Moon and Finger 9 – the past part 1

Comments (118)

1. Re: Orense, Aug 4, 2026 6:31 am

   SYNTAX (1 – in relation to the notion “haiku is not speech” but only a written, literary form and 2 – to Peter’s quip — two posts up from the one referenced above — that “In some sense, what is “active” is what is alive,” which 3 – may (or may not) have something to do with Orense’s application of Benveniste’s ENONCIATION to haiku in the sense of 3(a) – ‘where is the 4 -PRESENT of Peter’s “aliveness” and 5 – whether or not in terms of item 3 it can be dead on arrival)

   Hi Orense,

   I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’ve understood me at all. Allow me to try again…

   You write:

   “for the haiku to be “the same play,” something has to survive the change of medium, something identifiable across the spoken version, the written version, the memory of having thought it, the painted gallery wall. Whatever that something is, it can’t be syntax.”

   So, what you’re saying is maybe (because I think it’s unclear) —

   1 – the haiku composed in the mind has no syntax (how can one think in, with, and through language without syntax?), or

   2 – the re-presented haiku spoken aloud has no syntax, or a syntax differing to the original (merely because it has been spoken?), or

   3 – the re-presented haiku recording when played back has no syntax, or a syntax differing from the original (does the syntax somehow disappear in its mechanical reproduction?), or

   4 – the re-presented haiku as transcribed from memory has no syntax, or a syntax differing from the original (merely because it has been scribbled down?), or

   5 – the re-presented haiku placed on a gallery wall has no syntax, or a syntax differing from the original (merely because the text in which it appears is physically composed of vinyl instead of ink?), or

   6 – what?

   “Your artist can only know whether her unspoken haiku “has” a sentence fragment by mentally rehearsing it as language, which is already treating it as if it had settled into one instantiation.”

   Yes, thanks for your confirmation, that is the case exactly — that thought can and does instantiate language in haiku form in exactly the same manner as either speech or writing does, if that’s where one’s process begins, (whatever is or may be meant by “haiku”), and with the original “instantiation” marking precisely the unique piece or sequence of language in the mind, with line breaks, punctuation, etc. — if imagined i.e., “composed” with such. It is not a new or different poem because it changes medium. No revision takes place after it exits the mind. Its mere conversion into a different medium does not, in fact, change its syntax.

   The artist is on stage after a talk which included a reading. The last question from the audience is: “Would you demonstrate your process?” She nods, rises, and circles about the stage for a minute or so, listening without trying to hear and looking without trying to see. She sits back down and speaks a haiku (a poem recognizable to the audience as haiku i.e., bearing markers similar to those which she read earlier). The crowd applauds. Then, very quickly, as though it just popped into her head fully formed, she speaks another haiku into the mic, then rises, bows, and leaves the stage.

   Later that evening, someone who attended the talk recites the final two poems to a friend who didn’t attend.

   The friend is silent for a moment, then says, “Cool haiku, but I think I like the second one best,” and recites the poem back just as he heard it.

   1 – Three different poems, or just three different performances of the same poem?

   2 – Is it still literature when recited by the friends?

   3 – Is it not literature because it isn’t re-presented visually in the form of text?

   “Man, I think I’ll write that down.” He reaches for a napkin, asks his friend, “Gotta pen?”

   Thanks,
   M

   1. SYNTAX and thought…

      My ha’porth (they don’t issue halfpennies any more, they are practically worthless):

      I think in composing poetry, the creative process relies on an interplay between abstract, non-verbal impressions, memories including sensory memories, and structured language. My Experimental Psychology is dated to the early 1970s, but I’ve read a bit since. The assembly takes place in the cerebral cortices. In the left hemisphere, structured language is seated in Broca’s area of the frontal lobe, which assembles words into grammatical sentences in an inner rationalisation into words. Wernicke’s area of the temporal lobe decodes word meanings and helps search the remembered vocab for the right phrase. The arcuate fasciculus links these areas together to coordinate language flow. In the right hemisphere it is believed that the right temporal lobe processes figurative language, subtle ironies, abstract metaphors, and the right frontal lobe integrates emotional themes, moods, and context. The sensory and creative aspects involve the visual and auditory cortices to bring the poem’s imagery in the mind to life by picturing the scene and/or hearing internally the rhythm and cadence of the phrases. The prefrontal and parietal cortices are active during the day-dreaming state and are believed to be involved in producing creative thoughts and original connections.

      But the upshot of all that HI is an act of communication as the composed poem is written or spoken in words, whether with ‘correct’ syntax or disrupted syntax. It may be that that is the closest to what Orense sees as the living enunciative process that is always in the present whatever the tense used in the communication? Very evident as haiku’s origins, in gatherings of poets for renga, draw on their exchanges in speech? And what Adam sees as literature once written whatever its artistic merit or purpose? Just a thought…

      “I drank whisky at sunset” — pure literature, ergo. And, I’m telling you about it in the now.

      1. My penny’s worth–

         “And I had a bowel movement at dawn” — pure literature, too, a la Adam. Ergo? Ergo haiku does not do “the living enunciative process” any more or better than other forms of literature.

         PS: we stopped making pennies here last November.

         M

   2. SYNTAX @M. R. Pelletier

      M.,
      I don’t deny that thought is linguistic. Of course one thinks in, with, and through language. What I deny is that thinking in language commits you, in advance, to syntax in the narrow sense your definition depends upon: a fragment versus a complete sentence, a cut locatable at one string-position rather than another, a grammatical structure that can be checked against the rules of English.

      When we think, we are not silently rehearsing punctuation marks, line breaks, or syntax trees. We are not thinking “steady rain, line break, my thoughts somewhere, line break, among the falling drops.” The linguistic event precedes that kind of grammatical fixation. It already has imagery, rhythm, direction, and internal organization, but those are not yet identical with a particular grammatical parse. The language is there, but not yet as an object of grammatical analysis.

      Even if we disagree about that point, it still would not establish that the cut is syntactic. At most it would establish that the poem possesses syntax. Those are two different claims.

      Your thought experiment is useful because it asks us to identify what survives as a poem through different forms of realization: thought, speech, memory, writing, and visual presentation. Something clearly does survive, because we continue to recognize it as the same poem. But what is that something?

      I don’t think the answer can simply be syntax. Not because syntax disappears — it does not — but because syntax alone does not account for what readers and listeners actually experience as a cut.

      Even within a fixed linguistic form, with the same words and the same syntax, the cut is not necessarily fixed. A reader may pause after one phrase, another may carry the movement forward, and another may allow the final image to absorb the force of the turn. Breath, emphasis, rhythm, tone, and expectation all shape where attention catches.

      This is why I think “felt” or “functional” cut is not merely a softer version of syntactic cut. It describes something syntax alone cannot fully explain: the organization of attention.

      It also cannot account for a cut that preserves continuity rather than breaking it — nor for one that rides a conjunction when the poem takes that form in English.

      Consider Issa’s:

      雪とけて村一ぱいの子ども哉 yuki tokete mura ippai no kodomo kana

      The Japanese is a single unbroken string: the melting snow flows directly into the village full of children through the -te form, which connects the two clauses rather than separating them. The most explicit formal marker of the cut is kana at the end, and it does not sever the two images from each other. Instead, it closes the poem while holding them in relation. The melting snow and the flood of children become one continuous unfolding.

      When this continuity is rendered in English, as in Hass’s well-known translation, it naturally takes the form of a conjunction:

      the snow is melting
      and the village is flooded
      with children

      The “and” is not a mistranslation introducing an alien connection. It is an honest English rendering of the relationship already present in the Japanese: a movement from one perception into another while preserving their unity.

      No fragment is doing the work here. Sometimes the cut takes the form of a conjunction — the very opposite of a syntactic break. That is not a paradox to be explained away; it is the clearest evidence that the cut and the syntactic break were never operating on the same axis.

      If we remove the conjunction entirely and force a syntactic break, something is lost that has nothing to do with fragment count. The poem ceases to be one continuous perception. We introduce a separation that the original does not contain, while weakening the actual closure that gives the poem its force.

      This is why I hesitate to define cutting through a single formal operation. The cut is not simply where grammar stops. It is where perception changes organization.

      In fact, I think we often misunderstand cutting because we imagine it as primarily subtractive: removing a conjunction, omitting a verb, leaving a grammatical relation incomplete. But cutting is additive in essence. The means may sometimes be subtractive, but what they produce is positive. The apparent gap matters less than the shape it creates. Like negative space in painting, what looks absent is actively structuring what is present.

      Human attention can be reorganized in many ways. Syntax is just one instrument among others. So I agree that your artist’s poem remains the same poem across thought, speech, memory, and writing. That is precisely the interesting question. But what survives that journey is not merely a syntactic relation. What survives is a particular organization of perception — one that syntax can realize, but never fully exhaust.

      1. Orense,
         The Hass translation of Issa’s poem, which you claim to reproduce is, indeed, “well-known.” In fact, in the thirty plus years I have known it, I have never seen it as you misrepresent it here. The poem you provide is not the Hass translation but a version heretofore unknown.

         None can dispute that the translation of a poem includes not only the word choices of the translator, but also his choices regarding the line breaks, punctuation, and layout, etc. The version you offer differs in no less than four ways when compared to the actual Hass translation:

         1 – the first line of the Hass translation is indented approximately one tab (your altered version is left-aligned)

         2 – the first word of the first line of the Hass translation is capitalized (the first word of your altered version is not)

         3 – the third line of the Hass translation is indented approximately one tab (your altered version is left-aligned)

         4 – the third line of the Hass translation ends with a period (your altered version does not).

         The consequences of such misrepresentation are manifold:

         1 – you breach the participant’s trust because he naturally assumes that all of the choices in the version you provide in your role as host belong to the translator and not to you

         2 – meaning is corrupted because matters beyond word choice — line breaks, punctuation, layout, etc. — are guides to how a participant reads and, therefore, how a participant feels about and interprets a poem

         3 – your personal credibility is diminished, if not permanently damaged, by offering an inauthentic mix which does not accurately re-present the original translation

         4 – you undermine two of the three pillars of The Haiku Foundation’s mission: (a) “Expand possibilities for our second century” and (b) “Seek active exchange with other haiku languages and cultures around the world” for how can these be accomplished in the midst of falsity?

         5 – you also undermine, by extension and association, not only (c) the reputation of the blog you co-host, but also (d) the reputations of The Haiku Foundation as an organization, it’s board, it’s management, it’s employees, and it’s volunteers

         6 – and, finally, you discourage the present and future participation of all interested members of the broader haiku/ELH community who have engaged both you and your thoughts, observations, comments, and opinions in good faith.

         Such an act is unbefitting of a host of any forum. One can only guess at your motivation, but the four separate and distinct errors you commit — in reproducing such a short and widely-known poem — demand at least an explanation (if not an apology) to all the stakeholders mentioned above, especially as the assurance of accuracy (the minimum of due diligence regarding any act of quotation) is so easy to confirm and secure, for I am looking at the Hass translation right now on page 153 of my personal copy of The Essential Haiku (1994). It is the second poem on the page. The Internet Archive holds a digital copy of the Hass book available to anyone, anytime, and anywhere to view.

         Sincerely,
         M

         1. M.,

            You’re right that the version I quoted doesn’t match the printed page.

            Some context on the formatting itself: misattributions and small transmission errors are common in haiku, partly because of how the form circulates — long lists where the poet’s or translator’s name sometimes takes up more space than the poem itself aren’t exactly built for careful provenance. This particular version probably comes from my own habit from All Poetry, where I got used to working with bare-text versions of poems under study, stripped of capitals and punctuation — not because I think those choices don’t matter, but because a visible portion of haiku discussion culture will derail into objections about capitalization or punctuation in translation rather than engage the poem itself. I got tired of the endless debates and bare text sidesteps that particular tangent. It’s a working habit, not a position on what a translation should look like. In this case I was also quoting from my own personal lists while on vacation, working from my phone, which is exactly the condition under which that habit surfaces without my catching it.

            I also want to say, separate from the correction: I don’t think being wrong is, in itself, a problem. Errors are one of the hazards of having an opinion and saying anything at all, and I’d rather hold that standard for a comment section than pretend otherwise. An essay is a different matter — it’s considered, revised, and stands as the column’s word — and I hold myself to a higher bar there. A comment is closer to conversation, and I don’t want to place a burden of essay-level precision on myself or on anyone else contributing here, in real time.

            That said, the citation itself should be accurate once flagged, and I appreciate you checking it against the page.The argument about the poem doesn’t depend on the formatting either way, but here it is corrected, from Hass’s translation, p.153:

            The snow is melting
            and the village is flooded     
            with children.

            I’m not sure if the indentation will come through properly (fingers crossed).

            I will say plainly, though, that a missing capital, two dropped indents, and an absent period strike me as an extreme basis for claims about breached trust, corrupted meaning, damaged personal credibility, and undermined institutional reputations. I would have corrected the quotation regardless of how the error was brought to my attention. The correction stands; I simply don’t think the scale of the lapse warrants the scale of the indictment.

            My own motivation here has only ever been to engage in substantive discussion, which I’ve tried to do at length in this thread. I’ll also note, separately, that this comment doesn’t engage with anything in the substance of what I argued — the continuity carried by kana, the conjunction, the additive account of the cut. I’d welcome your thoughts there whenever you’re ready to return to it; that’s the part of this exchange I find most worth continuing.

            1. The indents didn’t come through…

         2. MRP: It is sad to see this incivility to my colleague, a fellow volunteer who puts an enormous amount of work into these posts and into servicing them. Your attack is, frankly, over the top: “misrepresentation”, “breach of trust”, “diminished and damaged credibility”, “discourage participation” “unbefitting of a host of any forum”. “One can only guess at your motivation” — come, come now. Please refer to the THF Code of Conduct, Item 1:
            “Be Respectful and Kind
            Treat all members with courtesy and consideration. Avoid personal attacks, insults, or any form of harassment or stalking, including flaming moderators.”

            Spacing in WordPress and in browsers is difficult, and multiple spacing is usually compressed in display. Using the pre tag can help, but even there the outcome as displayed doesn’t always correspond to the spacing as put in the text within the pre tags. They don’t work well in comments. Try it.

            You have brought a great deal to these discussions and it would be a pity if they descend into acrimony. Let us proceed with civility, goodwill and good humour.

            1. Keith/Orense,

               I would like you to know that I read the Code prior to making my first post in this forum and read it again before making the above post. I do not consider anything I wrote, or the manner in which I wrote it, to be in contradiction of it.

               As such, I myself feel it is unfortunate that you think I have been uncivil as I, to the contrary, believe I have been no more than honest, formal, direct, precise, and forceful in arguing against the sloppiness of attention in this forum and what I think it results in.

               You, of course, have a right to your opinions and a right to disagree with my observations. In my opinion, the cutting and pasting from the Code
               is no less a lazy act than is the failure to take the time to verify the accuracy of a quote. You both have assumed too much and you mistake the acrimony I feel toward the act for an acrimony felt toward the actor.

               Now, as you have brought up incivility as a topic of discussion, I may as well point out a few more things in the interest of engaged and enlightened participation:

               Firstly, I regard one of your early remarks to me — “Have at it!” — to be both dismissive and disrespectful. Do you consider it uncivil of me to say so?

               Secondly, a host treating the comments portion of this forum less seriously than the opening essays — which apparently are held “to a higher bar” — is an arrogant act. Am I uncivil for saying so?

               Thirdly, I find your attitude toward me as a “beginner” to be condescending. You have taken a hypothetical remark I made in a post as if it applied to me. Please don’t offer me any other advice that suggests I don’t know what I’m talking about such as referring me to Lorraine Ellis Harr’s submission guidelines — I felt at first reading (and continue to feel today) that they are advice for grade schoolers, at best. Does expressing this opinion also make me uncivil?

               Fourthly, the most uncivil remark I have seen in this forum was directed at Alan: “[…] 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 that these subjects deserve.” That is both a rude and unprofessional statement, especially when Alan’s post that includes his poems in the past tense is the most substantive argument anyone has made in this forum against a real or imagined prohibition on composing our work in anything other than the present tense. And I’m sorry, but we do not need to look at any examples of Japanese practice when our own practice in English so elegantly and economically demonstrates this. Am I uncivil for saying so?

               Fifthly, if you as hosts “simply cannot cover every aspect of such complex topics at once, especially in a comments format,” then why solicit participation? As Alan points out, “Not all of us are commenting just for your good self and Keith, but responding to the aspects of content as we see it.” As hosts, the structure of debate is established with your opening blog posts, but if the “argument” is scattered among multiple and varying topics, and your responses to our comments are, too, then we will surely have a very, untidy and disorganized discussion. As hosts, you both hold the responsibility to adapt your manner of discourse to the medium within which it is embedded. Am I uncivil for saying so?

