The following is my keynote address for the 15th annual Haiku International Association convention, held at the Ichigaya Arcadia hotel in Tokyo, Japan, on 30 November 2013. The Japanese translation, by Shoji Matsumoto, is a summary of  the English text and not a complete translation. Both the English and the Japanese were first published in HI (the Haiku International Association journal) #110, January 2014, pages 2–13. At the convention, I also read a set of twelve haiku from my “First Snow” trifold, prepared for the occasion, with Japanese translations by Emiko Miyashita, which she read with me. See also Emiko’s report of my trip, “Bashō’s Menu,” and Hidenori Hiruta’s summary and photographs. Click any photo below to see it in a larger size.

My grateful thanks to the Haiku International Association for welcoming me so graciously to their convention. I began my speech by thanking Akito Arima, president of the Haiku International Association, and everyone who helped make the event happen. I also presented greetings from David Lanoue, president of the Haiku Society of America, Terry Ann Carter, president of Haiku Canada, and Tanya McDonald, coordinator of the Haiku Northwest haiku group.

        秋深き 隣は何を する人ぞ          芭蕉 

        aki fukaki tonari wa nani o suru hito zo

        deepening autumn—
        my neighbour
        how does he live, I wonder?           —Bashō

Poets in Japan may wonder how their haiku neighbours live in North America. The community of haiku poets is thriving throughout the continent. We enjoy several vibrant organizations, many haiku journals, regular events and conferences, and an important archive for haiku poetry books. I would like to share the successes of haiku activity on the North American continent, far across the pond from Japan, as well as three problems that I hope can be addressed, in the hope that this information can help us know each other better, and to help make us better haiku neighbours.

Successes

Any discussion of haiku in North America must begin with its two oldest national organizations. The Haiku Society of America (HSA) was founded in 1968, and the current president is David Lanoue, who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. As of 1 November 2013, the HSA has 817 members, its second-highest

total ever. It holds quarterly meetings around the country, and membership benefits include a subscription to its haiku journal, Frogpond, and the newsletter, Ripples. The latest issue of Frogpond is 176 pages, and the journal welcomes English-language haiku from poets around the world. The group holds annual contests for haiku, senryu, haibun, and renku, gives awards for haiku books, and has an active website and Facebook page. It also publishes an annual members’ anthology. The HSA will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018, and has been the most important organization for haiku outside Japan since it was founded.
        Haiku Canada was founded in 1978. The current president is Terry Ann Carter, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. As of 15 November 2013, the group has 217 members, and members receive the Haiku Canada Review and an annual membership anthology, plus occasional poetry broadsides featuring poems by individual members. The group holds an annual haiku contest, and annual haiku weekends at various cities across the continent. Haiku Canada tends to welcome more experimental and wide-ranging approaches to haiku than has traditionally been the case with the Haiku Society of America. Haiku Canada has a recently overhauled website.
        A more recent organization is the Haiku Foundation, founded in 2008 by Jim Kacian. This group’s activities are primarily online, and it has a very active website, which features much online discussion.

This organization has no members, but provides many services of benefit to haiku poets, including a Haiku Registry that presents bios, photos, and haiku for hundreds of haiku poets, a daily haiku feature online known as Per Diem (also available as an iPhone app), annual haiku contests and book awards, extensive event calendars, a digital haiku library, and educational resources. The foundation also sponsors National Haiku Poetry Day on April 17 each year. Perhaps Japan could have a National Haiku Day, too? The foundation does tremendous work to promote haiku poetry not just in North America but also worldwide because of its strong online presence.
        Regional organizations also play an active role in the North American haiku community. Organizations such as Haiku Northwest, based in Seattle, where I live, hold monthly meetings at which haiku is shared and discussed, plus an annual retreat each October, called the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, which I direct. Featured guests in the past have included Emiko Miyashita, Penny Harter, Charles Trumbull, John Stevenson, Paul Miller, and Marco Fraticelli. The group has an annual contest and an active website, and is publishing No Longer Strangers, a haiku anthology celebrating the group’s 25th anniversary.
        Other regional organizations contribute in immeasurable ways to the sharing and enjoyment of haiku. An example on the West Coast is the Haiku Poets of Northern California, based in San Francisco, which publishes a haiku journal named Mariposa, holds annual contests and quarterly meetings, and stages the annual Two Autumns haiku reading, which is the longest-running haiku reading series

