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HS: For me, and I think for a lot of people who study Japanese poetry, one of the interesting things about it is the response of different readers. You saw Makoto Ueda’s Bashō and his Interpreters? I think that’s a very good book because it teaches you more about Bashō than most books. The audience is an important performer in Japanese poetry and in haiku in particular. It’s demonstrated in linked verse where one poet creates a poem and then another person, as both reader and responder, adds. When you’re adding you’re commenting on that poem, you’re saying what it’s brought to mind. This notion of responding to a poem in writing creates a kind of conversation. The response can be in the form of a haiku or in an essay. Until there is an accumulation [of commentary] it makes it very hard for non-haiku people in the West, particularly academics, to take haiku seriously. Imagine if you’re studying Chaucer. You’re not just sitting there with Chaucer, Chaucer has become part of the tradition and there’s been a lot written about him. What’s been written about him is just as interesting as Chaucer. I mean, sometimes a lot less, but ... [Laughter.] The commentary tradition is extremely important, and that’s what Japanese haiku poets make a living out of. They don’t make a living out of writing haiku and selling it. You make a living basically either being a teacher, correcting your students’ ivork, or writing commentaries and essays. The Asahi newspaper has a little column … Makoto Ooka writes at most three sentences [on each haiku]. Ooka was in here, right?

ML: Yeah, Rediscovering Bashō.

HS: It’s very stimulating. For one thing, he introduces new poets. The reader is both enjoying the poem and then enjoying the response. That’s an important part of the haiku process.

KJC: It’s a way in for some people, as well.

HS: Why don’t more English haiku poets write about their poetry?

FS: They’re self-conscious about it, that’s why.

HS: Another interesting thing was, I went through The Haiku Anthology and I met with Cor [van den Heuvel] and I said, “I want to reduce that anthology to the best ten.” So we had a debate about which were the best haiku in that anthology. What I realised talking to him was that we had completely different readings of the same poem. He was reading the poems according to the frame that he had of what haiku was supposed to be

HR: Not only that, but have you noticed that you bring your own experience to haiku, and sometimes perfectly good haiku you can’t really appreciate because maybe your experience is a bit too narrow?

HS: There was a poem by Hackett [about fish], I forget which one, and Cor thought this was the best poem, and I thought, I haven’t had that experience, and I didn’t really appreciate the poem, so there were many cases where we didn’t click. But I was reading some of the poems metaphorically and Cor had just assumed that there was no metaphor in them because that was one of his criteria: no simile, no metaphor, no personification. I thought these poems had a deep double, triple reading in which a poem appeared to be literal but had, for me, some implicit metaphor, had some depth beneath the surface, and Cor was, like, “That’s not why I chose that poem!” To me, that was a very interesting experience. He had made these selections according to this particular frame and I had made mine according to another frame, and our frames were so different … Commentary is a very important part of the haiku spirit. There’s no such thing as a misinterpretation, poetically. Different responses to the same writing is what linked verse is about, and it is an important part of the pleasure of haiku.