A Correspondence with David Cobb

A prelude to this correspondence is that I was giving two haibun workshops at Seattle’s Hugo House on 1 December 2007. One of my exercises was to share a prose piece by Seattle poet Peter Pereira, called “Syncope” (originally a blog entry), inviting students to try capping the piece with haiku—as a stepping stone into haibun for poets trying it for the first time. I had also written to Rich Youmans, Ken Jones, and perhaps others to have them offer some haiku in response to the prose, and I also sent this request to David. My idea was to share the response poems with the class to show how established haiku poets might work with the prose. Because of the unpublished nature of Peter’s blog post (other than on his blog, no longer online), I am omitting it here, though David does propose a rewrite of the first paragraph.

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 1:44 am

Subject: Haibun - Pereira

Hi, Michael: sorry to be so late replying to your request—my email has been down for weeks, until yesterday.

Other people you could try [with my request to write haibun in response to “Syncope”]: Ken Jones obviously; also Graham High [email addresses removed].

I find the Pereira piece refreshingly different in subject matter, but a bit overloaded with the first person. Also a bit more long-winded than it need be. It starts off with a subjectless sentence—the ‘I’ missing. My fancy would be to continue with that clipped style throughout the first paragraph, and then (when the scene is smartly set) switch to full sentences in para 2. I find use of a variety of styles / tempi effective; some might not agree.

So, my first edited para would be: “Had a strange experience my last night in Port Townsend. Out at dinner alone, reading a book. At a nearby table (that avoids ‘me’) six to eight coworkers from some kind of political organisation. Celebrating something, being a little loud and obnoxious. Men in the group obsessed with Larry Craig, going on and on about the ‘Man Laws’ he’d broken (the conversational style begs for he’d rather than he had), telling silly jokes seen online— one referring to the Tony Orlando song Knock Three Times, changed to Tap Three Times. Some of their comments a little homophobic, not quite crossing the line, but almost. My impulse to get up and tell them if they did. Mostly trying to mind my own business and ignore them.”

That’s 112 words compared with Pereira’s 137 and I think zappier.

If it’s a haibun, where’s the haiku? [It was a blog post, intended as casual prose, so never a haibun.] I know of the theory that a haibun doesn’t have to have one [see “Missing the Moon: Haikuless Haibun”], but can’t recall seeing a successful piece that didn’t. A haibun without a haiku seems to me like a haiku without a kireji [cutting word]. In both cases disjunction is the soul of the thing.

Best, David

[In hindsight, the “Syncope” piece was not ideal for this exercise because the prose already ended on a high note. I wrote the following to Rich Youmans on 6 December 2007 about my haibun workshop: “As it turned out (very astute classes), they commented on a shift of energy that takes place in the last line of the prose, making it very hard to write a haiku for the piece. It would seem anticlimactic, they said.” They were right.]

From: Michael Dylan Welch

To: David Cobb

Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 5:14 PM

Subject: Re: Haibun - Pereira

Thanks for your considered reply, David. I did write to Ken Jones when I wrote to you, but got no reply.

I appreciate your comments about this piece. You conclude by saying, if it’s a haibun, where’s the haiku? Well, that was actually my request. It ISN’T a haibun, and I had written to you to ask if YOU could write a haiku in response to it, as an exercise. It’s too late now, though (I should have responded to your message before this). I had planned to collect a number of different haiku in response to the piece to present to a haibun workshop I’m giving tomorrow. Nearly everyone I wrote was busy, never replied, or, in one case, thought it wasn’t possible to “haibunize” it with a haiku. But I did get a couple of replies.

This text from Peter Pereira was actually from his blog (often on poetry subjects), and I wanted to use it in my haibun workshop to show the value of “ordinary” writing (even fairly off-the-cuff writing like blog entries—plus it’s topical, if you might have heard of U.S. Senator Larry Craig, who was caught apparently soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom earlier this year). Relaxed and ordinary writing can still have an arc/climax, a point of view, and so on. There’s something unpretentious and straightforward about this text that I thought was worth emulating in a haibun (at least, it’s one approach—not the only one, to be sure). I’m planning to use it in the haibun workshop to prompt students to write haiku. Then the rest of the workshop will be given over to writing their own prose and haiku.

