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KJC: When your book came out, and then the article, I engaged in an in-depth correspondence with Fred [Schofield] and several other people, and tried to open [haiku] up, to expand what has always seemed to me to be a very confined version of permitted haiku formulae. So that’s why I’m glad to meet you.

HS: I’ve been trying to open it up. I saw so much potential and I thought, why did they want to confine themselves to these rules? When I met Dee [Evettsl we would have these great debates because he would tell me that you couldn’t use a metaphor and I said, well, all poetry’s metaphor. But of course there was a reason why he had come to that and that had worked for him. I wasn’t telling him he had to use metaphor, I just tried to show people at least there were these other options.

DC: Although we came across to people like Keith [Coleman] as regulatory, in fact we were always open to change, so on things like metaphor the position has shifted. We perhaps needed some kind of corset and we needed something to offer as opposed to those who say anything a person calls haiku is a haiku.

KJC: I think it was because of the idea that we don’t want ‘anything goes’.

DC: There was this view in the world, and we had very unhelpful dictionary definitions. People read these and think, “I can write haiku, I can count to seventeen.”

HS: Any genre has to have rules because that’s how artists create, by working with the rules. If you don’t have any rules, then you don’t have a genre.

FS: The good thing about your book was it started to put into perspective this idea of why, how can these two things be called haiku, what we are writing and what Bashō and the masters were writing. You can see where it’s coming from, for the first time.

HS: I’m not saying that [the haiku moment] is not haiku, but it’s only one part of it. I’m not saying that the Zen inspired model is not haiku, because that would be a misunderstanding. It’s fine, but it’s not necessarily the essence. I think the beauty of haiku is that it’s constantly changing, and it has this kind of transportability. It’s remarkable that it can go from one culture to another that’s so different, and when it’s transported it obviously has to have a different function, it can’t possibly have the same function. Even within Japan haiku is constantly changing, there’s no such thing as a fixed definition. It’s the nature of things that you have to continue to redefine it, rethink what it is. So the haiku moment obviously had great significance, right? It’s just that when I looked at it I thought, well, that’s fine, but I don’t want people to think this is the end point because I think it would ultimately have been stagnating. It’s obviously been very powerful in that paradigm and even I was very attracted to it for that very reason … I guess my own motive was that I saw these American scholars looking at Japanese culture that way. That was a serious misunderstanding. This was something that had been imported and was then being reimposed on Japan. To me, that was unbearable. When I was writing the book it was for people who wanted to understand Japanese poetry. Then a secondary part of it was the English haiku, but the main thing was to get it straight with regard to Japanese haiku. I figured if I could do something with that, then that would naturally have some effect on English haiku. I wasn’t trying to make any judgement on the state of English haiku, I was just trying to historicise it. It’s a remarkable phenomenon that English haiku’s gotten this far.