outside Japan, started by Garry Gay in 1990. Another notable group in California is the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society, in San Jose, California, started in 1975 by Kiyoko and Kiyoshi Tokutomi, which publishes Geppo, holds monthly meetings and an annual contest for traditional haiku, and publishes a membership anthology. It also holds the Asilomar haiku retreat each autumn by the California coast, and cohosted the Haiku Pacific Rim conference in 2012, with Akito Arima as honoured guest. While formally espousing traditional meter and season words, for more than 15 or 20 years now, the group’s journal has had very few 5-7-5 haiku—occasionally none at all. This trend demonstrates the limitation of applying the 5-7-5 rhythm to English-language syllables, and recognizes, even in this traditional group, that a shorter poem in English is more closely equivalent to the 17 sounds counted in Japanese (the word “haiku” itself is counted a three sounds in Japanese, but just two syllables in English). Further south in California is the Southern California Haiku Study Group, which meets monthly in Pasadena. It’s a very active group, but does not run contests or publish a haiku journal. Its members were instrumental in organizing and hosting the August 2013 Haiku North America conference aboard the Queen Mary ocean liner docked in the harbour in Long Beach. A few other haiku organizations exist in Vancouver and Victoria, and in Oregon.

        Further to east, the Haiku Society of America promotes regional haiku activity through its regional groups, but no groups are as active as the West Coast until you get to Chicago; Little Rock, Arkansas; Rochester, New York; Boston (and other groups in Massachusetts); New York City; Maine; North Carolina; and the Washington, D.C. area, among other locations. In Canada, active groups meet in Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal (the latter in both French and English). The activities of these and other groups are similar to West Coast groups, with periodic meetings and readings, as well as workshops to help promote haiku poetry to the public.
        Another significant haiku-related venture is the American Haiku Archives, founded in 1996 at the California State Library in Sacramento, which is the world’s largest public archive for haiku materials outside Japan. It has an informative website. The archive welcomes haiku materials in any language, but especially English. I cofounded this archive and serve on the advisory board. Every year we appoint an honourary curator. The current curator is Charles Trumbull, former editor of Modern Haiku magazine. Past honourary curators have been, since 1996, Elizabeth Searle Lamb, Jerry Kilbride, Cor van den Heuvel, Robert Spiess, Lorraine Ellis Harr, Leroy Kanterman, William J. Higginson, Makoto Ueda, Francine Porad, Hiroaki Sato, H. F. Noyes, George Swede, Stephen Addiss, Gary Snyder, Jerry Ball, and LeRoy Gorman.
        An even older organization, which I cofounded in 1991, and continue to serve as a director of, is the biennial Haiku North America conference. In 2013, this much-anticipated event welcomed more than 150 attendees to the Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach, California for five days of speeches, papers, readings, workshops, a bookfair, haiga display, conference anthology, and more. This event serves as a gathering of the tribes, welcoming haiku poets from across the continent and, increasingly, internationally as well. You can read more at the HNA website. Past HNA conferences have been in San Francisco, Toronto; Portland, Oregon; Chicago; Boston; New York City; Port Townsend, Washington; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Ottawa; and Seattle. In Seattle, we held our banquet up the Space Needle. These conferences are normally in the summer, but the next HNA conference will take place in October 2015, at the peak time for autumn leaf colours, at Union College in Schenectady, New York. You are eagerly invited and welcome to attend this event.
        Also important in the sharing and promotion of haiku in North America are small presses that publish haiku. The biggest of these is Jim Kacian’s Red Moon Press. It publishes one or two dozen haiku books each year, including the annual Red Moon Anthology, which collects the best haiku published in hundreds of other sources each year. In addition to publishing individual collections of haiku, the press also publishes books of criticism, anthologies, and occasionally translations. The service this press provides is central to the support and dissemination of haiku literature in English, bolstering the occasional but too infrequent publication of haiku books by major publishers. Read more at the Red Moon Press website. Other important presses for haiku are Charles Trumbull’s Deep North Press, Randy Brooks’s Brooks Books, Stanford Forrester’s Bottle Rockets Press, and my own press, called Press Here, among others.
        Speaking of books, there have been some key publications over the years, and one of them, a milestone for English-language haiku, just happened in 2013. That was the publication of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from Norton, a major New York publisher. This book, edited by Jim