               And, lastly, Alan mentions he finds the discourse “highly academic.” I think he was being polite. I find nothing academic here in the normal sense of the word — at least not so far. Neither is the material “recondite” — as you say — nor is the manner of argumentation: it is simply the case that many of the claims made are illogical. Consider the following, for example: “A haiku produces the feeling of presence not because the poet achieved a particular quality of perception, but because the poem performs as speech rather than as representation. It does not describe an experience. It creates one in the reader.”

               This statement offers the reader false dichotomies and creates errors of mutual exclusivity because it assumes the pairs of traits or qualities being juxtaposed cannot belong to the same thing. The example is particularly fecund for the same error of logic occurs twice in three sentences!

               In addition to that which was just noted, the recondite feel of these discussions often — but not exclusively — is created through attempts to double down on such illogical claims in response to critical comments from participants i.e., the logical error which creates an initial state of confusion is merely compounded when defended. In light of these criticisms, I ask again, do you think I am being uncivil?

               Does harsh criticism of necessity mean uncivil criticism to you? I have provided valuable feedback in a thoroughly-detailed, tough, serious, no-nonsense, I-mean-business manner. I don’t see any language in the Code that prohibits me from doing so. But if you insist on also misascribing my acrimony for the acts I have mentioned today to an acrimony for the actors, then I ask, do you think that anyone taking the time to try and engage here in a “truly substantive manner” has time to waste on personal attacks? I have much better things to do, so “Shame on you.”

               You can take my comments as they have been intended — to be used to improve the forum and the professionalism of argument and discussion within it — or you can ignore their substance, treat them as both unserious and/or offensive, throw your hands up in exasperation, make excuses, and change nothing. You’re the hosts — the choice is yours.

               Sincerely and without prejudice,
               M

            2. M.,

               I think there is a larger issue here that is more important to Moon & Finger than any individual disagreement between us: what kind of conditions make serious discussion possible?

               We conceived of Moon & Finger as a place where ideas about haiku can be put into circulation, questioned, challenged, refined, and sometimes rejected. That requires rigor, but it also requires good faith. And I think the two depend upon one another.

               For me, rigor in a discussion does not mean identifying every possible error or discrepancy. It means attending carefully to what is actually being argued. Precision matters, but precision without relevance can become its own form of imprecision.

               This is why I have some difficulty with the way the Hass matter developed.

               There was indeed a discrepancy between the version I posted and the printed presentation of Hass’s translation. Once you pointed this out, I corrected it. I did not think the point was worth litigating, because the argument I was making did not depend in any way on capitalization, indentation, or terminal punctuation.

               More importantly, I was not claiming to reproduce Hass’s translation as a quotation in the narrow sense you attribute to me. My wording was:

               “When this continuity is rendered in English, as in Hass’s well-known translation, it naturally takes the form of a conjunction:
               the snow is melting
               and the village is flooded
               with children”

               I was referring to Hass’s phrasing in the context of the argument, specifically his use of the conjunction “and,” because that was the feature relevant to my point. I did not write “Translation: Robert Hass,” present the passage as a formal bibliographical quotation, or claim to reproduce its typography or layout. I did not even use Hass’s full name. I was referring to it “in conversation.”

               So there was an ambiguity in how I presented the passage, and there was a discrepancy in its formatting. You pointed it out; I corrected it. That seems to me to be the end of the matter.

               What I find difficult is the escalation from that discrepancy to claims about sloppiness, laziness, arrogance, unprofessionalism, damaged credibility, breached trust, and possible damage to the reputation of the Foundation and its board.

               Those are not simply more rigorous versions of the original criticism. They change its object.

               And this is where I think our disagreement about rigor becomes important. Your response to a lengthy argument about syntax, conjunction, and cutting was to focus on a capital letter, two indents, and a period. You are certainly entitled to consider those details important. But I don’t think their identification, by itself, demonstrates a greater rigor of engagement with the argument. If the purpose is to understand what the argument actually says and whether it succeeds, then leaving the argument itself unanswered while concentrating on details that have no bearing on its reasoning seems to me to be the opposite of rigor.

               The same issue arises with your claim that some of my arguments are “illogical.” Declaring that an argument contains a false dichotomy or an error of mutual exclusivity does not establish that it does; the claim itself requires demonstration. If you think there is a logical error, I would genuinely welcome that demonstration: identify the propositions, show where I have treated them as mutually exclusive, and explain why the inference does not follow. And if you’re right, I’ll say so. I don’t take being shown wrong as a cost of this kind of discussion; I take it as part of the point of having one.

               I am constantly making distinctions throughout these essays and subsequent comments. But a distinction is not necessarily a dichotomy. I can distinguish between speech and representation without claiming that haiku must be one rather than the other.

               Indeed, much of my argument is about precisely how these dimensions interact.

               So when one component of an argument is extracted and treated as though it were the whole argument, the resulting criticism may be directed at a position I do not actually hold. Before we can determine whether an argument is wrong, we need to agree on what the argument actually is.

               That brings me to what I mean by good faith in intellectual discussion.

               At the highest level, it means trying to understand what the other person actually means. Communication is imperfect: words are ambiguous, arguments are compressed, people omit things they assume are obvious, and readers bring their own assumptions to what they read. A serious discussion therefore requires us to account for that imperfection rather than treating every ambiguity as evidence of the worst possible interpretation, and to make a genuine effort to understand the meaning behind an argument before deciding whether it is wrong.

               Where an ambiguity can reasonably be resolved by asking a question, we should ask. Where a statement admits of several interpretations, we should begin with the most charitable interpretation rather than the most damaging one.

               This matters for Moon & Finger because people will only be willing to bring forward their most challenging, exploratory, and spontaneous ideas if they know that those ideas will be encountered in this spirit. If every imperfectly expressed thought is treated as a definitive position, every ambiguity as an implication of bad faith, and every mistake as evidence of incompetence, people will quite reasonably become more cautious about what they say. We would end up with tidier and safer discussion, but not better discussion.

               The point is not to protect ideas from criticism. It is to create the conditions in which people are willing to expose ideas to criticism in the first place.

               And even if some of my arguments are wrong, I don’t see that as a problem in itself. I am perfectly entitled to put forward an argument that may turn out to be mistaken. A flawed argument can still be useful: it can expose an assumption, provoke a counterargument, reveal a distinction, or lead to a better formulation. That is one of the reasons to have a discussion rather than simply publish conclusions.

               Again, I don’t find the distinction between the standards appropriate to essays and comments particularly problematic. An essay is a considered editorial piece representing the feature; a comment is part of an ongoing conversation. That does not mean comments are unimportant. It means that they have a different function. Comments allow people to think aloud, make mistakes, correct themselves, and pursue ideas while the discussion is still developing.

               The same principle of good faith applies to your interpretation of the beginner guidelines Keith referred you to. I have never thought of you as a beginner, and nothing you have written has suggested that to me. Someone who arrives with a developed theory of the cut hardly strikes me as a beginner, and whether someone is experienced or inexperienced would in any case be largely irrelevant to me. Beginners can be right and experienced writers can be wrong.

               Keith was not recommending those guidelines to you as remedial study. He was using them as evidence of how haiku is conventionally taught, because the normative and prescriptive account of haiku is itself part of what this discussion is examining. His own interventions make it fairly evident that he does not regard such beginner guidelines as an authoritative statement of what haiku must be.

               I am equally puzzled by the suggestion that classical Japanese haiku is somehow less relevant to our discussion than examples from contemporary English-language practice. If we are asking how haiku functions as a form, surely the historical practice from which that form developed is relevant evidence.

               I also think “professionalism” is an odd standard to invoke here. Moon & Finger is a volunteer discussion feature. Keith and I are not remunerated for this work, nor are we presenting ourselves as professional academics or as a professional scholarly service. We take the work seriously and try to do it responsibly. But seriousness and professionalism are not synonymous.

               More broadly, you ask us to examine our own conduct and standards. I think that is entirely reasonable. But the same standard has to operate in both directions. You ask us to scrutinise our assumptions, our accuracy, and our manner of argument; it seems reasonable to ask you to apply that same scrutiny to your own comments, including the possibility that your interpretation of another person’s intentions or argument may itself be mistaken.

               That is not a request for gentleness. It is a request for reciprocity.

               This brings me back to the larger issue.

               Civility is not simply about whether you feel acrimony toward another person. You may sincerely believe that your criticism is directed entirely at acts and arguments rather than at the people involved. But the way criticism is framed affects the conditions of exchange. Using adjectives such as “lazy,” “sloppy,” “arrogant,” “unprofessional,” or “damaging” is not merely a particularly forceful way of saying that an argument is wrong. It changes the nature of the interaction.

               I don’t want Moon & Finger to be a place where criticism is softened until it becomes meaningless. I want people to be able to tell us that our arguments are wrong. But I also want the criticism to remain directed toward the ideas and reasoning under discussion.

               We are fallible people working within a constrained format. We will make mistakes. Some of our arguments will be incomplete. Some will turn out to be wrong. We will sometimes misunderstand comments, and participants will sometimes misunderstand us. That is not a failure of the project; it is the condition under which a genuine discussion can happen.

               If you wish to return to substantive discussion, I am more than happy to oblige. I am very willing to engage with arguments, including strong disagreement and criticism of my own. But I will not engage further with personal attacks or characterisations of my conduct.

               Moon & Finger believes that discussion matters in and of itself, and that it does not have to be, nor can it ever be, perfect. In this light, I think it is worth asking whether the way we respond to one another is encouraging or discouraging further discussion.

2. Orense,

   Re: 8/2/2026 5:34 am

   But my point is exactly that haiku in English are organized around sentence logic.

   My definition of “cut” is syntactical/logical, not visual. One may visually represent a cut as a line break, spaces, or punctuation, but these need not be present. The cut exists without them. Their use is an overwriting — a visual acknowledgement — of the cut’s existence.

   Mine is not a fragment-phrase argument — Reichold defined those terms by length alone (a decision which I continue to find strange). Sentence fragments can, of course, be longer than complete sentences. My notion of cut has nothing to do with either truth or meaning but rather with the breaking off of sense, with the interruption of the progress of a thought and it’s replacement by another thought which may or may not reach its completion.

   M

   1. While I disagree that haiku are organized around a sentence logic, I do agree regarding limits of the fragment-phrase idea. It artificially limits how people can approach haiku. Wish it that such parlance would disappear and something like base/superposed take its place.

   2. MRP…just to note that as far as anglophone haiku are concerned, a visual cut does have effect where there may be a semantic cut, inasmuch as it marks the poet’s intention, and may limit the reader’s options of seeing a cut elsewhere.

      in my medicine cabinet–
      or
      has died of old age…
      or
      ĥas died of old age!

      would certainly settle the matter among those who have seen a cut at the first line and those who see none until the end. While we’re on the subject, these cuts are not only visual or textual, but are cues for how a verse will be read aloud, with suggestive tones. With pauses.

3. Orense,

   Re:

   If “The speaker assigns “winter” to the fly not because the evidence proves that the fly died then, but because winter is the temporal world in which the encounter occurs,” then what are we to make of assigning “old age” to the fly’s cause of death?

   M

   1. M.R, if “fly” is a summer association, then the irony of placing its present state of death in winter, doesn’t disqualify it as also having its present state of death in summer, like 6-months ago (in the haiku’s universe), and only now being discovered by the speaker. As such, the “cause” of death being “old age,” is something like the irony of the Ozymandias sonnet, that even our deaths die. The fly’s past death is discovered in the current moment, and in that discovery, the death is reactivated as occurring both Now and Then. This reactivation-experience on the speaker’s part causes a duration to unfold it the speaker’s mind, thus the span of time that would qualify the fly to be “old” 6-months after summer.

      i.e. the fly passed away in summer, and the discovering of it now, in winter, causes the speaker to add the 6-months between summer and winter to the fly’s life, and thus to make the claim of “old age.”

      1. Adam,

         Yeah, no problem at all with your reading. Maybe I was wondering — based on Orense’s logic — why not just the winter fly/ has died?

         In other words, is the inclusion “of old age” redundant?

         1. In my reading, “of old age” very much strengthens the past-as-present-sorta dynamic for the reasons I blabbed on about above.

         2. For me, “of old age” is the least redundant part of the poem.

            Without it, we have an observation: the winter fly has died. With it, we have an interpretation: the winter fly has died of old age. The poem’s energy comes from the fact that the speaker does not merely discover a dead fly; he immediately supplies a cause. And that cause is peculiar.

            Moreover, “of old age” introduces duration. Without it, we simply have a dead fly. With it, an entire temporal horizon opens up.

            “Old age” immediately implies a long life, the accumulation of time, and the gradual movement toward death. Whether or not the explanation is factually plausible is almost secondary. The phrase invites us to imagine a duration far greater than the evidence can support.

            And once duration enters the poem, it begins to spread through everything else.

            It reaches back toward the speaker’s own good health. The fly is discovered precisely because the cabinet has remained unopened long enough for it to die there. The medicines exist to ward off illness, yet their very lack of use contributes to the conditions of the fly’s death.

            It reaches toward the fly’s imprisonment. The cabinet becomes a place of waiting. There is something almost folkloric about it: the creature waiting for the door to open, like the familiar image of someone waiting so long that they grow old waiting. “Old age” gives the fly a biography.

            At the same time, the phrase creates a tension with what may actually have happened. The fly’s death was likely not the slow completion suggested by old age, but something shorter, more frantic, and more torturous. The poem overlays one temporality upon another: the imagined duration of old age upon the probable reality of confinement and starvation.

            All of these temporalities are contained within those three words. That is why I do not hear “of old age” as a redundant explanation. It is where the poem begins to unfold.

            In fact, we might say that the poem is saturated with time. “Winter” is temporal. “Old age” is temporal. The present perfect, “has died,” is temporal. The unopened cabinet implies duration. The trapped fly implies waiting. The discovery of the body implies an interval between death and recognition.

            And the poem’s tensions are temporal tensions. There is the tension between the imagined long duration of old age and the likely shorter duration of the fly’s actual confinement; between the peaceful, natural death implied by old age and the more contingent, desperate circumstances that probably caused it; between the fly’s waiting and the speaker’s unwitting delay in opening the cabinet; between the moment of death and the moment of discovery; and between the finite life of the insect and the human tendency to project larger narratives of aging and mortality onto it.

            The poem continually moves between these different scales and experiences of time. The fly’s death may be brief, but the poem continually expands it into larger experiences of duration, waiting, aging, contingency, inevitability and mortality. In my opinion “of old age” is not an extra detail attached to the poem. It is where the poem’s deepest concerns enter.

   2. Winter is assigned to the fly for several reasons:
      an unqualified fly signals summer by default
      flies normally die in winter
      winter’s poetic essence is associated with ageing, loss, and impending cold death.

      And in Shakespeare, discontent!

4. Keith,

   Re: your post of 8-1-2026, 11:58 pm

   Having at it (as you insisted I do), an analysis of parts of speech reveals three of these things are not like the others:

   #1 – is a complete sentence – no cut (per my definition) – not haiku

   #4 – same as #1

   #6 – same as #1

   #2 – not a complete sentence – no main verb – single noun phrase sentence fragment with entailed cut – poem has no second part so nothing to juxtapose – not haiku

   #3 – same as #2

   #5 – not a complete sentence – no main verb – two sentence fragments: a noun phrase and a dependent clause each with entailed cut – two parts juxtaposed – a haiku

   A Haiku in English is an Interrogation of the Poetic Possibilities of the Sentence Fragment: a Working Definition.
   A haiku in English is a poetic form which contains at least one sentence fragment (any segment of language which is not a complete sentence such as a noun phrase, a dependent clause, etc.). A sentence fragment entails a “cut” (a complete syntactic break. A cut should not be confused with a mere pause, or caesura). The fragment generates the form’s incompleteness. In addition to the fragment, the form requires at least one additional segment of language to create a juxtaposition. This is referred to as the complement. The complement may be either a fragment or a complete sentence. The poem must also demonstrate brevity i.e., be capable of being remembered in its entirety after a single hearing or reading.

   Note: Many famous ‘haiku-like’ poems (poems which possess some but not all of the above elements) have been published in English. Consider the one you chose:

   In my medicine cabinet
   the winter fly
   Has died of old age

   Many of these can be easily modified to fit the above definition:

   medicine cabinet
   the winter fly
   has died of old age

   On Rules.
   A poetic form without ‘rules’ is formless.

   Even so, I am in favor of the adage, “Rules are made to be broken.”

