re:Virals 568

“More difficult than making your own verses interesting is understanding those of others…” ―Shinkei (1406 –1475). Citing this, Onitsura (1661 – 1738) wrote: “…this should be a way in which a person is completely given over to training.”

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Keith Evetts. This week’s poem, chosen by Dan Campbell was:

   
a train
I have missed
dream after dream
- John Stevenson, 
Wales Haiku Journal, Spring 2025

Introducing this poem, Dan Campbell writes:

Like John Stevenson, I also have had recurring dreams about missing trains. I have also dreamed about chasing taco trucks but I digress. Trains have fascinated psychologists, philosophers and poets, because trains combine movement, time, destination, and forces beyond our control. In my situation, dreams about missing trains probably means that I have let some golden opportunity slip through my fingers.

Host comment (Keith):

First I should declare that for me, John Stevenson is a true master of haiku and senryu in English, and his work has been a great influence on me as well as being a great read.  I always give it more time and study than that of many another contemporary haiku poet.

There’s a long tradition of dreaming and waking, and the transition between them, and which perception is real.  In Far East Asian thought there is the Zhuangzi: “I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference.” (Inner Chapters: the Adjustment of Controversies part 14).  Reality is modified by our perceptions, as are dreams.  “Perhaps the most striking feature of conscious experiences in sleep is how altogether similar the inner world of dreams is to the real world of wakefulness. Indeed, at times the dreamer may be uncertain whether he is awake or asleep.“—for a neurophysiology perspective, see the readable article Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology Nir and Tonioni, 2011 courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Dreams seem real enough to us, perhaps partly because during REM sleep the brain engages in a sort of de-bugging of past, actual, experiences of all sorts.  Sometimes they have somatic effects that persist on waking.  Lately, after an evening when I was called upon to capture and deliver to the outdoors some spiders that had taken refuge in the bathroom, my wife cried out and batted me one in the middle of the night as she dreamed a huge spider was pursuing her.  Make of that what you will.

Now, in a recent interview (link in the Footnote) John revealed that for many years he has cultivated the habit of writing down his dreams on awakening.  This has led to increased sensitivity and skill in recording them.  I see that his dreamscape, thus, has become as much a perceived reality as his landscape when awake. I assume that this senryu is from that notebook.

We all have recurrent dreams.  And we all dream, whether in sleep or in daydreams, of what might have been had we taken a different opportunity, a different train.  But do we know what would have awaited us at the destination?  Did we even know the destination?  This week’s verse encapsulates that, without resolution, in a clip from a dream experience.  The arrangement over three lines, with two line breaks acting potentially as subtle cuts in this otherwise continuous sentence fragment, offers a choice of readings.  You can suppose a real train /cut/: the necessity of catching it to go to work, say, occasioning lost dreams time and again.  A reading I have sympathy with as a former commuter in and out of London. Or you can take it as a dream train that “I have missed /cut/ dream after dream.  Or you can take the line breaks as no more than pauses in the breath for momentary contemplation, and hold all the lines together at the same time, unresolved, a cut left dangling at the end.  The train, a dream representing opportunity for exploration and discovery that the poet (and now you) feel has missed time and again seems to me the more natural reading, and one that opens up the reader’s own dreams, and failures, and renewed attempts.  A broader scope.

John frequently employs what are essentially single sentences or sentence fragments with pauses in the layout.  They are very effective.  Happily for readers, there’s a good selection of his work at the Living Haiku Anthology.

Urszula Marciniak:

Everything disappears so quickly through the train windows. We don’t have time to enjoy a single scene, but an entire series. Unless we look further, closer to the horizon. A train journey helps us reflect on our lives, on how many important things we’ve missed, how many dreams have flown behind us, abandoned or unfulfilled.

But the most important thing is the journey itself, life itself. The train moves on, life goes on. We don’t know when it will stop, or how abruptly.

Let’s stick our heads out the window. Let the wind blow our styled hair. Let’s smell the fields and meadows. Let’s not count the dreams that have flown away. Let’s grasp those that lie ahead. Let’s ride. Let the clatter of the wheels lull us to a beautiful dream.

