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

It doesn’t particularly surprise me that the more spontaneous type of haiku, such as Maurice Tasnier’s a late daffodil/arrives in my back garden/puffing and blowing or Kate Hall’s Atlantic dawn/the horizon cracks/into a smile in Blithe Spirit 11/1 are often rule breakers. They may appear to have sprung pure from the moment, but the subconscious mind undoubtedly can contrive. It is particularly adept at the art of the pun and can also manage metaphor and double entendre quite nicely. Just think of dreams.

My personal experience also bears this out. I take part in an e-mail kukai group which means I have to produce haiku to deadlines. On occasion I have submitted to this group examples of the ‘just wrote itself type and commentators have accused them of being contrived. If I had had more time for thought I might have written them more conventionally. (I might have. I’m not very keen on re-writing.)

The unguarded haiku moment may well land us with a dilemma, and I think there are reasons for this that can go beyond the subconscious mind’s delight in word play.

However much we try (if we are good rule followers) to write objectively only of what is before us in that elusive thing we call the ‘present’, it is very difficult for someone with normal neural functions to do this. We do not live our lives in isolated moments, or in a thin slice of time called the present. We live in a flow of experience that includes our childhood memories, what happened to us yesterday, our knowledge of history, stories we have read and our visions of the future.

Even while we focus on the here and now all of these things are with us and, in unguarded moments, may well influence the way we express ourselves. To attempt to exclude these things completely would be a difficult task and quite probably would only serve to weaken our writing. It would certainly exclude the possibility of Shirane’s vertical axis. (See ‘Traces of Dreams: Landscape Culture and the Poetry of Bashō’)

To interpret rules - such as the haiku moment, objectivity, or the avoidance of anthropomorphism or metaphor - so tightly that we squeeze the life out of whatever it is that inspires us to write would be a shame. However we do need to balance our more spontaneous effusions with a little cooler consideration.

Even those of us without much inclination to labour over re-writes do need to at least cast an appraising eye over these little things that write themselves in our notebooks. We need to consider not just whether they would be acceptable to those who make the rules (whoever they are), but also whether they adequately represent our own view of what haiku can be at its best and what we want to be known for.

I do think we should look our ‘gift haiku’ in the mouth!