   In offering a working definition to the ELH community for dissection and discussion I intend to question the ‘rule’ that in our practice there are not — and should not be — any rules. Perhaps as a community of practice we have overlooked some of the possible or even actual rules of our form because we have simply refused to look? Perhaps we have been told far too often that it can’t be done?

   A Simple Method.
   This definition was developed from a parts of speech analysis on the poems collected by our major anthologists — van den Heuvel, Ross, Kacian et al., etc. For example, it accounts for 65% of the poems in Ross’s 1993 anthology — almost 2 of every 3. Perhaps there is nothing in it? But what if there is?

   I have plunged my hands into the muddied pond of our practice and found a smaller number — and different kinds –of frogs than many might have perhaps expected. Maybe all I have done is to have looked in a manner which others have overlooked? Maybe all I have done is gotten my hands dirty?

   Thanks for the continuing opportunity to communicate through — and hopefully in many ways both large and small — beyond our disagreements,
   M

   PS: I see no reason why we shouldn’t continue our appreciation of what I have called ‘haiku-like’ poems. Many of them are, of course, very good.

   1. MRP: Thank you for these thoughtful comments, and doing the work. Challenging and good-humoured views are welcomed! They are what we want. It would be a dull world if we all agreed, with no scope for further learning or development.

      I have the following thoughts in response, in no particular order:

      —an individual poet (or critic) is entirely at liberty to formulate a preferred definition of haiku. Problems may arise when attempting to impose it on others.

      —If I were to try to define ‘what is ‘haiku’ —which I’m not about to do, for I would certainly fail—and discovered that many of Issa’s verses, of Taneda Santoka and Hosai Ozaki, were ruled out along with those of a modern great like John Stevenson, and much of the acclaimed gendai haiku in Japan these past eighty years, I should begin to think I’m on the wrong lines.

      —the history of squabbling schools or cliques in the genre, which continues, is of itself evidence that there has been, and remains, no agreed definition, many strands, and many approaches

      —as soon as we step away from 5-7-5, a marked cut, two parts and a kigo written in Japanese we are in movable territory. As are the modern haiku poets in Japan of the twentieth and this century. For ELH poets, we have the additional questions of whether or to what extent we try to mimic Japanese aesthetics or add our own.

      —the evidence of the record to date suggests that haiku is not one thing, but many, not only insofar as form is concerned, but in reasons and motives for engaging in it. I think that is something to be embraced rather than rejected. One size does not fit all.

      —the reason you find two-thirds of the verses you read fit a particular pattern may not be because the pattern is “correct,” but because it has become self-perpetuating. A normative formula has led to a conveyor-belt of stale, lookalike verses, often mediocre or banal. People write more like that, as they think they will get published. And they do. Haiku of the railroad track, clackety-clack.

      —if you embrace diversity in haiku, there need be no one form. That doesn’t mean that without a definition of form, it is “formless.” I think (with Levertov) that form is subservient to content. I have no problem with variable geometry of form.

      —I attach far more importance to the wine within than to the shape of the bottle or the glass, although they can enhance the experience a little in the anticipation and capturing the nose. For me, the ‘wine’ here is the act of engagement and contemplation, whether the poet’s or the reader’s, and reaching an insight either that one hadn’t had before, or that is expressed in a fresh way that once recognised, adds to it.

      —do I apply any tests?(you should be asking…). Yes, but they are rough and ready, to determine whether there is any DNA from the tradition in a particular poem. I find that with a broad and inclusive view of economy, suggestion, arrangement or juxtaposition, and use of compact images to encode a wealth of associations, there are many verses (that would be excluded by a formulaic view) which I assess to be in the spirit of haiku. And it’s the essence, not the variable form, that determines that for me.

      But that is just my view among many. I’m not trying to impose it on anyone. I like the fact that haiku resists definition, is broad and inclusive, and leaves scope for personal taste and personal variation. And for experimentation. Otherwise, I fear, it will harden into a didactic classroom exercise rather than a living, evolving genre.

      1. Having at it — “Haiku of the railroad track, clackety-clack.”

         Keith,
         No disagreement here on any of your thoughts. The working definition is a thought experiment I’m engaged in, a puzzle grown from a puzzle. I’ll keep playing in the mud …

         I’ll be brief about one of your points where I think this helps. If the anthologised practice is not representative of — let’s say — best practice in the ELH community, then I doubt any other form of promotion (or exemplification) could do any better than to push a ‘kind of haiku’ (shared preferences, ideology of the editor/s, etc.). It suggests nothing more than a philosophical and artistic free for all where none ever get beyond talking about their own horse.

         Anyone new to the game could only learn a ‘kind of haiku’ with its own fuzzy set of boundaries.

         Just a thought,
         M

         1. MRP: ‘Best practice’ is a concept more applicable to wiring a circuit board or book-keeping or fire drill than to poetry, I think. In hokku then haiku we have a substantial body of tradition, with notable exponents, going back more than 400 years. When you study their work (in as much detail as possible, I recommend), you notice a wide range of approaches that have won praise and enthusiasm and are generally held to be excellent verses. The range is wider than that which we find in ‘orthodox’ haiku in English that is taught as ‘good practice’ (and for that matter in the still very strong traditionalist schools in Japan, and the formal 5-7-5 enthusiasts in the anglophone community) What are taught—with admirable intentions—are some of the techniques and devices established in the genre. They are worthy, and powerful, and good things to learn; they may be drawn from a majority of traditional verses; but they are not ‘rules’. Your very assertion that ‘rules are made to be broken’ gives away that point. The acquis or acquired common ground from which haiku (and senryu) develops is much broader and more flexible, as many of the verses we’ve been examining so far in this feature show. Bashõ was pretty revolutionary in his day, as were several of the others, as are some haiku poets these days.

            That brings us to the question of evolution as new poets bring new ideas to the genre, some of which work, others tend to be discarded. The more rigid a straitjacket is in this genre of tiny verses, the more constraining, the more difficult to develop a personal voice, especially when a limited vocab of everyday words is held to be desirable. (Yes there is the case that aiming to write within a set of adopted rules can prompt creative solutions to stay within them, but that’s best left to the individual poet, I suggest)

            On the matter of ‘anthologising,’ personal perceptions do play a role, but wide reading and knowledge of what came before play a much bigger role. In the Red Moon Anthology there are ten editors worldwide plus the editor in chief. They and journal editors can propose candidate (published) verses throughout a calendar year, which are circulated in an anonymised roster every six months for the ten to vote upon. A verse must get at least five votes out of ten to go forward for final selection (or five out of the other nine if it happens to be by one of the RMA editors – they can’t vote for their own work). Apart from the editor in chief, the editors don’t know who votes for which works. Only when the book appears are the results known to all the editors. That’s probably as sound and detached as the process can reaonably be made. A standard practice doesn’t really feature in selection, though ‘good practices’ are by ingrained reading and awareness assumed. More interesting is whether the verse itself has impact, originality, insight, authenticity, sincerity…&c. Even poetry!

            Hardly a ‘free-for-all,’ I suggest.

            So, I think that someone ‘new to the game’ is well advised to learn the most prevalent techniques that are taught, and why they work, and to study good examples of haiku in the tradition alongside them with an open mind. The great merit of a haiku for study is that it is very short, so study of a good one in Japanese with the aid of several translations and an online dictionary and grammar, and a search for critical commentaries, is not too onerous, and well repaid. As is the study of the best verses of the well-rated ELH poets over the past fifty years too. The student will soon realise that the literature contains far more by way of variety than that they have been taught. And that the advice given in teaching or in ‘how to’ books, while good, is just that: helpful advice to speed the process. Techniques, devices, conventions, good practices but not the only practices, not rules.

            1. “‘Best practice’ is a concept more applicable to wiring a circuit board or book-keeping or fire drill than to poetry, I think.”

               I don’t. The first principles of any art are 1 – what is it?and 2 – how is it done?

            2. MRP: no worries. What works for you, works for you.

               If you have a defining set of rules for haiku, it would be interesting to see them. Starting with your first principle: “what is haiku”? I’m not sure I’ve been able to answer that definitively. As to how it is done, the record that I see shows: in many ways.

   2. M.R. Every rule has a limit, a moment of doubt, “is this haiku within the rule or mot?” It’s at that juncture that an introspective analysis of the rule demonstrates that any given haiku actually and commonly embedded with the space of the rule may NOT actually be within the rule, and thus any rule distilled from that haiku, and by extension all haiku(?), can’t be included in the set of haiku that constructed the rule.

      Soccer has rules, but gosh darn it, the game that I play with friends in a field in my hood. in which each team has only 9 players on field instead of 11 is still “soccer.”

      1. Adam,

         Yes, of course, all good, common sense with which I do not disagree.

         I think your soccer analogy functions like I intend my ‘working definition’ to function — if you take two players away from the structure of play why is it still called soccer? What else would have to be lost before we called the game something else? What is the minimum ground of “soccer”? Or in other words, with so much stripped away from the original, Japanese name-bearing practice, what is the domain of an ELH which can continue to bear the same name? It is very easy to imagine there must be a domain of ‘haiku-like’ poems, too. Why should this possibility give the community the jitters?

         1. M.R., I agree there are haiku-like poems, just as there are soccer-like games, but I would still call what I do with my friends, “soccer.” And it’s not merely because it’s /close enough/, but rather it’s because “soccer” is a nebulous, permeable thing that is constructed of solids and gaps, and the gaps allow new things to evolve. In a previous thread in moon and finger, I posted my answer to what is haiku:

            “I would argue we call haiku haiku because of both its (1) formal characteristics, (2) its perceived purpose as a genre, and the (3) sensed possibility and limits of experimenting upon both of these.

            (To this I would add something Orense wrote about,: a haiku is in a dialog with other haiku)

            I think your question of what is the “minimum ground” that qualifies something as haiku is a HUGE question, and something that should never stopped being asked. I think that question has much to do with item (3) above.

            Your comment about items being “stripped away” is, I think, what I was getting at with the comment about becoming introspective of “rules.” For what has been “stripped away from the Japanese name-bearing practice”? An example answer could be ELH has stripped away the sound-count (syllables/on) of haiku, but then, being introspective, we can found countless examples of haiku/hokku in the Japanese literary tradition that don’t use “correct” sound-counts? Entire schools of haiku that purposefully abandon sound-count limits.

            Those items that have been stripped away in ELH, have also previously been stripped away in Japanese haiku in its wide approach to this poetic genre.

5. Perhaps readers would like to exercise their minds and theories on the last example in the post: Jack Kerouac’s single continuous statement asserting that:

   In my medicine cabinet
   the winter fly
   Has died of old age

   The death of the fly has been completed. The event is, we assume from “has” died, the present perfect, in the immediate or recent past. Does it have to be?
   The moment of awareness, of insight, is the present moment—for both writer and reader.
   You could also consider why the poet has used the present perfect: is it merely to follow a convention? Would the burthen of the poem be any different if it read “In my medicine cabinet / the winter fly / died of old age” (with “and now I’m remembering and telling you about it” understood: the presence of enunciated speech)? Why did Kerouac not choose “In my medicine cabinet / the winter fly / is dead of old age”? Does “in my medicine cabinet” necessarily convey a present circumstance, this moment; or is it without time? How about: “In my medicine cabinet / many flies have died of old age / in winter”? Ruled out as “haiku”? If so, why?

   1. The original is more musical in rhythm and assonance, and the present perfect is more effective/affective.

      Your last example has the same elements but lacks a cut, conventionally at the end, so not haiku.

      1. …and would you say that the original is cut after ‘medicine cabinet’ (which is just about arguable)? Whether or not a cut is an inviolable ‘rule’ in haiku / hokku is another subject; and if so, what in ELH constitutes ‘a cut’ in definable terms (piece in preparation)

         1. No. The (exclamatory) cut is after “old age”.

            1. simonj: yes, as with many ku in a single continuous sentence. The trailing cut invites contemplation, reader completion, meditation, insight. I think here, more of an ellipsis than an exclamation. More of an “ah…”

            2. simonj, can you say why, or how?

            3. OK, maybe Keith explains it. But you know, I wonder if the reader’s *need* for a cut creates one.

            4. Replying to Peter Yovu:
               My acknowledgment of a cut is probably a combination of experience and my own practise.

               Replying to Keith Evetts:
               I think all cuts are exclamatory in some way. It is the poet’s intrusion, saying this is important in some way.

         2. If a “cut” in some instances, is essentially a surprise, or the unexpected, one could easily say that in JK’s haiku the cut comes after “the winter fly” with the surprise of “Has died of old age”. Of course, the cut is not announced by punctuation or spacing. It occurs with and as the surprise.

            1. Well, with the artificial lineation in ELH there’s a potential pause at each line-break, so if a reader wants to see a cut where there is no semantic (grammatical) cut, and no cut marked by punctuation, they have options. Even more, sometimes, in monoku with ‘mobile’ optional semantic cuts written with that aim in mind.

               However, with many a verse, both in Japanese and ELH, that is essentially a single continuous sentence with no semantic cut in it, like this one, there is a cut at the end, implied or marked in ELH, and often in classic Japanese with a formal kireji at the end, often not always keri or kana. Issa has many such.

               I’m not so sure that a cut is intended to surprise the reader: I read it as there to mark a separation of parts, and it is often across that separation that the ‘moment of awareness’ (and ‘insight’) occurs. Where there’s a cut at the end, usually there is, in essence, an invitation to the reader to return, contemplate, complete if necessary, recreate, and draw the insight. That might be the ‘surprise’ but there are differnt kinds of insight. Not only an ‘aha’ moment’ or an ‘o my god!’ moment, but an ooh moment, an aah moment, an aww moment, a hoho moment, an ‘I see now’…. all are valid.

               THe ‘disjunctive’ movement might emphasise that the cut is often there to shock (or surprise), and I think that can be one way, but only one way to use it. We’ll get to the idea of ‘a harmonious arrangement of separate but related things’ in due course.

               Lastly, Hasegawa Kai has an interesting notion, that I think I buy into, that whether there’s a formal or semantic cut in the middle of a verse, or not, there is a ‘silent cut’ at the beginning and end of every haiku: it’s a moment or thought ‘clipped’ from experience — at both ends…

            2. Keith, I was careful to say “in some cases”.

               Maybe you know how I feel about many (not all) single line haiku that can be “cut” in multiple ways and read accordingly. The implication seems to be, the more the better, or, it’s whatever you want it to be. My feeling is that for a haiku to work it has to have a *core* which is *felt* though may not be (is probably not) explicable. If multiple readings derive from that core, all is well and perhaps ‘a harmonious arrangement of separate but related things’ will be apparent. But often, it seems to me, there is a free for all. That’s how I see it.

               But as I always say about things like this, people should feel free to experiment, to try out what they are drawn to, and to take their experiments as far as possible. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

               Also, I would say that one could argue that there is a cut at the beginning and ending of any poem. Yes, I can hear you or Orense saying: that may be true, but it’s especially true of haiku.

               Also also, it is good to have haiku offered (like JK’s) to help ground conversation. I may offer one tomorrow.

            3. I tend to agree that a haiku works best if it has a ‘core.’ It would be somewhere along the continuum between utterly obvious and utterly Rorshach (as Lorin would put it). I recall you set store, in some comments in re:Virals, in haiku as a communication between poet and reader, and if the poet intended something, or some feeling, and the reader does not receive that intention—because drafted too vaguely, perhaps, or I might add ‘too far towards the incomprehensible’— there’s a failure in communication. That might be a failure in the reader’s sensitivity or insufficient ‘haiku acquis,’ or it might be a failure of the poet to realise that what they thought they were transmitting worked only for them in their context, and baffles other readers.

               Cuts as clips: yes, I’d argue that with the brevity, and all the baggage of expectation that it’s ‘a moment of lived experience,’ haiku seems to have in spades what Homer’s Odyssey barely has at all by way of opening and closing ‘silent cuts.’

               I think experimentation is essential if the genre is not to become fossilised. Understanding that much of it will founder and not be adopted.

            4. Peter,

               If a cut exists why would it have to be announced? Isn’t it more the case that spacing or punctuation (formatting) would merely represent a cut as opposed to actually being a cut? If the formatting makes the cut, then where is the cut when the poem is read aloud?

               M

            5. M– I don’t think I’m saying a cut has to be announced. (Traces of blood will be sufficient.) Oh, sorry. But I’m not sure I understand what you are wondering about.

         3. Keith,

            There is no cut after “medicine cabinet” — there is merely a pause, or caesura.

            Most of Richard Wright’s haiku-like poems follow the same O-S-V structure of Kerouac’s haiku-like poem. This inverted structure with a prepositional phrase as the first line simply turns a complete sentence inside-out or back-to-front. A complete sentence — both grammatically and semantically complete — cannot be a haiku for it has no two parts to juxtapose and no incompleteness for a reader to complete.

