Moon and Finger 7 – The Present Past: Reading Hekigoto Part 1

Comments (89)

1. Where does the past end and the present begin? Could one just as well say that a flyswatter becomes a flyswatter when it becomes possible for someone to swat flies with it?
   At edges things tend to get fuzzy. Trying to make firm definitions there can lead to nonsense. Or should I tell God that if he created us, he must have done it before he himself came into existence?

   1. Thank you, John. I think the question of where the past ends and the present begins is exactly the kind of question the poem is asking. But I would push back on the idea that attending to such distinctions necessarily leads to nonsense.

      There are many kinds of existence: physical, potential, conceptual, functional, experiential, and so on. Hekigoto is not claiming that the fly-swatter was physically absent before the act. He is focusing on a different kind of existence: the moment when something is realized as what it is through an encounter.

      Your example—that a fly-swatter becomes a fly-swatter when it becomes possible to swat flies with it—places the emphasis on potentiality. Hekigoto places it on realization. Those are different philosophical positions, not simply a matter of one being precise and the other confused.

      In fact, identifying identity with potentiality also creates difficult consequences. If capacity alone is enough to determine identity, then one could argue that every human being is already a murderer because every human possesses the capacity to kill. We usually resist that because we distinguish between what is possible and what has become actual.
      What is fascinating is that this question is already embedded in the scene itself, as Richard Straw remarks. Hekigoto swats the fly where Issa has mercy. The fly is not just a device for a philosophical example; it carries the weight of a living creature. Before the swat, the fly is potentially dead. After the swat, it is dead. Something comes into being, and something passes away.

      The poem is not trying to eliminate the fuzziness at the edges. It is asking us to look at one particular threshold: the moment when possibility becomes realization, and what that moment reveals.

      And this threshold is not an arbitrary one chosen simply because it raises interesting philosophical questions. It is the site of a practical problem Hekigoto was confronting as a haiku poet.

      In other words I don’t think Hekigoto is asserting a universal theory of existence; instead he is identifying the mode of existence that matters for the poetic and experiential problem he was working through.

      1. Thank you, Orense. Guilty as charged. I was thinking only of physical existence. I’ll try to become aware of other possibilities, too, but being just an old stick in the mud, can’t promise that I’ll think of them when I should.

2. Please note: This post is meant to come directly after Adam’s post below, dated July 20, 2026 9:24 A.M. There was no “reply” button” just under it. Clearly, some help with navigation on this feature, along with the ability to make stylistic changes (italics, etc.) would be helpful. I realize it has been noted already.)

   I may be rattling between the lines of this conversation, but what I consider important about it is how it might encourage examination of one’s disposition toward language. Simply, if one’s view is that language must give way to the thing that prompted it— rain, for example— in order to allow the reader to have some experience of *that actual rain*, he/she will use language accordingly, understanding one assumes, that language is limited, and perhaps even working with that knowledge. I think this, or something like it, is the position of many who write haiku.

   However, if one approaches language as something which, in poetry, can carry or be a sort of *parallel creation* to rain, a language-rain if you will, one’s language may be different, freer. Surprising.

   In other words, if the understanding is that the poem need not be *about* an experience but can be something in itself to be experienced, then perhaps different language will be used, or be necessary even. For one thing, one need not be faithful to event. Rather, it can carry the energy and inner dimension of the event.

   To put it in somewhat fanciful terms, the rain evoked *inside* the individual who is, for example, listening to the rain (outside) may need to find language that does not directly correspond. I’m repeating myself.

   The objection to this will be: well, then it is about the writer and not the rain. Maybe. But is not the inner rain as real as the outer? If indeed, they are even two things.

   I don’t know if this makes sense. I think I am describing something a little different than subjective experience. I have to think about it.

   And Adam— haecceity? I love the word, but what the heck?

   1. Ah, one must distinguish between quidditas, haecceitas and talisitas. Whatness, thisness, and thusness. What’s a cat. This a cat. Such is a cat. And what the heck is a cat (quid malum est feles) indicates haesitatio. Stuckness.

      On creating your own internal rain: we should get into cognitive neuroscience. But whatever the neural mechanisms behind semantic processing (increasingly identified), wouldn’t we still be left with how the sensations of rain built up in our neural and biochemical networks relate to actual rain?

      1. “How do you but every [neuron] that cuts the [cerebral] way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”

         1. Try again

            “How do you know but every [neuron] that cuts the [cerebral] way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”:

         2. I see your Blake, and raise you a Bosch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights#/media/File:The_Garden_of_earthly_delights.jpg This is not revealed by cross-sectioning the visual cortex, but its traces are in there somewhere…

            https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/27/brain-atlas-showing-how-words-are-organised-neuroscience

            I suggest that discussions continue in today’s Hekigotõ part 2

   2. Peter, I agree as poets we need to find our own answer.

      This is where I always find myself returning to the idea of haiku as the poetry of moments, and therefore of experience.

      Sometimes the impulse is to preserve an experience of the world as faithfully as possible. We find ourselves in a mode of attention that tries to remain as authentic to that encounter as we can—to the rain, the fly, the blossom, whatever prompted the poem. In such cases, language may seem at its best when it becomes almost transparent.

      But authenticity can also belong to our encounter with language itself. Sometimes what feels most faithful to the moment is not a direct rendering of what was seen or heard, but the linguistic event through which the experience becomes available to us. The poem may then develop a life of its own, not as a departure from experience but as part of the experience.

      For me, both impulses belong naturally within haiku. The moment we are trying to preserve is never only “out there” in the world, nor only “in here” in the self. It includes the meeting between world, consciousness, and language. Different poems lean more heavily toward one aspect or another, but I don’t think the form itself requires us to choose between them.

      1. Orense, speaking for myself, of course, I am not particularly interested in preserving anything. It is all discovery, and in my rather arcane view there is rain, or a tree (or rain and tree energy or spirit) or an objectless perception that pre-exists everything. Sounds Platonic, but I don’t think it is. It may be only a way of talking about a formlessness that seeks form and finds it in language. A preferred or useful way for me of talking about the creative act. Of course, all impulses belong naturally with haiku. But I do think along the lines of “what haiku may be” which comes back to “finding one’s own answer”. For me, the challenge is: is it possible to write something that carries some of the mystery and energy of my early encounters with haiku (and with my father’s image-laden dictionary) but does not primarily announce itself as haiku.

3. I have a favor to ask of both Orense and Adam.

   There is a bit of a sprawl in this discussion, at least as experienced by my somewhat ADD ish disposition. Is it possible to summarize what you wish to say at this point about *representation* (and perhaps other unavoidable aspects of the discussion?) Maybe it is not possible, and I realize some elements are only available in the weave of conversation. Perhaps just a paragraph or two? I do think this would be useful to me, and others.

   1. Peter, I think part of the sprawl comes from the fact that Adam and I are not quite using the word representation in the same sense.

      Adam is using it largely in the sense of something fixed, already given, or naturalized — a meaning that arrives pre-packaged, like a cliché. His concern is with representations that have become so familiar that they no longer generate discovery or require participation from the reader.

      I am using representation in a broader sense: the process by which something becomes present through a sign, image, or form. In this sense, representation is not opposed to immediacy or experience; it is one of the ways experience becomes meaningful and shareable.

      Representation exists at every level of meaning-making. It is not something that appears only in literature. Even in ordinary perception and speech, we are constantly using signs and forms through which experience becomes intelligible. Most of the time, however, representation is invisible. When we read a word, we do not usually attend to letters as marks representing sounds and meanings; we experience through them. The sign and what it signifies are fused in the act of understanding. The same is true in speech: we attend to what is being said, to the speaker and the situation, rather than consciously examining the representational process itself.

      This invisibility is not a weakness; it is part of what allows immediacy to occur. Speech carries with it the conditions of encounter: a speaker, a listener, a shared situation. The representation recedes into the exchange.

      Literature creates a different mode of attention. We do not attend to literature in the same way we attend to speech. We attend not only through the words, but also to the ways in which meaning is created through them. When representation becomes visible, it does not necessarily destroy immediacy. It can create another kind of immediacy: an encounter with the process by which meaning itself is made. Metaphor, literature, and art often work in this way. They reveal aspects of our relationship with the world that usually remain unnoticed.

      Haiku’s power often comes from holding both possibilities together: the immediacy of speech and the immediacy that heightened artistic attention makes possible. Like speech, it preserves a sense of utterance, situation, and encounter. Like art, it can make the structures of perception and meaning-making newly visible.

      Its particular achievement is that it does not choose between transparency and foregrounding. Through compression, the words can become almost transparent, allowing us to experience through them; yet the same compression can reveal the relationships between perception, language, memory, and context that usually remain hidden.

      I hope this clarifies what I mean. In the essay I say “literature is representation,” which was a shortcut for readability. A more precise formulation would be that literature makes representation available for attention. Sometimes it does this by foregrounding language itself; sometimes, as in haiku, by making representation so economical and transparent that we become newly aware of the structures of experience through which meaning is formed.

      1. Thank you Orense. I think I would have to have a better grounding in semiotics to easily take in what you are saying. Things like “signs” and “signified”, though simple enough, leave me a bit cold. Still, it is evident to me that you have a warm way of looking at them, and a clear way of expressing your understanding. A word like “imagination”, though typically confused with “fantasy” and making stuff up, has more appeal, when understood in the sense of the faculty that brings the world into being. I think, actually, this is not far from what you are saying. Importantly, I think you are not saying that representation is prior to what is represented, but that they are in relationship. Maybe you have said this too, I’m not sure– that in some sense they are in dialog. This may actually be most apparent in (but not exclusive to) haiku, in how the same little dance, so to speak, tries on different costumes again and again as the music changes. (Which is not an endorsement of the same-old same-olding that I for one feel dulled by.)

4. This is a response (or will be, later) to the opening of Orense’s piece, relating to speech and representation. I don’t know if I am pushing against anything, or if I am amplifying or mirroring what she says, or merely writing what comes to mind for me with her own written thoughts in view. Mostly the last.

   As always (the always of the past few weeks, anyway) there is a lot here, a lot to appreciate and ponder.

   First, I have been thinking about your statement, Orense: “. . . the rules worth keeping are the ones that serve what haiku essentially is.” When I saw this, I wanted to add something— “the rules worth keeping are the ones that serve what haiku essentially is to *you*, to the writer.. This may be something different than what haiku is taken to be structurally. It may get to why a writer feels so engaged with this form. I suspect there is always a psychological underpinning. Yes, structurally haiku feature (often) a break of some kind— why does this matter to . . . you? Why do you do it again and again?

   “. . . what haiku essentially is.” Interestingly, I was dipping into the intro to *The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century/ Japanese Haiku 2008*, and came across the following:

   [in the inaugural issue of the journal Tenrō, which Seishi Yamaguchi and some others founded in 1948,] “Seishi suggested that poets should pursue ‘kongen’ (the essence) in haiku, and this became their motto. Members tried to compose essential haiku with their *individual understanding* and used a variety of types of expression from modern haiku, aiming for a greater depth of inner reflection in their haiku.” (Italics mine).

   One wonders how many writers of ELH have actually delved into their own “individual understanding”. In this regard, another statement in this introduction struck me, offered in relation to Takeo Kuwabara’s criticism (1946) that haiku is a “secondary art”. “ . . . in the essay, the insistence was made that haiku should be called ‘secondary art,’ distinguished from real art because haiku was not art, but a kind of skill.”

