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

Dear Martin,
           Thanks for your interesting piece in 15/2. As usual, your generous and fair-minded criticism sets a standard. You may be touched to learn that, when I prepared my essay “Finding the Heart of Haiku” (15/1), I included and defined a type of haiku particularly to keep you happy. I laboriously but precisely termed this kind of poetry “Existential Imagistic Haiku”. So imagine my frustration to find that you ignored this, placed the kind of haiku I had in mind into my third type – “Simple Imagery”, and then criticised me for putting it there !

So, yes, for me the haiku by David Platt which you quote is an excellent example of the existential yet imagistic haiku I have in mind – “a momentary awakening to the ‘suchness’ , the ‘just-so-ness of things.” Or, in your words, “simply the utter clarity with which it is seen, heard and expressed.” Much the same goes for the poems with which you conclude your piece. I make it quite clear how I distinguish the above from “Simple Imagery”, even if, as always, we are talking about matters of degree and personal judgement. Neither do I despise “Simple Imagery” – please re-read!

You make an interesting distinction between human-centred or -related haiku, and those in which “we look outward, absorbed by what we see, hear and sense, putting down for a moment the burden of being human”. You could well be correct in implying that the latter belong to the existential imagistic family. Certainly they are no less liberative for the human spirit – but precisely because they are creations of the self, touching the hearts of other selves open to receive them. So I don’t think too much should be made of your distinction.

Next, to the grave charge of “flawed methodology”. Here I am reproached for comparing the like with the unlike, the crème de la crème of the Japanese greats with the humble produce produced month in and month out on the Presence and Blithe Spirit allotments. This completely misses the point. My comparison is with different types of poem, between turnips and tomatoes, and not with how well each succeeds as a type -- not tastiness versus inedibility. Attempts at existentially liberative haiku, for example, can easily degenerate into didactic Buddhist philosophy, leaving one longing for some fresh, simple greens.
I make it clear that my survey and methodology were very rough-and-ready indeed, undertaken in hope of goading those with more time and skill to undertake a similar enquiry. However, if the comparison were made with, say, a Red Moon Anthology or The New Haiku (Barlow & Lucas) I doubt if the result would be significantly different – much the same editors drawing on the  same journals.

You close by asking readers to be grateful “for those few poems that will stay with us through the years” May I say that just a few more than that might make a difference to the standing of the haiku community ? I have invoked the ghosts of the past to inspire the present with haiku which truly refresh  the spirit – not by being Japanese replicas or by trying to recreate a nostalgic excellence, but by endeavouring to be the kind of poems that have the potential to nourish us. Those of us who write and read haiku to live, rather than vice versa, are developing a website, www.redthreadhaiku.org  It has already received some warm welcomes (including a listing by Bill Higginson). Readers are cordially invited to visit and carry on the debate there.

Good wishes – Ken

Postscript to my comrade-in-arms David Cobb:

Congratulations, David, on your paper “Process and Product: Prospects for European Haiku”, which we all received in our mailing. But no I certainly don’t “disparage haiku that only make us laugh.” My target is the superficial humour of a contrived cleverness, and not, as I say, the many “spontaneous, generous and even compassionately humorous” haiku, that touch the heart as well as tickling the ribs. Like grapefruit as a matrimonial issue:

 Yours:                                         And mine:

Breakfast in silence                     Married thirty years
Both halves of the grapefruit      and still can’t slice a grapefruit
Unsweetened                               into equal halves