A few days ago I saw Inahata Teiko, President of the Japan Traditional Haiku Association, on NHK national TV in a haiku program.
She was musing about her sofu, grandfather Takahama Kyoshi and his heritage, and wheather she had kept it well during all these years she took over …
In the course of the program, she also stated
“I will never choose a haiku in a haiku meeting which does not have a season word.”

I tend to share her opinion.

I am very much for experimenting with poetry, short form verse, free verse, micropoetry and whatever it is called …
but Haiku for me will always be much closer to the traditional than to the gendai, where the limits toward other poetic genres are so blurred and “definitions” are rather opinionated.

I am looking forward to this discussion here !
Gabi from Japan

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“Is it important to continue looking to Japan for inspiration and education?.”

If you’re not looking at your own culture first and foremost, then the answer is no.

While my instincts always reach back to nature in order to objectify the thing trying to take expression within me there is something that wrestles always with trying to be true to the spirit of the expression. I hate to lable anything or to give anything catagories. I understand where Gabi is coming from and I know that so much more can be said in that framework but I also understand that poetry requires support but it also has wings.

I don’t connect with the samples given here… they don’t speak to me in a way that poetry sometimes can. So I know that haiku has many levels and as many ways of dealing with it as those who each manner of expression does connect with each group. Hope this makes sense to you all. I know I’m not very clear trying to put my thoughts into words here. But I do not write haiku to fit into any given form. The forms themselves or sort of building blocks to use to construct the haiku. Whatever fits is what I use.

I like how Murio’s poem creates an identification between the man being killed and the observers of his death. That a part of each of us dies with anyone’s death. This is an effective use of the 2nd person point of view. If Murio had tried to write the poem from the 3rd person point of view

from the sight
of the man who was killed
they also vanished

The effect is much more muted without any sense that “they” were actually observers of the man’s death. The selective employment of POV seems to make a critical difference in my reading of the poem.

I like the gendai approach now being encouraged by Gilbert, Metz, and some others. I find some of the gendai poems challenging and difficult to get my hands around. But that’s the whole point of being challenged. Whether the gendai aesthetic retains its influence as it now exists or whether it gets diffused & absorbed over time in the American haiku tradition is an open question. But I for one welcome new sources of artistic energy & inspiration from any country or any culture. At the end of the day, though, it will be American artists who will choose for themselves what they think works best. And they will be the ultimate judges of their own work. They bow to no one.

Despite the minute size of haiku, it certainly is a big tent. I think we should explore every boundary in haiku. By pushing and pulling the form we add to the tensile strength, its relevancy to express the nature/human continuum. Allow the fantastical, the absurd, and the surreal. Allow the logical mind to come unhinged and leap as Merrill said “with wings.”

In “illness in one eye:/I’m walking/like a goldfish” I get the visual of the poet’s swollen eye like that of a goldfish. But so much emotion comes when the poet states he is “walking like a goldfish.” Goldfish don’t walk in air; they flounder and flop about. This disorientation is at the heart of illness—his eyesight that once functioned one way no longer functions in that same way. How else could he have conveyed his situation?

Another example from the November 2009 issue of “Roadrunner” is this one-liner by John Stevenson.

a man in a crowd in a man

For me this is like the verbal depiction of the fourth dimension. The crowd is the cube in the middle and the man is at once inside and outside the crowd exchanging places in continual motion. We carry this notion of the individual but it passes through culture, though time and space, and comes out the other end as this notion of the individual. This is marvelous stuff.

I question the question: why should one respond to a “kind” of haiku rather than each haiku as a poem, or a potential poem (if poem is the sort of name that goes with a certain complex use of language)? I think the question reflects a certain decadence in the Ameriku culture: we are supposed to have an opinion about a KIND of poem. What if we look at each haiku, of whatever kind, just as “a poem” or a perhaps poem? Can we keep our minds from doing that anyway if we are freely engaging in reading for fun and enlightenment? Once we see the lineation, we see “haiku” or some variant (single line, etc), and we start classifying. Against this categorization, the poem SHOULD set up its own resistance–perhaps what we take as a “poem” is a fragment of a novel? or a cry for help?

