linking between verses is less absolute in the tradition than our modern categories might suggest. Bashō’s practice and poetics do not always support the sharp separation we tend to now make between the autonomous poem and the linked verse. The associative principles cultivated in renku can therefore illuminate what happens within a single haiku as well.

The sunset in snow and the repeatedly read letter share a quality rather than a simple likeness. A letter read many times has been softened by repetition, faded by handling, worn by the accumulated weight of return. It carries the particular intimacy of something that has been held and set down and held again, cherished perhaps, but also marked by time, by absence, by whatever feeling first prompted the reading and all the feelings that have gathered around it since. The sunset in snow takes on those same qualities: muted, pale, attenuated by the white silence around it. It feels less like a blazing spectacle than something delicate and already half-disappearing, beautiful through wear rather than through intensity.

This introduces a distinct and underrecognised mode of simile, one that operates not through identifiable points of resemblance but through emotional analogy. We are accustomed to similes having a stable perceptual basis: shape, colour, motion, function, some quality that can be pointed to and named. Here that basis is withheld. The connection is real but inexhaustible. The reader keeps searching for the ground of the comparison and never quite reaches it. Is it because both are faded? Because both carry memory? Because both are beautiful through repetition? Because both are already in the process of disappearing? The answer is all of these and none of them completely, and that irreducibility is where the poem’s depth resides.

Crucially, the explicit like does not flatten this inexhaustibility. It intensifies it. By directing the reader to search for a connection, it sets in motion a process of comparison that cannot be completed. The reader knows with certainty that a connection exists; what remains uncertain is its exact nature. The simile marker gives the poem a definite relational structure while leaving the content of that relation open. It is, in the most precise sense, calibrated space: bounded enough to be inhabitable, open enough to be inexhaustible.

There may even be a further reciprocity hidden in the comparison. If the letter is something written and reread, the sunset can be imagined as writing on the snow: light falling across a white surface as ink falls upon paper. The snow becomes the page and the sunset the writing upon it, but this writing is transient, disappearing as the light changes. The comparison begins to move in both directions. We read the sunset as a letter, but we can also read the sunset as something that is itself writing on the snow. The image becomes not simply a comparison between two things but a reversible movement between reading and seeing.

This gives the simile a performative quality as well. The poem does not merely tell us about a letter that has been read many times. It makes us return to the comparison itself, reading the sunset through the letter and the letter through the sunset, each time finding a slightly different relation between them. The simile enacts the repetition it describes. We reread the comparison just as the letter has been reread, and the sunset becomes something that can be revisited rather than simply observed once. The figure is not only about repeated reading. It produces it.

The poem also asks the reader to supply the kind of letter it is. A love letter, a farewell, an old family letter, something treasured, something painful, something that has survived long after the original feeling has dimmed: each possibility opens a different emotional register, and the poem holds them all without committing to any. That uncertainty is not a weakness but the poem’s primary resource. The simile initiates the search; it does not conclude it.

This is why an atmospheric simile of this kind can preserve and even heighten ma. The explicit like gives the reader certainty that a connection exists, but not certainty about the exact nature of that connection. The comparison remains suspended, fragrant rather than fixed. Without the simile marker, sunset in snow and a letter read many times might feel too disconnected, the leap between them too great and too intangible to register reliably without prompting. The like is what tells the reader: there is something here, look for it. What the reader finds in looking is the poem.

 

Conclusion

These examples show that haiku poets separated by centuries, aesthetics, and different conceptions of what haiku should be have all drawn on simile at times. From the traditional sensibility of Iida Ryūta to the Humanity Pursuit School style of Katō Shūson and his student Imai Sei, from the Old Masters to gendai haijin, poets have not hesitated to reach for simile when it was necessary or useful. I am not claiming that simile is a dominant feature of the tradition, but neither is it an outsider.

Nor are juxtaposition and simile alternatives that have to exclude one another. A haiku can juxtapose two things while also explicitly comparing them. The thunderhead and the cow in Imai Sei’s poem establish a field of relation through juxtaposition, while simile tells us how the cow is being perceived within that field. The summer night and Mount Fuji provide the scene in Issa’s poem, while hodo marks the particular resemblance through which Fuji is being seen. The juxtaposition establishes the world of the poem; the simile can reveal what happens within the poet’s perception of that world.

This helps explain why the relative rarity of simile should not be mistaken for incompatibility or redundancy. Haiku already possesses techniques that can often achieve some of the relational effects of simile, and so the explicit comparison becomes unnecessary. But there are moments when the relation itself is the experience, when the particular conditions under which one thing becomes available through another cannot be preserved by juxtaposition alone. In those moments, the small comparative marker can become the exact instrument required.

In all four examples the form of the relation is part of the meaning. To replace the simile with juxtaposition, metaphor, or some other device is not necessarily to say the same thing more economically. It may change what kind of relationship the poem asks us to perceive. Simile can preserve distance without preventing intimacy, subjectivity without turning into self-display, and uncertainty without dissolving the relation altogether.

This may be where the humble character of the device becomes clearest. Simile makes a comparison without making too much of it. The poet does not have to turn a perception into a declaration or claim that two things are, in some deeper sense, the same. The like acknowledges the comparison as a particular act of seeing: this is how it appeared to me, here and now. There is a quiet artlessness in that, and sometimes simile can even be an instrument of karumi. The poet’s subjectivity enters the poem without alienating the reader from experience.

As we will see next, simile can also be understood as an act of pointing, a gesture almost as simple as saying: look here. The poet’s perception is present, but the reader remains free to enter the comparison through their own perception.

Simile therefore tells us not only what the poet saw, but something about how the comparison came about. We do not simply hold two terms side by side and register a likeness. We move from one to the other, discovering in the movement the particular quality that makes the comparison possible. Next, in Part IV, The Pointing Finger, we will follow that movement more closely and go deeper still into simile’s nature and the mechanics of ma.

 

— Orense Nicod

 

A challenge for the reader:

Can you rewrite these four examples without simile while preserving what they most essentially do? 

Do you think simile is indispensable to certain kinds of experience, or are there always other ways of communicating what it makes possible?

As always discussion is welcome in the comments.

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, before we move on to Part 4, Keith Evetts will provide a breather from simile and explore how aphorisms and proverbs fit into haiku.

 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Still looking for simile in English-language haiku for the final instalment of our series.

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.

 

Imai Sei (今井聖)

Born October 12, 1950, in Niigata, and raised in Tottori City. His real name is Imai Kunihiro (今井邦博). He studied at Meiji Gakuin University, in both the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Letters, and later taught at Yokohama High School.

He began writing haiku at fourteen. In 1971 he joined Kanrai (寒雷), the journal founded by Katō Shūson, and studied under Shūson directly. In 1981, on Shūson’s recommendation, he won the Kanrai-shū Prize, and he became a full member (同人) of Kanrai in 1985. In 1995 he won the Seizan Prize. After working on the Kanrai editorial staff, he founded and became the leader (主宰) of his own haiku journal, Machi (街), in 1996.

Alongside haiku, he has worked as a screenwriter since 1993, studying under Baba Tō, and has contributed to film and television, including the film Asian Blue: Ukishima-maru Sakon.

His books include the haiku-themed memoir Like a Rolling Stone: Haiku Shōnen Hyōryūki (published by Iwanami Shoten), the youth title Bukatsu de Haiku (Iwanami Junior Shinsho), and four haiku collections: Hokugen, Tanima no Kagu, Bāberu ni Tsuki Nosete, andKyūgatsu no akarui saka. In 2017 he published a critical study of his teacher, Kotoba to nareba mō furushi: Katō Shūson-ron, which won the 32nd Haijin Kyōkai Criticism Prize. His students include Kitaōji Tsubasa and Shibata Chiaki.