            A cut in ELH is a complete syntactic break. The only way to achieve this in English is with a sentence fragment. A poem in the form of a complete sentence cannot have a cut at the end because there is nothing to cut to. But an ELH composed of two sentence fragments by definition has two cuts — perhaps the parts may be said to cut to each other?

            Misapplied and forced punctuation do not make a cut. You can slap an em dash after “medicine cabinet” but it still won’t make a cut — the syntax will remain that of a complete sentence (the eye might stop upon it but the tongue will roll right over it).

            All poems end, but the ending line of a poem — whether haiku, haiku-like or other — does not form a cut simply because it ends.

            “Ah” added after the end of either a sentence fragment or a single, complete sentence — being itself a sentence fragment in the form of an interjection and therefore entailing a cut — does add the necessary second part for a haiku.

            Every reader can hear a complete sentence. The absence of a period, or exclamation point, or question mark, etc does not turn a single, complete sentence chopped into three lines (whether S-V-O or O-S-V) into a haiku. The reader will know what is missing.

            Of course, I refer above only to haiku in English.

            Thanks,
            M

            1. “A complete sentence — both grammatically and semantically complete — cannot be a haiku for it has no two parts to juxtapose and no incompleteness for a reader to complete.”

               With respect, I disagree.
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/james-w-hackett-2/
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/john-stevenson-20/
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/john-stevenson-19/
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/sarah-davies/
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/jim-kacian-10/
               https://thehaikufoundation.org/issa-5/ (cut at the end)

               “cannot be a haiku”? There are no ‘rules,’ only tools and techniques, conventions and self-reinforcing orthodoxies. There’s more than one way to write haiku. To try to define it is to clutch at water with open fingers.

               However, we are getting way off the week’s subject. My fault. Although, this week we’ve had at least one single continuous sentence in what might be the immediate past, or could even be read a statement about a narrated past, by a more modern Japanese haiku poet. And with a simile, to boot. Cut at the end. Example no. 6 in the post above. Have at it!

            2. M., I think this is a good opportunity to bring together a few threads from this discussion, because I think they’re more connected than they first appear.

               I actually agree that haiku don’t organize themselves around sentence logic — where “sentence” means a grammatically complete, semantically resolved proposition. But I’d draw a different conclusion from that agreement than you do. If haiku isn’t governed by sentence logic, then sentence completeness or incompleteness can’t be the test for whether a cut is present, in either direction.

               Bashō is recorded, through his disciples, as saying that a haiku can contain a kireji and still not be cut, and conversely, a poem without one can still be cut. That teaching already treats the cut as a functional, felt quality rather than a mechanical one certified by the presence or absence of a particular formal marker. A poem that happens to be a grammatically complete sentence isn’t thereby disqualified from having a cut, any more than a poem in fragments is automatically guaranteed one. Sentence structure and the cut are simply operating at different levels, and I don’t think we can read the presence or absence of a cut directly off of syntax.

               What I’d want to hold onto is the idea that a haiku needs two parts in tension — a gap the reader completes. But I don’t think that gap has to show up as a visible syntactic break.

               It can exist in many ways for example between what a sentence states and what a reader recognizes to be actually the case.
               I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the Kerouac poem. On the surface, it offers one complete, tidy sentence: a fly died of old age. But the situation the poem describes doesn’t support that explanation. A fly sealed in a closed medicine cabinet, unable to escape, almost certainly didn’t die peacefully of age; it more likely starved or died of dehydration.

               And there’s a further irony underneath that one: it’s Kerouac’s own good health, his not needing to open the cabinet, that dooms the fly, while the cabinet’s actual contents — the medicines meant to guard against illness — never come into play at all. The fly dies neither of the illness the medicine exists to prevent, nor really of old age, but of something closer to cosmic irony: safety and death sharing the same address.

               That gap — between the stated cause and the real one, between what the sentence asserts and what the situation actually shows — is, I’d suggest, the poem’s real cut. It doesn’t need a dash or a fragment to mark it, because the juxtaposition isn’t syntactic. It’s between assertion and reality, and the reader completes the poem not by supplying a missing grammatical half, but by supplying the truth the sentence itself is withholding.

               This is also where the poem’s memento mori dimension and its cut turn out to be the same thing, seen from two angles. A fly is already a conventional emblem of mortality, alive or dead, and a medicine cabinet door is, ordinarily, a mirror — so the scene already stages the classic vanitas pairing of a small dead creature and a viewer’s own reflected face, without needing to announce it. But the fly’s death does more than repeat that symbolism; it completes it. A live fly only gestures at death somewhere, eventually. This one demonstrates that death arrived exactly where it was least expected — inside the room built to guard against it.

               The cut I’m describing, between the poem’s stated cause of death and its real one, is the same gap that opens onto that fuller meaning. Once a reader notices the sentence isn’t telling the truth, the whole scene reorganizes itself: comic irony on first reading, memento mori on the second look, the way an anamorphic skull resolves only from a certain angle.

               I’d add one more thing, since it bears on how much weight a reading like this can carry. Kerouac studied at Columbia under Meyer Schapiro, credited with drawing the Beats’ attention to painters like Van Gogh and Cézanne; he went on to paint seriously himself, working at times from Renaissance religious subjects; and he was raised Catholic, in a tradition where mortality iconography was ordinary visual furniture rather than specialist knowledge. None of that proves he built this irony deliberately. But I don’t think it needs to have been deliberate. A mind steeped in a visual and religious tradition can let its logic surface in three lines without ever needing to name it. Instinct and depth aren’t opposed here — the instinct may simply be what a fully absorbed tradition looks like from the inside.

               So I don’t think the cut and the mortality reading are two separate observations about this poem. The cut is where the mortality reading enters — the gap between what the sentence says and what the situation shows is the very thing that lets a small, funny death become, on a second look, a genuine memento mori.

               As a closing remark, I think determining whether a poem is cut is actually less difficult in practice than it sometimes appears in theory. The reader’s experience is often a better guide than the presence or absence of a formal marker.

               A poem with a strong cut continues to generate thought. The more genuinely there is to discover in the relationship between its parts, the more evident the gap that invites the reader’s participation. The cut is not simply the place where syntax stops; it is the place where meaning continues to unfold.

               Conversely, a poem can follow the phrase-fragment approach and still produce very little tension or resonance. A syntactic break alone does not guarantee a meaningful cut. Fragmentation is a technique, but the cut is an effect.

               In that sense, the question for me is not whether a poem has been broken apart grammatically or punctuated “properly,” but whether the space between its parts remains active.

            3. One further thought after posting that. There is a third irony hiding in “winter fly” itself.

               The label suggests that the fly’s identity — perhaps even its death — belongs to winter. But a fly sealed inside a closed cabinet could have died at any point after becoming trapped, perhaps weeks or months earlier, and only been discovered when the cabinet was opened in winter. “Winter fly” is therefore not really a fact about when the fly died. It is a fact about when the speaker encountered it.

               This is closely related to the poem’s “of old age” explanation, though in a different register. “Old age” supplies a cause that the situation cannot verify; “winter” supplies a temporal placement that the situation cannot verify. Both are acts of interpretation: ways of organizing an event from the standpoint of the observer who encounters it.

               What makes the first irony deeper is that the speaker replaces one kind of death with another. “Old age” represents death as inevitable — the natural completion of a life. Being trapped represents death as contingent — the arbitrary circumstance through which that inevitable end arrives. The fly’s death contains both truths at once. Every creature must die, but every creature dies in a particular way, at a particular time, through particular circumstances.

               That tension is at the heart of the memento mori tradition. Mortality is universal, but its encounter is always singular. The fly becomes a small image of that paradox: a creature that cannot escape death, yet dies through a circumstance it could never have anticipated.

               And this circles back to the question of the poem’s “when.” The relevant when is not necessarily the recoverable historical moment of the fly’s death. It is the moment of discovery, the moment when an unnoticed event enters awareness and becomes meaningful.

               The poem enacts this principle within its own fiction. The speaker assigns “winter” to the fly not because the evidence proves that the fly died then, but because winter is the temporal world in which the encounter occurs. The present of perception becomes the frame through which the past event is understood.

            4. Keith: “However, we are getting way off the week’s subject.” Not necessarily. The problem of what grammar haiku operate in has much to do with how tense is created and received in a haiku.

            5. Aye, Adam. The great Tao flows everywhere…it clothes and feeds all things. All is connected!

               However, we can address only parts of it at any one time. The past Part 2 appears tomorrow: Recollection. As we are at 90 comments to this post, which are becoming hard to keep track of, I suggest that tomorrow the threads remaining live are reintroduced by zestful readers, ideally with a one-word heading (for which we can search in browser Edit-Find as conversations lengthen) and leading with a brief summary of where you think we are at, so far.

            6. Keith, the following may be blasphemous, depending on how one feels about AI, but, I asked Claude to read the comments and come up with a brief write up of general topics that are still being discussed. Maybe it could be posted at the top of the comments section of part 2. Just an idea:

               Where We Left Off (from Part 1)

               Several threads are still actively unresolved and worth continuing here rather than starting fresh:

               CUT — Is the “cut” a syntactic break (a fragment/complement model, requiring an incomplete sentence) or a functional/felt quality independent of grammar (illustrated via the Kerouac fly poem’s gap between stated cause and real cause)? Also open: whether cuts are inherently “exclamatory” or surprise-driven, and whether every poem has an implicit cut at its very beginning and end.

               SENTENCE — Following from CUT: must a haiku avoid being a single complete, grammatically resolved sentence? A soccer analogy (how much can be “stripped away” before it’s a different game) and a proposed “working definition” of haiku are both still open for pushback.

               JK’s FLY — Close reading of Kerouac’s “winter fly” continues: the layered ironies (old age vs. starvation, winter as encounter-time not death-time), the present-perfect’s aspectual work, and a memento mori/vanitas reading (mirror, anamorphic skull) developed at length.

               ENUNCIATION — The claim that haiku functions as language spoken in an eternal present, versus counter-examples (thought without speech, deictic centers, haibun, framing). A thought-experiment about whether an unspoken/unwritten haiku is still haiku is the latest unanswered volley here.

               RULES — The broader dispute about whether haiku has any binding “rules” at all, or only techniques/conventions — a “wine vs. bottle” view and discussion of anthology editorial process, versus a push for a working definition.

            7. A great idea and initiative!

               One small clarification on the Kerouac section: I would not want the anamorphic skull to become treated as a central element of the reading. It is only an analogy.

               The reason the anamorphic skull analogy works is not because Kerouac’s poem is secretly reproducing a particular Renaissance technique. It is because it captures something fundamental about the memento mori tradition.

               Death is always present, but rarely confronted directly. Much of vanitas art works by allowing mortality to appear indirectly — through insects, flowers, timepieces, extinguished candles, or other ordinary things that carry a second meaning beneath their surface.

               The point is not that the viewer fails to see the object. The point is that the deeper significance is initially displaced. The image must be encountered from another angle before its full meaning becomes visible.

               That is what I find interesting in Kerouac’s poem. The dead fly is immediately there, but the mortality it carries is initially masked by humour, absurdity, and the apparent triviality of the situation. The reader does not receive a lesson about death; rather, death emerges through a change in attention.

               The anamorphic skull is simply a particularly vivid example of that general principle. It illustrates the kind of delayed recognition I think the poem produces: the mortality dimension is there from the beginning, but it becomes visible only when the reader changes the angle of attention.

            8. I think that cuts should await an eventual whole post or posts on the subject. Likewise single sentence verses, along with ichibutsujitate (which different sources interpret as single image, single theme, or single sentence), and the nikku ichishō pattern rarely discussed in ELH.

               Enunciation /spoken present is definitely a continuing theme germane to the three posts on ‘the past’.

               Rules or the accumulated body of practice, any time. But I fear it would be too tempting and distract from the closer-focused issue of the week. We can limit ourselves to the supposed rule that a haiku in English must be written in the present tense or, if a recollection, have a component of the text that can (if wished) be seen to bring it into the present. Rules in general, their use as guides or handrails, role in stimulating creativity, justification in the record or not, is a subject on its own that behind the scenes we have it in mind to post on.

      2. Simon, I agree the present perfect is more affective because aspect implies subjectivity. I’m not sure I would say that Keith’s version is less cut than Kerouac’s. The difference seems to me to lie elsewhere.

         Without the final phrase:

         In my medicine cabinet
         many flies have died
         of old age

         the poem still has a strong structure of separation and tension. The awkwardness comes from adding:

         in winter

         That apposition changes the function of the seasonal reference. Instead of belonging to the image, as “winter fly” does in Kerouac’s poem, it becomes explanatory. It tells us the conditions under which this statement is true, and in doing so it narrows the openness of the poem.

         This is also where Japanese offers an interesting contrast. Because number is not typically specified, a haiku can often hold both the individual and the general at once. A fly can be one particular creature encountered in a moment, while also suggesting a wider condition. English tends to force the choice between singular and plural, but Japanese often leaves that relationship unresolved.

         So I don’t think the issue is that Kerouac’s version has a cut and Keith’s does not. For me the issue is whether the elements remain in as productive a tension.

   2. Keith, I think the Kerouac poem becomes even more interesting if we look beyond the surface irony.

      Taken at face value, “the winter fly / has died of old age” is already ironic: the language of human mortality is applied to a tiny creature. But look closer at the circumstances, and the irony deepens. A fly trapped in a medicine cabinet may not have died of old age at all — it may simply have starved, unable to escape. The speaker’s explanation is therefore not simply a fact but an act of interpretation. Faced with a small, silent death, the mind supplies a story. The poem becomes a meditation not only on the fly but on our own desire to make death comprehensible.

      This opens a larger reading as well. The fly may stand for a more general condition: no creature can ultimately escape time and mortality. Even if one avoids one form of death, there are countless others. The irony is that the fly appears to have died the most natural of deaths, while the circumstances suggest something more arbitrary and contingent.

      This is where aspect, rather than tense alone, does the real work. Aspect is not a fact about the event itself — how long it lasted or whether it is objectively finished — but a way of presenting the event from a particular viewpoint. The present perfect carries perfect aspect: it frames a completed event as still connected to the present, not sealed off from it. The preterite, by contrast, is aspectually unmarked in English. It does not carry the same overt signal of continuing relevance, and beside the present perfect its use can suggest a stronger separation between the completed event and the present moment of awareness.

      That is precisely what makes the grammatical choice resonate with the poem’s content. The speaker’s claim that the fly died “of old age” is itself an interpretive act, a story supplied for a small, silent, and perhaps more arbitrary death. The present perfect’s aspect and the poem’s meaning are working in parallel: both frame a completed event through the perspective of the consciousness that is making sense of it, rather than allowing it to stand simply as a closed fact.

      Choosing the preterite instead — “the winter fly / died of old age” — would not remove the interpretation, but it would present it more as a settled report. The present perfect preserves the connection between the event and the moment of apprehension: the death has happened, but it has entered the present as something being understood.

      So the poem’s temporal centre is not the instant the fly died. It is the moment when the death is noticed and given meaning. That is the kind of “when” I have been arguing that haiku often foregrounds: not a historical fact waiting to be dated, but the temporal centre from which perception becomes interpretation.

      1. “The present perfect preserves the connection between the event and the moment of apprehension:”

         Exactly. As in my post: “The immediate past is more evidently contiguous with the present moment.”

         I doubt very much that Kerouac analysed it in those terms as he wrote, but he understood it instinctively from usage.

         And how about the other ‘present’ option, Orense: “In my medicine cabinet / the winter fly / is dead of old age”?

         Also, but not as directly relevant to this particular discussion about tense, Kerouac is providing “an explanation” — making an assertion — another thing that ELH rulemakers tend to rule out. However, I argue that it is an assertion that invites contemplation (by poet and reader), not a closure at all, and it is that central sharing of contemplation and (hopefully) insight that is in ‘the present’ (and is the essence of ‘haiku’). Witness your thought (very much ‘in the reader’s present’) that the fly had no means of escape had the cabinet doors been shut on it.

         Your views?

         1. Only nobody says “so-and-so is dead of old age”.

         2. My sense too that Kerouac went on instinct and feel with this. What do I know, but I doubt he thought about it much. The poem’s charm carries it past quibbles that one might have about it. There’s humor/pathos in the writer’s assertion that the fly dies of old age and not starvation or having sampled some fly-toxic spill, as Orense says. The rhythm, as noted, adds to the charm, each line propelled by a long *I* sound. (Also probably not thought out but part of the gestalt-moment of writing.)

