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Three Penguins published in the mid-sixties first drew me to Japanese as a source of poetic possibilities for my own work.  One was the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, a second was Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the third was a Pelican Book on Zen Buddhism.  I could not find much in the more feudal style of the tanka poets, which I put down to a probably inherent untranslatability, but the specimens of renga and haiku excited me. I wanted to escape from the English poetry market, which seemed to me (and often still does) to reduce poetry to a highbrow kind of I-it journalism, a dualism, that is, of the self which experiences and the world which is experienced.  It is a dualism which dries up both self and world and bears very little relationship to the largely arbitrary it's and thou's which make up the flux of the moments where we actually live.

     At that time, I'd been commissioned to write a half-hour-long poem for voices for Welsh radio - those were the days! - which proved vastly too complicated in the event, and ended with me meeting Saint David one winter's night in Merthyr Tydfil.  It was all very heavy and portentous, so I tried to lighten the proceedings with a solo renga about dawn and sunrise, with the different haiku and couplets forming a constantly changing pattern of five-line poems (AB BC CD, DE ...) and also (as three and two liners) another set of tiny moments at angles to one another, like a conversation or an early cubist painting.  So in my case, renga was my primary concern, not single haiku.  A bit later, I started getting my friends to compose rengas with me, but as they were neither poets nor students of Zen these were usually very uneven in quality.  But I've kept many of my haiku from that time and some, usually much revised, are in my present collection.

     English haiku tend to be one-off, isolating things.  We mistake them for imagism or, alternatively, for aphorisms.  In Basho, as far as one can understand him through translation and commentary, what he sees is totally transparent to his humility.   It becomes a vehicle of a kind of saintliness, a `helpless' trust in the world as it blows him along his path, so that what he sees and writes about is in no real way to be distinguished from what he is.  He feels love and compassion, for example, for the prostitutes who try to join him on his journey; but ultimately he knows that this love (caritas or agape, as a Christian might call it) is not his business.  If the gods or the great Buddhas wish to `absent them from felicity awhile' to interfere and with compassion to help others on the way to enlightenment, that's their choice, but neither on them nor on us is it a mandatory demand.

     The haiku is a sociable but not a social form.  It is almost totally unrhetorical, having nothing to say to the will.  It does not have an agenda of social change, except possibly to persuade other people to write haiku in reply. From all this flow the three classical haiku attributes - loneliness, tenderness and slenderness.  A haiku represents a sharing of a moment of great loneliness;   what is shared is centred on the feeling of loneliness itself, however much other feelings are involved with it.  Loneliness is the gift the haiku poet prizes above all, because it is the loneliness of detachment, not the bitter isolation of frustrated desire.  Within that detachment one's feelings can grow, not as the ravishers of virtue they normally are, but as Christ says God feels compassion for the fall of a sparrow.  Haiku poets like Basho call it tenderness - fellow-feeling, a gentle acknowledgement that things exist outside yourself, which suffer and have their being in the Tao of enlightenment just as you do.  And a haiku must be slender because it makes no claim upon us other than an invitation to share its moment. 

     As is well known, the haiku arose out of the renga, the `linked verse,' in which haiku-like stanzas (5+7+5 syllables) and couplets (7+7) continually change into five-line tanka and back again, as each poet in turn makes his or her contribution to the chain.  I believe every good haiku is essentially a renga in little, implying the renga's kaleidoscope of perceptions but also the renga-mood out of which all this mingling and shape-shifting can effortlessly grow.  This seems a difficult assumption to make in English where there is no cultural basis for it.  English poets have little experience of sitting round in a circle composing tiny poems that answer each other, a bit like a highbrow game of consequences.  But out of this cultural habit flow most of the features that make the haiku a distinctive “poetic” form, as opposed to a mere notation of experience.  The importance of the seasonal reference, for example, clearly derives from the rules governing renga.  In any game you have to have rules which both connect what you do with what has gone before, but also allow you to shift position, even if only slightly, so that you can avoid repeating yourself.  And of course, the traditional syllabic metre of the haiku arose from the same need for rules if you play a game like renga. 

     Accordingly, most English haiku-poets see no reason to adopt the 5-7-5 syllable pattern.  This is not because that pattern does not make a metrical unit in English - it does, though whether it is similar to the unit it makes in Japanese I have no means of telling.  It is simply that English poets don't have the renga-game, the renga-mood, behind them as they write, and accordingly their haiku tend to be a-cultural and isolated, without the felt need to follow extraneous rules.  I remember one instance where Basho suddenly realised that a haiku he had written lacked the necessary season-reference:  I think he destroyed it, or at least, disallowed it as a proper haiku. Would any English haiku poet feel that way about what he had just written?