He serves as a selector for the Tokyo Shimbun Kanagawa haiku column, is a director of the Haijin Kyōkai (Association of Haiku Poets), and is a member of the Japan Scenario Writers Association.

Iida Ryūta (飯田龍太)

Born July 10, 1920, in Kogurozaka, Yamanashi Prefecture, the fourth son of the haiku poet Iida Dakotsu. His mother was Kikuno. The family lived at Sanro (山廬), the Iida estate in Sakaigawa, where Dakotsu farmed and wrote, and where he founded the haiku journal Unmo (雲母, “mica”) in 1930.

A sickly child, Ryūta was raised largely by his grandmother. He attended Kōfu Middle School, then moved to Tokyo after failing his high school entrance exam, studying at a preparatory school and reading widely in the secondhand bookshops of Kanda. In 1940 he entered the literature faculty at Kokugakuin University, drawn there by the folklorist and poet Orikuchi Shinobu, and began composing haiku during his student years.

His three older brothers died, leaving Ryūta as heir to the family. After graduating, he returned home to help edit Unmo. When Dakotsu died in 1962, Ryūta inherited headship of the three-hundred-year-old Iida estate and took over as leader (主宰) of the journal, also serving as a haiku selector for the Mainichi Shimbun. Alongside Mori Sumio, he became one of the central figures of the traditionalist wing of postwar haiku, known for a style more delicate and lyrical than his father’s, marked by close, quiet observation of the Yamanashi landscape.

In August 1992, at issue 900, he ended Unmo’s run by his own decision, a widely noted moment in postwar haiku history, and largely withdrew from public life afterward, publishing little more. He also worked to broaden haiku’s popular reach, founding the NHK Gakuen haiku course in 1981, and contributed to Yamanashi’s cultural institutions, including its prefectural literature museum.

His major collections include Hyakko no Tani (百戸の谿, 1954), Dōbō (童眸, 1959), and Chisoku (遅速, 1991). He was a member of the Japan Art Academy and a recipient of the Person of Cultural Merit honor. He died of pneumonia in Kōfu on February 25, 2007, at the age of 86.

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 SIMILE 1 POLL  if you haven’t already.

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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Comments (48)

  1. 🆕️
    Found in an attic trunk, a yellowed letter:

    Dear Theo,

    I am much taken with your series of Theo-ries concerning the arts; or should I say, the Arts. The sight of a mind that penetrates way beyond Reality is thrilling.

    Meanwhile, I have continued in my own artistic callings. I enclose my latest haiku as a gift to you. It seems to a materialist to be a brick, a humdrum object. A London yellow, to be precise, that I brought home from the tip. In my life, I have experienced many such bricks. Indeed, my house is made of them. I do not mean this metaphorically. The yellow reminds me of summer, but that is just my subjective view. Or, as perhaps I should say, my idiosyncratic interiority. I have shaped the brick with my own hands. You will see the characteristic trowel-marks where the mortar is cleaned off, leaving one small bit as a blemish to remind us of our own imperfections, if any. It is cut slantwise into two asymmetric parts, and should be displayed, or rather, read, with a small gap preserved between them. I shall be most interested to see whether your view of this object corresponds with mine, although I realise that that doesn’t matter in the least. You may experience it as a square banana.

    Since we last exchanged news, I have had no luck with selling my prized unsigned Picassos, as there is no provenance linking them to the artist, and those capitalist ignoramuses at Christieby’s for some reason attach value to a proven connection with the artist. But the terribly well-bred and expensively-dressed young lady in charge of art auctions was very interested in the blank cheque signed with Picasso’s authentic signature, which my grandfather elected to keep rather than cash it in as payment for installing the man’s boiler.

    I have had a similar reaction to the exact copy of Rodin’s Thinker, which to prove your theories should stand alone as a work of Art. For the enlightened should give not two hoots for the artist, but only for the work, which is identical in every respect (except for being slightly cleaner, as the pigeons have not yet got at it). The auction-house was as dismissive as they were of my random arrangement of ballpoint pens in a toothmug, observing that if I had an established name as a bad boy of the art world that might be a different story. And bricks? Alas, that has already been done by Carl Andre in his Equivalent series, when I was in the green of my years.

    I am now writing a novel in the Elder Futhark. It is not the work of my daytime self, but dictated in the small hours by unseen spirits. Random and unexpected images collide in places. It will be like a lamp-post in the Sahara. I am sure that it will have a Life of its own, for does not Life imitate Art?

    Cordially Yours

    Confundius

    P.S. We shall have to meet in secret when the new ban on laughing enters into force.

    Reply

  2. 🆕️@Keith Evetts @Adam Graham

    Keith, I’ll complicate your account of “meaning” as something the poem is made to convey by seizing on something Adam was already gesturing towards when he introduced reflexivity in his earlier comment.

    The writer is the poem’s first reader. Even when a writer begins with a particular “meaning” in mind, the writing process often reveals further dimensions that were not consciously present at the outset. A word changes what the next word can be; an image establishes a relation that the writer only recognises once it has appeared. The writer then has to encounter what they have made, taking up, to some degree, the position of an other in relation to themselves.

    Formal poetry makes this particularly obvious. When some of the formal choices are outsourced to the form, the writer is no longer free to make every decision. The constraint produces possibilities that the writer then has to discover and respond to. This is one reason formal poetry is so often described as revelatory: the form can lead the writer somewhere they did not consciously intend to go.

    That does not make the resulting poem less crafted or less subjective. Quite the opposite. The craft lies partly in recognising what the constraints have made possible and choosing how to respond to them. The writer creates constraints, and then becomes a reader of what those constraints produce.

    So perhaps the sequence is not really writer → poem → reader. It is more like writer ↔ emerging poem ↔ reader. Writing and reading are, in this sense, not fundamentally different activities. The difference is that, in writing, the thing encountered is coming into existence at the same time as it is being read.

    This, I think, is also why I resist saying that the poem itself has a subjectivity. It doesn’t need one. The poem is inert in itself. What it has is a configuration of constraints capable of acting upon a subjectivity. The subjectivity belongs to the writer or reader; the constraints belong to the poem; the encounter is where they meet.

    And the haiku tradition seems to have been extraordinarily aware of this tension. In fact, much of its history can be understood as an elaboration of the reciprocity between reading and writing.

    Renku/renga makes it almost literal. Each poet reads what has just been made and writes in response to it. The previous verse is simultaneously something received and a set of constraints from which the next verse can emerge. Reading and writing become two movements within the same act.

    Honkadori extends the process across time. What was once written becomes something to be read, and what is read becomes material for new writing.

    Saijiki and kigo do something similar. A kigo is not merely information about a season. It is inherited poetic material, carrying associations accumulated through generations of reading and writing. The poet enters an already populated field of possibilities and constraints. Tradition therefore gives the poet not simply content but a structure within which perception and making can interact.

    And utamakura takes this reciprocity into the landscape itself. The poet does not simply encounter a geographical place and then attach a poem to it. A place such as Yoshino or Tatsuta has already been poetically read. Its name brings earlier poems, associations and expectations into the present encounter. The landscape becomes something the poet reads through the tradition, just as the tradition has become something encountered through the landscape. The inherited poem can therefore help constitute the experience from which the new poem is made.

