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

The last issue of Blithe Spirit carried excellent articles by Martin Lucas and D. J. Peel, both of them identifying what I would regard as the conflation between the ‘objective’ and the ‘mediocre’ that lies at the heart of Ken Jones's analysis of haiku types. This seems to be a category mistake, as becomes apparent when reading his classification, a scheme also described (and apparently approved) by David Cobb in his Bad Nauheim address.

I would like to add my own tuppence-ha’p’orth to the debate, in the form of the following observations. KJ takes issue with – one might say condemns – Simple Imagery. But what is ‘simple imagery’? Let us look at David Platt’s haiku, one of the examples quoted by ML:

                            dawn stillness:
                            leafless birch twigs bend
                            under long-tailed tits

Presumably, to DC (and KJ) this is merely ‘a nature note, and hardly poetry’, and would need the addition of ‘bedroom curtains, flimsy defences between the commotion in the natural world outside, and the excitement of the person lying awake in bed’ to become ‘real poetry’.

So: is this ‘simple imagery’, where ‘simple’ and ‘imagery’ both denote disapproval? No, because I would argue that this is an indefinable concept and therefore rather unhelpful for differentiating and categorising. A statement about a bare twig/low decibels/Aegithalos caudatus can never be 'mere' objective observation of photons and pressure waves impinging on the writer’s retina and cochlea, because the author chooses and edits what to include and what to leave out, and that can only ever be done from a human perspective. As far as we know, perching birds do not juxtapose the stillness of dawn 'as an effect' with the bare twig 'as an effect': only people do. And furthermore, Joe Doe may juxtapose them and consider it a meaningful activity, while Jill the Lass finds other elements more important and would have written about the situation from a different angle.

I am reminded of the following anecdote, possibly apocryphal, that is often recounted as a criticism of logical positivism. It is only a supposed criticism, because it is really a strawman, but may be useful here. At the start of the academic year, a professor stands in front of a Physics 101 class and asks the students to apply the rules of detached, unprejudiced scientific method, and observe. The naïve students are eager to please and for a while do their best to comply, but eventually the boldest among them says: “But professor, observe what?”. None of us, except possibly a newborn, confronts the world as a tabula rasa and observes it objectively. Everyone has memories and a personal perspective.

Perhaps I see the issue this way because I come at it from a photographic background: where to place the edge of the frame is (and certainly should be) a conscious act of aesthetic choice. How much of the bare branch should be in the picture? Does one focus on one bird and exclude the rest, or try to show a whole flock? Where is the edge of the flock, anyway? It keeps shifting, with some joining and others flying off, so the choice of moment is relevant. What you do in photography (and I would say, in haiku) is keep editing things out, until everything that remains in the frame is significant both to the meaning and to the structure that conveys this meaning. What is regarded as significant will always be a human – and therefore subjective – decision, and choices and decisions made by ML and KJ and JK will all differ in terms of content ('significance') and structure ('form').

The quality of the resulting ‘product’, to use Cobb’s term, is entirely a different matter yet again: it is measured (if it can be measured at all) along some other axis in another critical dimension. And as ML has shown, ‘simple imagery’ – when it is well-written and happens to appeal to the critic – has a habit of being described as ‘existential’. Photography critics do this all the time when they discuss Edward Weston’s images of seashells and peppers. Weston was a superb artist and master of technique, able to strip away seemingly superfluous layers of distracting context and show the object ‘as it is in itself’. At one level, these photographs are mere detached observations and ‘simple images’ of natural objects placed against a neutral studio background; at another, they provide transcendental insight into the true nature of things beyond the surface. Each viewer has to decide what the photograph ‘really’ says.