     My own interest in the haiku itself, though it did have a spiritual component, was perhaps more prosodic and formal than most.  I'd spent a lot of the early sixties translating for The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, and Welsh poetry is full of three-line and four-line forms, called englynion (sing. englyn), written either as single poems or in sequences. But I'd always been interested in the poetic possibilities of tiny formats, and the haiku certainly gave me food for thought. For one thing, it answered a need of the time.  The sixties in general tried to cut themselves off from history except as a kind of flavour.  The emphasis was on nowness, as in adverts or pin-ups.  The haiku's isolation of the given moment as opposed to a continuous passage of constructed consciousness, as well as its minimalism (its `slenderness'), had great appeal. 

   One problem, in such short poems, is the difficulty of giving the reader enough background for the haiku moment to make impact.  The once-obligatory season-reference gave at least some context, even if often a very conventional one; and I suppose that the haibun (a prose piece, usually a narrative, set with haiku as gems are set in gold) also partly arose from this need.  Haiku are by their nature discontinuous:  in a way, the haibun cheats, by putting them into a prose continuity, replacing the kaleidoscopic but “sociable” flux of the renga, from which haiku originally came, with a “social” or literary convention that gives shape to the passage of time.      

     Again, my interest in the haibun (I didn't know it was called that in 1967-71) was a trifle eccentric.  I'd long been interested in bi-focal or multi-focal writing, in which more than one style, register or even subject-matter or viewpoint counterpoint each other in a single piece.  (Again, I had models in Welsh poetry for such juxtapositions.)

     The late sixties and early seventies were for me a time of crisis, excitement and realignment.  After the cocoon of translation in which I'd lived for about four or five years, I was pounded by wave upon wave of beats, hippies, abstract expressionism, drug-culture, Marxism, the politics of participation ...  A new kind of religion seemed to be in the air, a secret knowingness among the young, whispering to the faithful in cult-films like Easy Rider and parading the streets of Bangor with the Beatles and their Maharishi.  In the middle of all this, I got engaged fairly disastrously (twice!) and finally found myself in a maturing relationship with Lesley, my future wife.
     In all this flux and turmoil, the haiku represented, not exactly a still point, but some kind of achieved trust in the moment and the otherness of things, and also an implicit scepticism about what it seems fashionable to call `grand narratives'.  Not that I rejected them, though I drifted away from going to Church.  I knew myself as a Catholic, a Marxist, a Welsh Nationalist, a fourth-or-fifth-generation Irish ex-pat, a poet haunted by the darkness of muses, a secret twin of myself, perhaps even a Zen Buddhist.  And why not?

     But life has a way of putting such mishmashes into perspective, if not sorting them out.  My poems, I felt, had work to do, to celebrate and mourn, invoke and condemn, console, strengthen, make love, laugh and cry.  That is, they had business with the will, often mine, but also other people's.  They were (at least some of them) those bêtes-noires of Keats, poems that had a design upon us.  Some  grew out of haiku-like moments:  indeed, there were whole sequences where I had too many ideas for poems - serial inspirations, as it were - to write them all at once;  and the haiku format functioned well enough as a sketch-pad.  So, although the haiku was no longer in the mainstream of my poetry, in this post-crisis period I did actually still write them - almost without meaning to!

     All the same, it was only Planet's publication in 2002 of my friend Nigel Jenkins's volume blue that made me take myself seriously as a haiku poet again.  I felt I wanted to respond and commemorate his initiative.  I knew nothing about other writers of English haiku, certainly not in Wales, and had never seriously tried to market or collect my own.  I wanted to greet his book, friendly-like, with an offering, a pamphlet called Skimmings, dedicated to Nigel, with about fifty poems, or half the number of blue:  it didn't compete, it celebrated his work in a sociable way that fitted both our friendship and the haiku tradition itself.

     Many of the haiku I'd written over the years needed pruning or even rewriting.  As I say, a lot of them were sketches for lyrics I had not yet time to write.  Here is a fairly simple and straightforward example - first the haiku:

               Ladybirds - bright holsters,
                    a mafia
                         doing their rounds like milkmen.

Here now is the lyric:

                      LADYBIRDS

                 Bright holsters,
                 A mafia
                 Doing their rounds
                 Like milkmen.

                 The black spots, the red,
                 Are the insignia
                 Of rival
                 `Families'.

                 They cull the fly,
                 Walk up and down
                 Rose shoots
                 Talent-spotting.

                 They are honourable men
                 - Black Guelph, Ghibelline -
                 Murderous
                 In the punctured buds.

     In this example the title and first stanza together are verbally the same as the haiku.  Rhythmically, however, they are quite different.  The haiku puts the ladybirds and the holsters into apposition with each other, a simultaneous recognition that the creatures are ladybirds and they are like fancy studded holsters that a gangster might wear.  The lyric makes its first stanza a description of a subject-matter that the title has already stated.  The haiku is momentary vision, and therefore rhythmically discontinuous with any before or after.  The lyric, on the other hand, announces a theme which invites a series of variations, playful if rather sinister, which can go on for as long as the poet wishes. 
     