   Putting aside the negative evaluation of haiku as “secondary” I found the distinction between what could be considered art and what a “kind of skill” apropos of much of what appears in the journals today— more skill than art, as I see it. In other words, checking off all the boxes of what a haiku is supposed to be, but not coming together as something greater than the sum of its parts. (Yes, it can be said that one person’s skill is another’s art.)

   I should add, as to the “essence” of haiku, reading the introduction to *Japanese Haiku 2008*, one gets the clear impression that how it (the essential) was regarded and understood changed from “movement” to movement in the 20th century.

   I’m going to post this and come back, I hope, to speech and representation, etc., later.

   1. I just want to say that there is a dizzying amount of interesting stuff in this edition of M and F, more than I can manage just now, and I realize I am adding to it. It has been useful to me to write what I have written, but I have no expectations that anyone reply to this.

      As to what is speech, what is representation, etc., I start, Orense, by saying that I keep your response to Adam in view: “The boundary between speech and literature is . . . permeable . . . The distinction is a matter of emphasis . . .” Which I appreciate.

      I just want to fin out what I have to say, mostly—

      I said I think it is important for a writer of haiku to understand what haiku essentially is . . . to him/her. I think it is equally important to be clear what his/her relation to *language* is.

      A haiku writer may be primarily interested in perception of a moment, the one in a stream of moments that was notable for some reason. Language, though obviously important, is secondary, it is not the main event, where for the non-haiku poet, while not ignoring the wish to be in relationship with the thing or event perceived, the underlying understanding will be that the poem is a moment and movement of its own, something which *is*, no less than the experience which stirred it up.

      This is a generalization, of course, and speaks to, on the one hand, haiku as a “wordless poem”, and poetry about which it has been said in numerous ways, “should not mean, but be.”

      This sense of poetry (as articulated by Archibald MacLeish) means, in part, that the poem is a thing (a moment, if you will) to be experienced in its own right. It acknowledges that the poem may have been prompted by an experience, but it is not the experience, and, it is not even a representation of the experience. Rather, it is an enactment of what the poet feels and thinks in response to the experience. (And the experience, of course, could be one’s own inner stirrings up.) Beyond that, I suppose, one gets into modernist or post-modernist perspectives: that it is the experience of language itself.

      Which I don’t think is the primary view of many haiku poets, and I am not saying it should be. (I do think, that some awareness of these differences can be useful. My stance has always been that experimentation— in this case experimenting with haiku as moments of language (its energy, its limits, its presence)— may open up directions it could take, show something more of “what haiku may be.” I say this realizing that the danger here is a movement toward solipsism, of language only in relationship to itself and not speaking to other; not relational.)

      One view of haiku, and I don’t know how prevalent it is these days, is that it does its best (given the limitations of language) to describe or present a moment objectively seen, as through a “transparent eyeball” perhaps. Iain McGilchrist has gone to lengths to show, somewhat via Coleridge and others, that perception is an act of Imagination— our *ability to make sense of something* might give as partial sense of that. It is then, a participatory act.

      What this means is that the experiencer, announced or not, is in the poem, and that language, which will carry some sense of her experiencing, is crucial. Further still that imaginative language is significant. By that I mean language that is woven into the original participatory act; language that is not suppressed, or goes through a filter of “wordlessness”.

      OK. I am not saying that this is necessary, or that exploring with “a wordless poem” filter/lens may be is pointless, or misguided. I am offering another look.

      So, there has been a perception of something outer or inner. Imagination has been involved in the perception, and then in the writing. One has a haiku. It speaks. Can one say that it does two things, two things which may in effect, be one thing? First, it points to an experience the writer had, in such a way as to make it feel like it is happening now. Points to, but is not equal to. Second, it is its own experienceable thing. It *is*.

      Is it an empty question to ask? — at any given time does one write in the direction of *pointing*, or of *being*? I think it is a useful question.

      So if I have addressed the question of representation and speech, I have done it obliquely at best— or maybe not at all. I’m not sure. This was quickly drafted, knowing a new installment of M and F will load in tomorrow

      1. Peter: excellent thoughtful comment, if I may say so.

         There’s no Moon and Finger post scheduled until the coming Tuesday. The Shiki posts were on Saturdays sparked by 4 July. The Chorus (polls) post for them might also be on a supplementary Saturday. If there’s a logjam (as well there might be) we may post more than once a week, but ideally the feature will settle down to a weekly rhythm.

         Meanwhile, comment away. This is a stimulating dialogue. Comments will be open for two weeks after the date of the initial post before the post with its comments is archived. They’ll continue to be read, especially by us but also, I’m sure, by others in view of their interesting content.

      2. Thank you, Peter. I couldn’t let you speak into the void without a response — something that happens rather too often with haiku theory, which has a relatively small audience. :)

         I’ve responded to Adam’s comment in some detail on the question of representation, and I think that addresses part of what you are touching on here: the relationship between experience, language, and the poem as something that is both pointing toward an experience and becoming an experience in its own right.

         I’ll be back with a comment on the question of the “wordless poem,” because I think it is closely related but opens up a slightly different set of questions.

5. The article notes, “the metapoetic dimension is not imposed from outside. It is built into the occasion of the poem’s making.” I would also associate this metapoetic dimension with haiku’s “grammatical dimension,” including tense of verbs. The grammatical construct of any given haiku is not imposed from outside, it is generated within each individual haiku. As such a one-size-fits-all-standard-grammar, while appropriate to quarterly-earnings reports and newspaper articles about lost dogs, is not appropriate to haiku. And if attempted to be applied to haiku can only fail. The ado about tense, and past participles, gerunds, etc. assumes that standard grammatical rules, norms, and constructs are attempted in haiku. They are not. Haiku does not aspire to be a sentence.

   As such any movement to challenge perceived grammatical oughts of haiku, including the silly prescription of present tense, works to move deeper into the core of what haiku is. I appreciate this article very much.

   Though I would pushback vehemently, though respectfully and in a soft voice, on the way in which “literature” is characterized in the article.

   1. Shiki too:
      “One should understand that haiku, in particular, has absolutely no regard for language, grammar, cutting words, or kana usage. However, those who wish to learn should gradually acquire this knowledge.”

   2. Adam, thank you — I’m especially glad you highlighted the point about grammar being generated within each individual haiku rather than imposed from outside. Tense and other grammatical choices are not rules to be applied externally but part of the poem’s own logic.

      I am particularly interested, though, in your pushback on my characterization of literature. Could you say a little more about where you see the divergence?

      I should clarify that my distinction between speech and literature is not intended as a value judgement. Representation is not a deficiency — literature opens forms of depth, reflection, and temporal layering that speech does not typically preserve in the same way, just as speech carries its own resources.

      The boundary between speech and literature is also permeable, and many literary forms move between these modes. Literature can create extraordinary forms of presence, and speech can itself contain reflection, narrative, and representation. The distinction is a matter of emphasis and mechanism rather than a hard boundary. So I am not arguing that haiku is outside literature, or that representation is something to overcome.

      What I am arguing is that haiku is perhaps the literary form with the closest relationship to speech — closest, that is, in how reliably it keeps the moment of utterance and the moment of content in live relation, in the way ordinary address does naturally and that literature often has to work to recreate.

      As I say in Part 1, its origins as hokku matter here: it emerged from a social, responsive situation, as an utterance within a gathering rather than as a self-contained written object. Even after becoming an independent form, it retained something of that inheritance — the sense of a voice addressing someone in a shared moment.

      For me, that is why questions of tense and grammar become so interesting. They are not merely questions of correctness; they are questions about how a written poem recreates the conditions of an encounter.

      1. “I am particularly interested, though, in your pushback on my characterization of literature. Could you say a little more about where you see the divergence?”

         Personally, I don’t experience “literature” as a representation. I think literature IS speech with a certain threshold of “friction.” I could say, “Please top the car,” or to add friction, I could say “Halt, noble steed of steel and combustion — let thy wheels cease their eternal turning!” The syntax, the metaphor, etc, introduce friction. It doesn’t allow the statement to flow by unnoticed, the friction pulls attention to itself in the here and now, and more than that the friction acts a spring, it stops the flow of desire, causing it to accumulate and then explode into the future, literature is temporal-construction, it doesn’t represent the future, it pushes us into it. We feel and experience the future as such, because of the flow of desire, and a desire that is most pleasurable is a stutter-step desire, the cat and mouse game of seduction. Literature is pleasure and pleasure is the now-becoming-new. Simply stated: Literature defers its meaning into the future. You write literature “deposits experience somewhere for later retrieval,” I would say literature generates (via friction) encounters for future experience.

         Literature defers its revelation into the future. I would call excellently written jokes literature. And the literary aspect of it is that the language doesn’t represent anything, rather the joke (the literary work) is crafted to introduce friction in speech so that it takes a moment, you must travel into the future (if even a moment), past the encounter with the language (literature/the joke), to “get it” and feel the experience of laughter, or tears or gasping of breath for lines of poetry so breathtaking, or a turn of phrase in a novel so moving.

         If there’s not enough friction in a speech act (whether oral or written) the joke isn’t funny, the line of poetry is really just a grocery list, the dialog in a novel is flat, something you can hear anywhere and any day.

         I think good haiku is literature, because it does what all literature does, it adds friction to speech, causing desire to build and then release as experience.

         1. We all love adding friction to speech. Here’s my shot:

            Literature in the sense of an art is the expression of human experience through language in an aesthetically significant form. Aesthetically significant works tend to call attention to their form as well as their content. Their value derives from what they say and how they say it.

            There’s no universally accepted definition of “aesthetically significant.” There are many appealing criteria by which works can be weighed. Weights vary according to personal tastes. Who is to judge? Writers, literary critics, scholars, or popularity among the general literate readership? Are any of those categories indispensable? Will they agree? Critics and scholars in particular frequently distinguish their positions, and make their names, by dispute. Evaluations change over time. Fashion and familiarity play a part.

            Some English-language haiku poets regard haiku as a serious literary art. They study the genre’s history, read widely, evaluate poems according to artistic criteria such as precision, resonance, originality, rhythm, imagery, and depth. They revise carefully and submit to journals of reputed quality. Their goal is aesthetic achievement. In this view, a haiku succeeds or fails as “a poem.”

            Others approach haiku primarily as a way of paying attention. They see writing haiku as a contemplative practice, an exercise in awareness rather than an artistic competition. The value lies in noticing an authentic real and present experience fully and honestly, and reflecting on it. Whether the resulting poem is considered “great literature” is secondary or irrelevant.

            Many regard poetic craft and spiritual cultivation as connected in haiku. Mindful attention provides the raw material. Creative perception and imagination distils it into poetry. Poetic craft shapes it into literature. A moment of awareness alone is necessary but not sufficient for successful haiku. Equally, technical skill without genuine perception can produce a formally polished but lifeless or inauthentic verse.

            It seems however that there is one fairly universal characteristic. “Aesthetically significant” or not, authentic and sincere or not, almost all love to be published somewhere “in the literature” and praised as poets, and to draw attention to that. Hermits they are not!