Sudha Devi Nayak:

The haiku in its crispness and vividness captures a persistent dream that haunts the imagination. The train is symbolic of the dream, the train carries the dream.  All life is animated by dreams, that turn into aspiration on their way to redemption. Dreams are elusive like mirages advancing in hope, retreating in despair defying your grasp.  “Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” says Matthew Arnold,  and that is the dream worth the pursuit.  All achievement has its seeds in a dream, as does all realisation, whether real or spiritual or sublime.  The pursuit of a dream can be as exhilarating as the realisation of the dream, the effort itself is the dream. As Basho says, “Everyday is a journey and the journey itself is home”.

Dreams can be extravagant, illusory, incapable of fruition, will o’ the wisps we have been chasing forever, and one has to settle for less. When the realisation dawns on us we are filled with an all consuming sense of disillusionment. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam/ Where is it now the glory and the dream?” we say with Wordsworth. Yet we do not abandon the dream, still the dream persists, visiting us in our sleeping and waking moments, and accompanying us in all our inward and outward journeys.

Dreams are the triggers for life and because they do not come to fruition we do not cease to dream like the tree that may not blossom does not cease to be a tree
The unfulfilled dream can be a missed goal or a lost love, once pursued with fervour, now a forever memory or fond regret.

Radhamani Sarma:

A beautiful haiku enhancing positive vibrant thoughts. Haiku writer John Stevenson, in the first person take begins his light write with the image of “a train”. Sometimes, it is so painful to imagine the concept of waiting — waiting for a train, for a bus, for the rain to stop, waiting in the lounge , or waiting in the waiting room etc; Here the persona records his dream one after another, subsequent to the missing of train.  While missing the train, he missed the destination, the purpose of his visit, the people he would have interacted with, the places he was away from, recollections he cannot escape, etc. it might have been a romantic dream, a royal couple, lovers and love fulfilled, or unfulfilled etc.

In the  lines “i have missed /dream after dream,” he expresses a sentimental journey, a spring blossom perhaps, and various types of dreams in his baggage claims.
Another interpretation is that he was not on time to reach the platform, hence he narrowly missed the train. Perhaps he fell asleep; in that deep sleep, a number of dream sequences ensue, wherein romantic lovers he envisions, it is not one dream, but a sequence of dreams; we , the avid readers should capture dream sequences;

“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon

Shalini Gupta:

The haiku is nostalgia and deep longing rolled into one. Is it a destination that was cherished, a path, that the writer had to take a detour from in life, to another, perhaps compelled by the practicalities of life? Train alludes to a journey with an end and so was it to be shared with someone or one towards a goal or a mission towards a life purpose, to be traversed alone? In L3, repetition of the word dream, stresses the impact of this feeling the poet is going through. Is it a nightmare? A thought that comes to haunt over and over again? I’m not sure why but it also reminds me of Robert Frost’s ‘The road not taken’, however Frost’s poem emphasises choice and pride in the road after comparing both and finally treading the one he has chosen for himself, unlike here, where the narrator is perhaps a victim of circumstances or fate.

Ashoka Weerakkody:

Stevenson writing a train haiku!  Makes me think about the ‘father of all trains’ who built and drove the very first revenue service passenger train, sometime during mid-nineteenth century in England. George Stevenson and his steam locomotive named the “Rocket”, entered history that way but not every ‘train’ ran with a ‘rocket’ on rails even then, for a train could be anything that had a long trail forming a lengthy and remarkable, moving (or rather movable) assemblage that always is likable and romantic under even the most dull surroundings. “Train” of the veil a bride wears in Wedding March might do exactly the same; brightening up the day, rain or shine outside.
Here the Author starts off with the Stevenson ‘heritage’ line,
“a train”
and hastens to add right undeneath.
” i have missed.”
Well, come to think of it. Someone may be lamenting that he was not there when George Stevenson chug-chugged away after a toot and whiff of escaping hot steam pushing the piston rods that turned his drive wheel over the slipping and bearing steel rail-way, all the time billowing sulphur-smelling black smoke from the coal fired stove that boiled the water, making up the marvel that each and everyone present that day was treated to an eyeful of, never to forget till their dying day.