     The two poems may have a lot in common, but they don't do the same sort of thing.  I think both are valid:  sometimes I prefer one, sometimes the other.  The haiku may seem merely fanciful if you've never watched a ladybird methodically predating greenfly up and down the stems of a rosebush, like a gangster from a protection racket collecting his `dues.'  The lyric is perhaps clearer because the comparison is more explicit. 

     The relation between haiku `sketch' and lyric `set piece' was not always so straightforward.  Sometimes it operated in reverse.  As I looked through my poems for publishable haiku to revise and include in my collection for Nigel, sometimes a haiku moment seemed to glimmer through a lyric, as though in some way it held the clue to the poem's inspiration.  It was almost as though it was asking me to separate it from its offspring and cut the umbilical cord between them.  `St Valentine's Day, 1966' (the traditional date for birds to find a mate) was like that: it is a love-poem about an early-morning visit to a girlfriend.  Here is my revised text: 

                       ST VALENTINE'S DAY

          In the streets given over to birds
          The grey streets early
          I stiffen my tread
          And the pigeons dance and honour their partners.

          And I kiss your cold cheek.
          Our white breath like a ghost
          Stands in the lacerating air
          Whirled about like weeds in a river.

          Like hammer on anvil
          My shoe hits stone.
          I kiss your cold cheek.
          My wings fold down.

The original text was twice as long and included much more bird imagery, among which these two lines stood out:

          It is a market day curdled with morning
          The grey streets stiffen to tickling claws

`Look,' they seemed to say, `I'm where all this started from. I'm a haiku.' So I wrote it:

          Sunrise -
               and empty streets
                    stiffen to pigeon's claws.

In this case, the lyric and the haiku have gone quite separate ways, though they both shared the same original inspiration that February morning of 1966. 

    Haiku-writing is valuable for a poet, but it can, I believe, also be dangerous.  It gives him a powerful lens to focus on the single moment, the moment of otherness, discontinuity and uniqueness, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.  It gives him also a filter to weed out from this naked inspiration any self-indulgence or poetic megalomania.  This is not simply because there's so little room to manifest such vices - a single syllable can demonstrate self-indulgence as much as a book;  but because the strictness of the form itself challenges you to desist, or at least shows up indulgence with devastating clarity. 

    That's the positive side, why haiku-writing may prove valuable to a poet in other traditions than Japanese.  But there's a negative side too, dangers which arise from these very virtues.  Like many other strict forms - the eighteenth century heroic couplet, the Elizabethan sonnet, the French alexandrine, the Welsh cywydd - haiku imposes an ethos on the poetic imagination.  It is open, like them, to a wide range of subject-matter:  haiku, like heroic couplets, can be about almost anything, much more so than your average romantic lyric.  Yet it is the couplet, not the lyric, which most imaginations tend to find constricting.  It's not what you start with that makes it so, but where it can take you.  The couplet jealously preserves itself against any deviation from its principles of growth:  rhyme, antithesis, balance, a generally urbane and public persona that is not to be closely identified with the actual personality of the poet; and so on, and so on.  The couplet involves a different idea of sincerity to that which moves us in romantic lyric.  The haiku is much more purist than either:  sometimes the question whether a haiku is, or can be, sincere or not seems to recede to vanishing point.  

     It may sound strange to call the haiku a strict form. After all, even in its original Japanese, it was metrically simple:  three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables respectively - not a fraction as complicated as a Welsh englyn.  Even this syllabic base has mostly been shelved in the work of responsible haiku writers in English. 

     The haiku in fact is a poem at one of the limits of poetry, on the very edges of verbal expression.  It breathes a very rarefied air and is mightily chary of wasting its resources.  Probably the free-verse haiku that most English writers use is even more extreme than the syllabic 5-7-5 of the Japanese original:  there is nothing to help you, or to leave your subconscious mind room to create.  Syllabic metre, or the necessity of a season reference, or the value of puns, give you at least some arbitrary conventions to engage you in conscious activity while your subconscious does what dreamwork is required.

     The strictness of haiku, like that of the sonnet, comes from its history, not from its metrical requirements.   You can write sonnets in many different rhyme-schemes, or even with no rhymes at all, in iambics or alexandrines, or more or less free verse.  They will still be recognisably sonnets because they refer, in their movement and purpose, to a long tradition of sonnet-writing, going back beyond Petrarch and Dante to a source somewhere in the Provençal canso of the eleventh or twelfth century.  A haiku, similarly, is a haiku because what it does and how it moves relate it to haiku and haiku-like developments, right back to the origins of the form in tanka and renga, way beyond the Edo period in Japanese history.
 
     There are many mansions in poetry's kingdom.  Extremist and puritanical formats like the haiku must not be allowed to disallow other modes of expression as self-indulgent or mere `poesy'; but neither must these other modes reject what the haiku can give, in particular the play of moments, like the plop of frogs jumping into ancient pools.  No other poetic form has had built into it this attention to the nowness and quiddity of the instant.  It is a valuable antidote to the often cruel continuities we impose on ourselves and describe as time.