Kacian, Allan Burns, and Philip Rowland, celebrates a full century of haiku influence and development. It stands on the shoulders of three previous anthologies, edited by Cor van den Heuvel, joining it as a high-water mark for haiku in English. Additional leading figures publishing books about haiku are Stephen Addiss, Bruce Ross, Patricia Donegan, and others, especially Addiss, who has contributed many translations, has emphasized haiga, and recently published The Art of Haiku, which may well join William Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook as one of the most important books about haiku yet published in English. In my own haiku library, I have more than 4,000 haiku books. From exploring the collection at the American Haiku Archives in Sacramento, and the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo, I know there are many more, not even counting the many new books I read about in haiku journals. While these books include a range of quality, they all contribute to a broadening appreciation for haiku in English.
        Not to be forgotten, of course, are the many journals that feature haiku. In addition to the Haiku Society of America’s Frogpond journal, the grand dame of English-language haiku journals is Modern Haiku, currently edited by Paul Miller. It began publication in 1969. This is the leading magazine of record for haiku poetry, reviews, and scholarship. Other printed journals for haiku and senryu in North America include the Haiku Canada Review, Bottle Rockets, South by Southeast, Mariposa, Mayfly, Acorn, and various online journals. Much discussion and sharing now also takes place on Facebook, Twitter, and many haiku-related blogs and forums, making everyone haiku neighbours around the world.
        One of my own initiatives in support of haiku, started in 2010, has been National Haiku Writing Month. I decided to choose February as the official month each year—the shortest month for the shortest genre of poetry. I have a website for this event, referred to as NaHaiWriMo for short, and also run a very active Facebook page. Both locations promote haiku as being more than just counting syllables, and promote other targets while trying to encourage the writing of at least one haiku each day. On Facebook, a monthly guest provides daily writing prompts, and participants have enjoyed them so much that they continue year round. February, however, is still the most active month, and postings typically reach an audience on Facebook of more than 500,000 people (including “friends of friends”). In its way, NaHaiWriMo has served to inspire many hundreds of poets, and has led them to join various local and national haiku organizations, and to get more involved. More importantly, these people have better discovered themselves and their environment because of practicing haiku.

Problems

One problem that English-language haiku has faced over many decades is “pseudo-haiku.” While haiku is taught in nearly all North America grade schools and high schools, it is often taught incorrectly, or very superficially, usually assuming that all you have to do is count syllables. Little or no mention is ever made of kigo (season word) or kireji (cutting word, or a two-part juxtapositional structure), chiefly objective sensory imagery, or other targets (I like to call them targets rather than rules). Nearly everyone in North America has heard of haiku, but only a relatively small number of people have any sense of its literary targets. Organizations such as the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Canada, and the Haiku Foundation therefore have much difficulty in improving the understanding of haiku among the general public, and many large presses continue to publish popular but misleading and misinformed books of “haiku.” While this problem has been occurring for thirty or forty years, or more, there are signs of change and improvement, albeit slow. The Internet has fostered an explosive growth of haiku in English, including very misinformed haiku, but it has also fostered some degree of more informed understanding. Some people deliberately choose to write pseudo-haiku, including joke haiku, which is always their choice, but doing so as a deliberate choice is better than being unaware that these poems are not really haiku. The very influential Wikipedia definition of haiku online has provided useful corrective information, among other online resources. I am pleased that in recent years, at random, I have encountered an increasing number of references to haiku in the general public that show a much more informed understanding than they used to in the past. I hope this trend will continue, but much work still needs to be done, including the correction of curriculum guides and textbooks, which are nearly always misguided or superficial regarding haiku.
        Another problem I would like to see addressed is for English-language haiku groups to have greater connection with Japanese-language groups, which are active in many major metropolitan

