Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I write on an aspect of Haiku which has troubled me for some years - Tense. In the BHS 1996 ‘The Nature of English Haiku’ (an invaluable document) it is stated under ‘A Sense of Presence’ that ‘to preserve a sense of immediacy, present tense is normally used, as if the situation were now’.

While recognizing that all poetry, indeed literature of any imaginative kind, is to some extent artifice, I wonder whether this well-meant injunction can lead to an unnecessarily stressed element of artificiality in the composition of haiku, or senryu. After all, it is surely the case that ‘haiku moments’ most frequently occur at times and in places where pen and paper - never mind keyboard and screen - are not to hand. Equally, it must often happen that the significance/beauty/ ugliness/pathos/irony/humour of an insight does not flower in the poet’s consciousness until long after the event, maybe years later.

Is it alleged that there is a poetic loss if intense epiphanies, as later realized, are faithfully expressed in the past tense? Is it not sometimes uncomfortably obvious that the writer’s experience, say in early life, is a recollection from the past falsely distorted to seem contemporaneous?

Which version of this memory appears the sincerest, the closest to actuality?

Which version conveys most potently the writer’s nostalgic, perhaps regretful recall of lost childish wonder, freshness? The present tense depicts an ‘immediate’ happening but, at least in my perception, it somehow robs the haiku of its haunting quality. It is only with maturity that the poet can smile that, at the time, both discoveries seemed equally exciting.

Much has been written about the need for foreign practitioners to avoid an attempt to emulate too slavishly traditional Japanese forms. Also, there’s the fact that present day haikuists in Japan itself are experimenting adventurously. Is this question of tense one which we should reappraise?