I agree with you about how the prose could be tightened, though I must say I find it sometimes too common (to the point of being a haibun cliche) when the prose in a haibun uses that “clipped” style. We’ve all done it, and it has its place, but I also think it can be overused (and probably would have seemed too contrived in its original blog setting). Nevertheless, how you propose applying it to this piece would clearly improve it [as a haibun], especially with the switch you propose from a clipped style to full sentences part-way through.

Again, thanks for writing about this. Meanwhile, how are things with you? What’s the latest scuttlebutt in the British Haiku Society?!? I guess a few people like Brian Tasker and maybe even Martin Lucas have been bowing out lately, which is too bad. What’s your involvement like these days? It’s also not apparent from the BHS Web site who the current officers are—that information seems to be well hidden on the site.

In the last few years, I’ve been active here with the Washington Poets Association, which has a large poetry festival every year [see “Burning Word”]. I’m also active in teaching various poetry classes (not just haiku) at various places nearby—teaching a class on E. E. Cummings soon, for example, and a class on “Microsoft Word for Poets and Novelists” for a writing conference in February. I’ll also be taking on the HSA regional coordinator position for the state of Washington in 2008, which will also be the 20th anniversary of the Haiku Northwest group, so we have a bunch of special events planned. Our son Thomas is now four years old, and very musical (and also surprisingly good at playing Uno, assuming you know this card game). Sarah will be two in December and is sticking up for herself more and more, and is endlessly cute. They keep us busy! We’ll be heading to Winnipeg for Christmas (my sister lives there), so they’ll both enjoy the snow, and Thomas will especially enjoy the plane ride!

Cheers,

Michael

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 10:13 am

Subject: further to Pereira

Sorry, Michael, I misunderstood what you wanted from me. I suspect, anyway, I’d have joined the respondent who ducked out, saying he/she wasn’t up to adding a haiku to make it a haibun.

No, I haven’t heard of Larry Craig, but I have read of David Cobb, who led the Green Party in 2004 in a fruitless attempt to thwart Bush’s election. Alas, I read he doesn’t plan to stand again; just shows you the name DC goes with Faintheart, not Braveheart. Chicken, the lot of us Cobbs.

In the same vein, I have dis-involved myself pretty much from BHS committee work since giving up the presidency (as the rules bound me to do) back in 2002, when Martin Lucas replaced me. Since then, he has been replaced (rules again) by Annie Bachini, in 2006. Although our membership stands up well (about 280 currently, and I see HSA [Haiku Society of America] has about 750-800 from a bigger catchment pool), it’s difficult to see who Annie might hand over to when her time comes. We are currently short of officers. I’m not looking to get back on the committee. (I organise the ‘BHS bookshop’ which is no big business, though it might be quite active in the next few months as—thanks to POD—we’ve been able to reissue The Genius of Haiku—readings from R H Blyth [see my 1994 review from Woodnotes]. Also, Martin has written for us a lengthy critique of 366 Brit haiku, much in the style of Blyth. It’s called Stepping Stones. For the moment, according to a rather curious decision of the committee, the BHS Bookshop is not an outlet for it (and I’ll have to think hard when the time comes how I can actually offer it for sale, as the cover price is high and they haven’t built in a discount margin, so the trade surely won’t take it).

I flirted with the idea of organising the 3rd European Haiku Conference in this country in 2009, but couldn’t find helpers, sponsors, without which it would be too much to take on. Support for the arts is weak at present, most support is siphoned off by the 2012 London Olympics. And commerce/industry is jittery and hanging on to its money. (I understand, though, that World Haiku Assn (Ban’ya’s lot [Ban’ya Natsuishi]) are planning to hold an international haiku conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, in October 2009.) Susumu [Takaguchi] remains a member of BHS, but we haven’t seen him for about 6 years. He walks off with our clothes every now and then, e.g., there are two Hackett Awards now, his (called the R H Blyth Award) and BHS’s (called the Hackett Award)—this year the same person won both awards, with JWH [James W. Hackett] adjudicating both. JWH is no longer the sole adjudicator of the BHS award, though; a different person will join him each year as a co-judge, or not exactly a co-judge—JWH will choose a winner, and someone else (this year it was me) another.