    That complicates the simple movement from experience to poem. The poem is already part of the experience.

    So perhaps the haiku tradition has long understood something that our modern model of communication tends to obscure: writing and reading are not opposite ends of a transmission. They are recursive acts of making. The writer reads what is emerging; the reader makes something from what has emerged; and tradition provides the constraints that allow those acts to meet.

    And perhaps this also explains the more modest conception of authorship we often find in the haiku tradition. If the poet is always writing within a field of inherited forms, words, places, poems and conventions, and is in turn discovering through what the poem gives back, then authorship was never quite the act of originating something from nothing. The modesty marks the conditions under which creativity actually happens: the poet is a participant in an ongoing process of reading and making.

    One tradition’s déjà-ku bordering on plagiarism, is the other’s routine participation in the universal renku.

    Reply

  3. 🆕️ARTHUR KOESTLER/CREATIVE ACT/HAIKU?

    Please note– I am offering this in response to a few things I have noticed in this installment of M & F, though I have not read the whole thing. It demands more of me than I can give right now. I hope it will not seem too out of place, and please know that it does not correspond to what appears to be a conversation happening between a few people. I hoped to use this in reply to posts about humor, and “cross[ing] the gap” and other things, but the allowable number of replies have been used up apparently.

    I am surprised that there is very little mention of Arthur Koestler’s ideas about “bisociation” and the creative act in relation to haiku on the web. M D Welch does write briefly about it in an essay on humor, but I can find nothing else.

    Koestler says: “I have coined the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane,’ as it were, and the creative act, which … always operates on more than one plane. The former can be called single-minded, the latter double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.”

    “The pattern underlying [the creative act] is the perceiving of a situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. The event [the moment of realization or insight] in which the two intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths . . .not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with two.”

    It could be argued that the “gap” created in haiku is the place where, between two discrete images or ideas, a third thing arises, which shares a “vibrational” field with both.

    The idea of a mandorla may apply, but I think in a limited way. I had hoped not to enlist AI in this, but after having written a bunch already and losing it, I will—

    ***Koestler’s bisociation can be imagined as a mandorla: two autonomous matrices of perception overlap without surrendering their difference, and the creative event occurs in the luminous, unstable interval they share.

    The haiku cut creates a mandorla-like field in which two images remain distinct yet become mutually transformative; Koestler’s term for the reader’s double awareness of those images is bisociation.***

    I suppose an argument against seeing the idea of bisociation as closely related to what haiku does would be that in haiku the two discrete elements don’t create a third thing but a pause in perception— an emptiness.

    But then, is that emptiness a creative field which the reader enters, lit by the spark created by the collision of separate entities?

    You might find this entry from Maria Popova’s Marginalian helpful in discussing Koestler:

    https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/20/arthur-koestler-creativity-bisociation/

    Reply

    1. 🆕️@Peter Youvu

      BISOCIATION/MITATE

      Peter, I think Koestler’s idea of bisociation is certainly relevant to this discussion.

      Where I remain hesitant is in treating bisociation as an account of what the cut itself does. It seems to me to describe one kind of event that can occur within the interval created by the cut, rather than the interval itself. A haiku can produce the kind of double framing Koestler describes, but it can also do other things with the relation between its elements. So the idea is relevant but not exhaustive.

      I also wouldn’t describe the ma as an emptiness waiting to be filled. It is shaped and charged by what stands on either side of it, as your field analogy requires. The particular elements of the poem give the interval its particular character, while not determining what the reader will find there.

      Where bisociation might come in handy is in relation to metaphor, which is perhaps its most obvious poetic instantiation alongside humour. Where I am suspicious of Koestler is that I intuitively resist a single explanation for creativity. If bisociation can describe everything, then it describes nothing. And it doesn’t give us anything poetically productive to derive from the distinction.

      I would much rather try to define the edges of simile and metaphor than say they are both bisociation.

      I recently came across the concept of mitate, which complicates this distinction. Everything I say here is preliminary and may well be wrong, since I haven’t read a great deal on the topic. Mitate seems to me to offer an interesting point of contact: one thing is perceived or presented through another, so that two frames are active at once. And it is neither metaphor nor simile. Where simile confesses the as and metaphor hides the as, mitate performs the as. The Zen garden makes the distinction clearest: nobody says the gravel is like water and nobody says it is water, but the garden treats it as water. Treatment rather than predication. Comparison as a ritual act, not a sentence.

      I think this is quite different from the way comparison is usually theorised in Western poetry, and fascinating in that regard. It seems to hold comparison and categorisation at their tipping point and, in that overlap, behaves differently as a third kind of operation.

      So I might see bisociation as one possibility within the ma, rather than as an exhaustive account of it. And even within that, I’m not sure it has explanatory power for the purposes of poetics if it describes metaphor, simile, mitate, and humour among other things, collapsing them into one category.

      Reply

  4. @ Keith (October 3, 2026 at 7:53 am)

    There ‘is’ a connection between poet and poem. The issue is what is the nature of the connection, is it the relation between a barn and a barn swallow, or, a more momentary popular analogy of the brain as a little capitalistic factory tinkering and manufacturing a consciousness that then itself, like a proper employee of the factory produces a poem, or, or, or, or ? (different historical moments have different analogies of how consciousness/subjectivities emerge). So there is a connection between writer and poem.

    You wrote, “But the communication and reception of the poet’s meaning is basic to the work, I think.” Outside of the irony of this when discussing haikai (I allude to decades worth of getting-it-wrong when it comes to 20th century ELH’s understanding of haiku), a one point a threshold is crossed when /basic/ communication becomes something more than ‘basic’ when it becomes Art. And when that Art is X enough it becomes an artifact unto itself. It /itself/ becomes the originator, and the poet and their intention don’t matter, we may not even know who the writer even was, or what they even intended.

    The Artifact has an X quality to it that is it subjectivity. It’s has a variety of agency (that may not be the same variety as a human), it shifts, means this, means that (if it were a human we called it “changing your mind” or “learning”), what you write as “The risk is that they are meaningless, or ‘mean what you want it to mean,’ for each reader.”

    In this way something like Ozymandias emerges into existence. Shelley tinkers (to use that capitalist analogy again) with some language, adding this to that, taking this away from those, and suddenly a spark IN THE THING ITSELF is generated. It’s Alive! (to allude to Mary Shelley). The THING communicates TO Shelley: Shelley cut a hole in the barn wall and the swallow darts out into the sunshine (to use another analogy).

    Artifacts are mysterious.

    P.s. in general I think Language itself is an additional subjectivity running on our bio hardwire, the Me that writes this is a different Me than the bio, tactile, experiential Me (the animal me) that Language (that big jerk) has uses. And Language-subjectivity just produces more language-subjectivity to spread. The parent’s voice (its Language-subjectivity) calls forth (implants) a new Language-subjectivity in the child.

    *

    WRT to you, “I wonder how many poets study literary, linguistic and philosophical papers before they write poetry?” They ALL do (if by “papers” you mean “abstruse theory” in general. Maybe not academically, nor even consciously, but theory cannot be separated from action. I can’t imagine an engineer saying, “I don’t need theory.”

    Reply

    1. Re: “theory cannot be separated from action. I can’t imagine an engineer saying, “I don’t need theory.”

      You can’t live without theory. When you take your next bite of food you theorize that it isn’t poisoned. When you take your next step you theorize that the floor is solid and you won’t fall through it into flames. Et cetera.

      Where do we draw the line between trivial and meaningful interpretation of this?