Let alone Mr.Stevenson of this age, but I myself, an alien from the Orient can’t help feeling let down by the time shift, the gulf that separates me from that golden age of industrial ‘revolution’ , the only sane thing history has offered mankind from the West that very soon engulfed almost the whole world. That, since here on my latitude trains began running from west coast inwards passing through level landmass till engaging the 1/44 gradients climbing up the heartland of the country, the central hills from where the nature’s gift of life; pure and cool spring water form the hydral catchments that flow downhill as rivers to the four corners of the paradise isle. The trains ran for a century and more making this one of the earliest lands to acquire the railway as main cross-country mode of transport, even preceding India, the neighbouring big brother! The pioneering ‘Stevensons’ from Britain laid our railroads to support the coffee and tea produce shippers who built a so-called “little england” up there in the cool climes where they lived, loved, laughed and died, to finally bury in here.

Came the massive rains, floods and then cyclones and the trains braved them all, till a couple years ago the final assault destroyed the mountain tracks and infrastructure, fully disabling all those trains that had thus far conquered the rough terrain of granite rocks and long tunnels. And it stays that way despite boast and banter of optimistic us! Ways of nature and elements we can’t alter with dreams alone.

And that takes me to the last line of this haiku;
“dream after dream”
Surely, the Author never thought of writing this poem in sympathy with a train lover’s shattered dream line, but in harmony with the passage of unending events that holds a life together through inevitable change of fate we all experience over the ages. Yes, the train serves perfectly the purpose here, as the long line of compartments that pass you by clattering periodically, as length after length, the jointed rails lament the ‘pain’ of bearing, in turn, the pain felt in the heart of the subject of the poem, who missed it though still so near and dear can’t get on board, having missed by a fraction of a second. Life may go on, not in dream terms but in reality and wisdom that shattered gaiety brings up and carries away!

Pamela Garry:

As Keith posted on THF just this week: ‘Recalling a memory is simply seen as a present mental event. Our contact with the past always occurs here and now.’

So I asked Google about the tense of ‘I have missed,’ the central line of this little poem. According to Google: “I have missed” is actually in the present perfect tense, not the past perfect or past imperfect. It uses the present tense of “have” plus the past participle “missed”, connecting a past action to the present moment.” And this aligns perfectly with “our contact with the past always occurs here and now.” (I think that’s part of why I love haiku so much. So many tenses to untangle and tie together!)

‘a train’ is objectively railroad transportation, and I have arrived late to the gate, ie “I have missed” the train. Or perhaps “I have missed” refers to emotionally missing the days of riding the train or a train of thought. This repeated feeling of missing something leads me to perceive a sadness in the poem’s mood. This sadness is deepened by the poem’s connection to the idiom “the train has left the station,” meaning lost opportunity.

“dream after dream” – who hasn’t experienced recurring dreams! Sometimes they are exact reruns, sometimes aspects change. Sometimes the dreamer might deliberately try to enter the recurring dream in hopes of a rerun or in hopes of a new chapter. I think the poet has more control than the dreamer, and yet the poet cannot control what the reader brings to the poem and takes from the poem.

For me, this beautiful haiku is about more than a train leaving the station too soon. It also touches on the presence of memories of repeated dreams and the relationship of dreamer to dream and that ever present and central expression of missing.

M. R. Pelletier:

Haiku as Vector

A man runs along a platform, a wheeled suitcase trailing behind. He’s late. He’s always late. Every time.

He sweats heavily and is nearly out of breath. He takes the longest strides he can manage, but a piece of one of the wheels of the suitcase is missing and, every now and then, it catches a crack or seam in the platform and causes him to lose his grip of the handle. He wonders if he should just leave the bloody thing behind and, as he thinks this, it occurs to him that he doesn’t even know what’s in it. In fact, he doesn’t even know if it is his.

He sees the conductor lean out of one of the cars, raise a whistle to his mouth, and give it a blow. Then, in a voice as loud as the whistle, the conductor yells, “All aboard! Last call for …,” but the destination is garbled by the revving of the train’s engines. He wonders whether he’s on the right platform. He tries to remember where it is that he’s meant to be going. The words ‘End-of-Line’ flash across his mind. End-of-Line? Stupid name for a town, he thinks.

He’s still forty yards out when the train’s doors begin to slam shut. He tries to yell, “Wait! Please! Wait!” but even though his mouth moves no sound comes out. He frantically waves his free arm trying to get someone’s, anyone’s attention, but it slows his pace too much. Sweat pours from his brow and his face is a dangerous color of red as he gulps at the air. He’s only twenty yards out as the train begins to lurch forward with the hissing release of its brake.