Martin, as you see, has not ‘bowed out’, though Brian T has. But, like me, Martin isn’t on the committee. His main activity is through the North of England sub-group; for example, they put on an event as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, though I believe it didn’t arouse much interest. Stephen Gill, on a short visit from Japan, gave a talk about haiku in London. I did a workshop at the V & A [Victoria and Albert] Museum in October, and gave a talk about haiku at the launch of a Japanese haiga exhibition at the Bankside Gallery, London South Bank Centre. Seamus Heaney wrote an article for The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, about the influence of Japanese poetry on English poetry, and mentioned only one exponent of the haiku form: Paul Muldoon! There’s a sub-committee working on a new package for teachers, replacing The Haiku Kit, which is still requested, but shows its teeth now. The way to find current officers is to look in Blithe Spirit; I guess the officers change too often to make it practical to keep putting the names up on the website.

Ken Jones is enormously active, but mostly in the haibun domain, as you probably know. He produced a new haibun/haiku collection this year, The Parsley Bed, and I did one of haibun only, Business in Eden. You probably read about it, as it was given an Hon Mench in the HSA Kanterman Awards.

Like you, I’ve been trying to develop another voice that produces non-haiku poems, and get the odd one published every now and then. At present, as for the last 3 months, all ‘creative’ writing has been on the back burner, as I was suddenly swamped by truly impossible deadlines for educational books for West Africa. [Read about David’s background with educational books on the Haikupedia website.]

And then there is the rest of life. This has included the christening of a grandson in Cork last month, and over the course of 2007 selling up a cottage on the coast to raise enough cash to buy my uni student daughter a flat in London; which in turn has led to me making a small garden from a patch of land that had been used for perhaps 50 years as a dumping ground for old mattresses, rotten carpets, bits of bikes, etc. and had become preferred home of a fox.

where the bonfire was

still in its scoop at dawn

the sickly vixen

While gardening, twice managed to disturb a wasps’ nest, the first time by sticking my hand right into it.

2008 can only be a doddle in comparison.

Best, David

From: Michael Dylan Welch

To: David Cobb

Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 3:33 PM

Subject: Re: further to Pereira

If I lived in England, I could easily see myself getting involved with the BHS. Seems like there’s a lot going on, and in a relatively concentrated geographical area (as opposed to the span of things across the United States). Here in Seattle, meanwhile, 2008 will be the 20th anniversary of the Haiku Northwest group, so we’ve got a bunch of things planned, including hosting the June [national quarterly] meeting of the HSA [see the Haiku Northwest website for meeting details].

I’ve caught wind of Martin’s Stepping Stones, and hope to snag myself a copy. I was recently asked to contribute to a new Canadian haiku anthology. I haven’t lived in Canada since 1986 [actually, also for six months in 1997 while awaiting a work visa to return to the United States], but of course I’m still Canadian. Where I’m going with this is that I’m still British, too, but I suspect I’m too far gone to be asked to contribute to a British haiku anthology! (Last lived there in 1984.)

So what will happen with the next European Haiku Conference? Oh how I’d love to come . . . sigh.

I had a poet friend in Canada tell me about Seamus Heaney’s article in the Guardian (my friend, George McWhirter, is the poet laureate of Vancouver, and a friend of Heaney’s). I was glad Matthew Paul’s letter was also published, slightly chastising Heaney for not acknowledging the British and Irish haiku scene (including mentioning you). It’s too bad these “mainstream” folks frequently know so little about the literary haiku scene in English—and no, Paul Muldoon doesn’t count. I used to think that THEY (the mainstream poets) were at fault for not knowing about us, but I now think it’s our own fault. If we’re in a haiku ghetto, we’ve put ourselves there, and don’t get our own poetry out more broadly as we could. I realize that some mainstream editors misunderstand haiku, and thus too easily dismiss even the high-quality literary haiku, which doesn’t help, but we really do keep too much to ourselves. That would help Heaney know that we exist—or if he does know, to grant us more respect and mention us on occasions like this. The solution, I think, is that we need to champion more individual POETS as well as poems.