            1. If “aesthetically significant” has no stable, agreed definition, no theory should get to say a poem’s aesthetic failure expels it from literature altogether. Bad literature is not an oxymoron — nobody actually argues about whether a bad poem is a poem. They argue about whether it’s a good one, and that argument only makes sense against a background of poems that plainly aren’t.

               I want to stick up for bad poems. They are still literature doing its job honestly — an attempt that didn’t quite hold, but an attempt nonetheless, not a non-poem masquerading as one. Even the Big Four have plenty of bad haiku to their names; it’s a feature of the form. You often have to write a hundred bad or mediocre haiku to end up with a handful of good or transcendent ones. And of course, one person’s bad is another’s masterpiece.

               Also someone has to be the hideously dressed bridesmaid, so the bride can shine. :)

            2. By calling a line or two “a poem,” aren’t you already categorising it as “artistic literature?” It may be unpopular to raise the question, but what if a given haiku is not “a poem?” Rosenstock among others have questioned whether haiku are “poetry.” (I’d amend that to “whether every haiku is poetry”). As Peter Yovu wondered, do haikuists so love to call themselves, and address each other as, “poets” because we feel uncertain and insecure alongside “mainstream poetry?” (We must get a better word than “mainstream, ” but we all know what’s meant by it, in the main). And if we say that all haiku are poems and therefore artistic literature, then whose set of aesthetic principles are we applying? English poetics/aesthetics, or Japanese poetics/aesthetics? Or either, or both?

               The older I get, the less enlightened, and the more wary of received wisdom.

            3. Keith, this is a fair challenge, and I don’t want to dodge it.

               I think the difficulty begins with an assumption buried in the question itself: that calling something “a poem” is certifying that it possesses certain fixed properties — the properties of “artistic literature.” I am not sure that is how we actually encounter poetry.

               When we call something a poem, we are not only identifying a set of formal characteristics; we are also describing a mode of attention. We are saying that we are encountering this arrangement of language as something to be dwelt with, listened to, and explored.

               This Is Just To Say, William Carlos Williams’s plums poem, is a useful example. In one context, it is simply a note left on a counter. In another context, the same words invite us to attend to the coldness, sweetness, and sensual presence of the plums as well as the coldness and sweetness of the words themselves. The language has not changed; the mode of engagement has. The poem is not merely a property deposited in the object. It emerges through the relationship between language, context, and attention.

               This also changes how I would approach the question of insecurity. If calling ourselves poets is not a claim to membership in some prestigious hierarchy of “real” poetry, but simply a description of the practice we engage in, then the question becomes less about status. We are not asking to be admitted into a club; we are naming a way of working with language.

               The question of aesthetics is more complicated, because of course no reader encounters a poem without bringing a history of associations and expectations. A reader who knows kiri as kigo encounters Basho’s:

               Won’t you come and see
               loneliness? Just one leaf
               from the kiri tree

               with centuries of cultural resonance that another reader may not possess. That difference matters. Japanese poetics is not simply interchangeable with English-language poetics.

               But I would hesitate to say that these are competing authorities deciding whether the poem succeeds. The reader without that background can still enter the poem’s fundamental gesture: the invitation to see a feeling embodied in a single concrete thing. The gap between an abstract emotion and a physical image — the inability of language to fully contain experience — is not owned by one tradition. It isn’t the property of English or Japanese poetics. Instead it’s available to whoever accepts the invitation to attend.

               So maybe the answer is: the aesthetics we bring to a poem differ, richer for some readers, thinner for others, but they aren’t rival authorities deciding from outside whether something counts. The question isn’t whose aesthetics get to certify the object. It’s what kinds of attention the poem makes possible and whether a reader, in whatever position they’re in, is willing to attend to it as one.

            4. Thank you for making me think, Orense.

               “When we call something a poem, we are not only identifying a set of formal characteristics”

               …I am wondering what would be the formal characteristics identifying a poem/not poem, a haiku / not haiku? (in English). Specifics would be more useful than generalities, I think

               “we are encountering this arrangement of language as something to be dwelt with, listened to, and explored.”

               ….as with, say, the Zoom presentation I listened to on how astrobiologists would determine whether there is life on other planets. Not by itself sufficient to determine if a text is artistic literature, I suggest. It needs more; just as it needs more than identifying formal characteristics (if those can be agreed upon). And so we get to:

               WCW’s poem: agreed. It produces a visceral response beyond being a plain communication, by an arrangement of words with shared associations. Perhaps we need that visceral element too for our haiku-is-poetry diagnostics kit?

               It may be that as soon as we step away from writing haiku in Japanese with Japanese aesthetics and a long cultural tradition of its own, we are no longer entitled to call it “haiku”. That could solve a lot of problems. To the extent we make it our own, altering the genome, we’re weakening the link with that legacy. The gendai movement also has that question to answer, but at least they are doing it within the same language and culture.

               Another question is why it should matter to us that we are writing “haiku?” What’s in that name that is so special for us?

            5. Keith, as I was arguing (half-assedy, which I will now go FULL-assuredly, haha) in a prior thread, I think even haiku written for “contemplative practice” as an an “exercise in awareness” are still “aesthetically significant works.” The folks who are writing these sorts of haiku, are working within their understanding of the form of haiku *as a genre of literary art.* I’m sure they’ve read some books that discussed the basic formal properties of cut, juxtaposition, etc, and these formal properties (and of course others that stay clearly within the genre as it is now, and that push the limits of the genre), these formal properties create “fiction,” the build-up of desire and release. With a joke its laughter, with a novel it could be goosebumps on the skin, with a haiku it could be the “aha moment.”

               I love this phrase, “Mindful attention provides the raw material.” And it begs the question: attention to what: the thing-in-itself, or the hon’i? ELH I think misstepped in its onboarding of haiku into English by assuming the former, while traditional Japanese waka/hokku/haiku is immersed in the latter. But, that’s another digression, ha. It’s just on my mind as I plod through writing an essay that looks at how instagram accounts (especially travel influence-accounts) curate their content so as to create/reinforce an “essence” of, say, Lisbon, or Paris, or Madrid, and how that links into the development of hon’i and curating of how objects (plum blossoms, moon, etc) were to be emotionally and artistically experienced.

            6. For Adam:

               I’m sitting in Runyon’s with a few other citizens when this professor guy walks in, orders a sarsaparilla and takes one of the spare chairs in our corner. The spare chairs are on account of law-abiding citizens who know who we are generally sitting some place else. So he hears the barman, who got out just this last week, giving a big hello to Books McConnell who walks in and takes the next chair. Books is a fella everybody’s nice to as they owe him money down at the track, but the professor guy doesn’t know this. Fact is you can get good odds he never placed a bet in his life.

               The Prof ups and says to Books very respectfully that he must be a literary type like himself and he’s just written a book on this oriental guy Issa. Books keeps a straight face as the rest of us think the Prof has just sneezed, and asks what’s the best thing the Issa guy ever writes. And the Prof says in all seriousness “little snail slowly slowly climb Mount Fuji!”. And he takes the moment of blank silence as respect for this great work that seems pretty obvious to us. I bet on some snails in my time which is why Books has to buy the drinks as a rule. Anyway, the Prof gets a bit heated about this Issa guy and tries to explain why it’s a great poem, when it doesn’t even rhyme and when the chances of a snail getting to the top of this Fuji are a billion to one against, while Books’s runner steals the Prof’s wallet without him having the faintest idea before we all excuse ourselves explaining that we can’t miss the three thirty at Belmont.

            7. Adam: I wrote “Many regard poetic craft and spiritual cultivation as connected in haiku.” And in that context I wrote: “Mindful attention provides the raw material.”

               A person who is not one of those who regard spiritual cultivation as connected with haiku as is poetic craft, is excused….

            8. Keith, my question for that third (or sub-class of second) class of haiku writers was mindful attention to what? But the question is, I admit, way off topic of the current essay regarding tenses/immediacy/representation in haiku.

            9. And for those (let’s not call it a sub class!) it would be mindful attention to the real and present things around them, using all their senses. Becoming the pine.

               I don’t think we’re getting that far off topic, at least the ‘immediacy’ part.

               Now In gym. Deep thought difficult

            10. Keith, if “becoming the pine” is a reference to Bashō’s “learn from the pine,” from my understanding, Basho was not referring to the “real and present things” about one, rather referring to the importance of sensing and experiencing the poetic/conceptual object of the things around one, “preserved in the collective memory of the culture.” Though of course, for Bashō, those “real and present things” were not the thing-in-itself, rather what was “real and present” was the artistically constructed conceptual object of “pine” and “bamboo” and etc.

         2. Adam, thank you — this exchange has clarified something for me.

            I don’t think friction and representation are opposed in the way they may have seemed at first. There is a great deal of overlap between what you describe as friction and what I am describing through the cut. The poem does not allow meaning to pass through unnoticed; it requires the reader’s participation.

            I should add, though, that I am using the cut here in a particular sense that I have not fully developed in this discussion. I have my own theory of the cut, which I will explore more fully elsewhere. For now, the shorthand I would offer is that the cut is for me not a discrete technique added to an already existing haiku structure. I see cutting as the underlying process through which haiku achieves its characteristic form: Compression Under Tension.

            Compression and tension are not separate operations or stages. They are mutually generating forces. The pressure of tension creates the need for compression, and compression intensifies the tension between the elements. Haiku emerges from this reciprocal process: the poem becomes small enough to create the charge of encounter, but charged enough that the relationship between its elements remains open. Compression brings haiku close to the conditions of speech; tension is what allows the literary dimension to emerge.

            Where I think we may differ is in what friction explains. I am not sure that friction itself is what distinguishes literature from speech, because speech is already full of friction — anyone who has had an exhausting conversation, full of hesitation, subtext, and things almost said, already knows this in their body. Humour, hesitation, irony, metaphor, emotional restraint, the pause before a revelation, the timing of a joke — these are not literary inventions added to speech. They are fundamental parts of human communication.

            I think the distinction lies, instead, in the mode of engagement. When we encounter speech, we are in a living exchange. We are constantly filling gaps in what might be called a mode of active completion: using context, tone, shared knowledge, gesture, and situation to reconstruct meaning — because speech comes with conditions and stakes that writing does not automatically provide.

            Literature creates different possibilities. It allows forms of reflection, temporal layering, complexity, and unresolvedness that ordinary exchange often cannot sustain. Representation, properly understood as re-presentation — making present again — is not the opposite of immediacy. It is one of the ways literature creates experiences that survive beyond their original occasion.

            For me, this is where haiku’s relationship with speech becomes important. Haiku is not oral in the literal sense, and it does not escape literary construction. It is an intensely crafted written form. But it retains unusually strong features of oral address: an implied speaker, a situated moment, reliance on shared context, and the feeling of an utterance occurring between poet and reader. This is why the cut matters: it is the site where compression and tension continually regenerate each other, producing the conditions of encounter — the economy, elision, and contextual dependence of speech — while keeping that encounter open, the elements held together without being reduced to a single explanation.

            The traditional elements of haiku all participate in this. Kireji are not merely formal markers; they preserve something of breath, emphasis, and emotional registration. Kigo does not simply identify a season; it supplies a shared situation that allows the utterance to exist. The poem’s brevity does not merely remove words; it changes the reader’s mode of engagement.

            Perhaps this is why haiku so often generates response. When a haiku truly strikes us, we often do not simply analyse it or admire it — we answer it by writing one. This is not accidental. It reflects something inherited from hokku: one utterance calls forth another.

