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

Can, and should, there be, in haiku, a unitary aesthetic? Can aesthetics ever be ‘objective’? Even if these are not the most adequate and cogent questions, even if the questions cannot respond to single answers, should we still not question the prevailing norms? And if not, why not? Challenging the accepted wisdom for haiku is fraught with outraged egos.

Tinkerings with small changes and adaptations seem more important than they are and are not what is required. Bashō, with good reason, was more Revolutionary than Evolutionary. Those who have lived as part of the industrial revolution, urbanisation, world wars, state mass serial murders, atom and hydrogen bomb displays, disquiet with the results of religious conventions and orthodoxies, increasing economic globalisation, political, social, cultural, scientific, technological upheavals and now an information revolution, must have more than ‘tinkering at the frayed edges’. A quantum leap is necessary, a new conjunction of basic elements to evolve significantly different outcomes.

The canvas of haiku is flat, no perspective, only homogeneous space where we, simulating direct and autonomous action, are manipulators and manipulated, sign makers and sign erasers, mirrors and reflections, observers and observed, puppets and puppet masters. Haiku is becoming a programmatic discipline in which taboos break through the veneer of tolerance, openness and acceptance. Strong ‘rules’, despite hand-on-heart protestations, strongly rule. Attempts to affect existent fundamentals are strongly repelled by an automatic, almost computerised and predetermined opposition. Orthodoxy is deeply ingrained...

Haiku informs of a process increasingly void of meaning and signification at worst, or moving in that direction at best. Working processes, historical encrustations act as a code to distort or neutralise meaning. Juxtaposition, a useful enabling device, is now more of a devolving mechanism, a way of equalising and weakening imagery and associations. Information = increased meaning, improved communication - True or False? Meaning is stage-managed, exhausted by the number of times ‘enlightenment’, ‘awareness’, ‘tricks’, ‘images’, ‘phantom content’ and ‘recycled information’ is grafted into these little poems. High levels of energy are deployed to maintain the accepted; anything to avoid the effort involved in, and the consequences of, understanding the need for, and the why and what of, change. Loss of existing methodologies and philosophies, of some ‘guidelines and strictures’, of ‘meaning’ and ‘reality’ as we know and love so much, is a little step too far. ‘Cleverness’ is not ‘meaning’.