Speaking of Vancouver, have you entered the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s Haiku Invitational? This is the third year for it, and I’m again one of the judges (not a secret). Our deadline has been extended to January 7 [2008]. So if you have an unpublished cherry blossom poem to enter, please do enter it (go to https://vcbf.ca/ and explore the Haiku links till you get to the Submit Haiku page).

I think I mentioned that I wrote to Ken Jones regarding the Pereira haibun exercise, but he never wrote back.

My son Thomas is now four, and very musical (way more than most kids). My wife and I hope he’ll look after us with his music royalties when we’re in our dotage. And Sarah will be two on Dec. 26. Not so musical, but a feisty and fun personality is developing. They inspire lots of poetry, including much longer poetry. Thomas disturbed some wasps in the summer—got stung three times, but seemed nearly completely fine by the next day. We’re all heading to Winnipeg for Christmas (Thomas will adore the plane flight, at least for a while!). I guess before we know it, we’ll be sending them off to college.

Here’s to a fine new year!

Michael

P.S. Here’s a poem from this past weekend (we had six inches of snow that melted in a day). Maybe I should say “rain” or “rainstorm” instead of “storm”?

after the storm,

the snowman’s wooden arms

askew on the lawn

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 4:36 am

Subject: further-further to P

To yours of 11 Dec: I fear you’re right about getting into a Brit anthology—not so much too far gone, as too long. (David Burleigh made it into the exclusively North American Haiku Anthology (van den H one [Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, 1999 third edition]) although he’s from Northern Ireland and, though living a long time in Japan, still has a distinctly Orangeman accent!) As to your Watford connections, you may not have caught up with the exciting news that Watford FC seem to be headed for promotion to the Premiership (again, ‘for one season only’, probably). Much seems to depend on whether one of their strikers is evicted by the Home Office and sent back to Sierra Leone, which he left as a child.

As to the attitude of ‘mainstream’ poets to haiku, and haiku largely being confined to a ‘ghetto’, I can’t really agree with you that the fault is mainly on the side of the haiku fraternity. A plague on both your houses, say I. It’s true that there are haijin, perhaps even a majority, who declare they want nothing to do with the ‘mainstream’ (sour grapes?); but there are plenty (including myself) who do everything they can to be ‘accepted’. To be fair, there are also ‘mainstream’ poets who have respect for haiku, though usually little real understanding to support their goodwill. I know one or two poets who actually believe haiku are harder to bring off than the poetic forms they normally write in (this doesn’t stop them producing a shower of haiku if someone offers them a fee, though). One friend of mine—she founded the Poetry School here—was asked by the BBC to produce half a dozen haiku overnight and phoned me up late at night to run her efforts past me. The BBC doesn’t come to me—this may be due to Susumu [Takaguchi] (the Old Bogey) as he, in his World Haiku Festival of 2001, got some sort of embargo on DC [David Cobb] raised at the BBC; a friend phoned up and suggested my name and was told, ‘Oh, yes, we know about HIM!’ So, there are cabals and cliques and clans at work, as in any other cranny of corrupt culture. On the plus side for haiku, Stephen Gill is well regarded by the BBC, and as you probably know has done half a dozen or more very popular 20-minute programmes on Japanese haiku for Radio 3.

Problems begin in the bookshops. Those with a discerning literary clientele, e.g., Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, are not averse to stocking a few haiku titles—they may hive them off onto a shelf of their own, or just slot them among the ‘mainstreamers’ in alphabetical order of poet’s name; but the problem is, they can’t discriminate, fall for the aggressive sales pitch, and stock the glossy but mediocre title, rather than the one the haiku fraternity might prefer to see on the shelves. I have tried to break through by mixing haiku/senryu with some (alas, not all that remarkable) ‘longer poems’, also with haibun and translations, and finding a respected ‘mainstream’ poet to write a foreword. e.g. Palm, with Carol Rumens as my advocate. After a long while I’ve just got 5 copies into the Foyles bookshop at the Royal Festival Hall.

