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

There seems to be a sufficiently strong rationale to suggest that English syllables are not the equivalent to Japanese onji. The commonly used alternative to 5-7-5 is ‘free-form’… Is this… a rush of blood to the head or just old fashioned, low-level anarchy for those unable to be effective within a fixed discipline? … ‘Personal ego rules OK’! Certainly viable from the evidence, is this a sufficient justification or a ‘cop-out’? The mountains of people writing ‘free-form’ haiku are not evidence that it is the best alternative, just that there are mountains of people who ‘cop-out’. What other poetry genre allows the extraordinary and total liberty to pick and choose any structure they decide is most appropriate with little regard for form and content integration? This, in my view, is such a large and fundamental comprehension problem, bigger even than the ‘I’ usage; it might be just too scary to confront. Better to ignore it for a hundred years or so and just continue our journey through the existing tunnel until we meet a blocked end. David Cobb... whose work has been an example to many of us, has written that ‘almost no-one would argue that form as a feature of haiku is more important than spirit’. I quite like the feeling of being ‘almost no-one’. Yes, I do know what he is intending to say but it just does not do it for me, mainly due to the unacceptable belief that form’ structure/content! spirit are either too easily interchangeable or completely dissociated and disconnected... Haiku that have survived the test of time, changing values, increased knowledge, new understanding and interpretations resulting from each generation’s altered perceptions, have done so because they have successfully integrated form and content... When this coalescing synergy, this merging to make an integrated but not necessarily harmonious whole, does succeed, and it is rare, the result is the appearance of that evanescent and seemingly inexplicable mysterious ‘spirit’. Left unanswered is how this integration is achieved. Is ‘free-form’ haiku really a viable alternative to an agreed structure and form? Many in the West and an increasing number in the East plough this particular furrow, but ‘many’ is not a requisite for ‘right’. I suspect it is easier to close down a poem when individuals give themselves this right and accept what little responsibility goes with it, when it mistakenly believes ‘spirit’ has a separate existence from, and is more important than, all else. That is not to say that the evanescent ‘spirit’ is not important, only that it fails to arise if it is not the product of other components even if they are at opposite ends of the content’ device spectrum - if it is not the synthesis of thesis and antithesis.