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

perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence
is made much larger.” Would you please elaborate on
how this type of seeing enlarges our existence?
JANE: I’ve come to feel that every good poem does this, not
only haiku. The exchange currency of the imagination is fundamentally
transformative and empathic. The current thinking
in neuroscience is that this recreation of other within self has
something to do with mirror neurons, but poets have known
the alchemies of empathy from the beginning. Permeability is
how image works, how metaphor works. Every time we take
in an image in a poem, we become for an instant that image.
Reading “mountain,” I become for that moment everything
I know of mountainness—its steepness, its insects, its largeness,
its seeming immobility punctuated by streams or rockslide,
what it asks of the legs that travel it, what it asks of the
breathing, of the eyes, what it tells us of abidingness and perspective,
of distance and scale. Any time we take in a poem’s
held experience, we become that experience. The experience
of a poem is not “about” life—it is life. And so taking in a good
poem, our lives are expanded by that poem’s measure. One of
the great paradoxes of haiku is that the measure of taken-in
meaning can be so large, from a vessel so small, and how
meaning in haiku can reach in almost any direction. A haiku
can puncture our human hubris, or can remind us that we too
are going to die. It can pierce us with the beauty of spareness
or open us to the futility of ambition. It can evoke humor,
memory, grief. It can, at times, do all these things at once.
CE: You also note that “...the haiku presents its author as a person
outside any sense of the personal self.” Do you see contemporary
English-language haiku presenting the authors as people
outside a sense of the personal self? What might the author
gain from striving to experience and write haiku in this manner?
JANE: I recently judged a haiku competition and was a bit
startled by the frequency of the pronoun “I” in one form or the
other, and by the strong presence of personal life that was in
them, including in those I chose as the winners. In some cases
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