What bookshops put in front of the general public seems in small measure to reflect the potential interest of the genre to the public. As you know, the British Museum’s Haiku has gone into 7 printings (50,000 copies?) [David Cobb wrote this book; see a video review of this book on YouTube] and on the strength of this the Museum bookshop took 10 copies of BHS’s just reissued Genius of Haiku—readings from R H Blyth—and sold them in a fortnight! Whereupon they ordered 50 more.

Over the years my networking with European haijin has grown and I’m now finding my ‘reputation’ on the Continent exceeds by far anything I have here in insular UK. I pinch myself when I’m sent emails saying that in Slovenia a collection of my haiku, in Eng and Slo tr., is among the most borrowed poetry books from libraries there, and ranked by a literary critic as one of the 5 most important poetry translations to have appeared in Slovenia in 2007. (They must have very exotic tastes in Slovenia—one of the other popular titles was a translation of modern Basque poetry!)

I think we are very slowly changing the picture—or is this wishful thinking? One thing that has been found to bring haiku poets and ‘mainstream’ poets closer together is joint renku sessions. Alec Finlay has done good work here, with his transportable ‘renku platform’, which he pitches in remote, atmospheric places, like Hadrian’s Wall. I got a very long (2,000+ word) haibun published in a ‘mainstream’ literary mag of middling standard, recently, but didn’t sound any fanfares about it being a haibun. I think it was just accepted as a short story sequence with odd little poems stuck in. Well, in 15 years we’ve come a way from the first critique I ever received: a fan who had slept with an allegedly up-and-coming ‘mainstream’ poet used her ‘influence’ to get him to run an eye over a sheaf of my ‘greenhorn’ haiku. He was scathing in detail, but the general comment was, oh, yes, these haiku things were popular back in the 60s, but now (in the late 80s) they’ve had their day. Well, he is now virtually forgotten, and haiku marches on.

All the best for the Yule, David

From: Michael Dylan Welch

To: David Cobb

Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 4:32 PM

Subject: Re: further-further to P

Hi David,

I think a team effort has put haiku into a ghetto—mainstream poets and editors have played their part due to misunderstandings and ignorance (not to mention a nearly uniform inability to write haiku of any decent understanding, let alone good quality), but haiku poets do keep to themselves an awful lot. Our best writers should be writing articles about the best haiku poets for mainstream poetry journals. We should lobby for haiku features in such journals now and then (and help with the editing/selection process to keep the dreck out). We should be sending our haiku contest or conference announcements to mainstream journals. We don’t ACT [enough] like part of the wider poetry community, so we aren’t treated with as much respect as I think we could be. Of course, a few of us ARE trying to interact with the larger community, and I think it helps, but it’s still an uphill battle, and it’s not enough.

I recall the American poet Annie Finch (who’s reasonably well known, and not just in formalist circles where she’s most known) once saying, publicly, that “haiku poets are touchy.” And indeed I think we are. It comes from being marginalized too often and for too long. It comes from an inferiority complex, too, I suspect, or a defensiveness. I don’t think our touchiness (from me included) is helping. Yet I often see strong mainstream poets talk about haiku in utterly ignorant and superficial terms. So when we respond, it’s frequently in a “corrective” manner. That can get pretty old quickly. Who wants to be lectured to? So, what IS the best way to respond to such ignorance? Ignoring it just lets it perpetuate. I really don’t know what the best solution is.

One distinction that I’ve found to be helpful in such discussions, though, is to differentiate between “literary” haiku and “pop” haiku (the notion of “popular” haiku tends to go over better than the disparaging notion of “pseudo-haiku”). You’d think that most serious mainstream poets would recognize the difference between pop and literary haiku, but too often they don’t—yet they do sometimes respond, I’ve found, to information that helps them see the difference between literary haiku and everything else. Yet still, some folks don’t care, and feel that haiku can be bent to whatever whims they want (a la Paul Muldoon). And it’s not that Muldoon’s haiku AREN’T literary, for surely they are, so it’s still a struggle to clarify the difference.