            Honkadori is one example of a much broader principle. Haiku exists in conversation with other poems, other voices, and inherited images. Immediacy in haiku is not the absence of mediation. Memory, tradition, and previous language are not obstacles to encounter; they are among the materials through which encounter is created.

            So perhaps we are approaching the same phenomenon from different directions. You emphasize how literature creates future experience through friction, tension, and release. I am emphasizing how haiku recreates something closer to the conditions of a present encounter.

            But I wonder whether your account leaves room for haiku’s particularity. Friction, delay, and release could describe a sonnet or a well-timed joke just as easily. What is it, in your conception, that makes haiku’s configuration of these resources distinct?

            What makes haiku remarkable, I think, is that it holds future release and present encounter together at once — and I’d be curious whether your account of friction has room for that doubled achievement, or whether it dissolves into an account of literature more broadly.

            1. Orense, Earlier I wrote that, via the friction-desire-release, “Literature is pleasure and pleasure is the now-becoming-new.” I think(?) my now-becoming-new is your “future release and present encounter.”

               You write, “I don’t think friction and representation are opposed.” I hoped to indicate that “friction” is the sum total of technique (cut, kigo, metaphor, allusion, etc.). These items cause “friction,” which has the effect of desire-release. “Representation” in speech/literature (to grant the distinction) to me is something like a cliché (“every cloud has a silver lining”). A cliche in ELH is yet another haiku that contains the phase “cherry blossoms.” Representation doesn’t have to be the actual language it can be the sentiment or gesture. There’s no friction within a cliche.

               However, I think cliche can be played with, manipulated, problematized, parodied to allow friction to develop. A joke can do it,

               Every cloud has a silver lining — mine just happened to be lined with someone else’s stolen aluminum siding, so now I’m also being sued

               A haiku can do it,

               cherry blossoms-
               a pair
               of gunshot wounds

               Please excuse the quality, they are merely examples that literature can employ cliche as one of its techniques. As you know, haikai itself developed as a parody of the cliches of waka/renga. So, I agree that friction and representation are not necessarily opposed. However, I would argue that literature, as a class (if the speech/literature divide is to be maintained) is not cliche, i.e. not re-presentational. To me Representation is authoritarian and pre-determined, Literature is now-becoming-new the opposite of pre-determined. I’m not saying you’re saying it is authoritarian, I’m merely voicing my original “push back” as requested, heheheh :)

               I agree that literature and oral utterances both contain “hesitation, subtext, and things almost said,” etc, as “fundamental parts of human communication.” I think what makes literature literature is the artistic crafting of “hesitation, subtext, and things almost said,” etc, to surpass a certain friction threshold that creates an optimal desire-release (“optimal” to a particular individual in a particular culture (there are some jokes that are crafted AS jokes, etc but don’t pass this threshold)).

               Haiku participates with this deliberate artistic crafting as well. But, a sonnet, and a novel, and a haiku, etc, perform this crafting within their own formal parameters (to address the issue of whether my “account leaves room for haiku’s particularity.”) Haiku is particular to itself due to the manner (its formal qualities) in which it generates desire-release, which is the pleasure of now-becoming-new (which, again, I think is your “future release and present encounter.”)

               While a bit digressive, our convo is I think getting into the issue of how haiku deal with the crafted simulations of oral utterance (present vs. past), and *why,* since modern day haiku are no longer situated in seat the of hokku. Maybe an example would be helpful, how do you think the following poem by Emily Dickinson is representational?

               Wild nights – Wild nights!
               Were I with thee
               Wild nights should be
               Our luxury!

               Futile – the winds –
               To a Heart in port –
               Done with the Compass –
               Done with the Chart!

               Rowing in Eden –
               Ah – the Sea!
               Might I but moor – tonight –
               In thee!

            2. Adam, I think there’s a slippage worth untangling here, because I don’t think we actually disagree about representation once it is separated from cliché.

               I think part of the difficulty is that “representation” has accumulated a certain baggage, and I understand why the word can be troubling. It often suggests a hierarchy in which there is a primary reality or experience on one side, and a secondary copy or substitute on the other. This suspicion goes back at least to Plato’s critique of mimesis, where artistic imitation risks being understood as a copy removed from the truth of things. Understood that way, representation does seem inadequate to describe what literature does.

               But I think that is a narrower sense of the term. In its ordinary use, representation means that something stands for or makes present something else. In this sense the term has been central to discussions of literature and art. Representation does not mean duplication. It describes the process by which art gives form to aspects of experience through a medium so that they can become available to another consciousness.

               A portrait is not valuable because it is a substitute for a person; a novel is not valuable because it copies reality. The act of representation always involves selection, transformation, framing, and re-creation. What is represented is brought into a new relationship through the medium itself.

               To be clear about my own position: I do think there is a referent. The feeling, the falling leaf, the encounter, exists prior to the poem whether in the world or in the imagination. What I deny is the hierarchy usually smuggled in alongside that assumption: the idea that the referent is the real, authoritative thing and the poem’s representation of it is a secondary, diminished copy. I don’t think that ranking holds.

               Magritte’s pipe is the clearest way I know to say this. Ceci n’est pas une pipe is true, and it is a good thing that it is true. The painted pipe is not a lesser pipe. It is something categorically different, and that difference is exactly what allows it to say something an actual pipe never could: something about seeing, language, and the gap between an object and its image. A real pipe cannot do that. Only the painted one, precisely because it is not one, can point toward that gap and make us think about it.

               Literature — and haiku is no exception — operates in this same space. The poem is not the falling leaf, the sound of rain, or the moment of loneliness. Nor does it simply point away from itself toward those things. Through language it re-presents them, making them available for a different kind of encounter. The gap between the experience and the image is where the poem’s power lives, and that gap is not a lesser version of the referent. It is an addition to the world, not a report filed on it at one remove.

               Which is why I don’t think representation, properly understood, is authoritarian or predetermined.

               Cliché is a different thing. I would put it this way: cliché is representation naturalized. Say “every cloud has a silver lining” enough times and it stops feeling like a construction requiring anyone’s work. It stops feeling made at all. The “re-” disappears. What remains is not re-presentation anymore, but something closer to presentation: a ready-made sentiment requiring no completion, no return, no reader participation.

               That is the authoritarian quality you are pointing toward, and I agree that it exists. I would simply locate it in naturalization rather than representation itself. Its power lies not in imposition but in invisibility. A cliché is not representation failing; it is representation that has succeeded too well, to the point it goes beyond itself.

               Which is why friction matters here, and why I think your examples actually support this point. Your stolen-siding joke and the gunshot-wounds haiku both work by exposing a naturalized phrase as constructed again. They force the “re-” back into a presentation that had gone dead. The work is not escaping representation but reactivating it.

               In fact, renewing a cliché can be one of the highest achievements of poetry. A wholly new image only has to create presence from scratch. A renewed cliché has to make us see something we have stopped seeing because it has become too familiar. The achievement is not simply novelty, but restoration of perception. Seeing something intimately known in a new way is one of the most powerful effects poetry makes available.

               On Wild Nights, I think this is actually a case where representation is operating very clearly. Dickinson quite literally represents desire through a conceit. The longing for union is not presented as a direct statement of feeling; it is given form through the imagery of voyage, navigation, harbour, and mooring. The poem does not simply say “I desire you.” It creates a symbolic world in which desire can be experienced.

               This is what representation does at its best. It does not merely substitute a sign for a thing already known. It creates a structure through which something becomes perceptible in a new way. The sea and the harbour are not the desire itself, but neither are they decorative additions. They are the means by which the poem makes desire available to imagination.

               So I conceive representation not as a value judgement but as a material condition of art and literature. Art uses a medium to re-present experience; it does not simply transfer experience unchanged. We cannot escape that movement from experience into form. The question is not whether literature represents, but how it represents. Friction is part of that process: it is what keeps the “re-” in representation alive, preventing what is made present from becoming merely given.

               There is an irony here: our comfort or discomfort with the word representation is itself a kind of representation problem. So I want to thank you for making the word re-present to me. :)

            3. I do understand what you’re saying about your approach to Representation, and it works flawless with your reading of “fly swatter,” and is obviously thought-out, profound, and foundational to your perception and experience of art….it’s just slightly different than my perception and experience of art :). Though the two are very compatible.

               *
               “Which is why friction matters here, and why I think your examples actually support this point. Your stolen-siding joke and the gunshot-wounds haiku both work by exposing a naturalized phrase as constructed again. They force the “re-” back into a presentation that had gone dead. The work is not escaping representation but reactivating it.”

               To me the cliches (big obvious ones, and small micro-ones [like the word “the”] already contain a RE-presentation, and the manipulation of them (in the offered joke and haiku) removes the “Re” so that that we can experience the cliched as non-cliche, i.e. they are just “presented” (or made new, i.e. now-becoming-new). Through the use of particular language the cliche is dissolved (though of course the action of dissolving a cliche in a certain way can itself become cliche, which I think the gun shot wound haiku is, ultimately, because its already been “done”).

               *
               “The poem is not the falling leaf, the sound of rain, or the moment of loneliness. Nor does it simply point away from itself toward those things. Through language it re-presents them…”

               In my experiencing of literature, a poem (a good one for the sake of argument) about rain, doesn’t “re-present” rain, it creates it, anew and in the moment of now-becoming-new. There is no rain that is like *THIS* rain before the poem create this rain in the now-becoming-new. There was no rain like this rain to Re-present. It just didn’t exist before its creation within/as the poem. A super-hyper-haecceity or *this* rain created in the now-becoming-new of a particular art piece. And it’s a new rain upon every re-reading of the poem, which is to say there is really no Re-reading of a poem.

               *
               Wrt the Wild Night discussion, there is a conceit, a very common one, yet the conceit is disposing of itself in the moment of a reading (a cliche shedding its “Re-“), and the experience is happening in the now-becoming-new. The friction generated by technique of the structuring of this particular language (of which metaphoric conceits are one) causes the desire-release of now-becoming-new.

               *
               I can see a lot of the qualities that you’ve given to the speech side of the literature/speech divide. in Wild Nights. What “speech” qualities do you see in the poem?

            4. Adam, I agree that we probably do not disagree that much :)

               I’d reframe the issue as so: I think the question is not whether speech and literature are fundamentally different in essence. The closer we examine them, the more the distinction may dissolve: speech can be highly crafted, literary works can create the feeling of spontaneous utterance, and both depend on shared structures of meaning-making.

               What matters for my argument and for haiku is that we generally experience them differently. We do not attend to an overheard remark and a poem on the page in the same way. One is encountered primarily as an act of communication within a situation; the other as an object of artistic attention.

               I think haiku is fascinating because it plays on the tension between these two registers of attention. It uses literary means to create something that can feel like an utterance arising from a moment. It invites the immediacy of speech while retaining the depth of attention that literature makes possible.

               I do not disagree that Wild Nights creates a powerful sense of address and immediacy. But I would distinguish between a poetic voice that creates the effect of speech and a poem that structurally and functionally operates as a speech situation.

               I am not suggesting that haiku has a monopoly on speech-like qualities. Drama, for example, is almost entirely composed of dialogue intended to appear as speech, yet we understand that it is framed within a literary and theatrical structure. Dickinson also uses features of speech — fragmentation, interruption, direct address — but transforms them into poetic structures.