      Reply

        1. 🆕️Discussion about it below the line is a waste of time, and one party being below it and another party above it is confusion. So, some agreement would be useful.

          I imagine that it can be drawn if a criterion of how to measure it can be established.

          Reply

      2. 🆕️Each time the program’s run, the constants stay the same, the variables are assigned a fresh value.

        Reply

    2. Adam:

      Your “at one point a threshold is crossed when /basic/ communication becomes something more than ‘basic’ when it becomes Art. And when that Art is X enough it becomes an artifact unto itself. It /itself/ becomes the originator, and the poet and their intention don’t matter, we may not even know who the writer even was, or what they even intended.”
      Equates to my: “If the reader’s interpretation is entirely different from the writer’s, that doesn’t invalidate the poem as a work. It may even increase its value while marginalising the author.”
      But I continue: “I suggest that those are the exceptions: most poems are not like that. They are intended to communicate something, as speech is intended to communicate some meaning”

      Where do you draw the line between a text that is not “Art” and one that is? I’d be interested.

      Poets dream about the moon.
      Scientists have got us to the moon.
      Philosophers are still arguing about whether the moon exists.

      — Confundius (my alter ego)

      Reply

      1. 🆕️Keith, you seem to be ‘reader’ and writer focused, while I’m ‘artifact’ focused. The artifact merely used the writer to come into existence.

        In other threads I’ve discussed a threshold of friction, when speech contains enough friction to generate a “desire-release of now-becoming-new.” I think that is when something becomes Art.

        To add one more line to Confounds:

        The moon smiles at what /it/ has done to all three.

        I add this to push on the notion of subjectivities that are not exclusively of the human-variety. The moon may be not passive, its coyness is generative.

        Reply

  5. What is the poem’s subjectivity?

    The poem is objective.
    It is entirely inert.
    A set of instructions.
    Reconstructed subjectively
    in the mind of the reader.

    Reply

    1. @simonj

      Yes, I agree entirely, which is why “the poem’s subjectivity” was originally in quotation marks. They got dropped through repetition.

      By “the poem’s subjectivity” I don’t mean that the poem possesses a subjectivity of its own. The poem is indeed inert: a set of linguistic and formal instructions, reconstructed subjectively in the mind of the reader.

      I mean the set of constraints contained in those instructions that can act upon the reader’s subjectivity. “The poem’s subjectivity” is therefore shorthand for the particular configuration of relations the poem makes available for a reader to inhabit and transform.

      The subjectivity belongs to the reader. The constraints belong to the poem. The encounter is where they meet.

      I really shouldn’t have dropped those quotation marks 😄

      Reply

    2. simonj, By subjectivity I (personally) mean by what is commonly referred to as “subjectivity,” the poem has a subjectivity (What is it like to be a bat, but What is it like to be a Haiku).

      It’s not simply a “set of instructions” and words are certainly not inert. The “ink” on a page may be, but a “word” is not.

      Reply

      1. 🆕️Adam, your “It’s Alive!” makes me think of another, admittedly unpleasant, biological analogy that may be useful here.

        A virus is not ordinarily considered alive, and it has no consciousness or intention, yet it can become active within a living system. More interestingly for this discussion, viruses can act as vectors for genetic material. In transduction, a virus can carry DNA from one cell into another, where that material can become active in a new system.

        I think there is something analogous in the movement from experience to poem to reader. The poem does not transmit the writer’s experience. What it carries is a form produced from that experience, capable of becoming active within another subjectivity.

        And the writer is the first reader in this process. The emerging poem can become active within the writer’s own subjectivity: it can surprise them, redirect them, reveal something they had not consciously intended. That configuration can later become active in another reader, producing an experience that is related but not identical.

        So perhaps I don’t need the poem to become alive, or even to become a subjectivity, for it to have the kind of agency you are describing. It can be inert in itself and yet capable of becoming active in another system.

        The virus analogy is admittedly ugly, but I think that ugliness is useful. It forces the distinction between being alive and being active, and between transmitting an experience and carrying something that can generate a new one.

        But perhaps I am missing something in your use of “alive” and “subjectivity.” If by subjectivity you mean something like the “what is it like to be…” quality you describe, then what does attributing that quality to the artifact explain that an account of a configuration of constraints acting upon a subjectivity does not?

        Reply

        2. 🆕️I think “becoming active in another system” is an inherent feature of subjectivities. My subjectivity is always becoming active in another system (mitosis, mutations, bacteria, water molecules, proteins, etc). Our physical bodies are always its own other body (its own “another system”), a 30 trillion cell ecosystem of mechanical meat that is constantly not what it was, but not quite what it is (“I am not what I am”). Now-becoming-new.

          And my subjectivity transcends my 30 trillion is/not-is body, it resides in active and dormant participation in the subjectivities of others I interact with, and vice versa, their subjectivists are active and dormant inside my subjectivity so as to change my subjectivity, yet also to project back onto them the flow of their own subjectivity (changed by “me” I some degree) so they can know who they are in relation to “me.” Subjectivity are waves not stable billiard balls. A “Writer’s experience” doesn’t exist. Rather, a “writers’s experience” exists.

          I like your virus analogy, just maybe that subjectivity itself is a virus, it can only exist “active in another system.” My system in necessary conjunction with other systems. I’m a virus, you’re a virus, we’re all viruses. :)

          Does something have to be “alive” (in a biological carbon based material manner) to have subjectivity? No, I don’t think carbon based biology is necessary for subjectivity.

          To connect Simile in haiku to this, it is a language code that as mentioned makes/generates the separation between two things (e..g. me and others), while, in this current essay, generating a point-of-view. I think that maneuver is very authentic because that’s what it is LIKE to have a human-variety of subjectivity: “I am LIKE an individual billiard ball who is expressing what is LIKE to be an individual.”

          Reply

          1. 🆕️I like the way you frame the point about simile, very evocative.

            I think that we’re using “subjectivity” somewhat differently. I’m interested in the more familiar sense of a situated point of view or experience, whereas you seem to be using it in a broader, more relational sense.

            I’d be interested to hear how you would place that idea philosophically. Are there particular thinkers or traditions that have influenced the way you’re thinking about it?

  6. @Keith Evetts @Adam Graham

    On your other points.

    Keith, your Martian question is really a version of Nagel’s bat: can a position built from a wholly alien mode of experience ever be inhabited by someone without the corresponding apparatus? Nagel’s argument is that even a complete objective account of the bat’s echolocation would not give us access to what that experience is like from the inside. Echolocation isn’t just unfamiliar to us; it is a mode of perception for which we lack the corresponding apparatus.

    A haiku works only where that’s not the case, where reader and poet share enough underlying schema for a position to be built at all.

    But Nagel’s example feels metaphorically relevant to me as we consider the poem as a position to be inhabited. Echolocation works by sending a signal out and reading the position it discloses in the shape of what comes back. That’s close to what a reader does when reading: attention goes out, the poem’s structure shapes a return, and a position is disclosed in the shape of that return.

    And the metaphor can get even more precise in regard to simile.

    Bats don’t echolocate at a constant rate. In open search, flying and scanning for something to orient toward, they emit calls at a slower, steadier rate, enough to keep locating themselves and the general space. But once a bat detects something worth resolving, prey, an obstacle, anything demanding precision, it shifts into what’s called the approach phase and then the terminal buzz: the call rate increases dramatically, sometimes to hundreds of pulses per second, trading range for resolution, building a much denser, finer-grained return exactly where it’s needed.

