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

Tundra, The Journal of Short Poetry, Issue 2, edited by Michael Dylan Welch, P.O. Box 4014, Foster City, California 94404-061-4 USA. $27.00 for three issues, single copies $12.00 for Europe.

Tundra is an interesting attempt to bring haiku together with all kinds of short poetry.   There is,  for instance,  a limerick cycle  based on  the  complete works of Shakespeare, translations from the ancient Greek of Luxorius and a feature on the American mid-west poet Ted Kooser. As for the haiku, there are a selection of translations of Akito Arima’s contemporary Japanese haiku by Emiko Miyashita and Lee Gurga. There’s plenty of English-language haiku too and naturally, the ubiquitous haiku-liteTM make an appearance, such as working late / in the office / someone opens a drawer by Nikhil Nath, a spool of thread / left on its side / summer rain by Burnell Lippy and Penelope Greenwell’s midday heat / under the shade tree / an empty chair. Alan Pizzarelli has morning twilight / a truck driver gently unloads / sacks of clams .  To adapt a quotation from Alan Bennett: these kinds of haiku ‘take the pith out of life’. Nothing really grabbed me until I got to Michael McClintock’s superb haibun-noir about a police investigation of a colleague's death: “According to Sergeant Dinker, he’d made two unintelligible radio calls and then went static.” What’s interesting about it, is that it’s such a good short story in its own right, I wondered if it needed the haiku and even needed to be a haibun? Well, the haiku do work, even if they could disappear back into the prose, but as this is obviously a fictional piece, the haiku are really just paraphrased highlights in a three-line haiku format. I’m not entirely sure where English-language haibun is going to take haiku if fictional haibun becomes the norm, which seems almost certain to happen. The danger is that haiku will just become the preserve of ‘good writers’ and lose its common touch. ..

     But the strongest feature of Tundra is the quality of the discussion. There is a correspondence dating from the 1970s between Cor van den Heuvel and Robert Bly with an excellent introduction and postscript by Welch. Bly doesn’t like the idea of non-Japanese haiku and no amount of argument by van den Heuvel was going to persuade him. Apparently Bly still held the same view in 1999. Cor van den Heuvel also reviews Clark Strand’s Seeds from a Birch Tree and Higginson’s Haiku World and Haiku Seasons. To close, it’s worth quoting van den Heuvel’s final paragraph from his review in full: “Strand’s faith that anyone can intuitively write good haiku simply by counting syllables and Higginson’s concern to include as many poets and peoples as possible in his saijiki are attitudes that can result, and have resulted, in the dissemination of a lot of less than laudable poems and not a few decidedly inferior ones. And they are being presented to a reading public that is already largely predisposed to expect nothing of lasting value from English-language haiku poets.”