areas, especially on the West Coast. One exception to this general lack of interaction is Seattle’s Haiku Northwest group, which has had numerous collaborations with the Rainier Haiku Ginsha, a Japanese-language group founded in 1934, even having an occasional ginko and kukai together, with a desire to do so more often. In addition, the most recent Haiku North America conference included numerous presentations by Japanese American and other scholars about haiku written at the relocation camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Japanese-language haiku groups in North America typically have a much longer history that English-language groups, and while their numbers are small, I believe they have much to teach English-language haiku groups. I would call upon English-language haiku organizations to make a greater effort to connect with haiku groups in North America that write haiku in Japanese.
        A third problem is the role of haiku in mainstream English-language poetry. William J. Higginson, in the very first paragraph of his seminal book, The Haiku Handbook, emphasized that the purpose of haiku is to share them. North American haiku poets could do a much better job of sharing their haiku and love of haiku with Japanese organizations, rather than sharing them just amongst themselves. But more than that, they could also do a much better job of sharing their literary haiku with other poets, journals, and poetry organizations that don’t normally focus on haiku. I myself could do better at this. For years, I have had the sense that English-language haiku exists in a sort of ghetto, and does not connect sufficiently with the larger poetry community. I used to think that this larger community was rejecting the haiku community. While that remains true to some degree, I now think that it’s really haiku poets who have put themselves into that haiku ghetto, isolating themselves in their own journals and organizations when they should try to do more connecting and interaction. The challenge is that the larger community has a natural tendency to reject haiku because of how extensively the superficial teaching of haiku in our schools has branded much of this poetry as inferior. Too often the popular perception is that haiku is a sort of joke poetry or a trivial ditty that doesn’t have the depth and reverberation of literary haiku in English. When very well-known mainstream poets in North America dismiss haiku, they are nearly always dismissing pseudo-haiku, and tend to have little knowledge of the leading poets, journals, and organizations that promote a more informed literary understanding of haiku. This is perhaps the most important challenge facing haiku in English, and while the issue does show signs of improvement after many decades, much more work still needs to be done.

Celebrating Haiku

One final comment is that avant-garde gendai haiku has recently had an increasing influence on English-language haiku. At its best, it has broadened overly narrow perceptions of haiku. At its worst, it has promoted poems in English that some feel are no longer haiku at all, but just short poems. Whatever the future holds, the haiku community is vibrant in North America, and is eager to continue celebrating haiku as a fulfilling and dynamic genre of poetry that helps to connect us to our haiku neighbours in Japan and around the world—in any language. If nothing else, these connections, these celebratory moments of sharing, are a wonderful part of what makes haiku poetry so rewarding. We are glad to be your haiku neighbours. Domo arigato gozaimashita.

海を隔てた俳句の隣人――現代北米の俳句事情

マイケル・ディラン・ウェルチ
アメリカ俳句協会副会長

序

        秋深き 隣は何を する人ぞ           芭蕉

         deepening autumn—
        my neighbour
        how does he live, I wonder?               —Bashō

北米（アメリカ、カナダ）で俳句活動をしている人たちがいると聞いて、不思議に思う日本の俳人がいるかもしれない。実際、活発に活動をしている俳句団体、多くの俳句専門の雑誌、定期的に開催している句会や俳句大会、俳句に関する豊富な書籍や資料がある。
        今日は、北米大陸における俳句活動状況に加えて、直面している３つの問題について述べたい。

俳句活動状況

（１） Haiku Society of America  （設立：1968）会長：デイビッド・ラヌー。会員817名。

・      米国各地に場所を変えて、年４回の俳句会議を開催。
俳句雑誌Frogpond　（池の蛙）は世界中から英語俳句を募集。

・      俳句ニュースRipples（さざ波）も定期発行。

・      年1回、俳句・川柳・俳文のコンテストを開催。

・      2018年には設立60周年を迎える。

・      ホームページ： www.hsa-haiku.org

 