               What interests me about haiku is that speech is not merely one of its effects; it is part of its inherited and characteristic mode of organization. Haiku creates the conditions of an utterance: a speaker, a moment, a context, and an implied listener. Its brevity, compression, ellipsis, and reliance on context allow it to function like something said within a shared situation.

               This reliance on context is especially important. In ordinary conversation, meaning is not carried by words alone. We rely on a shared world, shared knowledge, gesture, tone, and everything surrounding the utterance. Much remains implicit because speaker and listener inhabit the same situation.

               Longer literary forms often generate much of their own context. They establish settings, develop relationships, introduce voices, and gradually provide the conditions needed for interpretation. Haiku often works differently: it assumes a context and invites the reader into it. Kigo, cultural associations, memory, and experience become part of the act of completion.

               This is also why the absence of titles matters. A title is one form of external framing; it announces the poem as an object to be approached. Haiku traditionally does not use this kind of framing. It arrives more like an utterance than a named work.

               Dickinson also rarely titled her poems, and I am not denying that she captures something of the immediacy of speech. But no one would mistake Wild Nights for an overheard fragment of conversation. Its address is unmistakably literary. The repetition, rhythm, punctuation, and extended nautical metaphor (conceit in the Metaphysical poets sense) create the impression of a carefully constructed poetic event. Its power comes partly from the fact that the machinery remains perceptible.

               The paradox is that haiku, precisely because it uses so many characteristics of speech, can sometimes lose something when spoken aloud. Not because it fails to reproduce speech, but because the speech situation it creates can become too close to ordinary communication. The written form preserves the cut, the silence, and the compression that keep the encounter open as poetry.

               So when I describe haiku as speech-like, I do not mean that it is less literary, or that other poetry cannot create immediacy. I mean that haiku uses literary means to create a form whose fundamental mode of engagement is an encounter between utterance and listener.

               In other words, I would say that haiku’s inherited and characteristic mode is a speech situation, even when individual haiku choose to complicate or resist that mode.

            5. Been trying to square all this….so when I read Wild Nights or Shylock’s snark to Antonio about being spit on, or the end of Gatsby, etc, I sense something new in the room. Something was created in that moment that didn’t exist before (which to me is (I think?) what you’re describing as utterance-like: the moment of spontaneous oral creation that generates the sense of “immediacy” that oral creation buzzes with?).

               So, maybe the roads to the experience of “immediacy” are varied, one of which is the literary means by which haiku introduces friction, the literary and formal means it uses to generate a piece of art that /seems/ like oral utterances, thus entering a sense of “immediacy” via that road. “Immediacy” = your “future release and present encounter” = my “now-becoming-new”

               While Wild Nights uses a different road (i.e. literal and formal means of its genre) to produce “immediacy.” While drama does it via another road, and the novel another way, etc.

               Again, just trying to feel the pieces together

      2. I was curious what various sources on the internet would have to say about what the heck is literature about anyway:

         _______________________

         Notre Dame Magazine:
         _______________________

         During engaged reading, we compare the protagonist’s actions to what we’d do in a similar situation, or what we’ve done in the past. We practice making decisions that have consequences, which is to say, we practice adulting.

         Cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley calls reading “the mind’s flight simulator.”

         Speaking to The New York Times in 2012, he suggested that:

         “just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

         Notre Dame Magazine article:
         What Good Is Literature?
         Empathy is an endangered virtue these days. Its well-being could be revived by the simple act of reading about others.
         Author: Beth Ann Fennelly ’93
         Published: Spring 2020

         .

         If literature is whatever it is, to itself and to others, individual by individual, what is a haiku poem?

         Did Bashō, the professional poet, a paid expert in renga, and then later renku, and penning and reading multiples of thousands of hokku and other haikai verses, get frustrated or excited about pulling something new out of the “pond”.

         What are the ripples of that pond, whether we are familiar with a short verse about a small body of water and a number of amphibians.

         Now we have megaton bombs dropped on the innocent with most of us looking the other way. It’s not Japan being bombed or doing the bombing, although now I believe they are arming themselves to the teeth, and have the third most modern and powerful military force in the world, perhaps in the pond-universe.

         Literature comes from the Latin word littera, which means “an individual written character” or perhaps “”an individual written letter”

         Or are we are on a hiding to nothing?

         The Latin word littera (also spelled litera) means an alphabetical “letter” or “handwriting”.
         It likely traces back to the Ancient Greek word “diphthérā”, referring to a prepared leather hide used as a writing surface,
         and was transmitted to Latin via the Etruscans.

         Yes, it’s all about communication, to a few or to many.

         Hokku and haiku are tricky to widely and commonly communicate, perhaps that’s why we fall back to those who have fallen, have passed on, to the great Dead Poets Society in the Sky.

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

         Don Baird
         Haiku Now, 1st Place, 2013

         I watched a TV quiz where a man didn’t know about the 1939-45 war, and who were allies and who were on the side of fascism.

         I guess fewer and fewer people will bother to know about past and current wars unless they are in the actual war zone of one happening right now.

         The past is a safer place because we were never there personally even as it ticks by now.

         How to address a communication in any literary form or genre to counter the mind-watering kinds of information feeds.

         I’ll go back to ducks.

         The famous poem about ducks is “Ducks” by the English poet F. W. Harvey. It is famously known for its opening lines:

         “From troubles of the world I turn to ducks, / Beautiful comical things…”

         Written while he was a prisoner of war in WWI
         Frederick William Harvey DCM (26 March 1888 – 13 February 1957)
         Harvey was commemorated in 1980 by a slate memorial tablet in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral.
         “Ducks”, Harvey’s best known verse, was voted one of the nation’s 100 favourite poems in 1996 in a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC.

         .

         those who stop —
         ducks taking colour
         from the river

         Alan Summers

         Publication credit: brass bell: a haiku journal curated by Zee Zahava (January 2017)
         Anthology credit: EarthRise Rolling Haiku Collaboration 2017 Reconciliation
         Article/exercise: Ginko: All Fingers and Thumbs with Alan Summers
         Blithe Spirit 33.3 (August 2023) ed. Iliyana Stoyanova

         .

         Just keep on writing, we never know, it might catch on!

         1. I didn’t expect to get drawn into a debate about defining literature and poetry — famously two of the hardest things to pin down.:)

            But I’d say the idea that literature is representation isn’t especially controversial, and the etymology you found actually points the same way. Littera as the individual written character, traced back through diphthérā, the prepared hide used as a writing surface — that’s a reminder that the word names the mark itself, the trace left once someone is no longer there to speak. Representation, properly understood as re-presentation — making present again — was never the opposite of immediacy. It’s one of the ways writing lets an encounter survive the person and occasion that first produced it.
            And even if the distinction resists a stable definition, most of us intuitively recognize a real difference between speech and literature — a change in the mode of engagement, even where the boundaries are porous and the mechanisms complex.
            Haiku, I think, lives exactly in that divide. Take the Baird poem you quoted: its power comes from a single body, seen in a single unbearable moment — that’s the speech side, almost witnessed, present, particular. But it opens outward too, into something universal: not only her, but what war does to any body, any waiting, any silence carrying what can’t yet be spoken. That’s fūeki/ryūkō again, in miniature — ryūkō, the fleeting particular, held together with fūeki, the unchanging. Haiku doesn’t choose between the intimate stakes of one witnessed body and the vast stakes of history. It holds both at once.

            1. Yes, agreed. Nothing should be controversial but everything is now in this 1984 era.

               The urge to communicate is very dangerous nowadays, as I’ve discovered, as a haiku friend from another country is denied permission to visit the UK. Weird times or weirder times.

               Communication is key, even if only to ourselves at times.

6. Apologies if I’m a little slow to respond to comments today. It’s Bastille Day here, and there’s also the small matter of the World Cup!
   I’ll get back to the discussion as soon as I can. 🙂

   And don’t forget to take the poll! The answers will be particularly interesting to me. Since many of the questions touch on the nature of haiku itself, I think seeing the range of responses will be fascinating.

   1. Re:important things – the World Cup. Spain strangled you. Hard to play when you don’t have the ball. Also France had a mediocre day at the office.

      1. Spain were excellent and controlled the game from what I saw. I couldn’t watch the game with any consistency because my daughter caught something and I had to take care of her. Perhaps not being able to follow along was a blessing in disguise!

         I always support France, of course, but I was especially invested in this team. The relentless racist attacks the players had to endure made me want them to win even more. Sadly, it was not to be.

         Back to the drawing board!

7. These have been excellent discussions—difficult to follow at times (and keep up with), but overall excellent!

   One statement from the current essay stood out:

   “We do not primarily store the world by appearance. We store it by function. A chair is what you sit on — which is why a rock, a suitcase, a stack of books can all become chairs without confusion.”

   This statement brought to mind Ruth Krauss’s wonderful 1952 children’s book, A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of First Definitions. It’s illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

   Examples from the book:

   “Dogs are to kiss people”

   “The ground is to make a garden”

   “A castle is to build in the sand”

   “A brother is to help you”

   “A sea shell is to hear the sea”

   “Steps are to sit on”

   A possible interpretation of the poem:

   Perhaps Kawahigashi Hekigoto’s poem—“Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist”—is also about the poet’s sudden self-awareness?

   The “I” = the “fly-swatter.”

   Until the fly is hit, the striker of the fly does not know who or what type of person he is—that is, a striker of flies. Both fly and striker, in a way, become Buddhas?

   1. Thank you Richard, “Until the fly is hit, the striker of the fly does not know who or what type of person he is—that is, a striker of flies.”

      Yes, that is a wonderful extension! And a meaningful one, Issa’s compassionate shadow lingers.

      What a charming children’s book! There are some haiku to be found there.

      “difficult to follow at times (and keep up with)” I try to balance complexity but I’ll admit it’s not my strongest point… Perhaps I’ll get better at it with time. :)

   2. One could also imagine a performative version, where the hand is indicated as the fly-swatter.

8. re:
   “All useful examples.”

   I hope so!

   .

   smell of watermelon…

   The ‘just purchased’ puts the verse in the immediate past leading to the present moment.

   Just like yesterday’s rain is and will be today’s rainfall though not not further into the future, past actions lead to present ones, be it WWII or a melon in two halves (Bashō)
   (smiles)

   .

   end of the day
   the bootlaces tucked

   “Similarly leading to the present moment, the bootlaces are read as still tucked at the moment of writing / reading”

   What was an immediate action has consequences that travel back and forth from past, present, and future, just like WWII and Bashō’s halves of a melon of course. (smiles)

   We know Einstein knew, with or without help, that present is more than believe so why shouldn’t we incorporate that. I wonder what Japan’s rich tradition of “scientist-poets” would say now?

   Torahiko Terada (1878–1935)
   Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933)
   Akito Arima (1930–2020)
   Yosuke Tanaka (b. 1970s):
   Bridging science and literature into the modern era, Tanaka works as a scientist in molecular cell biology. He translates his day-to-day observation of biological phenomena into fluid, nature-focused poetry.
   https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-15801_Tanaka

   Albert Einstein:
   The “Block Universe”
   Through his theories of relativity, Einstein upended the idea that all of humanity shares the exact same “now”. Because time and space are intertwined into a single fabric called spacetime, your present moment changes depending on your speed and gravity. This led to the concept of the Block Universe—a four-dimensional reality where the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. Einstein famously summarized this reality in a 1955 condolence letter, writing:

   Despite viewing time mathematically as an illusion, Einstein heavily advocated for the psychological importance of embracing the present.