    That’s simile, or any other figure of speech or salient craft choice. It’s not a different kind of echolocation from ordinary reading; it’s the same mechanism intensified at a chosen point, a deliberately placed object designed to sharpen the return, to produce more resolved information about one specific relation the poet wants disclosed with precision.

    Juxtaposition alone is closer to the search-phase scan: locating a scene generally, letting the reader’s attention do continuous, low-grade work across the whole poem. The like creates the terminal buzz: here, specifically, the poet increases the signal’s density because this relation, and not simply the general scene, is what needs to come back resolved.

    A position in terms of a schema, almost by definition, is already general, repeatable, abstracted from any single occasion. That’s what distinguishes it from raw particular experience in the first place. So schematizing isn’t something done to already-transmissible material; it manufactures transmissibility.

    That’s why “empathetic” and “reproducible” aren’t two separate payoffs you get from schematization. They are the same payoff described twice. Empathy, at the structural level, is the capacity to occupy a shared structure and feel from inside it; reproducibility is that same structure’s availability to more than one occasion. Schematizing experience doesn’t make it empathetic and also reproducible. It makes it reproducible, which is what makes that kind of empathy possible.

    But this needs one qualification. Schematizing is necessary for transmissibility, but it isn’t sufficient. A schema can still have no corresponding faculty or structure on the reader’s side in which to become active. The bat marks that boundary. We can schematize echolocation as a system, but that doesn’t give us the perceptual apparatus required to inhabit the bat’s position from within. So the schema must not only be reproducible; it must be capable of finding a correspondent in the reader.

    Most human experience schematizes into something with broad correspondence, which is one reason haiku travels as well as it does across language and culture. But that correspondence is not guaranteed.

    I would go further and say haiku is a form built around schematization. The seventeen-syllable/on limit tends to weed out the kind of particular, idiosyncratic detail that would make an experience difficult to reconstruct beyond its original occasion. Kigo hands the poet centuries of schematization already tested for inhabitability. Juxtaposition schematizes relation itself. The cut schematizes the readerly position among the things presented.

    What a haiku offers a reader, then, is a position built from schema, inhabitable wherever a reader’s own schema corresponds. Where it does, that’s empathy. Where it’s shared across readers and centuries, that’s reproducibility. And where no correspondent exists at all, Nagel’s bat marks the edge past which no amount of craft can carry a reader through.

    Reply

    1. Orense, poet’s and poem’s subjectivity are definitely “related,” but the level of “dependency” may be more constructed by a particular historical moment’s understanding of Author, Artifact, etc. than by any particular /real/ or ahistorical universal dependence principle. The barn swallow bird suddenly darting out of a barn emerging into the sunlight, the barn and the bird have a relationship; to me the level of “dependence” in that relationship is more akin to the poet and poem’s relationship than say a factory analogy where the relationship is one in which the busy little factory of the poet’s brain produces a poem.

      In the discussion of haiku being a subjectivity, subjectivities are not stable billiard balls, they’re move wavy: not individual temporal identities, rather wave manifestations of a social field (a “historic moment”).

      Subjectivities are waves flowing /through/ (in a manner of speaking) other subjectives and events, and in that interact of two wave fields, other wave fields are produced (other subjectivities are produced which are experienced as “Me”)

      I disagree with the sentiment that “Echolocation works by sending a signal out and reading the position it discloses in the shape of /what comes back/. That’s close to what a reader does when reading: attention goes out, the poem’s structure shapes a return, and a /position is disclosed in the shape of that return/”

      I disagree that there is a “position,” nor do I think there is a “return.” The “position” of a haiku as a stable /thing/ doesn’t exist in my opinion, nor is there a stable Reader, such that there isn’t a “return” to the subjectivity that launched the attention (or, from out of which the attention flew like a swallow). Another way there is no “return” is because the ‘attention signal’ going out is not the same one ‘coming back.’ Both the ‘Reader’ and the ‘Haiku’ are constantly altering subjectivities.

      As such, I don’t hold with the idea that “Schematizing experience…makes it reproducible, which is what makes that kind of empathy possible.” I think empathy is possible because it’s precisely /not/ reproduction. Empathy is an experience of subjectivity becoming a different subjectivity in a similar way a photon approaching a mirror causes the electrons of the mirror’s surface to radiate in the exact matter as the incoming photon-wave, so much so that a “new” wave identical (in a manner of speaking) to the incoming wave is generated and emitted anew (though “old” and “new” are not really applicable to the event, they just terms of convenience)

      But, I agree that there’s a difference of ‘focus’ or ‘effect’ when using Simile. Your classical physics analogy of sound (as explained above), and my quantum analogy both have ways of explaining the effect of simile wrt ‘disclosing a perspective.’ In my analogy it’s why a mirror doesn’t simply emit random light in all directions when an incoming photon-wave is approaching, rather the mirror generates its energy wave in the exact angle as the incoming wave.

      Reply

      1. @Adam Graham

        I agree that the dependency between poet’s and poem’s subjectivity is partly historically constructed, envisioned differently as eras and worldviews change. But that presupposes my account rather than invalidating it: every construction of the Author–Artifact relation is still a construction of a relation. And what I notice is that the link is never severed: no historical moment has described a poem as unrelated to its maker. They vary the picture, not the existence of the tie.

        Your own swallow makes the point better than my account can. The barn swallow’s bond with barns is so persistent it became taxonomy: the bird is named for the relation “barn swallow.” Demolish the barn and the swallow nests in a garage. The construction varies, but the structural relation persists.

        I actually think our analogies do not diverge much, if at all. On the question of stable position, the bat and the moth are both in motion, and each pulse is unique. The return is also not identical; information is carried in the divergence. My analogy uses sound waves, yours light waves, these are structurally similar, with the same mathematics involved.

        On “position”: I never meant a stable thing. It is a “place,” in the sense of an occupiable structure. And your own analogy cannot quite do without it. The mirror emits “in the exact angle as the incoming wave”; that angle is a position. It is the structural feature the interaction preserves and re-instantiates. In a field of waves, where nothing is a stable thing, patterns are what recur: angle, frequency, manner. “Position” is simply the name for a recurring pattern a new wave can take up.

        And what recurs is the constraint, never the experience; the pattern, not the energy. That is why I think schematizing makes empathy possible: it transmits the inhabitable, not the lived.

        So what you deny — the stable thing, the identical return, the duplicated experience — I deny too. What remains is the angle: the structure that recurs when subjectivity becomes a different subjectivity “in a similar way.” Your “similar way” is my position: a set of inhabitable constraints.

        metamodern spring
        the swallows return,
        never the same bird

        🙂

        Reply

        1. Instantiation

          Seasons rotate, and they are always greeted –
          each one a little different though repeated.
          Each time I say your name, is it the same?
          A heart’s always a heart, a moon a moon –
          each beat, each night, each nightingale, each rhyme
          is changed a fraction by the passing time,
          yet it is no more novel than the tune
          piped by the wind among the soughing pines,
          as ancient as the rock warmed by the sun.
          A sweet air, with the heart’s ache still to come.

          Reply

  7. @Adam Graham
    I agree entirely that the poet’s subjectivity and the “poem’s subjectivity” are not the same thing. Where I would push back slightly is that they are still related. They aren’t identical but they aren’t entirely independent either. Nothing comes from nothing. Which is where the word reproduce sneaks in even though I do not mean it in the full sense.

