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

interest is always the same: in how poems work, precisely, in
why they affect us they do, and in bringing in whatever background
helps us read more vulnerably, openly, accurately, and
deeply. I think this is especially needed for haiku. We teach
haiku to third graders, but in fact it’s an art form that requires
some real initiation to be truly practiced or read. Haiku are the
most immediate of art forms in one way, but in another, they
are slip knots that you need to know the knack of, to untie fully.
The more I learn about haiku, the more I feel how much I have
not yet learned. It is bottomless, really. Any good poetry is.
CE: In your essay, you address the wide popular interest in
non-literary haiku and you specifically reference the thousands
of haiku written about Spam (“Spamku”) and posted
online. You foreground that, “... to write or read with only this
understanding is to go back to what haiku was before Bashō
transformed it: ‘playful verse’ is the word’s literal meaning.
Bashō asked for more: to make of this brief, buoyant versetool
the kinds of emotional, psychological and spiritual discoveries
that he experienced in the work of earlier poets. He
wanted to renovate human vision by putting what he saw into
a bare handful of mostly ordinary words, and he wanted to
renovate language by what he asked it to see.” To what extent
do you find contemporary English-language haiku poets continuing
to follow this approach?
JANE: It seems to me that the best contemporary haiku writers
are in Bashō’s lineage, and Issa’s and Buson’s. This is of
course my own definition of “best.” It’s fine that many poets
do other things as well. But the central work of poetry is
the same everywhere—from Sappho to Akhmatova, Tu Fu to
Frank O’Hara, lyric poets magnify and enlarge and open our
relationship to our lives, to the lives of others, and to the world.
CE: Your consideration of Bashō’s overall output of haiku
leads to an intriguing claim about the impact transparent
seeing can have. You state, “Bashō’s haiku, taken as a whole,
conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said
and known by image. When the space between poet and object
disappears, Bashō taught, the object itself can begin to be fully
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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