[Stephen Collington]

Hi Mary, Joan,

Mary, one of the things I hope to accomplish with this Haiku Resources page is to help its readers see that there's more to haiku than they may have previously imagined. Too often in the West, people have been convinced that haiku are exclusively Nature poems or Zen poems or "winter sunset, ahh . . . loneliness" poems, or whatnot. Of course, they can indeed be all that, but they can be much else besides. Ultimately, the only question that really matters is whether a given poem (to use Emily's famous test) takes the top of your head off or not.

As for "explaining," I do think that the old show-don't-tell rule is every bit as important in haiku as elsewhere. Because of the need for compression in so short a form, a certain amount of generality, even cliche, is sometimes allowed--especially in the "season word" part of the poem. So you get "autumn evening" instead of "the sun glowering, low and red, through the leafless branches of the trees . . . " That's a whole haiku right there already--which is fine, if that's all you wanted to say. If you're just looking to set the scene, however, you're better off using a shorthand like "autumn evening." That said, the poem must not stay at that level. The important point is that you join that generic "autumn evening" with something really specific and striking that makes the moment come alive, and gets the craniums popping.

In that sense, anyway, "love" is a perfectly acceptable base element in a haiku . . . as long as there's something in the rest of the poem to give it specificity. Like, say, sweet, bursting cherry tomatoes! The "generic" meets the "specific" and the juices fly. (In fairness, though, "after love" is not the same thing as plain old "love," is it? The writer is actually fairly "specific" here from the start. Ahem.)

Joan, quotation is actually a venerable technique in haiku; the early masters of the Japanese tradition loved to riff on catch phrases and little snippets of language taken from all sorts of different sources. So yes, your riffing on quotations from Sterba's paper is entirely legitimate as an approach to haiku composition. One thing to look out for though is that your juxtapositions should be neither too obvious nor too obscure. For example, in

"new way of seeing"
close both eyes and listen deep
in the earth for seeds

"new way of seeing" winds up functioning almost like a title, or a headword in a dictionary, for which the rest of the poem is a definition. In other words, the connection is too close, and there's no real "reactive chemistry" between the two parts of the poem--no heads popping. The image of listening for seeds is wonderfully evocative; the challenge is to find something that will really click with it. Looking back at Sterba's paper, I can see one option:

"focus on the music"
close both eyes and listen deep
in the earth for seeds

But that's still just a small explosion. And it may still be too close for some readers. At any rate, the art is in coming up with just the right combination. You've got a real knack for finding striking images; I think with a little more practice in tuning your pieces, you may produce some very fine haiku indeed.

Steve C.