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HS: There are two things that I saw as very different in English haiku. One, there wasn’t a seasonal word in the way there was in Japan - again, I wasn’t saying that was a bad thing - and then I said, I don’t see poems about famous places. In Japan this is extremely important. The season word includes you in a larger - what I call - cultural memory. But when you come to think about it, what can American poets write about? Gettysburg? Lexington? It’s pretty narrow. Earl Miner did a comparison with, I think, Samuel Johnson and Bashō’s Narrow Road. In England there is this tradition of famous places and writers going to places and writing about the memory, not just individual memory but the memory of the place. It would be much harder to find an American writer who …

DC: Bruce Ross tries it to an extent in the foreword to the American haibun anthology. He talks about Thoreau and he goes back to the travel diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers. It’s not very convincing …

KJC: I think he has a case with Thoreau.

HS: In the haiku anthology that Cor van den Heuvel edited there was one set of haiku that I thought were very good, Virgilio was it? It was Vietnam... His brother had been killed, and there was this series of haiku poems. I thought they were very profound, very moving. I said, look, this was based on this very traumatic historical moment and what I was trying to say was that people have done this, there has been this ‘vertical’ thing. It doesn’t have to be really complex allusion. It could be very simple on the surface but really have depth. For me, that was always my message. Not that you have to make the haiku complex, but in the greater poems there was something beneath the surface. One way of doing this, not self-consciously, was to be historical ... I wasn’t attacking pure nature poetry. I was just, for the same reason as bringing up the urban, simply saying, for one thing, you don’t have to stick to these rules that are supposedly derived from some authoritative source. You’ve got to be creating your own rules ... If you can’t rely on the seasonal word, which in the Japanese case is at least 50% of what’s going on, then there’s got to be something else. It’s not that the seasons have completely gone, but that that complex mechanism is simply not working, so some other complex mechanism has to be working in its place. It’s up to the poets of the culture to find that.

DC: A feeling for place?

HS: A feeling for place I think is very important … I’m not saying that people have to write about social issues … But the Vietnam thing had all these things in it. There seem to be a lot of poems about nature, but if I’m a scholar and I’m writing about that, it’s very limited. The Virgilio poems I could see writing an article about, as a way of getting people who were outside the haiku world into it.

HR: Speaking as someone who has written haiku about deeply personal misery, I find it takes a little while before you can actually write about it. So maybe we’re just experiencing a time gap, maybe that will come later.