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

* Haiku/senryu result from experience linked to a particular approach. They are the exhaustion of experience, differing from that of everyday actions in that they are a search and, as such, should be experimental, experiential, inde-terminate, incomplete, even unruly, but deeply authentic in a way not applicable to our experience of source events. ‘It is by postulating the impossible that the writer procures all of the possible.’  These words of Goethe make us aware that it can be nothing else.

* There can never be enough ‘unusual’ writing.  Too many haiku/senryu poems are too ‘usual’ and this normalcy is like a computer virus; unawareness is innocence, which is no defence against the ultimately devastating effects. 

* Why, because you cannot touch, taste, see or smell it, is a thought, a memory, or even a vicarious experience, not as much a reality as smelling a rose, or even the rose itself? Feeling and thought can fuse as much as, and, occasionally, more than, language and sensory experience.

* Acceptable, even ‘great’, word patterns do sometimes appear in the brain as if by spontaneous combustion.  These are ‘word moments’ not ‘experience moments’ but equally valid for haiku.

* Haiku signs, language format and content are being globalised, sanitised, homogenised and made socially acceptable and safe. Unpredictability is seen as subversive and to be avoided.  Much of today’s poems are a face-saving device, not a creative process.

* Sound and musical cadences are important features of short poems. Where brevity and compression are central and the emphasis is on minimalising punctuation they become vital.

* Haiku poetry is an enigmatic stance to life, not wanting to face death while being a significant expression of it.

* Bashō’s famous journeys are externalised to simplify understanding of the mode, rationale, concept and symbology.  They can just as easily be internal jaunts, psychological wanderings, mosaics (flat or layered).  But above all else they will be neutral.

* Making haiku or senryu equates to destruction of the original experience.

* Haiku puts the complex back into the simple where it belongs. This does not mean ‘everyday’ language.  Even though in common use it may still be complex. Insights may begin by seeming ‘clever’, but can change into a mystery.  In this genre mystery lies in authorial intent.  It is nothing more esoteric than that.

* Sequencing of human genetic code, perhaps more important than the invention of the wheel, will have an enormous impact on our perception of what it means to be human. How will this affect the nature, content and making of haiku/senryu?