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

In my experience, to go, say, into the New Forest with a group of haiku friends with the intention of writing haiku on the spot, haiku arising out of experience of the Forest that afternoon, would be something to avoid: to be with a group would be to experience the group, not the Forest; I normally need to take in impressions without linking them to any purpose of mine. To see, perhaps to love, the place, the thing for itself, not bothering about self, is better than an organised haiku walk, which, in a sense, uses the world as a commodity to be exploited. Also, on the spot writing can be superficial; better to let impressions sink in and digest. That way the focus somehow homes in on the living core, the essentials. The mind has done its sorting out job in the dark of unawareness.

Forty years later
   toe-nail still black where the rock
      dropped on it.

Pool in the brook -
copper green, so clear, gravel
   plain six feet down.

Her body golden
in the brook pool
   of Nant Uchaf.

Rock pool in the Wye
ripple sunlight dismembers
   the school of small fry.

Goronwy
   looking from cliff edge -
      Gaw, ain’t we up a depth.

The brook with the clear pool is in Snowdonia, North Wales. I last saw it in 1939 when I was on honeymoon up there. Ice-cold water, tinged green by copper in rock, with the sun shining down into it, it was other-worldly beautiful. The pool was in a near circular basin scoured out of the finegrained pale grey rock. I had found it in a previous year and was revisiting it.

I am old, 92 last month, so my physical horizons have drawn in. I can’t walk far and can’t do as much, so books, photograph albums, people are my journeyings and events, my fresh experiences and new growth.  Memories have gathered to themselves constellations of fresh insight, more awareness of the energy of life in them so haiku from memory are not just the dry husks of dead events. Life in them has been distilled into a higher proof!