He makes one final push, but the broken wheel of the suitcase wedges perfectly into a crack in the platform and the suitcase stays where it is while he continues onward — with his wrenched shoulder, torn fingers, and bursting lungs screaming — then downward like a spinning top that has begun its terminal wobble and, just as he’s about to hit the ground …

A man sits up in bed in the darkness of early morning. He, too, sweats heavily and is out of breath. He turns on the lamp on his bedside table and reaches for the pen and notebook he keeps in the drawer. He quickly scribbles something down, puts his pen and notebook back in the drawer, wipes his forehead with a sleeve of his pyjamas, turns off the lamp, and then tries to go back to sleep. A few hours later …

A man runs along a platform …

far ahead
the train rails join —
brilliant dawn
— Christopher Herrold, Inside Out, Red Moon Press, 2019

Alan Summers—if we dare…:

As a long-time fan and student of John Stevenson’s haiku approach, it’s wonderful to discover an opportunity to talk about one, and find a new masterpiece. As I’ve been commenting a lot on enjambment as not just a line break, let me explain myself. The “break” method I’ll call “transitus” for now, feels very fitting for his unique style, as well as the coincidence that it’s around public transport again:

transitus (Latin, noun)

passing over
transit
transition

Transit means moving from one place to another. Avoiding the rabbit hole a little, briefly “transit” is from Latin and transitus means “passing over” or “passage” with the verb “transire” as “to go across”. There are also religious connotations though lets jump to secular ways. This feels where both in the haiku and in the movie “North by Northwest” (Alfred Hitchcock’s film starring Cary Grant [Roger] and Eva Marie Saint [Eve]) feels very much jumpcut in technique, yet it’s actually a match cut (or graphic match/smash cut) to be more precise, film buffs!

This may make more sense if we go back to part of the religious meaning:
The Transitus refers to “the time of passage through death to life”.

Watch the end of the movie, a classic act of haiku juxtaposition!

Back to the future, if we have John’s haiku as a single line haiku (monostich haiku) would it be as strong.

e.g.
a train I have missed dream after dream

Instantly the verb tense ‘have’ feels clumsy, despite its iconic “present tense/simple present” aspect it changes when added to ‘missed’: It becomes something that starts in the past BUT continues in the present. Is this perhaps one of John’s secrets?

Let’s go back to the tristich chosen version (tercet/3-line haiku):

a train
I have missed
dream after dream

Is the middle line a pivot? I don’t feel it is. Rather, the author’s direct observation of:

a train

Followed by:

I have missed
dream after dream

Are these perhaps utterances aloud or someone partly asleep, or mental thoughts placed into ‘haiku form’.

QUESTION:
Is John interrupted by, or from, a ‘night’ or ‘day’ dream? Is he asleep and rudely awakened by a real train outside his window, or a train station bench, or something else?

Any haiku by John Stevenson looks incredibly simple “but if we dare” we can read them more than once, and closely, I mean really lean in and really closely inhabit them. There is a lot going on in those eight words.

Author John Stevenson:

This poem is shasei applied to dreams. I suspect I remember more of my dreams than most people do. When I notice an image that seems to be developing over a series of dreams, I take special interest in it. Probably, I will board that train eventually and, when I do, it might be as a passenger, a conductor, a sleeping car attendant, an engineer, some kind of freight.

At the technical level, I like how “train after train” stands in for “time after time.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Alan has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, to a maximum of 500 words (succinctness will be valued);  academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic. As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems. Please note that commentaries must be your own personal work.

Poem for commentary:

     
past bedtime…
a lunar landing glows
through the keyhole
—Lorraine A Padden
  from A Marvel Universe
  The Pan Haiku Review issue 4 (December 2024)
(note: please treat this as a standalone verse)

Footnote:

Short bio:

John Stevenson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America, former assistant editor and editor of Frogpond, and former managing editor of The Heron’s Nest. He is currently an editor of The Heron’s Nest and Upstate Dim Sum. He was the 2018-19 honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library.

Here is a link to a recent interview, conducted by Luke Thompson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VhgA3PE3eQ&t=92s

—–

Another favourite:

my farmer’s market
can beat up
your farmer’s market
—John Stevenson Frogpond 40.3 2017

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

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