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So how do haiku get written?  Is there just one way or many different ways?  Where do haiku come from?   A different part of the brain from that which writes shopping lists or even ‘proper’ poetry?

     Eric Speight at 92 goes back sixty-three years to distill haiku from memories that seem as bright and clear as the day they were born (page 10).  David Cobb (page 11) is on the defensive about a haiku he asserts was spontaneously created but which he thinks will be read as contrived, laden with metaphor, the ‘product of fantasy’; I remember talking to him on previous occasions about haiku of his that seemed ‘worked at’ but which he asserted ‘just came to him’. Can you set yourself up to be spontaneous?  Kate Hall, behaving like Ibsen, produces a haiku out of a kind of almost frantic shopping list while doing everything but dedicating her ‘writing day’ to writing (page 12).  Doreen King, raising the issue of ‘imagination’ in haiku, insists on the ‘Britishness’ of her haiku, avoiding the slavish imitation of Japanese models  (page 17) and Cherry Taylor (page 41) offers us her gift of the product of sleepless night hours which reminds me of James Kirkup’s saying - ‘a haiku a day keeps the doctor away’.

     Meanwhile, poems keep coming to charm me with their humour and lightness and the usual crop of haibun which are so much more difficult to sift. I am coming to think that for a haibun to work there must be some ‘organising principle’ at work expressed in ‘language with a difference’; there should be a distinct lingering ‘flavour’; sometimes I regretfully  ‘reject’ haibun that leave a profound flavour but which lack ‘organising principle’ and/or ‘language with a difference’.

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With sadness but also gratitude and appreciation for his long service to haiku we record the passing of Robert Spiess 1921-2002.  For many years editor of Modern Haiku and well-known for his own haiku, haibun and ‘Speculations’.

casting off the lines
odour from the wooden wharf
of drying dew

Robert Spiess

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day of his death
the ‘Get Well Wishes’ card
still not sent
     (for Robert Spiess March 13th 2002)

LA Davidson