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Talking to people about the March 2003 ‘Surreal Special’ edition of Blithe Spirit, I find that the first question they ask is, “But what are surreal haiku?” The second question they ask is, “Can you give some examples?”

I hope the following will go some way to clarifying the scope of ‘surreal’ haiku and that you will feel inspired to explore different parts of your psyche and capture these experiences in haiku form.

It seems easiest to start with what surreal haiku are not. They do not come from ‘actuality’, but they are not ‘made up’. I  won’t go into the debate here about poems which appear to be written from actuality but are in fact ‘made-up’ - see previous issues of Blithe Spirit. Surreal haiku are seen or felt in a dimension of the psyche other than the one that the majority of people operate from most of the time. I believe that each channel, or whatever you want to call it, of the psyche has its own rationality. In order to write surreal haiku you need to be able to explore different components of your psyche and, in order to understand other people’s, you need to be able to enter their ‘world’. A tall order, but everything has to start somewhere, sometime. Why not now?!

I have deliberately used the word ‘surreal’ rather than ‘surrealism’ because the latter was a particular school of thought and I would like to broaden the scope to include ‘magic realism’, that is, haiku which operate from what might be thought of by some as ‘the rational ego centre’, i.e. ‘reality’ (actuality), but flip into another part of the psyche.

Shoved off the stairs - 
falling I become
a rainbow

     (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press 1999)

What are definitely not surreal haiku are poems which project on to another subject: so no crying sunsets or keep-fit plants, unless of course you’re Matsuo Bashō.

Part of the reason why some of us who have been writing haiku for some time feel in a rut is because we are working in one dimension, although we may try to make that one dimension multifaceted. What used to be called ‘The BHS Consensus’ had as negative an impact as positive in terms of the development of haiku poetry in Britain. It is time to play a bit. It doesn’t matter if our first attempts aren’t good  - the first shasei haiku we wrote probably weren’t good either .

As most artists of any media know, exploring a different art form from your speciality helps your speciality. Although we’re not exploring a different medium, I do think there’s the potential for surreal haiku to enhance shasei haiku by offering new perspectives.

under the sea
a fish becomes human
in an air pocket

Annie Bachini - First published in Troubadour No 13,
Ginyu Press, January 2002.