   A contradiction perhaps, perhaps there is an alternate and complementary approach, perhaps some of us do this already.

   .

   I once was this stone home for another

   “The ‘this’ puts it in the present moment.”

   Both and neither. I was therefore I was, therefore I was this stone long ago, wherever it is or was.

   .

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

   “The ‘is added’ puts it in the present.”

   The ‘WAS’ INCIDENT, where one tree was, and perhaps is sticks, or sticks from somewhere else abut the once-tree, the ‘is’ fast becomes as historic as the tree.

   We can of course determine the exact date of the month in November, though it’s not 2018, and would hark back pre-Halloween dominated days, where Guy was King for a day. (smiles)

   .

   occluded moon
   was it the words
   she said

   ” This raises the question of whether “occluded moon” is in the present, the observed occluded moon right now; or (as often seems to me to be the case with kigo) the generic “occluded moon” that is timeless. Which would put the verse into the timeless with no obvious present. Exactly when Orense’s frame can be invoked: the tense is immaterial if we take the verse as being spoken ‘now.’ ”

   There was and is and will be an occluded moon. I could read this under a current timeline of an occluded moon or think back in time. Those words, are they from a teenage time or young adult time such as 20s or 30s (personal age not 19something30s ).

   Everything is now until it’s not. A second is a big fat second, as I mentioned in an earlier post, but it goes and joins the rank of past seconds, lost in days, weeks, months, years.

   .

   creeping sepia
   a dog that outran
   the wind

   “Ditto. If ‘creeping sepia’ is intended to be what we are observing now, the verse overall becomes the present. If that too is a recollection, a generic creeping sepia, then the verse can be construed as all in the past, or without time. In which case, the Orensian frame can be invoked. Or, if it is a memory, it can be suggested that the memory is a mental event happening ‘now’ when your write it and we read it.”

   The dog, our last parents’ family dog, was as rapid if not more so than a greyhound or lurcher! It’s in its time capsule like those buried by schools, hopefully with no teacher or student “accidentally” embalmed!

   I prefer my Summerian simultaneous/co-existing or past life time frame aka an Aestates Cognomen Process.

   As we think therefore we create an extra universe, perhaps mine abide in ones with only one tense and one with multiple. The best thing is not to over-Schrödinger it.

   1. Alan, I think your emphasis on temporal fluidity is an important part of this discussion. Haiku has a remarkable capacity for complex temporal layering and ambiguity. Its sparseness invites this.

      In that sense, past tense is not an intrusion into haiku’s possibilities but one of the ways the form explores them. The past is part of human experience. We do not encounter the world only as an isolated present; every moment is shaped by what has happened, what is remembered, and what is expected.

      Haiku often emphasizes immediacy, but how natural is it to represent experience without any trace of the past? The past is not simply behind us; it is one of the dimensions through which the present becomes meaningful.

      The challenge for past-tense haiku is not that the past cannot be present. It is that the poem must find its own way of keeping that relationship alive.

      Haiku does not simply represent time; it experiments with how different forms of language allow us to experience time.

9. I think each of us has areas in our lives where we’re simply “fly-swatter.” Will we ever truly become one? Do we know we can? Do we want to?

   1. I think each of us has some ability in life that exists only in name. Will that name ever materialize? Do we know it’s possible? Do we want it?

      1. Thank you, Urszula. I like how you extend the poem’s question from objects into human experience. I think it is a natural extension, and I briefly touch on this implication in Part 2. The fly-swatter seems to exist first as a possibility, but only the encounter makes that possibility real. I agree that perhaps the same is true of our own capacities: a name can point toward something latent, but it is through action that it comes into being. Sartre and the existentialists placed a similar burden on the self — with existence preceding essence, one is responsible for creating oneself. No wonder they all looked like they hadn’t slept! :)

         1. Thank you very much, Orense.
            Sorry to bring up the frog topic again. If someone had thrown a stone into the pond instead of a frog, meaning the participant would have stayed outside, would the old pond have noticed the difference?

            1. I think that’s another very interesting question, Urszula; thanks. My reading (out of many enticing readings) is that the living animal is as essential to the verse as is the eternal still pond. A stone or any other inanimate object would not do. The verse represents the life-force itself making a brief splash. During the comments I noted that we see this also in Bashō’s “stillness / penetrating the rock / a cicada’s voice”. There’s also “the sea darkens / a duck’s voice / faintly white”. The fragile life force set against the still pond, the unyielding rock, the darkening sea. In these and some others substituting an inanimate thing would be inferior (darkening sea / the cliff crumbles / faintly white?). This is Bashō’s zoka, the Creative, the Dao: that he urged his acolytes to follow.

               Back on the current topic, how do you think the verse would be if changed to:

               old pond
               a frog jumped into
               the sound of water

               Within Orense’s proposed frame, would this not still be heard in the present of the spoken haiku?

            2. Thank you, Urszula and Keith. These are particularly interesting thought experiments because they reveal how much the poem depends on the precise relationship between its elements.

               Urszula, I think the old pond itself may not “notice” the difference between a frog and a stone, but the poem certainly would. The frog is not simply an object that produces a sound; it is one of the elements that makes the whole mechanism of the poem work. Replacing it with a stone would alter the nature of the encounter. The frog’s life and movement are part of what allows the pond, the frog, and the sound to come together as a single moment.

               Keith, I think the same applies to the question of tense. When a haiku is placed in the past, the completedness of the act becomes part of the meaning; it changes the subject of the poem. A past-tense version can still achieve presence, but that presence becomes more about the result or trace of the event than about the unfolding itself.

               The synesthetic quality survives, but the temporal relationship changes. In the original, the frog, the water, and the sound seem to arise together. With the past tense the event occurs, but the old pond remains old despite the splash. The original poem holds us close to the emergence of the moment itself, whereas a past-tense rendering places us in relation to something that has already happened. Those are two different experiences.

            3. Yet: “The haiku poet is always speaking to the reader in the present. The poem is not a record of an experience. It is an address.”

               If so, the frog ‘jumped’, or the frog ‘has jumped’ should still be equally in the present, in that haiku frame. Yet it seems uncomfortable. Is that because we are trained by reading so many haiku in the present tense? How long is a present moment, an instant? The sight, the sound ‘has’ travelled to the eyes, the ears… A while passes. The poet writes (in the spoken word), the reader reads…. This isn’t a quibble, it’s a test of the theory. Exploring the thought.

            4. I think this is where the distinction becomes more interesting. I agree that the present of haiku cannot be reduced to grammatical present tense, because as you say, every haiku involves mediation: the poet has already experienced something, the words are spoken later, and the reader receives them later still. If presentness meant a frozen instant, no haiku could ever truly escape the past.

               But if haiku functions as speech then the poem is always an address, and the reader encounters it in the present of reading.

               However, this does not mean that all tenses create the same kind of presence. Every haiku is a particular configuration, and the mechanism matters. Present tense has an inherent advantage because the moment of the content and the moment of utterance are already close together. Past tense has to work harder to keep the past event alive within the present encounter.That is why I would say past-tense haiku are often more difficult to write, not because they cannot achieve presence, but because they have to overcome the natural tendency of the past tense toward representation and distance.

               However, that additional difficulty is also its potential. Past tense is not simply a less effective substitute for present tense. It creates possibilities that present tense cannot create in the same way: the awareness of aftermath, trace, memory, completion, change, or the distance between an event and its recognition.

               So the argument for past-tense haiku is not that tense does not matter. It is that tense is a poetic resource rather than a rule. The past tense carries a different set of affordances. It asks the poet to solve the problem of presence differently, but in doing so it opens up different kinds of experience.

               With Bashō’s frog, the original’s openness allows the moment of arising to dominate. But a past-tense version would not simply be a defective imitation; it would be a different poem.

               Looking at the past-tense version:

               ah, old pond!
               a frog jumped in
               the sound of water

               the kireji becomes crucial, which is why I think it deserves to be foregrounded.

               The first segment is already present. The ya is an act of address, an utterance happening now. We encounter furuike before we encounter the event. The past tense that follows does not remove the poem from the present; rather, it establishes a relationship between a present act of perception and a completed event.

               This changes the centre of gravity of the poem. The old pond takes on greater weight because it is the first thing encountered and because it remains the enduring reference point against which the frog’s action is measured. It has the last word so to speak. The jump is no longer primarily the moment in which stillness is broken; it becomes an event whose significance emerges through its relation to the old pond.

               That opens possibilities that the present-tense version does not foreground in the same way. The pond may become a force of accumulation: old because it contains the traces of countless encounters, countless frogs and countless splashes. The particular event we hear becomes one instance within a much larger continuity.

               Or the poem may suggest eternal return: the old pond is not simply an unchanging backdrop but the ground in which renewal continually occurs. The frog’s jump is not an interruption of the pond’s stillness but another expression of its ongoing vitality.

               There is also a possibility of humour that becomes more available through this shift. Because the old pond is encountered first and carries the weight of age and permanence, the frog’s completed action can almost take on the quality of a small transgression:

               “How dare this frog interrupt the venerable stillness.”

               The humour comes from the disproportion between the two things: the ancient, dignified pond and the impulsive little frog that has disturbed it. The past tense contributes to this because the disturbance has already happened; we are looking back on the frog’s audacious act from the perspective of the pond’s enduring presence.

               This is another effect that is not simply a weaker version of the original. It changes the relationship between the elements. The frog is no longer only the source of a moment of awakening; it can become a character entering into a much older world.

               And there are many other interpretations of the relationship between these two parts across this temporal gap.

               These effects are not better or worse than those of the original; they are different. The present tense naturally supports the immediacy of emergence. The past tense can place an event within a larger temporal field — one in which memory, trace, recurrence, and recognition become available.

               Its difficulty is therefore also its creative possibility.

               I should add that the kireji is not itself the necessary condition for this effect. It helps and foregrounds the speech situation because it preserves the voice of the utterance so clearly, but it is only one possible mechanism.

               A haiku without an explicit kireji can still maintain this relationship between the present of address and the time of the event. What matters is not the presence of a particular grammatical marker, but whether the poem keeps the content moment open to the reader’s present encounter.

            5. Yes, I go along with that, Orense. The kireji is often important in establishing a connection with present awareness. Many examples of this in next week’s post (as you know).

               And humour (of the warm human humour kind) is often a background characteristic of good haiku. Something often ignored in ELH verses striving to be emotional, particularly in the melancholy register. We have it in Hekigotõ’s haiku. It is often a form of detachment, of reflection. Issa being supreme in this, perhaps.

            6. I agree. I think one of Issa’s great lessons is that humour and depth are not opposites. The assumption that a haiku must become more profound by becoming more solemn is one of those inherited ideas that is worth questioning.

               Issa’s humour often comes from the same place as his compassion: close attention to the small, ordinary, vulnerable, and absurd aspects of existence. The joke does not reduce the subject; it brings us closer to it.

               I would love to see more of that range in ELH: not humour as a separate category, but humour as one of the ways haiku can reveal reality.

