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

(You are out for a walk. Descending just beyond that tree, a piece of cobalt-blue rubber… somewhat limply filled with air. One light bounce on the ground and you hold it tight. A tiny furled, encapsulated message is attached. It’s in Chinese or Japanese. Perhaps this thing has sailed across Siberia! … In the vague hope of either winning a prize or serving to expose some infringement of human rights, you have it translated.)

Dear Finder,

Welcome to the world of Japanese haiku! Congratulations on having found our balloon! Over here, there is so much haiku in print today, we poets have taken to writing verses on the sky. There is about as much chance of someone appreciating our haiku this way as following the normal publication channels! We are launching this balloon into the teeth of a typhoon. That way, it should go overseas.

the baby is amused -
seed pods of wisteria
trembling in the wind

Michio Sano

(On the other side of the tiny scroll of slightly weathered paper …)

If a haiku poet yourself, read on!

Here, haiku has become an intellectual industry dominated by a few key players - the national broadcasting corporation (NHK), the national daily newspapers (Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri, etc., and the ‘culture colleges’ they run), the publishing houses of Tokyo and the great national associations of Modern Haiku (Gendai Haiku Kyokai), Traditional Haiku (Dento Haiku Kyokai) and Haiku Poets (Haijin Kyokai), each with its own headquarters in the capital. Like a hexagonal column of basalt with six nice clean sides, the haiku industry has risen into the sky these past two or three decades until it now towers over the fledgling haiku networking ghettos of the rest of the world. And yet, as you might know, it is no more closely linked to the rest of the world than you are: indeed, probably not as closely. Ours is a strangely self-sufficient world.

Why is this? Resting on its laurels? Hidden behind the screen of Japanese language? Geographical distance? Such factors surely play a part. But the single most important aspect holding Japan back from international haiku networking (leading to cross-fertilization) must surely be the busy-ness of the million Japanese poets and our preoccupation with our own national scene, which, by a factor often to twenty, is bigger, and almost certainly creatively richer, than the rest of the world put together. Have you any idea how busy we are? The parameters are set - criteria, responsibilities, deadlines, rewards - and degrees of satisfaction. It is a business, with echelons of lifelong haiku poets slowly rising through the ranks to inherit increasingly demanding roles which will inevitably interfere with our ability to tend to the grass roots connections that used once to be so quintessentially haiku. That’s not to say that, away from the desk, we Japanese poets will not find time to continue to scribble our own haiku. Of course we will! Being so brief, we can churn out any number of them with consummate ease. Alas, perhaps this today is their chief merit?

Swaying with its scent
the lavender horizon

Hiroko Suzuki

Seen in this light, we feel it best to leave World Haiku to those very few fellow Japanese who have networked with foreign poets and who have at least begun to appreciate the variety of perplexing visions that beg to be admitted to that Palace of Haiku somewhere in the Tokyo clouds. Please allow us time! Meanwhile, my friends and I shall continue to send off our haiku balloons, albeit in Japanese. To a large extent, no doubt, we will be talking to the wind.

If you wish to respond to this message, kindly send your balloon to land just to the north of the bamboo grove by the westernmost lake near the Old Capital. We always look out for incoming windmail.

Sincerely yours,

The Hailstone Launchers