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On 6th July 2001 in Northampton, Akiko Sakaguchi kindly hosted a gathering of BHS members who had come to meet Haruo Shirane, Columbia University Professor of Japanese Literature and author of Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory and the Poetry of Bashō. We talked for three hours about various matters of haiku interest, and an edited record of the conversation is presented here. Those present were. Akiko Sakaguchi (host), Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (guests) and David Cobb, Keith J Coleman, Martin Lucas, Helen Robinson and Fred Schofield (BHS). Martin edited the talk from tapes provided by Akiko.

HS: I know Dee Evetts very well.

DC: He helped to set up the BHS. You know him?

HS: He lives nearby. So he was active in the BHS?

DC: When we were thinking of setting it up, which was about ‘89, I wrote to HSA and said, ‘We have this idea, have you got any members in Britain?’ They wrote back and said, ‘Yes, we have one! His name is Dee Evetts and he mostly lives in the States, but he’s in England this week!’ So I contacted him in Oxford and he said, ‘I happen to be visiting my mother next week. She lives two miles from you.’ So we met in a pub in Chelmsford. Dee interrogated me. He didn’t think that anybody in Britain would really understand haiku. He gave me a quiz for about half an hour: do you always write 5-7-5? do you have any philosophical message? We agreed that we would put out flyers about ‘The Haiku Interest Group Newsletter’, HIG for short. That’s how we started. Then we said, ‘We can’t go on paying for this out of our own pockets, do you want a society or do you want to go away?’ Most people wanted a society, so

FS: But some went away?

DC: Yes, they did, about 30 disappeared.

HS: Do you think Dee Evetts has rather a fixed idea of English haiku? I always get in these debates with him.

DC: He’s very interested in this cutting edge thing, haiku or senryu that deal with problems like divorce.

ML: He wrote a piece about homelessness, didn’t he? He quoted John Stevenson: ‘Could homelessness become the cherry blossom of our time?’ [Laughter.]

DC: One could argue endlessly about whether they’re haiku or senryu. In mood they’re perhaps solemn.

HS: I gave that talk in Chicago at Haiku North America two years ago and then they published it in Modern Haiku. At the time I had this idea. I was trying to get people away from what I thought were confined notions of haiku, so I said I had this idea of urban haiku, the city. There was what I thought could be an obsession with nature, everything had to be nature, and I was looking at the poets and 80% of them were living in big cities. I said, well, it’s only natural you should write about your own environment. Dee was very interested. He called me last week and said he would help me out on it. Now I realise it’s the kind of topic that would fit his

DC: Yes, a lot of his poems are domestic. I mean, they could be anywhere, his guitar resonating in a bedroom, woodchips rolling along a verandah. He writes very close to his hands and his body, the particular world no more than ten feet around him.

HS: In the New York Times they did a big spread on haiku with topics like subways or movie theatres or the homeless. That intrigued me ... if there’s an interest in Britain in such topics?