The Tyranny of the Specifics

A certain amount of any communication is holding the floor, phatic exchange like meercats making are you there contact growls.
Do we write whether we perceive anything new or not? Do we write by habit or by impulse when there is something to uncork? Is it stultifying or clarifying? Are we getting it right or going on flights of fancy or form? What is our practice like in terms of nailing facts?
When we write about the world around us, are we writing what we imagine we see or what we see? Raffael de Gruttola questioned whether we are at risk of reproducing some “homogenized national landscape” that leaves out the particulars of region in an effort to not exclude anyone who might not “get” some reference.
We don’t want to fudge facts so more people get our drift, do we? Misinformation officers are already overstocked. A certain diligence and meticulousness is welcome. How to balance being accurate and being overly exact?
Do we want to be transparent to the widest possible readership? Last year Emiko was talking about cultural translation of season words and how they don’t transpose to a new geography and other culture. The marks of a season are culturally embedded.
Kigo/sajiki/season word indicators came up as a discussion topic at the haiku conference. Although it is particular to haiku, the issue of how specific to be has broad applications. To rely on a kigo list is to use a word as a shorthand symbol for the season on top of or instead of describing what happens. (Moon being reserved for autumn by default unless specified as a kind of moon.)
To be as specific as possible makes the poem personal and specific and gives the strongest resonance but with the fewest people. To say cow vetch rattles will bring certain readers into a snap of focus, while for others, the picture will get hazy, being only sound without sense.
There’s a missed opportunity to educate oneself on insects and cultivate knowledge of wildflowers so we are learning the world. Having a word for something is a tool to make a distinction and to begin to observe. What if we get down some narrow throat of a flower and no one can orient themselves to our specificness?
What can we assume the reader will catch? What does it matter that one doesn’t catch? We set a word out there and if a reader doesn’t know it, maybe on next pass with someone else they will have built a hook to catch more. We can’t dumb down, nor do we want to reach for the most obscure thing as proof that we know something. That too creates gaps between writer and poem and reader.
To use the most archetypal words, bird, water, etc, reaches the widest audience without obstruction except that vague words are a kind of obstruction of abstraction and blandness.
To observe behavior of a species and know its rhythms is to be alert to the world outside of self. Would a field guide, paired with observing, be a better tool than a kigo list to fill in the requisite line about season?
Are we including unlikely portraits (like photoshop errors) to get at some “emotional truth” but messing up the biology?

Marshall Hryciuk pointed out season word lists are no substitute for what you perceive.
In such a short form, every word, every syllable has to work, carry its weight to earn the right to stay. That idea of compression comes in opposition to the practice of kigo. I’ve been in discussions where we talk about what to do about the issue of kigo. Is it genuine or an aspect of desk poetry? If feels non-essential sometimes. A throwaway word may indicate season but risks over-representing, say, crickets, in the population’s perception. What’s more, to use season words as a mandate can make the poem a cookie cutter exercise and we lose something of the moment by needing to include a kigo because the form requires it? How to balance?
Are we asking the right question? Should our indicators of time’s passage be rooted in the manufactured not the natural world given how much time we spend in nature?
George Swede (Joy in Me Still and White Thoughts, Blue Mind) said there is a force of change in haiku but it is not that of cross-pollinatization from other literature so much as impact of urbanization. Barry George (Wrecking Ball & Other Urban Haiku) concurred that haiku needed to be observant not just of those bits of nature but the built environment and seasonal changes, such as homeless people’s movements and construction seasons.
André Duhaime said that we look towards Basho as a model for content of haiku, but after the bomb in Japan, everything changed. There was more social consciousness and urban elements. We mythologize the haikuists and wax nostalgic about the nature of nature. We look towards Shiki as an ideal practitioner of haiku but he himself wasn’t informed by Japan but inspired by French Impressionism. Haiku and poetry has always been cross-pollinating around the world, as de Gruttola points out, with WC Williams, Pound, Olsen, Creeley, Kerouac and Ginsberg. (Haiku does not exist in a vacuum, except in that vacuum of females, presumably. ;-)]
When we temper romantic habits and seek to state what is actually before our eyes, it can reinvigorate, refresh our vision.