            7. Dear Keith and Orense,
               throwing a stone has sparked so many interesting insights.

               Thank you so much.

            8. Good thing it’s a pond and not mountains ;)
               I’m glad to be here. Your level of knowledge makes me realize the extent of my ignorance, but that’s good news.

            9. I think your original question is actually one of the most valuable things a reader can do: question, test, and play with a poem. Knowledge can certainly open further doors, but it is not a prerequisite for meaningful engagement.

               Substitution, paraphrase, and imagining alternatives reveal what a poem is doing by showing what happens when one element changes. If replacing a frog with a stone, or changing a tense, alters the whole structure of the poem, we learn something about the role those elements were playing.

               In that sense, curiosity is perhaps the most important tool a reader brings. Scholarship can add context and possibilities, but the first encounter with the poem is already a form of inquiry. Knowledge can never replace that encounter; at its best, it deepens it.

            10. I like an unconventional and somewhat rebellious approach to the world. I think I’ll have the opportunity here, too. I also like out-of-the-way ponds, the kind covered with duckweed like a carpet. You can stand there and stare for hours, not even writing a haiku, just being there.

10. fly hit until fly-swatter was not
    or
    fly hit until fly-swatter existed not

    is what we have to go on in the Japanese.

    So: is this a verse composed at leisure with philosophy in mind? Or…

    “…. me and my mates are sitting around on the tatami at Hekigoto’s gaff when this pesky fly appears. ” Damn!” I cry, “there’s no fly-swatter.” But that Heki, he acts straight away, picks up a fan, and clocks the fly one. End of. “Aha!” says Heki. “Until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter. ”

    And whaddaya know, it becomes a haiku sensation. That guy!”
    — Damon Runyon, “On Rokku Broadway” (attrib.)

    It’s the imp in me.

    —-

    There’s no semantic cut within the verse, unless vestigial between the two clauses (Ueda’s comma). Neither does it follow a 5-7-5 pattern: hae utsu made has 7 morae (‘on’ in sound units), haetataki nakarishi has 9 morae. I think it was written on one line (a frequent custom of Hekigoto’s, they say)

    1. .
       Touching on the famous phrase, which could describe haiku both contemporary and yet to be!

       “If you meet the Buddha, kill him”
       The famous Zen Buddhist phrase. Originating from the 9th-century Chinese master Linji Yixuan, it is not a literal call to violence. Metaphorically, it means you must destroy any rigid concepts, external idols, or dogmatic beliefs you hold, as clinging to them will block your own inner awakening.

       .

       clenched fist a fly slips away killing buddha

       Alan Summers
       Glint ebook collection
       Proletaria politics philosophy phenomena ed. Elancharan Gunasekaran
       (February 2020)
       https://proletaria730964817.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/glint.pdf

       .
       verb or adjective, verb and adjective!?

       VERB:
       “Clenched” is the past simple tense and the past participle of the regular verb clench. It means to close or hold something very tightly, such as a fist or jaw, usually out of tension, determination, or anger.

       Here are the specific conjugations:
       Past simple (Verb): “He clenched his fists in anger.”

       Past participle (Used in perfect tenses): “She had clenched her jaw for hours.”

       Adjective: It frequently describes a state, as in “a clenched fist” or speaking “through clenched teeth”.[1, 2]

       1. Thanks, Alan. I cover the use of the past participle in English as a handy way of writing of the past without being obvious about it in the second of my three posts to come covering use of past tenses.

          1. Some good examples should come up here that could or might be useful then. (smiles)

    2. Keith, I love the Damon Runyon version! The mundane encounter is precisely what makes the poem interesting. Whether Hekigoto sat down with a philosophical intention or simply transformed an everyday moment is almost beside the point — the haiku’s force comes from the fact that the ordinary action opens onto a deeper question.

       Gabi Greve’s interpretation is similar, though with a newspaper rather than a fan. What is interesting is that whether we see the perfectly crafted object finding its fulfillment in use, or a random object being repurposed, the philosophical point remains the same. It is simply viewed from two different directions.

       I’ll keep the discussion of the cut for next week.

       PS: I thought being written in one line was the default in Japanese haiku? Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean by Hekigoto’s one-line practice? Do you mean without a syntactic cut?

       1. On lineation: I had thought so too. One column top to bottom. However, I’m not certain of this without research, but I have seen in e.g. Persinger on Buson, and Donegan and Ishibashi on Chiyo (a calligrapher of note), their verses presented in three columns reading right to left (in Persinger’s case at least. I haven’t examined that aspect in Donegan & Ishibashi).

          A quick search reveals that traditional Japanese haiku, as we thought, are typically written in a vertical column top to bottom. Separate columns are a documented convention, sangyō-gaki (three-line writing), existing alongside (and competing with) ichigyō-gaki (one-line writing) as calligraphic/typographic conventions for presenting haiku. Sangyō-gaki — splitting the 5-7-5 across three separate vertical columns, read right to left — became common because it gives an English-reading eye a visual cue for where the phrase breaks fall, something the English translation’s line breaks can then be lined up against. Persinger &c. doing this seems to be a presentational/editorial choice.

          So, as you were!

          On the other: I was probably confusing Hekigoto with Seisensui, a proponent of free-rhythm haiku as a form that can be spoken in one breath, a one-line poem. Forget that comment. One has to be so careful sticking one’s head above the parapet.

          1. Keith, thank you for the clarification. So my instinct was right, but with the useful complication that there are multiple traditions of presentation. I’ve noticed that Japanese haiku are often presented in three divisions in contexts such as haiga and shikishi, but I wasn’t aware of the details of the broader range of conventions. Sangyō-gaki is a fascinating addition.

             And no need to worry about the Hekigoto/Seisensui mix-up — these distinctions are precisely why these discussions are valuable. The history of haiku is full of overlapping developments, and it is easy to conflate related figures and ideas. Better to raise the question and explore it than to leave assumptions unexamined.

             We are all still learning when it comes to haiku. I’m constantly discovering new things and revisiting or refining things I thought I already understood.

             Also, I don’t think there is any danger in you sticking your head above the parapet here — these are exactly the kinds of details that make the conversation richer. Besides, if you want to see further, you have to be willing to stick your head above the parapet. 🙂

11. Thank you for this invitation:
    “They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.”

    .

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

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

    I really look forward to poets posting their own modern/contemporary published work, as I’d also love to create my second feature of Working the Verbs for a future Pan Haiku Review edition.

    Thanks to Moon & Finger for exploring verbs in their own way!

    .

    A few of mine, for the time being . . .

    .

    was it dark inside wolf

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

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

    creeping sepia
    a dog that outran
    the wind

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

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

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

    .

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

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

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

    .

    end of the day
    the bootlaces tucked
    into their own home

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

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

    .
    occluded moon
    was it the words
    she said

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

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

    .

     
    I once was this stone home for another

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

    Essay Credit:
    Monoku: An Experiment with Minimalism in Haiku Literature
    by Pravat Kumar Padhy pub. Under the Bashō journal (November 2018)

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

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

    .

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

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

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

    .

    1. Alan:
       All useful examples.

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

       The ‘just purchased’ puts the verse in the immediate past leading to the present moment. The ‘smell of watermelon’ also suggests a contextual present.

       end of the day
       the bootlaces tucked
       into their own home

       Similarly leading to the present moment, the bootlaces are read as still tucked at the moment of writing / reading

       I once was this stone home for another

       The ‘this’ puts it in the present moment. It would be different in an interesting way if the line read “I once was a stone home for another”, whereupon it would suggest (by omission, leaving space) a present follow-up to the line that the reader is invited to contemplate with a “but now he’s/I’m….”

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

       The ‘is added’ puts it in the present.

       occluded moon
       was it the words
       she said

       This raises the question of whether “occluded moon” is in the present, the observed occluded moon right now; or (as often seems to me to be the case with kigo) the generic “occluded moon” that is timeless. Which would put the verse into the timeless with no obvious present; or all into the past if this is read as a memory of things long ago, with you also recalling the ‘occluded moon.’ Exactly when Orense’s frame can be invoked: the tense is immaterial if we take the verse as being spoken ‘now,’ heard ‘now.’

       creeping sepia
       a dog that outran
       the wind

       Ditto. If ‘creeping sepia’ is intended to be what we are observing now, the verse overall becomes the present. If that too is a recollection, a generic creeping sepia, then the verse can be construed as all in the past, or without time. In which case, the Orensian frame can be invoked. Or, if it is a memory, it can be suggested that the memory is a mental event happening ‘now’ when you write it and we read it.

       All points covered in the three posts scheduled.

       1. Above note was supposed to be in the reply,

          but re:

          “All points covered in the three posts scheduled.”

          Perhaps you could give us a proposed schedule and do’s and don’t that we cannot discuss until they go live? Even if the list changes, we can know what is proscribed in discussions until then?

          1. Alan, we don’t proscribe anything! (within THF’s conduct rules). But what will be covered, in broad outline, is given in the first post as:

             Post for 28 July:
             — the immediate past that on completion leads to the poet’s moment of awareness (in the present, assumed). This equates to the present perfect tense (“has been…”) in English. There are many examples of these.

             Post for 4 August:
             — something in the present, often (but not always) a kigo, or some observed phenomenon, that prompts, or is connected or compared with, a recollection. However, “the present” may be far longer than “a moment;” “the past” may be distant, a long time ago.

             post for 11 August:
             — a phrase or statement about the past, whereupon a reader is in essence invited to supply the present to complete the verse; or verses that are all in the past and where the past tenses in English are appropriate. The poet, and the reader, is left to contemplate it in the present.

             Verses that fit these categories are of interest, but even more of interest would be those of distinguished classical or contemporary haiku poets that are wholly in the past, which although I have some and cover that point, they are in short supply. The work is done, the posts written, but new material would be very welcome and taken into account.

             Today’s post, and next week’s, focus particularly on this verse of Hekigoto in detail, and on the idea that haiku as a spoken genre is always in the present whatever the tense it’s cast in. Your views on that would be great.

             And yes, time is so last year! Increasingly so at my age….

             I have amended to “distinguished classical or contemporary haiku poets”

             1. But we have to wait until those posts are officially up though?

                re:
                classical or contemporary masters (irrespective of gender)

                Who dictates who is the master though? I’m always amazed that after over 30 years in haiku, the poll only says over 20 years, that someone who is or can closely be called a ‘master’ although that is really a problematic label, that has been discussed, might be better called virtuoso or genius.

                It’s more user friendly and not elitist.

                I feel some of us, not just me, like to comment in the moment. Whether that’s a present moment, a past moment, a future moment to be, heck universes are side by side nowdays, time is so last year.

             2. Alan, your desire to discuss and your enthusiasm are genuinely appreciated. At the same time, as much as we might want to follow ideas as they arise, commenting willy-nilly across different topics can make it harder to sustain meaningful discussion, with the kind of close engagement and exchange that these subjects deserve.

                I think a minimal structure and progression help everyone follow the conversation and allow ideas to accumulate, leading to deeper discussions over time. We simply cannot cover every aspect of such complex topics at once, especially in a comments format, which can quickly become overwhelming and difficult to navigate.

                That said, no one is preventing anyone from raising other points or suggesting directions for future discussion. The conversation is open — it just benefits from some sense of sequence in my opinion. :)

             3. Dear Orense,

                “commenting willy-nilly”

                I understand that you are saying don’t comment unless it’s within your strict guidelines?