    @Keith Evetts
    What you’re describing, living in Issa’s skin after years of reading, isn’t access to Issa’s private, biographical, long-extinguished subjectivity. It’s a progressively refined model built from hundreds of poems’ worth of textual residue, filtered through translation, scholarship, and an accumulating sense of a recurring stance. That’s not the private at all, that’s the personal taken to its richest possible development: not one poem’s position but a whole corpus’s worth, triangulated into something that feels like a person because it’s consistent across hundreds of instances. Issa’s actual felt experience on a specific afternoon two centuries ago, the neurological, biographical fact of it, is exactly what’s gone, and no amount of reading recovers that.”Collaboration,” I’d suggest is still collaboration with the construction, however convincingly it comes to feel like the man.

    Someone might push back by saying: if a sufficiently rich personal construction becomes functionally indistinguishable from “the real Issa” to the reader who’s done the work, does the distinction become a difference that makes no difference?

    And to that I would say that it matters theoretically but not necessarily experientially. This is exactly the shape of the phenomenological reduction itself. Husserl’s whole method depends on the gap between how an object gives itself (immediately, as if transparent, as “the thing itself”) and what reflection discloses about how that givenness is constructed (noesis/noema, the object as always already an achievement of constituting acts, never a bare unmediated presence). Nobody experiences a table as a bundle of constituting acts. We see it as a table, full stop. Only the philosophical move, stepping back from the natural attitude, reveals the construction underneath the immediacy. This is confirmation that the distinction I’m making behaves the way every act of givenness behaves. Issa presenting himself to you as inhabitable, as a person you can live inside, is exactly what the personal construction is supposed to do when it’s working well.

    And I think collaboration is the correct word for what it feels like from inside the natural attitude. The theoretical distinction isn’t competing with that description, it’s explaining why that description is available at all, the same way a scientific account of depth perception doesn’t make a landscape look less three-dimensional, it explains why two flat retinal images look that way to us.

    However the distinction does occasionally surface experientially. If a poem long attributed to Issa were revealed as misattributed, or as containing a mistranscription, or a biographical “fact” about him debunked, most readers report something like a small vertigo, a felt sense that the Issa they’d built had been resting on sand. That moment is the personal construction becoming visible as construction, which is otherwise invisible precisely because it’s doing its job.

    Reply

    1. @Keith Evetts

      A further point.

      There is an asymmetry that is interesting to consider. This feeling of closeness often reported with Issa (I feel it too) doesn’t happen with all haijin.

      If what a poem transmits is a position, not content, then how intimate that position feels is itself a stylistic variable, something the poet’s mode controls, not a measure of how much private truth leaked through.

      Issa’s manner, self-deprecating, confiding, willing to put his grief, his poverty, his physical discomforts on the page, constructs a position that’s specifically shaped to feel like being let in. The flea bites, the “mine too” quality of his humor, these aren’t incidentally personal, they’re a mode of address that invites the reader to feel addressed as a confidant. That’s a craft choice with a predictable effect: readers report friendship with Issa because his poetics are built to produce exactly that feeling.

      Bashō’s distance does the opposite kind of work. His poems tend to subordinate the speaking self to the scene, often erasing the first person almost entirely, favoring a contemplative remove that constructs a position oriented toward reverence or stillness rather than companionship. Readers don’t usually say they feel they know Bashō; they say they feel changed, or quieted, or instructed, which is a different relation to a different kind of constructed position, one built for awe rather than intimacy.

      Shiki is different again. Shasei’s commitment to observation keeps the poems oriented outward, toward the object seen, with the perceiving self present but understated, more a transparent instrument than a confiding voice. Readers tend to admire Shiki’s eye rather than feel they’ve met the man, except in the poems from his sickbed years, where the mode shifts closer to Issa’s confessional register and the friendship-feeling reappears.

      Reply

      1. I find it rather a leap to think that Issa chose systematically to ‘build his poems’ that way because, in advance of abstruse theory two hundred years thence, he divined that readers in the next millenium would report friendship with his subjective interiority.

        Or did he just write with realism, sincerity and humour, of things that he and many experienced in his time, and would experience again? “To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging.” –Marcus Aurelius, Meditations # 10.27

        The world is more complex than this simple fellow conceives, it seems.

        At least, the theory provides comfort in that one person’s subjective interiority by definition is not fully shared by another’s, which must apply to philosophic discourse as much as poetic discourse, if admitted.

        I am smiling as I write. I do enjoy this superstructure erected upon the humble haiku, even erecting some myself from time to time.

        two philosophers
        argue in a coffee shop
        autumn leaves

        Reply

        1. This reminds me of a haiku I wrote a few years ago:

          snowflakes in sunshine
          we debate
                  the nature of things

          It was written in response to a haiku by James McRight Jr, a friend who has since passed away. For the prompt “write about an object,” he wrote:

          snowflakes in sunshine
          moments too pass away

          and we ended up discussing what constitutes an object — and whether a snowflake is one. The haiku was my response to the moment, and I am being quite literal in reporting my experience. Yet a reader cannot recover the situation of its genesis. Something else is transmitted: the structure of the moment — of melting, of transience, of encounter — not its particulars.

          Which is the answer to your question about Issa, in miniature. Nobody designed this verse. And yet what crossed to you just now, across years and a death, was not the afternoon but its structure.

          The creation of such a position need not be designed in the strong intentional sense. A poet does not have to think, “I am going to construct a subjectivity for a future reader to inhabit.” The position can emerge from the interaction of language, form, convention, historical moment and the poet’s habitual ways of seeing. What you call realism, sincerity and humour are those materials, informally named.

          But I also don’t want to become naïve about the reality of writing. Craft is not dishonesty, and intentionality does not invalidate the experience that a poem communicates.

          Issa’s poems can feel extraordinarily unguarded, but his corpus also shows a poet returning again and again to similar structures, and subjects, varying them slightly. You can see him experimenting with how a variation changes the effect. The two yakimeshi poems in this thread are an example. That is not accidental self-expression. It is craft.

          I think this makes Issa’s apparent intimacy even more interesting. What feels like being let into Issa’s private world may be the effect of a remarkably consistent poetic craft. He has learned how to make a position feel intimate. That attention, to me, makes it only more honest, not less.

          But then again

          philosophers arguing about arguing about arguing

          Reply

          1. Perhaps we are back to discussing whether, and to what extent, haiku are about communication?

            And do we conclude that the further a haiku/short poem is removed from what approximates to reality, into a poet’s imaginative subjective interior, duly processed (or ‘crafted’) into the poem’s subjective interiority, the less it is likely to communicate with a reader whose subjective interior doesn’t correspond at all with that of the poet?

            When I consider ‘reality’ I am thinking of things that are to a great extent reproducible, if not entirely so. Not in terms of theoretical absolutes and relatives. Once a philosopher convinces him- or herself that all is subjective and imagined, they are quite likely to remove themself from the gene pool by crossing a busy road. Or freeze to death in Saigyõ’s snow….

            On the other hand, I am quite intrigued by the quantum physics analysis of haiku, even if it does seem rather subatomic. I’m thinking that John Stevenson’s “pretty sure my red is your red” probably holds true if you express red in terms of a wavelength and assume that there is not much variation among retinal cones (i.e. a steep normal distribution curve). Such analysis might extend to the gravity of haiku. But what about that other intangible haikai element, levity?

            I think of Newton
            as the apple falls
            on my head…
            my wife discovers
            levity
            —haikuKATHA #35

          2. I co-founded “haijinx-haiku in humor” with Mark Brooks, and then we added other fab editors, though sadly the journal finally went into full hiatus with the articles and essays on humour within haiku not accessible other than David Cobb’s essay:

            ________________________________
            Humour in Haiku by David Cobb
            ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
            This article first appeared in Haijinx and was published in 2001. It appears here with the author’s permission.