（２） Haiku Canada （設立：1978）。会長：テリー・アン・カーター。会員217名。俳句

・      Haiku Canada Reviewを定期発行。

・      年１回会員のハイク句集を発行するほか、随時個人別のハイクを発表（片面刷り大判紙）。

・      年１回俳句コンテストを開催。またカナダ国内の各都市で随時「ハイク・ウィークエンド」も開催。

・      ホームページ： http://haikucanada.org/

 

（３） Haiku Foundation （設立：２００８）。創始者：　ジム・ケイシャン。

・      原則オンラインで情報交換。

・      会員制ではないが、広く全米の俳人に情報を提供。

◎ Haiku Registry （俳句記録帳）･･･俳人紹介、写真、俳句など。

◎ Per Diem （日めくり俳句）･･･毎日俳句を配信。

・      年１回俳句コンテスト、俳句出版奨励賞選定、その他の催し。

・      デジタル俳句図書館の設置。

・      毎年行われるNational Haiku Poetry Day （４月17日）を後援。

・      ホームページ： http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/

 

（４）地域団体

（４－１） Haiku Northwest （シアトル）

・      ハイク月例会開催。

・      Seabeck Haiku Getaway（シーベック俳句年次総会）開催

過去の参加者：宮下恵美子、ペニー・ハーター、チャールズ・トランブル、

ジョン・スティーブンソン、ポール・ミラー、マルコ・フラチセリーなど。

・      年１回俳句コンテスト開催。

・      創立２５周年記念俳句集、No Longer Strangers (『もはや他人ではない』）を出版。

 

（４－２） Haiku Poets of Northern California （サン・フランシスコ）

・      俳句雑誌Mariposa （「チューリップ」）を発行。

・      年１回俳句コンテスト開催。

・      年４回俳句会開催。

・      年１回Two Autumns （二つの秋）俳句朗読会開催。

 

（４－３） Yuki Teikei Haiku Society （カリフォルニア州サンノゼ）

・      俳句雑誌Geppoを発行。

・      俳句月例会を開催。

・      年１回伝統俳句コンテスト開催。

・      会員の句集を発行。

・      毎年秋に、Asilomar haiku retreat （アシロマール俳句祭）開催。

 

（４－４） Southern California Haiku Study Group （カリフォルニア州パサデナ）

・      月例会を開催。

・      今年の８月、ロングビーチに停泊していた豪華客船クイーン・メアリー号上で開催されたHaiku North America conferenceに貢献。

 

（４－５）　その他、バンクーバー、ヴィクトリア、オレゴンにも地域俳句団体がある。

 

（５） American Haiku Archives （サクラメント、設立：１９９６）。

・      館長：チャールズ・トランブル

・      俳句資料の収集。

・      日本以外で世界最大の俳句資料館。

・      ホームページ： http://americanhaikuarchives.org/

 

（６） Haiku North America Conference （設立：1991）。ウェルチ氏も共同創始者の一人。

・      各地で俳句大会を開催･･･次回は2015年。
ニューヨーク州のシュネクタディで有名な秋の紅葉の全盛期に開催される予定。
皆さんの参加も大歓迎。

・      ホームページ： http://www.haikunorthamerica.com/

 

（７）俳句専門の出版社

（７－１） Jim Kacian’s Red Moon Press

・      毎年15冊以上の俳句関連図書を出版。

・      年1回その年最高の俳句を収録したRed Moon Anthologyを出版。

・      ホームページ： http://www.redmoonpress.com/

 

（７－２） 他にも数多くの俳句関連の出版社あり。

主なものは、チャールズ・トランブルのDeep North Press、ランディ・ブルックの Brooks Books、スタンフォード・フォレスターの Bottle Rockets Press、私のPress Hereなど

 

（８） 俳句雑誌

（８－１） Haiku Society of Americaの Frogpond journal･･･最も有名

 