            “I heard a fly buzz–when I died–”

            “Seventeen syllables? / No, as I say, American Pops:– / Simple 3-line poems”
            J Kerouac

         3. Keith,

            I think the discussion of tense and aspect risks becoming too abstract if we separate the forms from the poetic situation in which they occur. Tense and aspect are not interchangeable options in the abstract; the poetic moment makes some choices more or less available.

            It is also useful to distinguish the immediate past from perfect aspect. The present perfect often occurs with events that are close to the present moment, but its essential function is not simply to mark recency. Perfect aspect presents a completed event from the standpoint of the present, as something whose significance remains connected to the current moment.

            “She died fifty years ago” presents the death as a completed event located in the past. “She has been dead for fifty years” does not make the death recent; it presents the continuing relevance of that state from the present perspective. Likewise, in Kerouac, the force of “has died” is not merely that the fly died shortly before the poem. It is that the death has entered the poet’s present field of awareness.

            This is why “is dead of old age” is grammatically possible but, to my mind, much less interesting poetically. It presents a state: the condition of the fly. But the poem is not really about the fly. The fly is the occasion. The poem is about the poet’s encounter with a memento mori.

            The fly itself already carries a traditional association with mortality and decay. It is one of the most familiar memento mori figures in art, especially in Northern Renaissance and Dutch vanitas painting, where a fly settled on fruit, flowers, or a skull quietly signals corruption, impermanence, and the passage of time. Japanese tradition carries similar associations. A living fly can already function as a reminder of mortality.

            What Kerouac’s poem does is double that symbolism. The fly is not only a traditional emblem of death; it has now actually died. The symbol and the literal fact converge in the same small body. The fly becomes, in a sense, a memento mori of a memento mori.

            The setting deepens this further. A medicine cabinet is often itself a mirror, and mirrors are among the most familiar vanitas motifs as well. When the cabinet door is opened or closed, the dead fly and the poet’s own reflection can occupy the same visual field. The poem thus recreates, in an entirely ordinary bathroom setting, the same juxtaposition that painters repeatedly used: mortality encountered through the pairing of a transient object and one’s own image. The fly’s death becomes not simply the death of another creature, but a reflection of the poet’s own mortality.

            I would say the humour is what grounds all of this rather than undercutting it. Kerouac doesn’t make the fly into a purely abstract emblem. The absurdity of attributing a human category like “old age” to a fly keeps us anchored in the particular creature and the particular situation. The humour does not diminish the memento mori; it prevents it from becoming solemn or detached. The fly remains funny, ordinary, and strangely moving, even while carrying this older symbolic resonance.

            The “when” of the poem, then, is not the moment when the fly died, nor simply the immediate aftermath of that death. It is the moment when the poet encounters that death, sees himself reflected in it, and turns an ordinary observation into a meditation on mortality.

            The completedness of the event matters, but it is not the centre of gravity. The centre, in my opinion, is the present act of awareness through which the event becomes meaningful. That is precisely what the present perfect preserves.

            1. Orense: “the moment when the poet encounters that death, sees himself reflected in it, and turns an ordinary observation into a meditation”

               Quite so. We are saying the same thing. And it is that awareness, that meditation and communication that is ‘the present moment’ for the poet. And when the reader reads, it is the reader’s meditation after reading the verse that is in the reader’s ‘present moment.’

               “The completedness of the event matters, …The centre… is the present act of awareness through which the event becomes meaningful. ” Exactly so.

               “That is precisely what the present perfect preserves.”

               As we see in parts 2 and 3, the more distant past is likewise connected with the poet and the reader’s ‘present moment of awareness.’ Whether immediate, yesterday, or long ago, the past is connected with our present. There is no other way I know to reference the past, than in relation to the present.

               This week we have had the immediate past, which frequently in classic haiku, and in the Kerouac too (which is why I chose it to end the post) is well conveyed in the present perfect, a completed action and therefore in the past, but the immediate past. Bashõ’s horse has just gone and eaten the hibiscus. We can go on to show that the more distant past too is connected with the present in an act of recollection, awareness, contemplation, meditation, communication in our present. Let’s leave that till posts 2 and 3 are out.

               And the posts are full of examples, just so that we are not discussing in the abstract, but in relation to each poem covered in the post.

            2. I’ll just add a passing thought to close the reading. What I find particularly interesting is that the poem’s structure mirrors, in a way, a strategy often found in memento mori and vanitas art itself.

               Some works conceal their mortality theme through distortion or indirection. The classic example is the anamorphic skull that appears meaningless until viewed from the correct angle. The reminder of death is present all along, but it does not initially present itself as such.

               Kerouac’s poem seems to operate similarly. The memento mori is there, but it is refracted through several layers of distortion. The humour of attributing “old age” to a fly, the questionable explanation itself, the smallness and apparent triviality of the incident, and the poem’s fragmentary presentation all divert attention away from the mortality theme even as they carry it.

               In that sense, the poem does not announce its memento mori directly. The reader arrives at it obliquely. One begins with a dead fly and a slightly comic explanation; only gradually does the deeper meditation on mortality emerge. Like the distorted skull in an anamorphic painting, the image becomes visible only when viewed from a certain angle.

               This may be one reason the poem avoids solemnity. It does not present mortality as a lesson. It allows mortality to appear indirectly through humour, misperception, and ordinary observation.

               The use of the perfect aspect participates in this. The crux of the poem is not the dead fly but the poet and reader occupying a certain position relative to it.

   3. Keith,

      Re: “Does “in my medicine cabinet” necessarily convey a present circumstance, this moment; or is it without time?”

      How exactly could a preposition of place — on its own — provide an indication or marker of time?
      ‘In my kitchen’ or ‘In my apartment’ or ‘In my mind’ would each still be without time, right? Were you hinting at something else?

      M

      1. It’s for consideration that by default assumption in haiku, ‘in my medicine cabinet’ reflects ‘right here right now’ as the poet tells us about it. Otherwise, I don’t think it does. Hence, asking what you all think.

6. Re: Orense’s post dated July, 31 @ 7:25 am

   (Great stuff today from all. For some reason, I did not have a reply button beneath any of the posts …?)

   Orense,
   I appreciate your passion and tenacity for this subject and look forward to the continuing progression of your argument. Please remember that what follows are merely spurs in aid of that development.

   As for Q1:
   Does one enunciate one’s comments before writing them down and posting them to the forum? Of course one could but — most likely — one does not.

   We have not communicated through speech. No one in this forum has spoken a single word. Our communication has not required a single speech sound.

   Every day I think in, with, and through language without having either to speak or to write. Therefore, language does not presuppose communication. It is only communication which presupposes enunciation or writing.

   Some other things I wish to lightly lean on:

   “Every utterance implies a deictic centre.” In reading the text of a haiku I perform no act of utterance (unless I choose to read it aloud). If I do choose to read aloud, my performance creates a deictic centre for this — and only this — reading. This is true even if I am reading my own poem. I cannot duplicate the deictic centre of the poem’s original composition. The occasions of “thisness” differ.

   “Haiku generally assumes the poet as the source of perception.” The poet can compose through the lens of an imagined persona, through the voices of fictive characters, or through the actual eavesdropped language of random people on the street. (The continuance of old habits does not preclude a concurrent, differing set of practices which fly under the radar).

   “It is a written, revised, and crafted literary form.” Haiku need neither be written nor revised and, therefore, need not be literary, but it is a crafted form.

   “A diary entry, a letter, a sermon, or a court transcript all establish their relationship to time and reception through external framing.” So does haiku. Is it not published in books framed by the publishers as both poetry and haiku? Does one not read and discuss haiku on blogs promoting the appreciation of ‘haiku’ on websites operated by entities such as The Haiku Foundation? When have you ever encountered a haiku without external framing? If you encounter a three-line poem anywhere your first thought will be: ‘haiku.’ And what about all those collections of haiku organized by season: Spring-Summer-Autumn-Fall? We’ve all been framed …

   “without such framing apparatus […] no title” What about those collections which also provide original headnotes as well as commentary?

   “It does not introduce itself as a record of a previous moment.” What about haibun?

   Can the above be accommodated within your framework?

   Exhibit #3

   Pointing fingers–
   above,
   a moonless sky.

   Thanks,
   M

   1. M. R.,Thank you for these careful objections. I think they are useful because they help clarify a distinction that may not have been sufficiently explicit in my earlier posts.

      My argument is not that haiku is speech, nor that written language is equivalent to spoken language. The distinction I am trying to make is between language that is more or less speech-like: language that remains closer to the conditions of situated communication, and language that is more heavily mediated as a literary or formal object.

      Written language can vary greatly in this respect. A text message, for instance, is written, yet remains highly speech-like: it depends on shared context, implication, and supplementation in ways that a legal contract or technical manual generally do not. The question is therefore not whether language is written or spoken, but how much it preserves the conditions of a situated encounter.

      I should also clarify what I mean by enunciation. In ordinary usage, “enunciate” often suggests vocal articulation, speaking words aloud clearly. That is not the sense in which I am using it. In linguistics, enunciation refers to the act by which language is produced in a particular situation by a subject addressing someone.

      This is not a concept belonging only to one theorist. Linguistics has long recognized that language is not simply a collection of statements detached from circumstances, but something produced and interpreted within situations of use. Benveniste’s work is especially influential here because he showed how every act of enunciation implies a deictic centre: a who, a where, and a when.

      These coordinates do not need to appear explicitly. Often they are precisely what remains unmarked. Their absence as grammatical elements does not mean their absence as structures; they remain the implicit point of origin from which meaning is organized.

      “Does one enunciate one’s comments before writing them down and posting them to the forum? Of course one could but — most likely — one does not.”
      I think this objection depends on equating enunciation with vocalization. In the sense I am using, writing a comment is still an act of enunciation. It is an act of language addressed to others and situated within a communicative event. The fact that it does not produce speech sounds does not remove the underlying structure of address. The same applies to reading. When we silently read a text, we are not merely decoding inert marks. We are engaging with an act of language from a particular position of reception.

      “Every day I think in, with, and through language without having either to speak or to write. Therefore, language does not presuppose communication.”
      I agree that linguistic thought can occur without external communication. But this does not remove the relevance of orientation. Even private thought occurs from somewhere. One might even argue that linguistic thought retains traces of the social structures through which language is acquired.

      But I do not need to claim that all language presupposes communication. My narrower claim is that once language enters a communicative situation — whether spoken or written — it has a point of orientation.

      Your moonless sky image is actually a very good analogy for this. A moonless sky does not mean the moon has ceased to exist. Indeed, we have a name for that condition: the new moon. The moon’s absence is still a meaningful relation to the moon. It is not simply a void; it is another phase of its presence.

      Likewise, removing an explicit temporal marker does not eliminate the “when.” It creates a different kind of “when.” The historical occasion may disappear, but a new temporal centre is supplied through the encounter between poem and reader. Even “always” is evaluated from a now.

      This also helps answer the question of why haiku does not simply function like any other writing that suppresses explicit markers of speaker and time. Benveniste distinguishes between forms where the marks of enunciation remain visible (discours) and forms where they are suppressed (histoire). Third-person narration is the classic example: events appear to narrate themselves, with no visible speaker saying “I” or locating the action in a particular here and now.

      This is a genuine challenge because haiku often shares those surface characteristics. Yet haiku is not generally received in the same way as omniscient narration. Despite the absence of explicit markers, haiku tends to generate the sense of an implied perceiver: someone who saw, heard, or encountered something. This is partly convention, but I do not think it is only convention. It arises from the combination of fragmentation and perceptual focus.

      Using the archetypical example:

      old pond
      frog jumps in
      sound of water

      This does not present a complete proposition about the world. It presents a moment of attention. The lack of explanation and the emphasis on sensory particularity invite reconstruction of an encounter.

      Omniscient narration often suppresses the speaker through completeness: its syntax and explanatory structure allow events to appear self-contained. Haiku does something different. Its incompleteness seems to draw attention back toward the perceiving consciousness that selected this fragment.

      This relates to your objection to my statement that “haiku generally assumes the poet as the source of perception.” I would describe this as a convention rather than a necessity. Haiku can certainly employ persona, imagined situations, or invented voices. My claim is not that every haiku is autobiographical. The point is that haiku is traditionally received differently from many other literary forms. Unless there is a reason to read otherwise, the perceiving consciousness behind a haiku is generally understood as belonging to the poet. That expectation is part of the form’s relationship to situated perception.

      As for your point about haiku being spontaneous and unrevised: I do not mean that every haiku necessarily undergoes extensive revision. I mean that writing as a medium permits selection, reflection, and reshaping in ways that ordinary speech generally does not. Most haiku make use of those possibilities.

      This is precisely where haiku’s double nature becomes interesting. It is a literary object shaped by the possibilities of writing, but it retains speech-like qualities: fragmentation, contextual dependence, reliance on implication, and the expectation that the reader will participate in reconstructing a situation.

      “A diary entry, a letter, a sermon, or a court transcript all establish their relationship to time and reception through external framing. So does haiku.”
      I agree that haiku is often encountered within frames: journals, books, websites, anthologies, seasonal collections, and so on. But I would distinguish between a frame that identifies a text as haiku and the poem’s own operation. We do not need a journal setting in order to encounter a haiku. A haiku can exist on a scrap of paper, in a notebook, or as an isolated text and still function as haiku. The question is not whether haiku is ever externally framed, but whether its meaning depends primarily on that framing.

      “What about maegaki? What about haibun?”

      I think these actually reinforce the distinction. Maegaki provides additional information about the occasion of a verse. But the fact that such information exists as something added to the poem suggests that the haiku itself does not necessarily require it in order to function.

      Haibun is a different form: a deliberate combination of prose and haiku. The prose and the haiku interact to create meanings that neither creates alone. Its existence shows that contextual expansion is possible; it does not show that haiku itself depends upon such framing.

      One final observation about this thread as a whole: I find it interesting that many remarks and objections repeatedly return to questions of speaker, occasion, context, and time — precisely the dimensions that become active when we encounter language as situated communication.

      To say that a poem has “no when” already requires some awareness of when as a meaningful category. The absence is noticed because the dimension remains active.

      So I would not frame my argument as a set of necessary properties that every haiku must possess. I am describing a centre of gravity: a historical and formal tendency.

      Haiku is not speech. It is not less literary because it is speech-like. It is a written literary form that preserves enough of the conditions of speech that those conditions remain active in reading. And I think this may be one of the things that makes haiku distinctive.

      1. “Haiku is not speech. It is not less literary because it is speech-like. It is a written literary form that preserves enough of the conditions of speech that those conditions remain active in reading. And I think this may be one of the things that makes haiku distinctive.”

         I greatly appreciate the clarity and insightfulness of this. In some sense, what is “active” is what is alive.

         1. “Haiku isn’t speech”

            So let’s say I’m out for a walk, and let’s say on that walk I experience something, and after experiencing that something a piece of language arises in my mind. Let’s use “steady rain/ my thoughts somewhere/
            among the falling drops” as an example. Is this not a haiku?

            Then let’s say I continue my walk. The thought — the piece of language — continues to stick in my mind. So I say it aloud as I walk: “steady rain/ my thoughts somewhere/ among the falling drops.” Is this not a haiku?

            Maybe, after a bit, I pull a device out of my pocket, turn it on, and it records me saying aloud: “steady rain/ my thoughts somewhere/ among the fallen drops.” Is this not a haiku?

            For a conceptual artist whose medium is language and whose process of creation is spontaneous, the haiku may prove to be an ideal vehicle. Such an one knows that haiku are composed in the mind, made of thought, but thought in the form of language. Such an one knows that speaking that haiku is a representation — a re-presentation — of that form through different means. Such an one knows that scribbling down that form in a personal notebook no one but she can read is but another re-presentation of the original work. Each re-presentation is but another documenting of the actual work whose existence comes into being as thought.

            Let’s say this artist has an assistant whose job it is to make one or more re-presentations of the work public. Let’s say that the assistant secures an installation at a small gallery where five of the haiku will be re-presented as black text on white, painted walls. Are they any more haiku now that they have been made public than they were in their original forms as thought?

            If the artist never — under any circumstances — revises her haiku once thought of, then can we consider haiku only as a written, literary form?

            Is the re-presentation the actual work or merely it’s trace?

            “Haiku is a performance art,” this artist might say. “What you encounter on the wall is merely a script, a set of instructions. Like the remnants of Shakespeare’s play, it is not the play itself.”

            1. M., I’d grant much of this, and it’s a fascinating thought experiment. I want to take it further, because I think it does real work against the syntactic account of the cut.