                I thought we could comment, not so much for yourself and Keith, but for those of us who are interested, to comment in our own way.

                I’d be really interested in comments by those not normally able to comment, and have their say and thoughts. It’s a shame that we, whether perceived as ordinary or not, cannot run a discussion through comments.

                This has become a highly academic platform, to me, and I’m not that stupid, where only some are welcomed.

                I actually made a post that was within this fly and swatter context, so bemused why that is not seen as relevant.

                Not all of us are commenting just for your good self and Keith, but responding to the aspects of content as we see it.

                I remain bemused on several counts. It’s such a shame.

             4. Alan, I think you’ve misunderstood me. I explicitly said that discussion is open and that no one is being prevented from commenting or raising additional points.

                What I was trying to express is not a desire to control the discussion, but an awareness of my own limits. I will point out that you are, after all, the one who keeps questioning my choice of words. I hope you’ll forgive me for the great crime of using “master” and “willy-nilly.” 🙂

                I am not characterizing your comments. I was responding to what you yourself expressed: a desire to comment as ideas arise, without any particular organizing principle as to which topic was being discussed at a given moment—that is what I meant by “willy-nilly.”

                Your references to relevant haiku are often very useful, both for Keith and for me, as we are always looking for interesting examples.

                My point is simply that meaningful engagement requires a degree of focus. When several different topics are being pursued simultaneously in the same thread, discussion can become fragmented, and I find it increasingly difficult to respond thoughtfully to everything. There is only so much bandwidth I can hold, and I do have kids and a life beyond these comments.

                So please do comment as you wish. Others may well pick up threads that I cannot. I am only saying that I am only human and cannot always respond meaningfully to several different conversations at once.

             5. just a note, I helped form the original THF’s conduct rules that Laura Sherman provided first as an excellent skeleton, and then myself and Don Baird, with Laura, modified it to be suitable for the haiku poetry platform on the Mentorship side (now gone) and this platform.

                It was developed for healthy debate and protecting us from being diminished as humans and poets. We had a very healthy atmosphere, which as Chief Moderator then Sole Moderator (12-14 hours a day to maintain safety) I then stepped down and highly recommended the wonderful Marion Clarke who was amazing.

                It’s a shame the other side of the THF boards has gone as we had very vigorous and inclusive debate even if it was challenging at times!

             6. Yes, it’s a pity the Forum had to close down. I managed to save some of the very interesting discussions there before it did, including ones that you initiated. Moon and Finger should in a small way help to fill the vacuum. Within the limitations of the post-and-comment format, there may be spin-offs into all sorts of directions. At the same time, we have had feedback from readers that the sheer number of comments, and different threads in comments, is making navigation difficult. I’m not sure how we strike the balance in that, within the WordPress CMS. On ‘highly academic,’ our intentions are not to duplicate other THF offerings but to supplement them. Some of that will be possibly more recondite literary or linguistic questions. We are aware that some like analysis, some don’t, and we hope to have a mix and variety for all. Some will be earthier. And we already have had some outline proposals for guest articles, which are heartily welcomed, via the submission form.

             7. I didn’t want to comment again, so I’ll try to make it brief.

                I hold many hats from previous ones such as criminal court witness statements to running small, medium and big hospitality duties from one person to 100,000 people.

                I can’t edit my posts, which only THF officers can, I believe.
                re:
                “You seem to have edited your comment since then, which makes my response appear directed at something other than what I was actually replying to.”

                Even if I wanted to edit, I don’t have the protocol tools to do some, I’m just a punter now, years since I’ve been THF team moderator, head moderator etc… etc…

                The discussion is pretty challenging, and as an ordinary male I can only multi-task to a certain degree, and unable to take off time as I used to do, to spend a day formulating articles, and essays etc… alas.

                I like accuracy, but also my own approach to thinking and attempting to put this across where I don’t lose myself and hopefully everyone can enjoy my distinctive quirky and Virgo approach, and perhaps ADHD which is varied in the general populace as everything else is.

                Thirty plus years has seen me witness some remarkable arcs of development, as well as new people who gift haiku a revived atmosphere, approach, and opportunity.

                We all need focus in life, and I give hyper-focus to haiku feedback. I’ve even not noticed on two occasions, many years ago, that the bread toaster was giving so much white smoke I could see beyond my laptop screen, when someone banged loudly on the front door!

                I recognise that you and Keith are giving deep thought and work to your posts, and the rest of us might not always be able to match that in the same way, as poets are like a herd of cats (we don’t exist as a herd).

                I too have big family responsibilities as do most people, very big responsibilities. Plus I work 10-14 hours or longer on various aspects of haiku, both Call of the Page and outside of that. A lot of personal outreach which goes beyond haiku feedback to other matters.

                Again there is no need for both of you to follow comments if that’s an issue. Obviously as per Code of Conduct or SPAM attacks it’s needed, but not haiku poetry thoughts.

                I can’t help my psychological profile and it’s been useful in various fields even before my full-time haiku job, and enthusiasm. Plus it’s a way to keep up, on several social media platforms and new developments and approaches etc… that I can pass on to fellow poets.

                To err is to be Virgo in my case.

                Plus I had a lovely morning with Karen and my mother-in-law spending a Birthday Breakfast at Wetherspoons from 8am-11am without my laptop! A break I can rarely allow myself though my mom-in-law deserves it! (smiles)

             8. Yes, it was my mistake I was looking at the wrong comment when I wrote that. Ironically I since then edited my comment lol

    2. Thank you Alan, “The verb tenses in English-language are intriguing as some are obviously fixed in the past, some seem to waver as if rippling through or alongside the present, whether poetic or quantum science or both!” Yes I think the quantum-like quality of some forms that create ambiguity like the past participle, is a very interesting point. It doesn’t always have to be present or past the poem can be productively both. Perhaps something to explore in the future as its own topic.

       clenched fist a fly slips away killing buddha

       That ‘s a wonderful one. I wonder if a swarm of flies will amass like frogs did in the old pond posts :)

       1. That’s very kind to comment.

          Talking of swarms I remember at just after 4.30 in the morning, after feeding the horses, I’d go for a bike ride, with the neighbour’s dog running alongside. He was okay but I would have a cartoon-level black swarm of Queensland bushflies around my head so dense I can barely see. Very naughtily, this back in early nineties, I resorted to carrying a spray can to give myself a few seconds at a time breathing space.

          I’ve since lost a haiku covering that time, gone in the great fly swarm in the afterlife.

          1. Alan, thank you for sharing this. When I’m in the countryside, I often get followed by swarms of different types of flies — I try not to take it personally. 🙂

             It also reminds me that behind Hekigoto’s philosophical question there is an ordinary, embodied encounter. The fly is not an abstract object in the poem; it is an annoyance, a presence, something that demands a response. The fly-swatter emerges from that interaction.

             Haiku are so easy to misplace, and when we do, their presence can remain like a fly that keeps flitting at the edge of awareness.

             1. I’ve had interesting interactions with flies attempting to communicate. After all humans are only type of sentience, and not always that efficient hence this weird creepy continuation of WWII.

                I hope people post more of their own work, whether flies or swatters!

                .

                glass both sides the winter fly’s indecision
                after Jack Kerouac

                Author: Alan Summers

                analysis FEATURE: Tiziana Ciola
                PERCORRIAMO INSIEME… HAIKU E DINTORNI “Walking the path together…” June 2026

                .

                FEATURE:
                Tiziana Ciola
                Alan Summers A brilliant honkadori! I love how you took Kerouac’s iconic window pane and turned it into a witty, existential dilemma for a winter fly. A very clever and refined piece.

                NOTE TO ITALIAN READERS:
                Below this haiku, the author has inserted the note “A nod to Jack Kerouac” (A tribute to Jack Kerouac). But what does it mean, exactly?

                In the Japanese tradition, this technique is called honkadori: the art of composing a new haiku alluding to a famous text from the past, taking some elements from it to turn them into something new.

                The author took as a reference (honka) a famous haiku from Kerouac that reads: “On both sides of the window glass, it is Valpurga night,” in which the glass represents the thin barrier between inside and out.

                With great originality, the poet of our group has taken up the same spatial concept (glass both sides), but he leaned on a winter fly. Stuck on glass, undecided whether to seek the warmth inside or freedom in the cold outside, the fly becomes a formidable and ironic existential metaphor.

                NOTE:
                In my medicine cabinet
                the winter fly
                Has died of old age
                BY JACK KEROUAC
                Scattered Poems pub. City Lights Books, 1971, page 74
                Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac

             2. I won’t quote it all as it’s about honkadori, another topic.

                English/Italian:

                .

                The analysis of Summers’ haiku
                glass both sides the winter fly’s indecision

                Translation: vetro da entrambi i lati / l’indecisione / della mosca d’inverno

                The spatial parallelism: Kerouac said “on both sides” (of the window pane); Summers condenses this in a very modern way with “glass both sides”.

                The fly’s point of view: A fly in the dead of winter finds itself on the glass. It looks inside (where it is warm, but where there might be humans or traps) and it looks outside (where there is open space, but deadly cold).

                The metaphor: The glass is transparent; the fly sees both worlds but is stuck on the pane. Undecided whether to seek warmth inside or freedom in the cold outside, the fly becomes a powerful and ironic existential metaphor.

                In conclusion, the author took a highly celebrated haiku by Kerouac as his reference point (honka)—the one where the window pane represents the thin barrier between inside and outside—and perched a winter fly right on top of it. By doing so, he conveys the exact same sense of suspension, but with a touch of irony and a wonderful poetic focus on the insect.

                .

                L’analisi dello haiku di Summers
                glass both sides the winter fly’s indecision

                Traduzione: vetro da entrambi i lati / l’indecisione / della mosca d’inverno.

                1. Il parallelismo spaziale: Kerouac diceva “on both sides” (su entrambi i lati del vetro); questo autore sintetizza in modo molto moderno con “glass both sides”.

                2. Il punto di vista della mosca: Una mosca in pieno inverno si trova sul vetro. Guarda dentro (dove c’è caldo, ma forse ci sono umani o trappole) e guarda fuori (dove c’è spazio, ma fa un freddo mortale).

                La metafora: il vetro è trasparente, la mosca vede entrambi i mondi ma è bloccata sul vetro, indecisa se cercare il caldo all’interno o la libertà al freddo esterno, la mosca diventa una formidabile e ironica metafora esistenziale.

                .
                p.s.
                I had a Summer fly this year who acted the same. Indecision as it’s hostile out there, and our house/home is insect friendly but beware we do love spiders too!

             3. I love the way these comments return the poem to the actual encounter with another living being. The fly is not simply a metaphor waiting to be extracted; the metaphor arises because there is already a real relationship there — attention, curiosity, uncertainty, even attempted communication. Perhaps that is one of haiku’s strengths: it allows the human imagination to extend outward without requiring us to erase the otherness of what we encounter.:)

             4. .
                Obviously the commentator got caught up in a common internet mistake re thinking Kerouac wrote about a window pane and a fly.

                I can’t edit the post once it’s up alas.

                A second fly on the wall haiku[s] by Jack though!

                The fly, just as
                lonesome as I am
                In this empty house

                https://www.arteidolia.com/kerouac-haiku-yuko-otomo/

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