（８－２）他の俳句雑誌：Haiku Canada Review、Bottle Rockets、South by Southeast、 Mariposa、Mayfly、Acornなど。

 

（８－３）私自身と俳句雑誌

・      俳句雑誌に関わるようになったのは2010年の「俳句作成月間」（National Haiku Writing Month）を提唱した時。2010年の2月開催。〈２月と俳句は折り合いがいい。
1年の内で最も日数が少ない月（２月）――最も短い詩（俳句）。〉

・      「俳句作成月間」 （NaHaiWriMo）のホームページ： www.nahaiwrimo.com

・      Facebookも頻繁に使っている。友達は50万人以上。

・      俳句雑誌は読者に刺激を与えている。読者は積極的に俳句団体に加入しはじめた。

３つの問題点

問題点１．アメリカの小・中・高校では、間違った俳句を教えている場合が多い。英語のシラブルが５－７－５なら俳句である、という教え方だ。季語や切れ字の説明はない。北米では俳句の文学的意義はあまり重視されない。Haiku Society of America、 Haiku Canada、 Haiku Foundationなどの真摯な俳句団体は、人々の俳句に対する考え方を変えるのに苦戦している。大手新聞社や出版社は一般の人たちに、間違った概念の俳句を広く紹介している。この問題は過去３０年、４０年あるいはもっと長期にわたって存在してきたが、徐々に、これらの誤解は改善されつつある。インターネットの発展に伴って、俳句は誤解も含めて急激に広まってきた。意識して似て非なる俳句を作る詩人も現れた。世論作りに影響力のあるインターネット検索のWikipediaは、他に比べてハイクの概念を正しくつかんでいる。しかし俳句のガイドブックなるものは、まだまだ俳句についての正しい認識が足りない。

問題点２．同じ米国内において、英語の俳句を作っているグループと日本語で俳句を詠んでいるグループとの交流が少ないことが問題。例外は、シアトルにあるHaiku Northwestグループ。1934年に設立されたRainier Haiku Ginshaという日本語俳句集団と頻繁に交流している。俳句吟行や、句会を一緒に開いている。日本語俳句団体は米国内ではごく少数ではあるが、歴史の古いこのグループがもっと積極的に日本の俳句について指導力を発揮すべきであろう。一方、英語俳句の諸団体は、今まで以上に、北米内の日本語俳句集団との接触をより強めるべきだと私は思っている。

問題点３．米国で主流の「英語の詩」に対する「俳句」の影響力の問題。「俳句の特徴は、みんなで分かち合う詩であることである」（William J. Higginson著　"The Haiku Handbook")。北米の俳人たちは、日本の俳句団体ともっと交流すべきである。もっと重要なことは、北米の俳人たちが、俳句に関係のない詩人、俳句を取り扱わない詩専門の雑誌などの出版社、詩の諸団体と情報を交換すべき。問題は、人々が学校で習った間違った俳句の概念を払拭できないままに、俳句を軽視する傾向がある点である。彼らは、俳句は言葉遊びの詩に過ぎないとか、俳句は詩としての文学的価値に、奥深さや余韻が欠けているとか口走るのである。北米における俳句の最大の問題点はここにある。この問題点は徐々に改善されつつあるが、まだまだ俳句が正しく理解されるまでの道程は遠い。

俳句の喜び

近年、現代俳句は「英語で書かれた俳句」に大きな影響を与える傾向にある。いい意味では、従来の堅苦しい俳句に広がりをもたらした。悪い点は、一部の俳句はもはや俳句ではなく、単なる短詩のよう。将来の方向は分からないものの、俳句活動が北米でますます盛んになり、北米の俳句愛好者は、俳句の持つ躍動感あふれる詩という特色を楽しむだろう。アメリカの俳句は、言語の違いを超えて隣国日本はもとより世界中の俳句愛好者との結びつきを強めていくことは間違いない。少なくとも、世界中を「俳句の喜び」で結ぶ素晴らしい絆は、「俳句の世界に入ってよかった」という喜びを、世界中の人たちに与えるだろう。