[Stephen Collington]

Sad news from a thread on General Talk: William J. Higginson, author of The Haiku Handbook and one of the pioneers of the English-language haiku, has died. See the GT thread HERE . . and don't forget to click on the link that Duncan provides to read the obituary of this outstanding poet and teacher. (Thanks to Duncan MacLaurin for posting this.)



[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 13, 2008).]

[Mary Meriam]

Steve, I really like the haiku in this essay -

Thoughts on Juxtaposition by Carmen Sterba
• A clear, nonacademic exploration of the importance of "juxtaposition" as the central technique of haiku poetry, with illustrative examples. Good read.

- but I gotta tell ya, they seem like a whole different species from the other haiku I've read. I thought you weren't supposed to use words like "love" and "gift" - aren't those "explaining" words?

Mary (certain now that I don't have a clue how to do haiku)

[This message has been edited by Mary Meriam (edited October 13, 2008).]

[Henrietta kelly]

Mary --- I found great inspiration in her own words all four below came from reading her site. The first is a straight steal the others from a word or two.

Stephen--My question is, did I steal or can I call the below works mine?

“since the distant past
only three changes in nature
best is transference”

“reverberation”
one beating heart sings of love
echoes hit the moon

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

this and the ones that followed were inspired by the word flow . I will post all in the other thread. it has been a produtive morning if only one is fit to keep-

small "burn" in overflow
slipping bluebells crowd the banks
ringing in delight

a “burn” is a Scottish river de- light is not lol




[This message has been edited by Henrietta kelly (edited October 13, 2008).]

[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.

[Henrietta kelly]

"Focus on the music"

Yes -- I think what happens is I see that explosion of images and I feel as if I need to grab them all before they become lost to me, and they do, I can’t seem to hold them steady unless I get to scribble them down real fast. The good thing is when editing one can drop the fire brand that sparked the imagination.

I also like your idea and with a small edit can change the whole outcome.

Centre in melody
close both eyes and listen deep
for the earth has seeds


I'm glad I asked, as I always felt a bit of a cheat if others words invoked me to write. ~~~ henie


[This message has been edited by Henrietta kelly (edited October 14, 2008).]

[Stephen Collington]

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A good haiku should always be able to stand on its own--without title, without footnotes, without any hemming and hawing of preliminary explanation. And yet, from the very beginnings of haiku--before it was even called "haiku"--poets have also been setting their poems within longer prose works. Some of this activity, of course, is no different from what we might find in any other literary context: poets adding poems to their letters, diaries and other writings. Indeed, some of the most well-known haiku in the Japanese tradition first saw light as part of longer works, particularly Matsuo Basho's famous travel diary, Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), and Kobayashi Issa's bittersweet journal The Spring of My Life (Ora ga haru).

But beyond these more traditional prose forms, haiku poets also gradually developed a whole new genre of writing in which poems are no longer so much "set" in a prose context, as arranged as equal partners with prose in a dynamic interplay in which the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. And so was born haibun, a hybrid art of poetry and prose.

Haibun and Other Mixed Forms

• contemporary haibun online
• An online magazine specializing in haibun as a rigorous literary art. Along with the "haibun selections" for each issue, the site also presents a number of excellent resources explaining the nature of haibun, and how to write it. Scroll down for "Essays and Interviews by Editors" and "Editors' Thought Pieces."

• Simply Haiku Archives
• Archives of the online magazine Simply Haiku. Starting in 2004, haibun has been a regular feature in each issue; note also the many excellent critical articles in the "Features" section.

• Haibun Today
• An online haibun journal run in blog format, with regular postings of new works and critical material on a near-daily basis. Represents a substantial community of poets working in the form today.

• Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North
• An extraordinary website presenting five different, complete translations of Basho's classic journal (click on the various names in the "Translations" list in the left-hand column of each chapter page), lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps and artwork, and annotated with a full discussion of each short chapter. (Also includes the Japanese original, in a scanned text for universal browser-friendliness.) Arguably, the Narrow Road is not a fully developed haibun in the modern sense, but it is nonetheless "required reading" as the revered forerunner of the genre. And the site is a superb resource.

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[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]

[Stephen Collington]

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If a haiku should always be able to stand on its own, wouldn't it be cheating to add illustrations? And if a picture is worth a thousand words, wouldn't that drown out any haiku in the vicinity?

Well, the great masters of the Japanese haiku never thought so, so why should we? From the time of Basho in the seventeenth century right on down to today, haiku poets have "illustrated" their poems in a variety of styles and media, in the process producing a whole new genre of art as poetry . . . and poetry as art. The haiku painting, or haiga.

Haiga Resources Online

• Haigaonline
• An online magazine devoted to haiga of all kinds--everything from traditional ink-and-brush painting with calligraphy to cutting-edge digital imaging and PhotoShop mashups. A great site to explore.

• Floating Stone by Susumu Takiguchi
• Personal page of contemporary Japanese poet and artist Susumu Takiguchi. Good place to get a grounding in the aesthetics of the "traditional" haiga, as practiced by a modern master.

• "The Modern Haiga Creation Process" by Ray Rasmussen
• An excellent introduction to the techniques of modern haiga, from the wonderful archives of Simply Haiku.

