Part of the strength of a lot of people coming together with one shared passion is seeing the diversity in evolution in one one place. Some haiku aims for literary. Some aims away.
Some don’t put haiku as a subset of poetry but a parallel track, perhaps comparable to how biology and chemistry are not the same thing. Some are happily mixing it up with whatever — concrete poetry, music, folky conversations, or biting political commentary. Some class it as by-products of meditation or observation, more like science than the loosey-goosey fiction of Poetry.
There were panel discussions of retrospectives of what happened over the past 25 years in haiku. Some was in French, some in English, most not translated to the other. I could understand some, perhaps most of the French but not to the level of taking notes at the same time. Unfortunately as animated as Dorothy Howard’s presentation was, she spoke too fast for me and gave no handouts. (She is the editor with André Duhaime of Haiku a seminal collection of haiku from 1986.) I missed some of the other presentation. For the remaining 3 people, here’s some of what I gleaned:
Rod Willmot‘s first words were in answer to “Who first?” He said, “Let’s go right to left and hope Canada goes the same way.”
Cor van den Heuvel at Literary Kicks calls Rod Willmot (of Ribs of the Dragonfly) and George Swede (of Almost Unseen) two of the major figures of the half-century:
As English language haiku approaches the end of its first fifty years, a number of poets, other than those discussed already, have, by the quality and quantity of their haiku, emerged as major figures: Anita Virgil, Gary Hotham, Marlene Mountain, Alexis Rotella, George Swede, Alan Pizzarelli, Michael McClintock, Raymond Roseliep, and Rod Willmot.
George Swede said that talking about what poetry is and isn’t is like trying to pick up quicksilver.
In such a global picture of tens of thousands of voices and dozens of languages, getting a general picture of practice might not be doable.
At the same time one can look at what has happened in written collections in English or in French and tell anecdotes of what we recall of being dominant ideas.
Swede took 8 anthologies or magazines as source texts from 1980 to 2010 and did a count to see what we practice. In 1980 over 90% of haiku were 3-lines and in 2010 counting samples of Frogpond (2008, 2010) Modern Haiku (2009) and White Lies (2009) he found the rate hovering around the same
one liners: 7.93%
two-liners: 1.13%
four-liners: 1.13%
not left-aligned: 5.4%
less than or equal to 10 syllables: 16.61%
(Interesting that nearly 1 in 5 are under 10 syllables.)
He found that haiku with nature-content only dropped from nearly 23% of haiku in the survey of 1986 and 1992 samples to 10% in 2010. Those with a mix of human and nature dropped less than a percent. Haiku with human-only content nearly doubled from nearly 16% to nearly 30%.
There has been a shift to senryu and perhaps, as suggested by a couple people in the audience, to reflect the increasingly urban lives of the population. Most poets don’t seem to play with space and left and right justification as much as they might to use the potential of the physical page.
Janick Belleau quoted Maurice Coyaud who argues for using poetic device in haiku by saying you effect you can do with metaphor and personification in 2 words, it would take you 5 words to do with nature alone.
Belleau took 9 French anthologies spanning 1998 to 2009, from France, Belgium, Quebec and Canada and looked at which ones included which aspects of form and spirit of haiku.
The most standard traits of form were brevity, being in the present moment, with season and nature being referred to.
The strongest traits of spirit of haiku were: perceptions/emotion, sensorial experience and relating to existential reality. Less frequent characteristic aspects were relationship of nature to humans, link with the universe and relationship of the poet to the reader.
Maurice Coyaud’s Chevaucher la Lune diverged most with only half of the traits while the haiku represented in 4 of the anthologies (Haiku anthologie du poème court japonais by Corinne Atlan and Zéno Bianu, Anthologie du Haiku en France by Jean Antonini, Dire la Faune 1, Dire la flore 2 by Robert Malançon and Dix vues di Haiku by Serge Tomé) generally adhered to 10 out the 10 form and spirit constraints.
A light moment in the talk.
What is the mood or purpose or tone of haiku? Is it peace, or play or observation? Is there to be not just a cutting word or punctuation of shift but to make a cutting effect? Is its role aesthetic like flower arranging or as a forum for raw emotion?
Willmot said that in the 80s there was the debate in haiku of what to do: seize the moment? Or is anything really lost by putting things in the past tense?
The same debate is ever cropping up by those who reflexively change everything to first person present tense, sentence case with the intention of creating clarity and immediacy.
His feeling is that haiku is about feelings. Poetry can transfer an intensity of experience. Or it can fall to aphorizing and sentimentalizing. He aims for “letting a semi truck grow out of a seed”.
He felt that haiku went in and out of mainstream popularity for a while based on what society needed. For a while Canada, and its component citizens, had a thirst for long expository lines, such as Dennis Lee was doing in English Canada with his Civil Elegies and Gaston Miron was doing in French Canada. The spirit of the time was outwards, a thoughtful consideration of what the nation could be. What is the hallmark of now? We turn towards individuality more and hobbies interests rather than civic concerns.
What would be a way forward in haiku? Haiku can be in opposition to mainstream without the trappings of authorities and rules, exploring risks of what might work and might not and putting it out there. He said when he was 17, in 1965 he hand-calligraphed books and sold them on the street corners to American tourists fresh off the bus. They had no preconceptions of what constituted literary. It worked or didn’t. The establishment, then and now, have a reverential attitude towards rules; rules can obstruct meaning.
For a while, until the 80s, haiku was rooted in North American soil and since then there was born a nostalgia to try to transplant haiku back into the soil of Japan, an equivalent to Neoclassicism or Chinoiserie. People venerate the Japanese like Trekkies at a convention. Haikuist wanted to expand the hobby to exoticism of clothes, objects, paintings and Buddhism. That is a legacy of Blythe and others, a selective reading of Japanese literary arts because there is also the school of haiku in Japan where every haiku is a stab
There comes what he calls a “luggage moment” as when in an airport when you’re carrying your bags from the carousel and something comes over you and you drop all the bags and just walk away.