Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

Do you feel that the current version is at least as much directed
toward those who already write haiku as it is toward
the initial audience?
JANE: I was asked by the Branching Out program to give a
talk for the general public—for people who might not have
read much poetry, let alone haiku. I tried to do that—to find
ways to open the field to newcomers—but poetry is a universal
language, whose very point is that it does not simplify;
it expands, saturates, investigates, faces many directions at
once. I tried to make the original talk something that would be
interesting to both kinds of audience—new, and informed—
and truly, there isn’t that much of a gap. You’re always a beginner,
entering a poem. A poem asks an original, unjaded
presence, some state that includes both informed awareness
and the erasure of preconception.
I have polished the piece quite a lot since the original lecture,
but that’s just what I do with anything I write, poetry or
prose. I’d gone over it again just this past February, when I
was asked to lecture on Bashō at a Japanese university. As to
whether I changed it to make it more useful for serious writers
of haiku, no, not specifically. I myself don’t make that strong
a distinction between looking at poetry as a writer and as a
reader. Every serious writer needs also to read alertly, with
a real depth of attention—both her or his own work, and the
work of others; and every act of reading a poem is a recreation
of the original energies of its writing—that is what a poem is:
not a record of thought, experience, emotion, realization, but
a recipe for its own reenactment.
CE: You have extensive knowledge about poetry in general
and haiku in particular, including a knowledge of the history
of haiku in English. Where do you see this book fitting
in among some of the other work on haiku in English (for
instance, Eric Amann’s The Wordless Poem; R. H. Blyth’s
Haiku in 4 volumes; Harold G. Henderson’s Haiku in English;
and William J. Higginson and Penny Harter’s The Haiku
Handbook to name just a few foundational texts in this field)?
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