• "HAIGA This Delicious Cocktail of Art, Poetry and Calligraphy" by Susumu Takiguchi
• An interesting article on the aesthetics of the haiga from a Japanese perspective.

• "Looking and Seeing" by Jim Kacian (PDF)
• A long, discursive essay on haiga, and on the marriage of image and word in general. Includes many beautiful examples of traditional haiga, with commentary. The essay is a PDF file for Adobe Reader; if you don't have Adobe Reader you can download it for free online. (Just Google "Adobe Reader.")

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[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]

[Stephen Collington]

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If you've ever read anything about the history of haiku, then you probably know that the form evolved from an earlier kind of poetry variously called renku, renga, haikai no renga . . . or in plain English, "linked verse." In fact, haiku wasn't even called "haiku" until the poet-critic Masaoka Shiki gave it the name at end of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, poems in the form were called hokku (literally, "first" or "starting verse"), the point being that they were intended, at least in theory, as the first installment of a longer work.

Japanese linked verse (renga or renku, ren meaning linked and ga and ku meaning "poem" and "verse" respectively) has a long tradition, going back over a thousand years. In its most basic form, it involves two poets putting together a 31-syllable (or "mora") tanka, one poet supplying the first part of 5-7-5 and another the concluding 7-7. From this beginning, poets gradually evolved longer forms, in which verses were added one after another like links in a chain:

A 5-7-5 > B 7-7 > C 5-7-5 > D7-7 > E 5-7-5 . . .

and so on, until the poem grew to 18 or 36 or 100 verses--or sometimes even more. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this form was its aesthetic principle of "link and shift," whereby each new verse added to the overall work had to make a self-contained poem with the verse immediately preceding it and unconnected with the verse before that. In other words, after the first verse (or hokku), each succeeding verse was part of three distinct poems: once with the verse before it, once with the verse after it, and of course once as a part of the overall sequence in its own right. Thus verses followed A, AB, BC, CD, DE . . . in a succession of constantly changing but interrelated poetic images. The result is a fascinating, complex form of communal poetic creation--spontaneous, playful and interactive.

Because the starting verse was the one part of a linked poem that could be produced ahead of time, and because it set the tone for the whole piece, linked-verse poets always took great pains to produce the most striking, richly evocative hokku possible. Moreover, as practice, they produced them in great numbers--far more than they could ever use in actual linked-verse collaborations. And so was born the idea of the hokku as a stand-alone poem, the familiar form that we know as haiku today. (The word haiku itself is a portmanteau of haikai no renga no hokku, where haikai means "comic" or "playful"; haikai no renga = "comic linked poetry.")

Behind the grand tradition of the hokku/haiku, however, there remains the fascinating world of linked verse which first gave it birth. In today's interconnected wiki-world, where collaboration and creative networking have never been easier, the form is undergoing a remarkable renaissance. Some links to explore . . .

Renku or Japanese Linked Verse

• Link & Shift: An Overview
• A good introductory lesson to the "core driver" of linked-verse composition, by John Carley. Start here.

• The Click of Mahjong Tiles
• A sample 36-verse kasen renku. Enjoy the poem, then click on the link at the top of the page for the "Annotated Version." A superb introduction to renku aesthetics in practice. The details may seem bewildering at first, but there's a good reason for every rule. Rewards close study.

• Laughter Rising
• Another sample 36-verse kasen, this time from the archives of Simply Haiku. When you finish the poem, click on the link at the bottom of the page that says "Tomegaki" for commentary.

• Haiku, Haikai and Renga: Communal Poetry Practice by Sonja Arntzen
• A good introduction to the historical background of haikai poetry in general, with a special focus on "communal" creation, and suggestions for modern practice.

• Renku Home, by William J. Higginson
• John Carley's The Renku Reckoner
• Renku Resources from the World Haiku Club
• Renga Info by Jane Reichhold
• Four comprehensive resources, chock full of information on the reading, composition and appreciation of linked poetry. All worth exploring in detail. Between them, they should leave no doubts about the scope, complexity and fascination of this marvellous form.

Well, that should be enough to start. But don't forget: as always, there's lots more in the superb archives of Simply Haiku.

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[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]

[David Rosenthal]

Steve,

What a great list of resources you have amassed here! I thought I'd mention one more if you don't mind. Here is a good online Haiku journal:

Roadrunner Haiku Journal

David R.

[Stephen Collington]

Hi David,

No, I don't mind in the least--it's exactly what I was hoping people would do. And remember, DG threads are not "scrubbed"; they remain on the board permanently, so anyone can add to the Resources here at any time (though as I've said elsewhere, we should always repsect other DG events when they are underway, and avoid bumping then).

The World Wide Web is a moving target, with new sites appearing and (alas) disappearing all the time. I hope that people will see this thread as a communal resource to be updated and added to at will. I have taken the lead here, but I have no illusions that I've even begun to scratch the surface of all the neat stuff out there waiting to be found.

So I say, pile on after me. If you know of or find a neat website, by all means share it with us!

Steve C.


p.s. (Editing back.) Forgot to say thank you. David, thanks for the Roadrunner! Beep-beep!

[This message has been edited by Stephen Collington (edited October 21, 2008).]