The Haiku Foundation Forums

One possibility: you can open this up considerably by dropping the word "my". What do you think?

I've been considering this question for some time-- I've delayed posting my thoughts here, as they are still somewhat fluid, but in the end I've decided to go ahead, if only to help keep things going. So . . .


Surely “socially relevant” will mean different things to different people. For many it will mean feeling part of a haiku community with all that implies. For others, its meaning will fall somewhere within the range of possibilities implied by effecting some sort of change, making a difference in people’s lives, or in the culture as a whole.

But the question relates to “poetics”, that is to say the art and technique of poetry, and this brings me more directly in touch with my own inclination-- stance if you will-- which is to believe (without being particularly attached to or insistent on the belief) that poetry, to be poetry, must be in some way revelatory, and that revelation (embodied in non-linear, intuitive language) of whatever is hidden, lost or denied is ultimately, eventually beneficial, and socially relevant in ways that may take time to become apparent.

I think the value of any art lies in its ability to draw participants into a deeper understanding of its “subject matter”, bypassing, at least initially, intellection and moving toward intuition. In short, it has no agenda-- which to some may mean it will fall short of social or political relevance. But as I see it, not having an agenda gives the reader/listener (in the case of poetry) the opportunity to discover his or her own relationship to that subject, fostering feelingful contact. Haiku is not unique in this, but it does seem to be a core aspect of its “poetics”, in theory if not always in practice.

I think it is fair to say that Japanese aesthetics (which inform haiku poetics, needless to say) have influenced Western culture-- consider wabi-sabi-- and been incorporated to the extent that the influence itself is no longer in the foreground. This is much less true of haiku itself, which (is it fair to say?) the majority of “mainstream” poets and the English language world as a whole continue to see as a Japanese cultural phenomenon which may be learned from and imitated but which is as genuine in the English language as “champagne” produced in the Napa Valley.

From this point of view,  “haiku in English” is regarded as something closer to “haiku in Japanese in English”. And in many instances, this is  the case. The genius of the English language (with all its cultural felicities and limitations) has only sporadically been explored in haiku. Haiku writers seem reluctant to sail beyond Japan’s territorial seas. And some who do are nonetheless drawn back by the undertow termed “gendai”.

To my mind, this has bearing on any discussion of social relevance.

So haiku poetics, yes, insofar as they have been incorporated into the work of many poets of the past hundred years, have had and continue to have social relevance-- if one believes, as I do, that poetry itself does. However, haiku itself remains in a bubble.

Susan Diridoni's poem posted on the Foundation Home Page:

coyote chorus
elevator to the roof
of forgotten woods

Also have a look at Sam Savage's work here:

http://antantantantant.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/sam-savage-ant-ant-ant-ant-ant/

Alan, I guess it wasn't clear, but I did come down in favor of Peggy's poem-- based on a slightly higher score for originality.

Thanks, Alan, for your generous response. For now, I will only say that a critique of Roadrunner is long overdue. But this is exactly like saying a critical exploration of "new directions in English language haiku" is long overdue. It is a tribute, I believe, to the journal that it is no longer quite accurate to say that Roadrunner is the only current venue for serious poets to explore the possibilities of haiku. Modern Haiku and Frogpond (the former more so and for a longer time) routinely include the kind of the poem that is sometimes referred to as "the kind of thing Roadrunner does".  

I feel nothing but respect and gratitude for what Scott Metz with Paul Pfleuger have done, not only in opening doors and minds, but in being ambassadors for the new haiku, bringing such people as Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Robert Hass and others into the mix, if only briefly.

While I'm on it, a further note of thanks to Scott Metz for creating Troutswirl over on the original site.
I miss the mess and bustle of many of the exchanges that occurred over there; I miss the Virals.. . Troutswirl seemed to thrive at a crossroads, like a bazaar attracting goods (and not-so-goods) from all over.

As it thunders
the ears of the forest
become leaves
                             -- Mario Benedetti

Wonder if anyone likes this per diem selection as much as I? It feels true, perhaps not merely logically, but mytho-/psycho-logically. I like the idea of writing a short poem which if posted on a bus or telephone pole would be appreciated even by people who had never heard the word haiku. This may be a poem like that.

what we breathe
in human skin
and insect parts

                        Chris Gordon

A number of poems we've looked at are about transformation. We started with Jim Kacian's

in a tent in the rain I become a climate

which gives us an outside look at something experienced, not so much the experience itself. That said, I have a lot of praise for the poem. Other poems also, including Tohta's, tell us about the author's experience, tell us that he or she had an experience, but again, there is a sense of being outside. And I love Tohta's poem as well, and other poems of explicit "becoming".

But there are ways, and I believe Chris Gordon's poem may serve as an example, where transformation is what happens within and as the poem itself, and we are led by the internal force of it, to undergo a transformation. To experience it.  

Ambiguity is one way this may happen, a place in the poem where we are forced into uncertainty, a state in which we may experience, if only briefly, a sense of another reality. In Gordon's poem there are two simultaneous senses, and maybe more, but two are primary as I read it--

      what we breathe in:  human skin and insect parts

That is one reality, a somewhat familiar, if unpleasant one. The other is this one--

       what we breathe in human skin and insect parts

or, to be clear about this:

       there are things we breathe while we inhabit our human skin and our insect parts

This reality, which has entered through the door of ambiguity, is certainly less familiar, but because ambiguity and simultaneity act as wormholes into strangeness, we feel the truth of it-- or rather, we are less defended against the strangeness. If only briefly, until the rational mind says "yes, I inhabit my human skin, but not insect parts, forget it".

But what the poem enacts is the becoming something more than human, or perhaps something more human, if we accept that yes, we are also made in some way of insect parts. It is not a long shot from Issa's empathic haiku.

The poem works from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Or it may be truer to say it works from the inside to a place deeper in, or different.

A poem like this gives me hope that what we call haiku is still alive.