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

Haiku/senryu are little poems produced in a special kind of way; they are the poetry of the moment - the moment when the mind has a sudden apprehension of both union with and separation from the cosmos. There are numerous Western versions of this Zen approach: Plato suggests that ‘one must make that which contemplates… resemble that which is contemplated’; Sartre’s famous chestnut tree root experience in La Nausée gives us both the absurdity, the paradox of the utter pointlessness of the present moment going nowhere fast and the huge significance of the self-same moment; Gurdjieff’s freeze-frame STOP! exercise is a very practical way of becoming ‘me here now’. Haiku is the poetry of what happens when, in Gurdjieff/Ouspensky terms, you go to eat the food of impressions but catch them at the moment of entry into the human factory, at the moment before they get digested into all the associative juices that run inside us, the moment before naming, cataloguing and classifying begin to take place. I believe that the reason many people can’t deal with haiku is that they’re too eaten up with what happens after you start digesting experience; that’s what they think poetry’s about - à la Wordsworth, for example, many of whose poems are for me, superior examples of what happens to a haiku-ish moment when thinking clicks in. Nothing specifically Japanese about this - could just be an obscure mid-Sussex poetic form called a ‘ukiah’, the way I think about it. And that’s how it is.

I deliberately choose to write 5-7-5 ‘haiku’. Not out of any belief that this is how it should be done but just as a challenge to myself to do something with a bit of structure for a change and make it work as haiku, flowing naturally and without padding. I write haiku in the moment. Very little polishing. If I find myself unable to expand the moment (thinking too much about 5-7-5-ery or what words to use or switching things around a lot) then I give up and walk into the next moment..