               Medium matters, and we don’t apprehend the poem the same way across its transformations — heard is not read is not remembered is not performed. That’s not a point I need to resist; it’s consistent with everything I’ve said about how haiku organizes attention differently depending on how it’s encountered. But notice what your own example requires: for the haiku to be “the same play,” something has to survive the change of medium, something identifiable across the spoken version, the written version, the memory of having thought it, the painted gallery wall. Whatever that something is, it can’t be syntax in the narrow sense your definition depends on — a fragment, a complement, a countable cut located at a specific point in a specific string of words — because a thought held silently in the mind, before it’s spoken or written, doesn’t have a checkable syntactic structure in that sense at all. Your artist can only know whether her unspoken haiku “has” a sentence fragment by mentally rehearsing it as language, which is already treating it as if it had settled into one instantiation. Before that, what she’s holding is looser than any single syntactic realization.

               So I think the thought experiment supports the position I’ve been arguing throughout this thread, not the syntactic-cut position. If the poem survives being poured into radically different media — sound, ink, memory, wall text — and stays recognizably itself throughout, then what makes it a haiku, and what makes it cut, has to be something that also survives that journey. Syntax doesn’t survive it; a spoken utterance and a silent thought don’t share a syntax tree in any meaningful sense, only a shared, portable sense of where the poem turns, breaks, or holds two things apart. That’s much closer to what I’ve called a felt, functional cut than to a fragment-and-complement structure defined at the level of English grammar.

               As for whether the gallery installation is “more” haiku than the original thought: I’d say no, and I don’t think that’s a problem for treating haiku as fundamentally a written, literary form either. What I actually meant by that phrase wasn’t “haiku only exists once inked on paper,” but that haiku, as a form we recognize and read, has developed conventions that were shaped by, and are legible through, writing, even when a particular instance never gets written down. Your artist’s mental haiku still has that shape; it’s just never been re-presented. The shape doesn’t come from the paper. It comes from the tradition she’s composing inside of, in her head.

               I’d put it this way: your artist’s private, unspoken haiku about the rain and her scattered thoughts already has whatever makes it a haiku, before it ever becomes a string of English words with a checkable syntax. The syntax is just one medium it can be poured into, among several. What survives the pouring is the thing worth calling essential — and I don’t think that thing is syntactic.

               As a closing remark, I won’t go into the details of my own conception of the cut here, since it would hijack the thread rather than close it. But briefly: I think what gets cut is not syntax. It’s perception.

7. Perhaps a moment in a haiku is like Schrödinger’s cat?
   We don’t know if it’s past, present, or future.
   What observations can we make to determine this? And do we even need to know?
   The emotions it evokes in us are present, but they stem from our past and our plans for the future.

   1. Urszula: your last sentence, yes, that seems to be what things boil down to: a mental event in the now.

      The poet’s observation –> contemplation –> insight –> poem!, then the reader’s poem! –> reconstitution –> contemplation –> insight.

      The future in haiku is another matter, though not unrelated. Complicated by (as far as I am aware) the lack of future verb modifiers in Japanese, where it is assumed by context. I do have a few examples in the future from Japan, the home of haiku, but they are very rare (almost unknown until the twentieth century, although there is one good example before then by a virtuoso of the genre); whereas examples of the past are legion. However, thought of the future is also a present mental event. And on Orense’s view that any haiku is in effect speech enunciated in the present, again it should not matter what the tense is that it is written in, if any tense at all.

      As to your question “do we need to know?” Or mine “does it matter?” I think the only practical answer is that it matters only to the extent that editors or other haiku rainmakers say it does. That is, if one wants to be published by them. If we can shift that view to take into account the flexibility enjoyed by “the greats” so much the better, I think.

      All the same, it’s stimulating for my old carthorse brain to think about it.

   2. Ah, perhaps it is what we call the haiku moment which is more like the thought experiment we call Schrodinger’s Cat? A quantum (meta)physics of haiku might be something like the idea that a reader can experience the same, identical haiku moment felt by an author.

      “Do we even need to know?” Schrodinger thought we did. What may be the case at a quantum level is not the case in a larger-than-quantum scale: the cat cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. Our observations have no quantum effect at scales above the quantum: my opening of the box to check the state of the cat has no effect on the cat’s state.

      You are right to address from whence our emotions stem. Surely, as you say, they do not come from outside us. That the same stimulus — language arranged in the form of a haiku — does evoke different responses from different readers makes this clear. The form’s incompleteness may help explain this but not any abstract, as-yet-to-be-defined talk about a “moment” or the “present moment.”

      I ask for your — and everyone else’s — patience if you feel my quest for specificity and simplicity of definition comes across as nothing more than knuckleheaded pedantry, but I do feel the topic is important: Dare I say of moment? My only goal is to get both my and our heads right about it.

      1. Thank you so much for your wise, beautiful, and deeply thoughtful comments. Reflecting on the essence of haiku is as rewarding as creating it.

8. unfolded
   paper crane
   the frayed creases

   (Wonja Brucker, Herons Nest 38.2)

   The moment seems /now/ even if the crane has recently been “unfolded” in the past which revealedthat the creases have”frayed” which causes an emotional moment in the present

   1. Adam, this is a beautiful example of precisely this kind of temporal movement. The past is not simply left behind; the traces of what has happened create the emotional recognition of the present moment — of loss, or perhaps tenderness.

      I suspect that a Japanese version would very likely invite a rendering through keri: not simply as a marker of pastness, but as the moment of realization when something from the past becomes newly present to consciousness.

      1. … except that けり (keri) is no longer used in everyday speech in Japan and has been relegated to the classical or even archaic. It is no longer used in haiku, although there are occasional more contemporary exceptions where the adoption of classic language lends a note of stylistic humour, and we have one of those next week (in the past tense). The modern past た (-ta) can indicate completed action. But keri has/had its other role as a cutting word, the ‘moment of awareness’ – Ah! Likewise, かな (kana) -Exclam!

         Nothing has directly replaced keri or kana. Modern Japanese haiku have evolved from grammatical markers towards structure and context as ways of indicating or producing awareness in the reader. This may stem in part from Shiki’s inheritors (here are the real and present images –> discover their meaning –>draw the insight). But also there is “the cut” which has morphed from specific markers to a variety of more subtle things. Connecting across the cut is a moment of awareness. Interestingly there seems, on the face of it, more scope in anglophone haiku. We have line breaks, punctuation, semantic or grammatical ‘cuts’, juxtaposition by break or by preposition, white space, brackets, various means of distinguishing parts of a verse by manipulation, and sometimes an abrupt ending (we have one of those at the end of next week’s Part 2, where the word “dead” is a pretty abrupt ending that acts as a closing ‘cut’). I have been collecting forms of ‘the cut’ in anglophone haiku for a number of years, and a piece is in preparation, though it is unlikely to get a slot for some months.

         The awareness, the insight, now arises through context and through the act of reading and reconstitution, rather than devices for “and now I realise…ah!”

         In their beginnings, anglophone English haiku often tried to mimic the effect of keri or kana with words such as ah, oh, lo, or exclamation marks. These were not ‘wrong’, but clunky. More recent haiku in English generally avoids these explicit signals. Moreover, it is the fashion now to avoid punctuation, which may well have deprived us of something useful.

         1. PS: Indeed, there’s space to consider whether anglophone haiku have more in common with modern gendai haiku in Japan than either has with haiku of the tradition. However, I’d just note that when looking at modern Japanese haiku (and toiling through their translations) they wouldn’t always ‘get through’ to English readers as haiku. Yet another subject for someone to write about for us. Meanwhile, Fay Ayoagi translates contemporary Japanese verses each day at https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/2026/07/29/todays-haiku-july-29-2026/
            and Alex Fyffe has some useful collections of same in his collection of translated Japanese poetry at https://longdream.wordpress.com
            e.g. at random: https://longdream.wordpress.com/category/poetry/uda-kiyoko/

         2. ” it is the fashion now to avoid punctuation, which may well have deprived us of something useful. ”

            Keith, quick response. The poet James Richardson, who in his recent books of poems includes aphorisms (which he calls “vectors”) in his last book *For Now* included around 50 haiku, many good ones, ones that show some awareness of what haiku is. In fact, I believe he has taught haiku at Princeton, as part of his classes on poetry in general. He uses commas
            a lot in his haiku, and told me once that this may not be the fashion, but that he believes something is lost is abandoning them, and other punctuation.

            Even our winter,
            over. Now the fifth season–
            all of them at once.

            What was wrong,
            monarch,
            with being a caterpillar?

            End of summer, sills
            brimming with wings
            breath makes fly again.

            1. Excellent, Peter. Grist to the mill. We lately had one in re:Virals that depended greatly on a simple comma to open up readings:

               a second ambulance
               passes, silently
               in the rain

               —Alan Yan
               Acorn #56, Spring 2026

               Then there is

               same old pond;
               the semicolons
               in frogspawn
               By a little known versifier, Poetry Pea Journal 1:22

               I love
               “What was wrong,
               monarch,
               with being a caterpillar?”
               but I wonder whether current haiku journal editors would accept it from, say, a poet without an established reputation…(for all sorts of imagined reasons). Latter-day Issa.

               And the question mark puts it in the present (more examples from next week)

            2. And as you can see, Richardson starts his haiku with capitals and ends with periods, which is what he does with his longer poems, as if to say, they are all poems. I suspect that many haiku poets, trying this approach, would squirm a bit with uncertainty. Squirming with uncertainly is not a bad thing.

   2. Adj
      Adj – N
      Det – Adj – N

      Thanks for including another verbless — and therefore tenseless poem. I think there are more than a few examples of what I have called the “timeless” haiku — in the simple, descriptive, dictionary sense of the word I offered, not the metaphysical or mystical — floating about on the sea of current practice.

      May I ask how you know — from the language of the poem itself — that the crane was recently unfolded?

      And, If you don’t mind, I am also interested in your remark about the word “frayed” causing an emotional moment. Personally, I do not have an emotional response to this poem, though I am curious about the number of foldings and unfoldings it would take to cause noticeable fraying. What is that emotion?

      1. There’s a fairly obvious play for sabi —the creases are ‘frayed’ (can paper creases be ‘frayed’ rather than worn?). Just as an anglophone haikuist can’t bring themselves to write about a brand new and unblemished anchor or iron gate, they always have to be ‘rusted’ or ‘broken’ or in some other way imperfect to emphasise that life is imperfect, transient & everything decays &c &c.

         However, I like the verse partly because it takes an opposite view to the customary folding of a paper crane. That, the crane unfolded, the creases are revealed to be worn, suggests to me several unsuccessful attempts to fold one, such as would doubtless be the case if I fumbled around the task. Irrespective of when the paper was unfolded, or of the emotion (in my case, not ‘sadness’ but fellow feeling as a failed origamist), it’s the viewing and moment of perception by the poet, and reading and piecing-together of the verse to deduce some insight, that are in the present and connect the past with it.

      2. M. R. Pelletier, the sensation I get from “unfolded” haiku is that the sheet of paper was folded quite a long time ago, and just recently unfolded, destroying the work of paper art/creation that has remained as such for a long while. There’s a sadness to this destruction on the speaker’s part, with maybe a bit of cruelty of will, the will to destroy something beautiful, something meaningful.

         I find the crane was recently unfolded, because the creases are not only still visible, but visible in the sense that the straightened out sheet of paper is still referred to by the speaker in its “origami” essence, that is as a “crane.”

         1. Thank you, Adam, for laying that out.

            My first thought on reading this poem was only the author could know it was a crane, for how could I, a schlub with no experience as an origamist know an unfolded piece of paper had once been folded into the shape of a crane?

            My second thought was about the word frayed which conjures for me the notion of a repeated action resulting in noticeable wear-and-tear, like when the bottoms of your jeans wear through at the back from constant contact with the ground.

            My final thought was about a noticeable fraying caused by a long process of folding-unfolding-refolding, of how much time and attention, how much concentration, it might take to learn such a craft.

            Alas, though I am aware of the concept of sabi, the poem did not evoke such a response in me, whether or not the poet had a mind to invoke it.

            The fraying is not for me a symbol of sadness but the sign of a determined practice.

            1. I can appreciate the interpretation of the folding/unfolding pattern generated by the haiku. With that interpretation the sense of a recent past still hovers about the work.

9. Re: “whether the ‘present tense’ restriction when composing English Language haiku is justified […] or not” and “whether the philosophical framework of haiku […] is always the present moment, whatever the tense of the verse; or not”

   An exhibit (in favor of not):

   steady rain
   my thoughts somewhere among the falling drops

   1. This is an intriguing example. Could you say a little more about how you see it bearing on the question? I want to make sure I’m fully grasping the point you are making with it. Is it the fact that the speaker’s thoughts are “somewhere among the falling drops” — that consciousness has moved away from the immediate scene — that you see as challenging the present-moment framework?

      Or is there another aspect of the poem that you had in mind? Perhaps its tenselessness?

      1. A little more —
         No verb, no tense. If we grant the exhibit is a haiku in English, then by its example alone haiku in English need not be composed in the present tense (and, perhaps more interestingly, in any tense). Any school of haiku may insist on the presence of any given element in a poem for it to be a haiku, but practice keeps demonstrating what is merely variable.

         More still —
         “present n. 1. A moment or period in time intermediate between past and future; now” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).

         The present is a relative term definable only in relation to other relative terms — the past and the future. Though the terms are relative they share a definite sequence — past -present – future.

         So, too, does each haiku, whether uttered or read, have its own definite sequence.

         Let’s return to the exhibit. Presently, my re-reading of it is entirely in the future, but if I have read the first line and am presently reading the second line, then the first line is in the past and the third line remains in the future. So I can never read or utter a haiku wholly in the present moment but only a part of it.

         More than meets the eye —
         Haiku in English which contain none of the markers of time available in the English language, like the exhibit, are timeless. (i.e., 2. Unaffected by time, op cit). In other words, in regard to the exhibit, we neither know the ‘when’ of the speaker’s utterance nor the ‘when’ of the images to which his language refers. All relations to time have been made indeterminable. Therefore, there is no ‘when’ to default to.

         1. Thank you, that helps clarify the example considerably.

            I find both the grammatical point and the point about a haiku unfolding in time persuasive. The poem certainly demonstrates that a haiku can function perfectly well without any explicit tense marking, and therefore challenges any strict requirement that English-language haiku must be composed in the present tense.

            Likewise, I think you are right to emphasize that a haiku unfolds in time. This is not incidental to the form but central to many of its effects. Meaning often emerges through sequence, delay, juxtaposition, and discovery. The movement from one part of the poem to another is often where much of its power resides.

            Your poem is an interesting example precisely because it seems to hold several kinds of presentness in tension:

            steady rain
            my thoughts somewhere among the falling drops

            The absence of a verb certainly removes any explicit temporal marker. We are not told whether the rain is falling at this precise moment, whether the image is remembered, or whether it is being presented as a recurring condition. In that sense, the poem has something of what might be called a timeless or gnomic present: it opens onto a situation that is not fixed to a particular date or occasion.

            But I am not sure that this means there is no “when” at all.

            From an enunciative perspective, temporality functions much like other deictic categories. We do not need coordinates to understand “here,” nor a proper name to understand “I.” English grammar itself suggests something similar: a verbless utterance often defaults to describing a present state of affairs because the unmarked case is interpreted relative to the moment of speaking. Stage directions work in the same way: “Rain. A door, ajar.” They are verbless and tenseless, yet no reader takes them as descriptions of the past or as general truths. They are understood as occurring now, within the space of the stage, without a single tensed verb establishing that fact.

            Likewise, the absence of grammatical tense in a haiku does not necessarily remove its temporal horizon. It may simply mean that the “when” is supplied contextually rather than marked linguistically.

            In your poem, the rain may not belong to a clearly defined chronological moment, but the speaker’s consciousness does. “My thoughts somewhere among the falling drops” gives us not a general statement about rain, but a particular encounter between perception and thought. The poem holds the recurring and the singular together: rain as something that returns endlessly, and this unrepeatable moment of awareness.

            Perhaps this is close to the tension Bashō identified between fūeki and ryūkō: the enduring and the changing, recurrence and the individual event. The rain belongs to the world of repetition; the speaker’s encounter with it belongs to a specific moment. Haiku often derives its power from allowing these two temporal dimensions to coexist.

            Your point about a haiku unfolding in time also raises a fascinating question. The fact that the first line has passed while the third remains to come is true not only of haiku but of all speech, and perhaps of all consciousness. Experience itself seems to involve a continual holding together of what has just been, what is, and what is about to be.

            In fact, I wonder whether haiku’s brevity allows it to approach presentness more closely rather than less. Because it is such a manageable linguistic and perceptual unit, the whole poem can often be held in awareness at once. What has just been read remains active in memory while what follows is anticipated. The poem unfolds sequentially, yet it can also be grasped as a whole. This temporal buffering is not an obstacle to presentness; it may actually be what makes it possible.