At any rate, with Tundra (wish I could keep it going—I still want to), I’ve tried to integrate haiku and mainstream poetry, and it was working very well, I think [I was doubting my ability to publish Tundra; the first issue had come out in 1999, the second in 2001, but moving from California, a new job, buying a house, and starting a family kept me from putting out further issues]. And Modern Haiku, by publishing haiku by mainstreamers (McClure, Collins, Ferlinghetti, Muldoon, etc.) has made steps to educate. I think it will slowly pay off [in hindsight, I would say it hasn’t]. Yet I think “the poor will always be with us,” so to speak—we will ALWAYS have the misperception of haiku to fight against.

Speaking of Stephen Gill, and his success with the BBC, aren’t all of his programs about Japanese haiku? They are practically never about English-language haiku, that I’m aware of. There’s plenty of acceptance (publicly and literarily) for haiku in Japanese (in translation), but that’s not really the issue at hand. It’s haiku in ENGLISH that’s in the ghetto. So when I see Stephen’s success with the BBC, I hope he would channel some (much more?) of that acceptance into talking about English-language haiku (and if you want my opinion, even his Hailstone group is rather quirky and insular, and not the best example of English-language haiku [perhaps because of its disconnection with most English-language haiku, especially American haiku]). And when I see Stephen Addiss being successful with his long series of hardback books combining Japanese art and haiku translations, I wish he could do a similar anthology of English-language haiku. Perhaps his publisher (Weatherhill) wouldn’t go for that (whether he’s tried or not), but it sure would be nice, wouldn’t it? But even when there are successful English-language haiku anthologies (Cor’s, especially his recent baseball anthology, Jackie Hardy’s, and even the English-language originals in your British Museum book—there are a few, right?), they are too few and far between. Maybe that’s all the market can handle, and the market may be the final arbiter, but then there are dozens of lavish books of pseudo-haiku published every year. It’s too bad they do so well. I’ve heard a couple of people say (to my astonishment) that they think such pseudo-haiku books will “open the door” for literary haiku—but I think such books do exactly the opposite, perpetuating misunderstandings, co-opting haiku for nonliterary purposes, funny as they may sometimes be. No, I think they have the opposite effect, reinforcing misunderstandings of haiku rather than helping to educate.

If there’s any consolation in all of this, in the last 10 or 15 years, I do think there have been small changes. People ARE becoming more aware of literary haiku and its distinction from pop haiku. It may take another 50 years for textbooks and curriculum guides to be corrected, but I do think it’s slowly moving in the right direction—so I agree with you there. Or at least I like to think so, to help keep from going mad if it isn’t changing.

Blyth, I think, is far more popular than we realize. I think he’s easy to sell, thus the success of Genius of Haiku.

And I admire what Alec Finlay has been doing. I’d like to meet him someday. Perhaps he could be persuaded (you too!) to come to Haiku North America in August of 2009 (Ottawa). Linked verse and especially collaborative verse is an increasing hit in American poetry—not necessarily in a renku fashion, mind you, but with some awareness of renku. I’m okay with renku, but would prefer simply haiku to be promoted better to the public. But Alec does get himself out there, and get funding for it, which is a huge part of the battle.

Wonder if the British Museum would possibly go for publishing an anthology of English-language haiku? Have you tried?!?

We’re off in a couple of days to visit my sister in Winnipeg for Christmas. Cheers,

Michael

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 6:34 am

Subject: further-further-further

Hi, Michael:

I largely agree with yours of 20 December, in particular that the large majority of our haiku (and it should go without saying, that includes very many of my own) had better not have been published. But that shouldn’t, to my mind, account for the low esteem in which haiku are held in the general literary world. The majority of ‘mainstream’ poems had also better not have been published. In Mainstreamia, people are able to distinguish between the pearls and the swine fodder; so it’s their lack of ability to discriminate that gets haiku rejected, good and bad alike. Couple that with OUR unwillingness to discriminate, because it rocks the boat of friendship to all who aspire to write haiku.

I think the bonhomie of the haiku fraternity—congenial as it is in many ways—is to blame. The climate is so friendly and encouraging to rank novices that they are ready in a year to publish their own first collection, and because this is so easily and cheaply done with a batch of poems as short and space-friendly as haiku, out it comes. Then the reviewers will hardly ever condemn anything except perhaps by faint praise. In other words, the haiku world is also not set up to discriminate. I guess that’s because its prime function is not a literary one, but something connected with lifestyle and philosophy.