            David Cobb (1926-2020)
            https://nzhaiku.wordpress.com/essays-articles/humour-in-haiku/

            .
            He had a way of adding humour that was not strained.

            I keep finding new wonders, despite knowing so many of his works!

            .

            on the latrine seat
            a small offering of gold
            from a buddha’s thumb

            Minding the robots
            technicians shift their weight
            from foot to foot

            couple aged eighty
            carrying a dozen eggs
            between them

            day of his funeral
            still inviting messages
            after the tone

            weekend in autumn
            a little more patience now
            with kipper bones

            _____________________
            Plus this famous one:
            –––––––––––––––––––––

            barbecue –
            hairs on the cook’s belly
            sprinkled with salt

            – David Cobb
            Jumping from Kiyomizu

          3. @Orense,
            As I see it, what crosses from poet to reader is a communication with meaning, not simply a structure. The structure is the frame chosen by the poet to convey meaning. The meaning does not become separated entirely from the poet and their perception, even when the poet dies. The experience and thought meant something to the poet who meant to say something to the reader. I feel they ought to be, and are, connected. That is not to deny that the poem itself, particularly in the case of haiku which is conspicuously open to re-creation of meaning, cannot mean something different to the reader than to the poet. Of course the reader is shaped by their own experience. Of course each instant and each instantiation is different. The question is: how different? Or better: how much is common and shared? The topic of the week, Simile, depends utterly on shared perceptions.

            If the reader’s interpretation is entirely different from the writer’s, that doesn’t invalidate the poem as a work. It may even increase its value while marginalising the author. But I suggest that those are the exceptions: most poems are not like that. They are intended to communicate something, as speech is intended to communicate some meaning, and if they fail in that, the failure counts against. The reader may gain more from adding to that communication from their own experiences and perceptions, sure. They may also gain more from learning about the context in which it was written. But the communication and reception of the poet’s meaning is basic to the work, I think.

            Others disagree, and prefer poems not to be comprehensible or explicable. Not communicating any meaning, not making sense, but offering themselves entirely to the reader to construct, or not, what they will. The risk is that they are meaningless, or ‘mean what you want it to mean,’ for each reader. This lets the poet, already marginalised and killed off in the Barthesian world, completely off the hook. Anything goes. The more disruptive, the better. Down with Ozymandias! Shake the reader’s brain, and see what falls out, and behold, poetry!

            (I quite like some of those poems. Others verge on gobbledegook. Let it be said.)

            I wonder how many poets study literary, linguistic and philosophical papers before they write poetry? And whether their poems would be better for it, or worse? Maybe we should have a poll?

          4. @Keith Evetts
            Yes, we are back at the question, and I want to answer it by splitting the word communication.

            Haiku is about communication, but not the communication of information. “Water boils at 100°C” achieves nearly perfect transmission and cannot be a haiku. Not because of its content, but because it leaves nothing for a reader to become. It closes every gap it opens and arrives complete. Information is transfer without remainder.

            Haiku communicates experience, which is precisely what cannot be transferred, because my experience can never be your experience. So the question becomes how haiku communicate at all.

            And here I come back to Merleau-Ponty. He argued that we are not minds piloting bodies but bodies knowing the world, with perception arriving long before reflection or argument. He is associated with the formulation that “the touching is also the touched”: the body is on both sides of the encounter, perceiver and perceived at once.

            The shared material of self and world he called “la chair”, the flesh: the common stuff of which seer and seen are both made. The perceiver is itself among the perceived, made of the world and in the world, able to touch it. But the reversal is never complete. The touching and the touched can exchange places, but they never quite coincide. He called that standing divergence the “écart”.

            And that may be where poetry actually lives.

            The reversibility is why experience can be communicated at all; the écart is why it can never be communicated as information is. A haiku does not carry an experience across the gap. It cuts a set of constraints into the gap, and the reader’s experience regenerates there: new every time, on the other side of the divergence.

            Your “reality”, the reproducible, is therefore not something that crosses the écart as information does. What crosses is a structure: the pattern or constraint I have been calling the position throughout this thread. And that is where the poem changes hands.

            If experience could be transferred as information is, a poem would arrive as property, the author’s, delivered intact. Because of the écart, it arrives incomplete until the reader completes it in their own experience. At that point the poem is no longer simply the author’s. The cut remains his, but what happens through it is yours.

            An interesting extension of this idea would be that if the écart is where the poem changes hands, ma might be the measure of that exchange. In other words, ma, the interval the haiku tradition has long recognised, may be understood as the degree to which the écart remains engaged rather than closed.

            And humour may be the écart’s most rigorous everyday demonstration, because we all know the mechanism from childhood. The incongruity theories of laughter, from Kant’s “strained expectation” to Schopenhauer’s sudden recognition that the concept under which we have organised reality does not fit, can be understood as the écart surfacing in a flash: the divergence between schema and world becoming momentarily visible.

            We could say that the laugh is the écart made audible.

            The strongest evidence is something everyone knows: an explained joke dies. If humour were information, explanation would deliver it perfectly and jokes would improve with footnotes. Instead, explanation closes the gap.

            A joke is therefore a position, not information. It cuts an occupiable gap and the laugh happens only if the listener crosses by themselves. That is why timing exists at all. The beat is a held écart, waiting for the listener’s engagement. Ma in its purest comic form. And the laugh is the mark of that change of hands.

            There is also an interesting historical resonance here. Haikai “comic verse” developed a playful, irreverent dimension in deliberate contrast with the elevated courtly traditions from which it borrowed and parodied. The tradition has long known that grief and laughter can share a mechanism: a divergence that is crossed. One produces weeping, the other laughter. The ma between them can be structurally the same.

            And a joke is always constructed, whether improvised or written, often with its seams deliberately showing. No one thinks the laugh is less real because we know someone constructed the joke. I think the same is true of craft in haiku.

            I’m lagging behind since you’ve posted another comment since this one. I’ll answer your new points later. I guess I’m Alice’s rabbit in this thread.:)

  8. “A comparison comes from somewhere. It belongs to a particular observer, at a particular moment, under particular conditions. This situated relation inevitably discloses a perspective….The poet’s perspective is not an addition to the experience being communicated. It is fully part of the experience.”

    There’s a sort of subjectivity /of/ an art piece, quite different from that of the writer. It may be seeded by the writer-as-historically-situated-catalyst, but the art work develops an interiority of itself. As it does, it then generates a Kind-of-Perspective-Required to understand it. A figure, or stance, or perspective, or certain persona, that it generates such that (in the case of haiku) a reader can slip into to encounter the poem. The poem generates its internal logic then creates a necessary-subjectivity needed to encounter that logic, and at the same time creates an opening such that any reader can step into said necessary-subjectivity (when it’s said that art changes you, this is that mechanism; art works generate the Kind-of-Person required to encounter it, then it molds viewers/readers into that Kind-of-Person…though of course individuals can resist such pull and change).

    As such, the idea of simile expressing a “perspective” is fascinating. Simile pulls that expression into revelation. It sort of hands you the suit to try on, rather than surreptitiously slipping you into it. In doing so a reader is able to more purposefully explore the subjectivity of the poem, AS WELL as the experience that subjectivity is undergoing.

    Reply

    1. Yes, you’ve put your finger on an important distinction the essay doesn’t quite make: the poet’s subjectivity and the poem’s are not the same thing. I gesture towards this when I distinguish between the private and the personal.