            And there is perhaps another specifically haiku dimension: whatever tense a poem uses, or whether it uses tense at all, the cut is always present. The cut is an event of perception and relation. It creates the space in which the poem’s elements meet, separate, and resonate. A haiku may refer to the past, suggest recurrence, or leave its temporal reference open, but the act of cutting occurs in the present encounter between poem and reader.

            I think all these points lead to a broader question about how haiku functions. Rather than showing haiku to be outside ordinary temporal and linguistic structures, they seem to me to be evidence of haiku’s close relationship with enunciation.

            A more elaborated literary mode often has many ways of establishing its temporal and narrative frame: exposition, description, character, context, and explicit markers of time. Haiku frequently strips these away. What remains is not an absence of context, but a greater reliance on the conditions of the utterance itself — the implicit speaker, the moment of encounter, and the reader’s participation in reconstructing the situation.

            The very features that might appear to make haiku “timeless” — the lack of tense, the minimal syntax, the openness of reference — may instead reveal how strongly it depends on the shared situation of perception and utterance. The poem does not eliminate the here and now; it leaves more of it to be supplied by the act of reading.

            1. I appreciate the connection of “steady rain” haiku with deictic operations, for the extension of space (“my thoughts [extended out beyond my brain to ]somewhere”) is temporal. The enunciation of /something over there/ generates the space for time to elapse in the now (?)

            2. Now that the word “deictic” has been used twice, I feel compelled to mention a line from the Mike Leigh movie *Naked*
               in which the main character sees a very restless individual across a city street and says:

               “What’s it like being you? Bit hectic, is it?”

               OK, minor change then “What’s it like being you? Bit deictic, is it?”

               And a proposal: that the name of this feature be changed to “Deictic and Haecceity”. Got a certain ring . . .

            3. LOL, Peter, they have indeed. As I clop along behind with my cart, I have to keep looking things up in Google. Which, I tell my ageing brain, is probably good for it.

               Do the academically-inclined find that once a thing has been labelled, it is explained, its essence known, or alternatively, it can then be argued about? With a certain guilt I recall the scientific papers I once wrote (in the long-ago…) full of arcane terms.

               But we are going to stick with “Moon and Finger.”

            4. Peter,

               A fair warning. Any term that obscures more than it clarifies deserves suspicion, and there is always the danger of jargon becoming a substitute for thought rather than a tool in its service.

               For what it’s worth, I find deictic easier to defend than haecceity. It is a fairly common grammatical term for a phenomenon that is difficult to discuss without repeatedly resorting to long descriptive phrases, and one that I think is particularly useful when discussing haiku. So much of the form depends on orientation.

               Then again, haecceity, though it can often be advantageously replaced with the more transparent thisness, does point to a philosophical tradition that words such as particularity or uniqueness do not quite carry.

               As for renaming the feature, it would be fitting, but a pain to type. The existing title is already deictic. A finger’s entire function is to point beyond itself.

               Perhaps we’ve been discussing deixis all along.

               Or perhaps that’s just another symptom of ultracrepidarianism.😂

            5. Don’t mind big words– haecceity known to me, deictic not– as long as they are not camouflage for a degree of ultracrepidarianism.

            6. Re: there is no ‘when’ at all

               Flint Hills showers
               my scattered thoughts
               among the forum posts

               All consciously processed language is actualized or operationalized now — in the present moment. It is a psychological fact, but so what?

               Haiku holds no more special advantage in regard to verisimilitude to utterance than the diary, the epistle, the psalm, the sermon, the prayer, the texts of Shakespeare’s plays, or of the transcripts of court proceedings. Nothing more can be claimed for haiku than for any of these other forms.

               I didn’t say there is no ‘when’ at all — I said that in poems with no markers of time made available to the hearer/reader there can be no ‘when’ of the poem to default to. Hence it is the ‘when’ of your reading of the poem to which you refer. And another will refer to the ‘when’ of her reading of the poem but the ‘whens’ remain forever independent of each other — to each her own ‘when.’ There is no ‘when’ at which an inferred or imagined act or event could have occurred if the language of the poem bears no markers of time (unless it’s composer and readers share something of the lived situation from which the poem arises).

               Thus,

               Flint Hills showers
               (Am I in the Flint Hills? Is it raining there now? Has it rained earlier this week? Am I just riffing off the earlier poem?)

               my scattered thoughts
               (Are my thoughts really scattered in a permanent sense — as in scatter-brained — or merely figuratively? Or am I just being literary and choosing a word with associations to rain showers?)

               among the forum posts
               (You might default to a ‘when’ of now for the time of this poem because you feel that you have insider information regarding the circumstances of its creation. But what if I have merely retrieved it from one of the shoeboxes I keep my haiku in from behind a divider card marked “1985” which happens to have been my freshman year at college? And what if you also knew that the college I attended was one of the original campuses involved in the creation of the internet and of the Unix language and that as students we had access to both email and discussion boards?)

               But even then the language of the poem does not — of itself — provide a ‘when.’

            7. M. R., I think there are two different questions that need to be separated here. The first is whether language in general presupposes an enunciative situation; the second is whether haiku, as a particular poetic form, foregrounds that situation in a distinctive way.

               On the first point, Benveniste’s enunciative triad is useful. Every utterance implies a deictic centre: a who, a where, and a when. These coordinates do not need to appear as explicit words. In fact, they often remain unmarked. Their absence as grammatical elements does not mean their absence as structures; rather, they function as the implicit zero point from which the utterance is produced and interpreted.

               This is why I would distinguish between the absence of a determinate “when” and the absence of “when” altogether. A haiku may not provide a date, a historical occasion, or a recoverable moment of composition. But that does not mean it lacks temporal orientation. The enunciative structure remains: an implied poet perceiving something, from somewhere, within a moment of awareness.

               The same applies to the “who” of the triad. By convention, haiku presents itself as the poet’s act of perception. This does not mean that every haiku is a literal transcription of experience, nor that the poet and poetic voice can never diverge. But unlike forms that foreground persona, fiction, or a constructed speaker, haiku generally assumes the poet as the source of perception. The absence of an explicit “I” is therefore not the absence of a speaking position; it is an unmarked one.

               This leads to the second question: why is haiku particularly suited to making this enunciative structure felt? I am not arguing that haiku simply is speech. It is a written, revised, and crafted literary form. The point is rather that haiku occupies an unusual position between speech and literature. It retains features of the utterance situation in a way that many other fully mediated written forms do not.

               A diary entry, a letter, a sermon, or a court transcript all establish their relationship to time and reception through external framing. A diary is dated; a letter acknowledges an absent addressee; a sermon or psalm refers back to a situation of delivery; a court transcript identifies itself as a record of an event that has already taken place. These forms make the distance between the original act and the later reader part of their structure.

               Haiku works differently. It typically arrives without such framing apparatus: no title, no explanation of circumstances. It does not introduce itself as a record of a previous moment; it presents an encounter. It behaves as though the reader is not absent.

               This is connected to haiku’s origins in hokku, the opening verse of linked verse, where the poem emerged from a shared seasonal and social situation. The formal features inherited from that context — the kireji, the fragmentary syntax, the reliance on juxtaposition rather than explanation — retain something of the immediacy of an utterance. They do not merely describe an experience after the fact; they invite the reader into the structure of experiencing.

               I think this also answers your Flint Hills example, though not quite in the way it may have been intended to be answered. You are right that the poem’s actual compositional history is unrecoverable and potentially misleading — it could belong to 1985 as easily as to this morning, and nothing in the text settles the question. But the “when” I have in mind was never the historical date of composition. It is the when of utterance, or discovery — the when of reading.

               The deictic centre a haiku implies is not a fixed historical coordinate waiting to be recovered, the way a diary’s date can in principle be checked against a calendar. It is a zero point that can be reactivated in each reading. A letter’s “now” remains anchored to the occasion of its writing; a haiku’s “now” remains available to be re-entered because it has not been fully tied to a recoverable external occasion.

               The very feature you use to unsettle the poem — that we cannot pin its “when” to any actual historical moment — is therefore, on my account, not a defect but part of the mechanism. The poem’s presentness was never dependent on recovering when it was written. It depends on the fact that each act of reading recreates an encounter with the moment of perception.

               I should be careful here, though, since this renewed “now” of reading is not unique to haiku. It is a property of language itself, and poetry necessarily participates in it. Nobody dates a Shakespeare sonnet before feeling addressed by it. What I think is distinctive is not the mechanism itself, but its exposure. Much poetry retains discursive scaffolding — argument, narrative, extended address — that holds the reader’s present somewhat apart from the implied speaker’s situation. Haiku, having stripped away much of that scaffolding, leaves very little standing between the act of reading and the moment of perception itself.

               So the renewed present is not unique to haiku; rather, it is unusually exposed there. Haiku does not invent the enunciative structure that all language and poetry rely upon. It simply removes much of the apparatus that can conceal it. Its apparent lack of explicit “who,” “where,” and “when” is not an absence of those dimensions, but their withdrawal into the implicit structure that makes the poem possible.

            8. Orense, to sort of circle back to the convo about literature/speech. In my head, as mentioned in that thread, there is a quality/experience “X” (immediacy, now-becoming-new, etc.). Not that all roads automatically result in X, but when done such that it passes a certain threshold within the formal constructs of any given genre of speech (utterances, haiku, sonnet, novel, etc.) any given road can lead to X.

               It sounds like your argument is that haiku is /like/ oral utterances and thus leads to X. As such, any “literature” must share or have enough qualities of oral utterances to lead to X (haiku’s “greater reliance on the conditions of the utterance itself.”)

               In my head, each genre of literature (including spontaneous oral acts like freestyle rap and improv theater, and late night conversation over beer, which to me qualify as “literature” is the possess the desire-release dynamic mentioned in previous threads) can lead directly to X without having anything to do with qualities of oral utterances (or maybe its the case that oral utterances have qualities that rely on art to seem like X; i.e. Life imitates Art)

               Any given literature genre cannot exhaust the means to reach X. Haiku has formal properties (cut, fragmented syntax, etc.) that can lead to X, but it is missing other properties that can also lead to X, properties that other genres possess, though these other genres may lack the properties of haiku like cut and fragment syntax.

               One of the means of leading to X is the formal properties (& the manipulation of them) to generate a sensation of the “when” of haiku, which y’alls highly interesting exploration of how the “when” functions to lead to X is fascinating.

            9. Adam, I think the point where we may be talking past each other is that my argument is not evaluative but functional. I am not arguing that haiku has privileged access to X, or that one mode of encounter is inherently better than another. I do not believe there is a single privileged or ideal way for poetry to work.

               What I am trying to describe is how different forms organize our attention. We do not encounter all language through the same primary mode. When we receive an utterance as an utterance, our dominant orientation is one of supplementation: we supply the absent elements of the situation — the speaker, the context, the circumstances of perception, and the meanings that depend on them. When we encounter language framed as literature, decoding becomes more prominent: we attend to the structures and patterns through which meaning is produced.

               Of course, these processes are never exclusive. Speech also requires decoding, and literature also invites supplementation. A sonnet, for example, still asks us to reconstruct a voice, a situation, and a relationship with the reader. But its primary mode of encounter is usually shaped by attention to the crafted linguistic object: its patterns, structures, imagery, and formal relations.

               My argument is that haiku is distinctive because it brings these two orientations into unusually close contact. It is more speech-like than many literary forms in that it preserves and foregrounds the conditions of utterance: an implied perceiver, a situated encounter, a moment of attention. But it is also unmistakably literature, activating the heightened attention to language that comes with encountering a crafted form.

               This is, I think, the same claim I was making to M. R. in the thread above, approached from another angle. Haiku’s formal inheritance from hokku — a live, spoken contribution within a shared social and seasonal occasion — together with the retention of that inheritance in features such as kireji, fragmentary syntax, and juxtaposition without explanation, makes it more speech-like than many other written literary forms. That speech-likeness keeps supplementation active even while the poem remains, unmistakably, a crafted linguistic object inviting decoding.

               The two modes are not separate phenomena that happen to coincide in haiku. Haiku holds them in tension because it is closer to speech than a sonnet or a novel while still being fully literature.

               I think its brevity is crucial here as well. By removing much of the explanatory and discursive material that would normally mediate between these modes, haiku allows them to coexist in a particularly concentrated form. It can be received as an encounter being offered while simultaneously revealing itself as a linguistic construction.

               Its “thisness,” then, does not lie in superiority over other forms, but in this particular configuration: the coexistence of a mode of reception associated with utterance and a mode of attention associated with literature.

               One further point, though: I am not entirely sure I would frame X — immediacy or renewed presence — as the shared destination of all art, with different genres simply taking different routes toward it. That does not affect the functional argument above, but I think it matters conceptually.

               Much art seems to pursue effects other than immediacy, or even to depend upon distance from immediacy: irony relies on hindsight and separation; allegory often asks for structural reflection rather than direct encounter; satire requires a critical position rather than immersion; wisdom literature often invites contemplation rather than presence. These are not failed attempts at immediacy. They appear to be pursuing different ends.

               So I would describe the argument slightly differently: haiku’s particular configuration — the simultaneous activation of supplementation and decoding — produces certain effects, presentness among them. But that does not mean haiku is unusually successful at a universal goal that every genre is secretly pursuing. It means that haiku is organized to produce a particular kind of encounter, just as irony, satire, or allegory are organized to produce others.

               Immediacy may be one of the possibilities available to literature, and haiku may pursue it with particular intensity, without being the hidden measure by which all other forms should be judged.

            10. “”When we receive an utterance as an utterance, our dominant orientation is one of supplementation: we supply the absent elements of the situation” (Orense)

                Exactly. One of haiku’s major strengths (though not exclusive to haiku, but it majors on it).

                And I think that this is what we do in response to Hekigotõ’s fly-swatter: “until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter”—“but there is now” Here, the reader is not just filling in the gaps, but completing the poem where the end left it dangling. And if it was dangling in the past, the reader may in these cases complete it in the present. Not ‘always’ but in some cases.

                We have one or two of those in part 3, two weeks hence

            11. I understand what you’re saying, and I find the argument being constructed wonderful and the insights it brings incredible, I just disagree, ha! :)

                I think the ground of my disagreement is, (1) the disagreement with the concept of “reproduction” we’re each operating on, and (2) something here, when you write:

                “Of course, these processes are never exclusive. Speech also requires decoding, and literature also invites supplementation. A sonnet, for example, still asks us to reconstruct a voice, a situation, and a relationship with the reader. But its primary mode of encounter is usually shaped by attention to the /crafted linguistic object: its patterns, structures, imagery, and formal relations./”

                I never can’t see a haiku as a “crafted linguistic object: its patterns, structures, imagery, and formal relations.” I experience haiku as crafted linguistic objects (of greater or lesser degrees of success), designed of certain “patterns, structures, imagery, and formal relations.” I encounter haiku as art objects, as objects trying (to greater or lesser degrees of success) to introduce friction (desire-release) to create the now-becoming-new, which I think Art (whether visual, literary, televisual, etc.) does, not as a goal or telos, but merely it just does what it does just being the thing it is. Art creates the future (i.e. freedom of the non-actualized).

                I think oral utterances too are “crafted linguistic objects” to a greater or lesser degree with their particular patterns, structures, imagery, and formal relations.” There are no “natural utterances” (not even the noise we make when we stub our toe), there is only speech in all its forms (utterances, poems, prose, etc), and when a form is treated to a greater degree of success it surpasses a certain threshold of friction and thus categorized as “literature” (even utterances as in freestyle rap and improv theater).

            12. Orense, I should clarify just a bit, I’m not in disagreement with your analysis of how haiku function and the effects of that function, just a slight disagreement merely when other forms of lit are wrangled in in the way they are. :)

            13. Adam,

                Am I right in thinking that our disagreement may come down to this?

                You seem to locate haiku’s distinctiveness primarily in its means: its particular formal strategies, structures, and techniques. The effects those means produce are real, but not unique to haiku. They are effects that other forms can produce as well, by different routes. In that sense, haiku would be one particular way of generating a broader literary or aesthetic charge.

                My own view is that the means and the effects cannot be separated so cleanly. The specific formal means of haiku give rise to specific effects and a characteristic mode of encounter, and that mode of encounter is part of what haiku is.

                Is that a fair statement of where we differ?

                Or perhaps I’m constructing an elaborate theory of a disagreement that doesn’t actually exist 😄

            14. Orense, yes, that’s a fair breakdown of my part of the disagreement :)

                “My own view is that the means and the effects cannot be separated so cleanly. The specific formal means of haiku give rise to specific effects and a characteristic mode of encounter, and that mode of encounter is part of what haiku is.”

