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

Brian Tasker’s review article in BS 11/4 and Caroline Gourlay’s article in 12/1 prompt me to question the fondness among haiku poet-commentators for the distinction between haiku and ‘mainstream poetry’. Both articles exemplify the tendency to ignore the fact that much non-haiku poetry is as far from being, or aspiring to be, mainstream as most good haiku is. To imply, as Brian Tasker does, that ‘conventional short poetry’ is the alternative to haiku (or vice versa) merely promotes a diminished sense of the scope of poetry. And while I agree with the thrust of Caroline Gourlay’s argument for haiku societies’ looking ‘outward’ as well as ‘within’, her frame of reference is still ‘limiting’. Agreed, ‘the time has come ... to pay more attention to the contemporary poetry scene’, but the scene extends beyond Betterton Street, the ‘poetry establishment’ and ‘mainstream poetry magazines’. Why not draw on other innovative, marginalized poetry for points of comparison and contrast, and ‘dialogue’ with haiku - rejecting the mainstream assumption that a ‘competitive ... jostling for position’ is a ‘natural and healthy process of evolution’? Caroline Gourlay asks, ‘Do haiku societies want to move closer to the mainstream poetry establishment or are they perfectly content as they are?’ - but perhaps they should want neither of these things, doing better to question, continually, both their own mainstream and that of the ‘poetry establishment’. (1) At the same time, it does seem to me important to resist the idea that haiku and poetry other than haiku have little, as it were, to offer each other - even if that is often the case. The ‘unique’ quality of ‘the whole genre of haikai’ is more precarious and thus more ‘interesting’ than Brian Tasker’s appeal to its ‘unique viewpoint’ suggests - an argument I’ll develop after a brief foray into Stanley Pelter’s ‘Pensées’.

     Like Pelter, I see the need to question the bias among western haiku poets against more language-oriented (too easily dismissed as ‘intellective’) exploration of haiku. However, I want to suggest that ‘syntactic jarring of the [poem’s] perceptual space’ (as Barrett Watten puts it with reference to Larry Eigner’s poetry), may be more appropriate to haiku than word-play of the sort that predominates in the poems in Pensées 3. (2) Pelter seems more interested in what can be done semantically with(in) words within a traditionally descriptive framework than in breaking up the frame itself and letting syntactic shifts and gaps do the work.

     One could also take a more radical approach to the question of content. I wonder how many BHS members know that this too, for example, is British haiku (by Tom Raworth, in Haiku, Trigram Press, 1968;  or tottering state, Paladin, 1988):-

now the melody
in the pattern of shadows
one shadow behind

- or that British ‘renga’ includes this (by Harry Gilonis and Tony Baker, in from far away, Oasis Books, 1998):-

[........]  falling drunkenly upwards into a pool of stars

28.

our drenched words
still cling to       as spores...

If one could listen at the sound of their falling
would make a music uneclipsable before & after ours

[........] 87. 

[arm del.] [grasp del.] [clasp del.]
[hand del.] [shoulder del.]
[knee del.] [form del.] [smile del.]
in the forests
of the night

Which is not to suggest that a fresh approach need do away with all the traditional virtues. Tomas Tranströmer’s haiku, Charles Henri Ford’s, and those of Cid Corman (who generally doesn’t label his ‘haiku’ as such except, sometimes, where they are translations), are notable cases in point, showing how poetic orientation broader than the tradition of haiku can serve to enrich rather than demean the genre.

     In short, I believe that openness to a broad range of poetry, and thus to a broad range of possibilities for influence (with a view to ‘individual vision’), must be all to the good, especially if this has the effect of resisting the over-emphasised, over-explicated received wisdom and the tide of ‘homogenous’ haiku it has given rise to. This may well mean, contrary to Brian Tasker’s way of thinking (see Modern Haiku, winter-spring 2001), that haiku poets need to be less rather than more ‘clear about’ what they’re doing - if more originality (as opposed to novelty) is to creep in. One consequence could be - to appropriate another comment of Brian’s (from the online World Haiku Review) - that they ‘experiment’ with writing less haiku. If one is drawn to the spirit of haiku, no doubt haiku will sometimes result from the attempt to write, not haiku especially, but poetry - and not necessarily poetry that is ‘mainstream at heart’.