      The poet’s subjectivity is biographical, situated, mortal — it dies with the poet. What survives in the poem, and what the reader actually encounters, is the poem’s own: a constructed interiority, derived from the poet’s but transformed by form.

      I would add one refinement to your account. The poem does not communicate the experience itself — experience is not transmissible. What it can reproduce is the position from which the experience arose: the conditions of subjective experience rather than its content. Your suit analogy is very useful here. The poem’s opening, in the sense you describe, is a position cut so that others can stand in it.

      Your account makes me think of Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility of perception. The poem’s flesh and the reader’s flesh are of the same flesh: in reading, we touch the poem, and the poem touches back.

      Reply

      1. In practice the effectiveness of these tiny poems may depend on, if not the universality of an experience, then the extent to which it is shared in the human condition. Would the ‘constructed interiority’ of a haiku written by a Martian be as communicable to a human as one written by another human?

        “When it snows, it is cold…”

        I’d require some convincing that the poet’s subjectivity dies with the poet altogether. 200 years after he died, I can easily live in Issa’s skin, for instance; and the more one reads of him, the closer one can empathise with, emulate in my mind, his experiences. I guess that’s what you’re dignifying scholastically with Merleau-Ponty and ‘reversibility of perception’? I perceive Issa’s poem in an active collaboration — with Issa, via his poem.

        Reply

        1. Keith, but one doesn’t have to live in Issa’s skin via haiku he wrote to “connect” with those haiku. One need know a single thing about Issa.

          You write, “the more one reads of [Issa[ the closer one can empathise with, emulate in my mind, his experiences.” A couple ideas emerge here:

          1. The more one reads haiku by Issa the more one may be able to empathize with the anyone’s experience.

          2. The interiority of the haiku Issa wrote may act as a guide or a map to Issa’s subjectivity, just as a tour guide (as a separate subjectivity) may act as a tour guide to a historic location.

          3. How much projection (in a general sense) is occurring of seeing Issa’s true subjectivity in his works, rather than the works’ subjectivity, or at the very least the subjectivity of a persona Issa created to craft haiku through? There may be a large component of interpreting (if not actually generating) biographical material through his haiku.

          4. If Issa’s haiku presented as a separate subjectivity /to Issa himself/, then the flow of cause-n-effect may be a bit murkier. Issa’s subjectivity may simply be responding to, and thus his life choices are influenced by his work’s interiority.

          Reply

      2. Orense, I think we’re entangled in the issue of ” to reproduce” again, ha. I don’t know if any subjectivity can be “reproduced,” such that a haiku’s subjectivity isn’t a reproduction of anything, no more than mine or your subjectivity is a reproduction of something. The conditions of experience /are/ the content. Any historical moment producing a subjectivity and/or interiority (either “human” or “non-human”) is both the conditions and the content. Your subjectivity is /of/ the conditions that generates it and those conditions are its content. Yada yada. Again, it’s an entanglement of your seeing reproduction involved, and my not seeing reproduction involved? :)

        And I think this has much to do with the “inauthentic” haiku discussed in the Shiki and Subjectivity essay, when a haiku expresses itself in an outdated mode, the subjectivity that it attempts to “dress” (to use the suit analogy) a contemporary reader (contemporary subjectivity) in, the suit doesn’t quite fit the conditions/content of a contemporaneity. The contemporary subjectivity can’t quite enter the anachronistic subjectivity of the haiku, or if it does don the suit, it knows, at a sort of self-conscious reaction, that the suit is “old timey” and not “of our time,” that it’s “in costume.”

        Reply

  9. Another penetrating and persuasive post, Orense.

    ——

    summer night —
    like a lump of fried rice
    Mount Fuji

    —Kobayashi Issa
    tr. David G. Lanoue

    This is Issa’s endearing sense of humour, making the extraordinary ordinary, and very amusing.

    In the heat of summer, fried Fuji loses its snowcap and browns. This same Fuji that has been revered and extolled for its beauty by generations of virtuous poets and artists. A sly dig by Issa. A dose of realism. And not the only one, for we also have (another favourite):

    掃溜に鶴の下りけり和歌の浦
    hakidame ni tsuru no ori keri waka no ura
    Ah, a crane has landed on the muckheap—Waka Bay

    Waka no Ura being a beauty spot much idealised in classic Japanese poetry. The crane, an elegant and auspicious bird. The midden, a fact of everyday life (and likely teeming with crane-food). A haiku realist landing among the lyrical waka poets.

    In the Fuji poem, as so often with Issa, there’s also scope for philosophical reflection hidden in his warm, human humour. ‘Tis customary to show that we are not barbarians by waxing effusive about the beauties of nature, haiku poets being particularly attached to signalling virtue in this matter. But give a hungry person in the real world a choice between a lump of fried rice and a view of Fuji…

    Similarly (although I’m straying from the topic of the week) another favourite among Issa’s verses is
    daiko hiki daiko de michi wo oshie keri
    Ah, the daikon-picker with a daikon has shown the way (daikon being a long radish)

    Again, the image facing us is warmly comical and endearingly human, as is seeing Fuji as a lump of fried rice. But behind it is the real thought that your trade influences the way you see the world, and you make use of whatever comes conveniently to hand. And beyond that, if you extend the action to a spiritual “showing the way,” in whatever walk of life you can find “the way,” the path.

    (Added)…and some say there is no role for philosophy in haiku….

    Reply

    1. Yes, the daikon haiku is wonderful. It isn’t a simile but it kind of is a metaphor for what simile is and does. 😄

      There’s also this example of use of simile by Issa which is very similar to the example in the essay:

      名月や焼飯程のしなの山
      meigetsu ya yakimeshi hodo no shinano yama

      harvest moon–
      Shinano mountains like
      fried rice balls

      David G. Lanoue says: “The two haiku of the previous year (1813), Issa compared Mount Fuji and other mountains to mounds of fried rice. The current haiku goes beyond visual similarity. The harvest moon shines over the harvest celebration: a good harvest will mean “mountains” of food for the people of Japan. Visually, he might be referring to their snow caps.”

      If only there were websites like haikuguy for all the major haijin…

      Reply

      1. .
        I couldn’t resist!
        .
        spaghetti bolognese–
        I sip cooking wine
        finger dishevelled hair

        Alan Summers
        Publication credit: Blithe Spirit Vol 11 No 3 (September 2001)
        Award credit: Sketchbook Editor Choice # 06 (2007)
        Sketchbook, A Journal for Eastern & Western Short Forms ed. Karina Klesko

        Not a simile, though…

        Reply

    2. Is it because it is too long? Messy? Tangled?
      Because we throw it and see if it sticks?🤣
      It also makes me think of the sacrilegious act of breaking spaghetti in half. We’re tempted to simplify it, shorten it, make it more manageable… but something is lost in the process.

      Reply

      1. I found your article very interesting, but, like with spaghetti, found it difficult to “catch the ends” of it. Anyway, I had fun making my response as ambiguous as I could: is it the poetry, or the theory, or the theory of poetry that is like spaghetti?

        Reply

        1. Yes, and I think the ambiguity is precisely what makes the simile work. Food can hardly be entirely negative: it nourishes and sustains. But the particular experience of eating spaghetti also introduces a certain ambivalence. It can be satisfying and sustaining while also being messy, tangled, difficult to handle, and rather hard to “catch at the ends.” That combination makes the comparison much richer than simply saying that the theory is complicated. 😄

          Reply

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