For example,

in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off

—Yagi Mikajo

is clearly a “poem” by virtue, first, of NOT being another use of language; then by virtue of certain positive aspects, including the sense of fragmentation, though the complete sentence here tugs in the opposite direction. One might, at first glance, sense a feeling for the surreal in “scarlet mushroom”; but “mushroom” has certain tendencies, culturally, and these would have to be sorted out during the interpretive process. The short line, being a short complete sentence, says, “yes, this is a not-that-hard poem”; then, in the opposite direction (it IS hard), we try to integrate that “sentence” into the scene supplied by the first section (speaking haiku structure here!, but that seems inevitable at this point, seeing the author is Japanese and the item “comb” and how it “slips off” conjures up a certain KIND of comb (not an American one). Anyway, we proceed in our sorting process, coming to terms with this bit of language and gradually “feeling” it as if it WERE a “poem.”
And we should do that with any “poem” we run across.
In the end, or at the beginning, I’ve been thinking recently, it may beuseful to think of “haiku” as a STANZA form: originally, I suppose that’s what it was. Only really good poets can write a complete poem in one stanza. Basho could, and he set a standard and made it seem like a good think to do.

In an essay I’ll be publishing next summer I make the distinction between gendai haiku that take the reader into consideration and those that don’t. For example, while the image in the poem:

Illness in one eye:
I’m walking
like a goldfish

- Ban’ya Natsuishi

is fantastical, I as a reader can understand it. His ocular problems are giving him distorted images and he feels like he is looking out of a goldfish bowl. This brings into play ideas of entrapment or identity. I don’t need special knowledge that only its author can provide to access this poem. However, for a poem such as:

in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off

- Yagi Mikajo

I have no clue what this means. A poem in Gilbert’s book:

twenty billion light-years of perjury your blood type is “B”

- Hoshinaga Fumio

is a further example. Fumio tells Gilbert in the interview that type B blood is considered melancholy. he adds, “I felt my rebelliousness or revulsion could not be blood-type A—it must be blood-type B.” Huh? How could a reader ever be expected to know that? They aren’t mind readers. Likewise I feel that Mikajo’s poem requires some special knowledge that only she can provide.

Haiku are poems that shift/leap from the known to the unknown. In traditional haiku the leap is usually to something realistic, but I see no problem with poems that shift to the fantastical. However, the reader needs to be considered. While many gendai poems do take the reader into consideration, many in their effort to be fantasitical or strange don’t.

Whether they are gendai haiku or not, I agree with Paul that it’s vital to distinguish between poems that take the reader into consideration and those that don’t. This is worth noting both as readers and writers of haiku. (And you may indeed write some haiku for yourself, and some for others.)

If a poem seems to not take the reader into consideration, though, I would add that such a poem may need to be apprehended, not by itself, but by a larger corpus of haiku by that poet, or in the context of a particular type of poetry. We often think that each haiku has to “stand alone,” and generally that’s a good idea, but we also need not limit haiku to that narrow perspective.

Indeed, a poem may be requiring things of you that are not in the poem (and not just knowing things like the fact that blood types are a big deal in Japan, and somewhat equivalent to one’s zodiac sign in correlating to personality). For example, some poems by Ban’ya Natsuishi (such as some of the “flying pope” poems) strike me as not taking the reader into consideration, yet they have a different effect when assessed cumulatively, creating a sort of personal mythology and other effects. Whether that cumulative effect is better for some readers or not may be a matter of taste, but I do think the cumulative effect is better for some readers. And that is a fresh way (among many ways) to apprehend each poem than as yet another nature nugget.

Michael Dylan Welch

Thanks to the writer and responders for this interesting discussion. I recently led a workshop for members of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society which consisted in part of discussion of the Scott Metz review noted in the Sailing. As part of the workshop each participant undertook to write one or more gendai haiku. We all found it surprisingly difficult. I tabled

peace rally
I stub my toe
on the Washington Monument

BTW can anyone tell me how to acquire a copy of The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century? An email in English to the Society was not answered.