                I would agree that this statement as part of my view of things. I think that oral utterances and any form of enunciation (novel, sonnet, rap song, etc.) that “preserves the conditions of a situated encounter” resulting in now-becoming-new is “literature” (i.e. it surpassed a certain threshold of friction)

                So, oral utterances, novels, sonnets, jokes, haiku, etc. are all different forms of literature (when they surpass that threshold). Thus, to read a statement that “haiku is oral utterance-like,” (which is what I believe you mean when you say “speech-like”) to me is equivalent to saying “haiku is sonnet-like,” or “haiku is novel-like.” As well as saying “a novel is oral utterance-like,” or a “sonnet is oral utterence-like.” Basically the formula is “one act of speech is like another act of speech.”

                And while such statements are correct, for there are shared similarities between forms of speech, I think it reduces the uniqueness of any given form of speech. But, this is where the tension arises in reading your ideas, for you DO chart the the uniqueness of haiku, to a very fascinating and profound degree. It’s just, like I mentioned, when you start wrangling in other forms of speech, all the stuff in my head doesn’t sync up with how you’re discussing them. But that’s Ok and I’ll try not to keep bringing up my same old contention on every essay that posted to Moon and Finger hahaha :)

   2. Without a verb or an adjectival past participle this is tense-less and such a verse seems to be considered as ‘present’ by default. Now, if you had written ‘my thoughts scattered …’ and/or ‘fallen rain’ we enter an interesting area. Weeks 2 and 3.

      How about:

      we kissed in the rain
      and then I went and looked up
      “sayonara”…

      Where the ellipsis invites the “ah…” of awareness.

      1. I think the reader’s default to what you call the present is habitual, even when it isn’t in the language of the poem itself. That’s what I am troubling here. I sense a confusion between a strictly linguistic/poetic function and a psychological function.

         1. I’d go along with that. We’re told by many that haiku deal with the present. So absent any contradictory content or context, we tend to assume that a verse presented as a ‘haiku’ is in the present. Orense is arguing that if it’s haiku, in essence it’s the spoken word, and that is always in the present moment, so the tense it’s given in is immaterial. I’m arguing that whatever the written tense, the act of awareness and insight is in the present (both for the poet and for the reader): a mental event. Ergo the tense it’s written in is…immaterial.

            That said, the bulk of anglophone haiku are deemed to be composed of, or inspired by, real-and-present images, and that has advantages in freshness &c., but there is no one way to write haiku.

      2. Keith, M.R., is not “falling” acting as a sort of adjectival present participle introducing a sense of tense (i.e. “present time”)? As contrasted with,

         steady rain
         my thoughts somewhere among the /fallen/ rain

         1. I think “falling” by itself (as adjective) is tenseless and would be governed by context, but in default of any other spec is assumed to be present — if only by the default habituation we’ve been discussing. It’s also interesting that the tenseless form of several Japanese verbs with the continuative ending -te often seems best rendered as -ing. We have one in next week’s, where subsequent context puts it firmly in the past…

            the falling leaves drift past my window
            the falling leaves blocked the car radiator
            the falling leaves next autumn will be no challenge to the new roadsweepers

            winter rain
            my thoughts somewhere among the fallen raindrops

            Could be all in the past. Winter rain can happen any year. What makes a reader assume it is right here, right now? Other than convention.

            1. So, the line (not withstand any habituation of establishing it in the present) then becomes a possibility of,

               somewhere among the [drops that are falling]
               somewhere among the [drops that have fallen]
               somewhere among the [drops that will fall]

               But, is not the very possibility of a shifting tense (i.e. the reader’s choice of tense) an operation in the here and now. The /possible/ can’t be in the past, for the past is actualized. And the /possible/ (here understood as choice) can’t be in the Future because the choice hasn’t been made yet.

               Which if the writer had explicitly given us,

               my thoughts somewhere in the fallen drops

               or

               my thoughts somewhere in the drops to fall

               The possibility (ie. the current Now) is reduced(?)

            2. Yes, in my view they’re all mental operations in the here and now. The past (and the future) are always connected with the present. How else would we define ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ if not in relation to ‘the present?’

               The ‘present moment’ is where first, the poet’s and then, the reader’s cogitations take place. And with the same material in a poem, the readers’ cogitations may be very different (as we see in re:Virals).

               present at dinner
               the young speak of the future
               the old of the past.

            3. But, further, or maybe rather, more explicitly, the “steady rain” haiku, isn’t merely making a general claim that choice is “mental operations in the here and now.” The haiku is structured to make the reader choose in the here and now (choose you own adventure).

               IF the haiku had been written,

               my thoughts somewhere in the /fallen/ drops

               The tense-ing of the poem would be what you’re calling “immediate pass”

               IF the haiku had been written,

               my thoughts somewhere in the drops /that will fall/

               The haiku is future directed.

               The larger convo about this haiku is the claim there is no tense implicated in it, or am I getting that incorrect? I find that there IS a tense implicated, not in a general “all-our-experience-happens-Now” manner, but in the formal structure and diction choice of the haiku.

            4. Yes, I’m saying that absent any contextual clues or verb tenses, e.g with a noun-only verse or one with expressions with no fixed tense, the default assumption is the present. (M R Pelletier argues that there is nothing to stipulate that. I tend to agree. It’s a conditioned assumption. “Winter stars” are not necessarily “this winter’s stars right here, right now”).

               That default assumption may apply in other situations than haiku, but we are considering haiku here. By conditioned habit we ‘expect’ haiku to be in the present, and some would rule out as ‘haiku’ a verse that is written wholly in a past, especially a distant past. By Orense’s enunciated speech framework ex-renga hokku to haiku, we take haiku to be in the spoken present whatever tense they are written in. In the approach I take, the reader’s act in addressing a verse and cogitating over it, is in the reader’s present whatever the tense it’s written in. In the act of writing, the poet connects the past and/or future with their now. In the act of reading and becoming aware of the insight the poet has offered, we connect the past and/or future with our now. The tense as written can suit the poet. Same conclusion, different rationale.

               I’ve been posted places where steady rain has lasted for days on end….

            5. Perhaps it has already been said here, but part of the tension (no pun intended) around a haiku composed in any tense other than the explicit present is that it may imply that it was written somewhere and some when apart from actual events or experience. In other words, made up. I don’t think the taboo against such writing is as strong as it once was, but I think a lot of people who try their hand at haiku are, at a minimum, uneasy with it. How many times, (most, it seems), on re:Virals, does one see the author of a selected haiku describe the actual situation that prompted it, as if to validate it. Maybe Keith knows if someone has ever said: “Well, I made this up.”

               Nothing wrong with writing from actual, on-the-spot experience. My take on “made up” haiku is that if it is alive on the page, it is probably alive in some way in the writer, as an inner experience, or as a memory just now surfacing but very present. And sometimes one has to make up a lot of stuff to find out what’s true. And maybe, sometimes, writing about the past, or from, or as the past, will be most true. Truth is always in the present tense. Or so I declare.

            6. Peter: absolutely cf the first para under the heading “The past in haiku” in the post above. The vast majority of haiku are written in the present from real-and-present experiences or observations and they tend to have freshness and immediacy. Or they are presented as such (and sometimes one doubts).

               But that is not to exclude other kinds, exemplified in the above post where a real-and-immediately-past experience occurs, and in the next two posts where real-and-more-distant past experience of some kind is the subject, now recollected.

               And yes, truth, or insight, occurs in the poet’s present as the verse is written, and in the reader’s present as it is read; the ‘moment of awareness’. Say I.

            7. Peter, I think this is another instance of something I keep coming back to across this whole thread: that haiku lives between speech and literature, and most of the critical tensions that recur around the form can be traced back to that navigation.

               The anxiety you’re describing — the felt need to validate a haiku by supplying its “real” occasion, the discomfort with admitting “I made this up” — only makes sense if haiku is being received primarily as utterance: an utterance implicitly claims to report something that actually happened to an actual speaker, so a poem read that way seems to owe us a verifiable occasion behind it. But haiku is also, unmistakably, literature — a made thing, a linguistic construction — and under that aspect, whether the occasion was actual or invented has no special bearing on the poem’s success. Novels, after all, are not diminished by being fiction.

               The tension you’re naming, then, isn’t just about honesty or fabrication. It’s about which of haiku’s two natures a given reader (or poet, anticipating a reader) is foregrounding at a given moment. When we lean toward haiku-as-utterance, invention feels like a betrayal of the form’s implicit promise. When we lean toward haiku-as-literature, invention is simply craft, no more suspect than a novelist inventing a scene.

               I said elsewhere in the thread that haiku does not typically have framing and I was waiting for someone to bring up maegaki. However maegaki doesn’t really complicate this picture — if anything, it confirms haiku’s double nature from yet another angle. A title or a diary’s date marks distance: this text was produced elsewhere, at another time, and you are receiving it after the fact. Maegaki does something different. It isn’t distancing the verse from an occasion; it’s authenticating the verse’s claim to one. It says, in effect, this really happened, not this happened elsewhere and long ago.

               That maegaki exists at all, and has such a long tradition, shows that poets have long felt exactly the pull you’re describing — the sense that a haiku, received as utterance, seems to demand proof of a lived occasion behind it. But the fact that most haiku carry no maegaki, and are read and valued as haiku anyway, shows that this demand isn’t actually a structural requirement of the form. The verse doesn’t need its occasion authenticated to succeed as literature. So maegaki’s existence and its optionality point in the same direction: haiku sits close enough to utterance that the impulse to authenticate arises and has produced its own convention for satisfying it, while sitting far enough into literature that most verses forgo the convention entirely and lose nothing by it.

               I think this is exactly why “truth is always in the present tense” works as well as it does. It relocates the test of a haiku’s honesty away from documentary accuracy — did this really happen, at some past moment we could verify — and toward the aliveness of the writing and reading itself, now. That’s a truth-condition literature can satisfy regardless of whether the underlying occasion was lived or invented.

               And I think the very fact that haiku is held to this standard at all — a standard no other literary form is held to in quite the same way — is itself telling. No one demands that a novelist confess which scenes “really happened,” and no one feels betrayed to learn a sonnet’s beloved was composite or invented. That haiku alone provokes this particular anxiety suggests it isn’t simply one genre among others that happens, incidentally, to sometimes get read as reportage. Readers hold it to the standard of utterance in a way they don’t hold other literature, which is itself evidence of how close to speech the form actually sits.

10. Melissa Dennison (of re:Virals) has just come up with a couple from Blyth. One by Shiki is more clearly in the present as far as his translation goes, so not intriguing in this study. The other is a very rich haiku I never focused on before:

    麦くひし雁と思へど別れかな
    mugi kuishi kari to omoe do wakare kana
    —Yasui

    Blyth gives:
    The wild geese—
    They ate barley, it is true.
    But departing—

    “kuishi” is the simple past “ate” or attributively “that ate”. There’s no kireji or other cut in this continuous sentence in the original, until ‘kana’ at the end (a slightly stronger, sometimes exclamatory, indication of present awareness than ‘keri’ and without keri’s auxiliary function in the present past.) Also, ‘departing is not given as part of a verb but as the noun, ‘departure.’ Departure doesn’t have a tense…

    I might read it as

    I know
    the wild geese ate the barley
    though on departure… ah!

    We have some layers here. Yasui, a merchant from Nagoya (I can’t find whether he was by happy chance a grain merchant!) and disciple of Bashõ, first recognises the damage wild geese have caused to the crop, then excuses them as it was on their departure. At which time, of course, they have been fuelling up for their journey. It also gives a season: in Japan, spring, when geese depart northwards (they were likely eating green barley shoots). Their departure also means they won’t be a continuing pest for the farmers.

    Blyth remarks that the poem expresses the paradox that even something troublesome becomes dear at the moment of parting.
    The “ah!” might indicate sadness that they are leaving, but that’s not explicit, and a likely trap for anglophone readers always inclined to favour that emotion. Rather, Yasui leaves us to work out the layers of tension in his mind, even moralities, among farmers, merchants, and wild things doing what they have to do. This interesting verse fits in the category of recollection-with-subsequent-contemplation-in-the present-moment. The “it is true” in Blyth’s rendering, or the “I know” in mine, connects the past with the present. And communication thereof. Thank you, Melissa!

    1. The romaji in Blyth is searchable in the Haiku Foundation digital library if you would like more examples.

11. Keith, it is truly a cosmic alignment that our approaches are so complementary. 🙂

    Your keri examples show so clearly that the past in haiku is not a retreat from the present, but often the very thing that creates a deeper awareness of it.

    When it comes to the use of keri, I can’t help but think of Nakamura Kusatao’s much-admired haiku, which pushes the same mechanism even further:

    furu yuki ya Meiji wa toku nari-ni-keri

    falling snow…
    long has it now gone:
    the Meiji era

    https://sites.google.com/site/worldhaikureview2/WHR-January-2017/one-hundred-haijin-part-4

    Famously, this haiku departs from the usual convention of one kireji per verse — it has two, ya and keri. But the doubling isn’t ornamental: the poem is not only about the end of an era, but about the further realization that even that past has itself become distant — a sense of irretrievability that the poem enacts formally. The double cut emphasizes this widening temporal distance while at the same time performing the fact that haiku itself has entered a new era. Form does the work that meaning is pointing at.

    It’s another good test case for your present-perfect reading too: “has now gone” is exactly the shape you’re describing. The era’s ending is a completed event, but the awareness of that ending, prompted by the falling snow, sits squarely in the poet’s present. Keri here isn’t just marking completion; it is marking the felt distance of an entire epoch — perhaps the largest possible scale on which the “completed event leading to present awareness” mechanism can operate.

    1. Ah, that one of Kusatao’s bridges to next week, where a reader determined to cling to the present moment would say that “falling snow” is in the present and prompts the recollection. Although I could challenge that on the grounds that a kigo like falling snow is generic and we might be in ‘any’ winter; or that falling snow is continuous over rather longer than a moment, sometimes a whole day. But I won’t. As well as prompting the recollection, falling snow with its ‘poetic esssence’ is also being juxtaposed/compared with the passing of the Meiji era. That thought is a mental event in the present for both poet, and now reader! But yes, it does consider the Meiji era as being lost forever and finally.

       I like your reading that the “past has itself become distant — a sense of irretrievability that the poem enacts formally.”

       Next week:
       “— 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.”

       1. Yes, the ambiguity of how present the snow is creates a productive tension. The falling snow may be doing something more paradoxical than simply prompting a recollection. It both bridges and widens the distance the poem is contemplating.

          On the one hand, every winter since Meiji has laid down another layer of snow between Kusatao and that era. The snow becomes a measure of accumulated time, embodying the very distance that the poem recognizes.

          Yet at the same time, snow is one of the few things that seems unchanged. Kusatao sees falling snow; we see falling snow. The image appears to create a continuity across time even as it reveals a historical gulf.

          Perhaps the hidden philosophical center of the poem is the unsettling question: is it the same snow at all?

          If it is, then the snow becomes a bridge to the past. If it is not, then what appeared to connect the present to Meiji becomes another sign of irretrievability. The bridge itself becomes another form of distance.

          That is one reason I find the relationship between ya and keri so compelling. The poem seems suspended between continuity and loss. The snow offers recurrence, while keri closes on the realization that what has passed has become irretrievably distant. The world repeats itself, and yet nothing returns.

          There is another resonance I wonder about, though my Japanese is not strong enough to know whether it is significant, especially since it is not linguistically straightforward. I cannot help noticing the similarity between furuike ya and furu yuki ya: Bashō’s “old pond” and Kusatao’s “falling snow.”

          Could there be, beneath the surface, a reference to that older haiku tradition—not simply as an allusion, but as a way of measuring the distance from it? If so, the poem becomes even more layered. The opening echoes the tradition that came before, while keri recognizes how far away that world has become.

          The past is seen and heard through the snow—yet the snow is not a transparent medium. It softens, obscures, and distances what it reveals. With that ghostly aural echo, the poem would then be looking not only at the lost Meiji era, but perhaps at the accumulated distance between modern haiku and its own origins.

          I should add that I really like this translation, which I believe is Susumu Takiguchi’s. The punctuation is especially effective: the ellipsis and the colon recreate the poem’s double cut in English quite naturally.

          1. It’s an effective arrangement. Yes, the kigo carries the feeling not of just one winter, but many winters accumulating. There’s also the ‘silent’ association of snow. The voices of the Meiji era are silenced and cold….

             Aside from the closing ‘keri’ signalling the ‘ah’ of present awareness, or your argument that every verse is to be treated as enunciated speech in the present (and if so, the tense as chosen by the poet is immaterial), there really is nothing to hang on to for those who reject verses for being entirely couched in the past.

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