The Japanese have a hierarchical system in which, under the leadership of a sensei, they rise in stages from novice to apprentice to journeyman, and eventually might become a master themselves; but even they are given to over-publishing.

As I wrote in my last email, I’ve tried the tack of volunteering to help booksellers who specialise in poetry to set up a stock selection of the more reputable haiku titles. As yet, I’ve never had a reply. Are they suspicious that I just want to flog my own work? Or do they resent the inference that they’re not competent to do it on their own? Or are they so overburdened with admin that they haven’t time to reply? It isn’t that they wouldn’t make money. There’s evidence enough of demand for haiku books that even exceeds that for other kinds of poetry.

The general public’s taste in literature of all kinds is pretty low, and the preference is for what I would call ‘verse’ rather than what I regard as truly ‘poetry’, but this seems not to be a valid distinction in most people’s minds. Thus, the most purchased poetry titles are things like Pam Ayres ‘funny, homely ditties’, Roger McGough’s sarcastic wit with a leaven of sentimentality, Spike Milligan, and so on.

Perhaps the best things are happening on the web? I wouldn’t know about this, because until now I haven’t had the leisure to explore the mass of things on offer and seek out the sites that attract readers/commentators with robust standards. I have been drawn a bit into the German web-scene, and have the impression that their filtering system is doing something to raise standards there. I’m more dubious about the Red Moon anthologies, because they’re set up to appear annually, willy-nilly, extent predetermined by the previous year’s selection, so in a year when the harvest is poor there is still the same amount of haiku selected as in a vintage year.

Yes, Stephen Gill’s success [with the BBC] is entirely with elucidating classical Japanese haiku. And yes, he much overrates the output from his Hailstone group; but (understandably) very few remarkable haiku are ever produced. Stephen knows enough about haiku to be able to recognise this, but his pride in bringing and holding the group together clouds his judgment.

I was heartened when, a month or so ago, I led a workshop at the V & A [Victoria and Albert] Museum. The group, as always, was very mixed, ranging from some with almost no previous exposure to haiku, to some who one might think ought to have joined BHS or some similar organisation by now. My plan was to lead them gradually to appreciation of the way disjunction lifts haiku onto a higher plane than the ‘mere nature note’ or shasei-type haiku which tend to dominate haiku magazines; but in this they actually preempted me. They picked out this feature more or less unaided, the haiku they rated most highly among a varied selection I put in front of them, all made striking use of disjunction and it became clear to me that their hesitation about committing themselves to haiku was precisely because there were too few haiku being produced that used disjunction in an ‘interesting’ way. In fact, I think dear old Blyth put his finger on it, with one of his outrageous axioms, when he said, ‘Unless a haiku is interesting, it isn’t haiku at all.’ The trouble with all those little personal volumes that we haikuists rush to bring out is that they hardly ever have anything ‘interesting’ (or surprising, original, making-the-hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-stand-up) to say.

Would the British Museum be ready to put books of Western haiku on their shelves? Logically, such books would be outside their remit, but in fact it’s probably not out of the question. However, I think it might be because they think my name (because of Genius of Haiku and their own BM Haiku) is a sort of ‘open Sesame’ to rich pickings; and it seems rather presumptuous to push forward only my own books. And the one I’d like to put forward doesn’t exist yet, except perhaps in manuscript. I could see them taking Martin’s Stepping Stones, as it deals with Brit-haiku in a similar vein to Blyth on Japanese haiku. But (a) the committee doesn’t want me to explore that possibility until late next spring at the earliest, and (b) I don’t know how I could do a deal with BM, as the cover price on Stepping Stones provides no margin for [bookseller] discounts—I could only supply to BM at a loss. (Of course, there are circumstances when that might be worthwhile.)

Hoping you’ve enjoyed (or are enjoying) your Winnipeggian Christmas by the time you read this.

Yours, David.

From: Michael Dylan Welch

To: David Cobb

Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 6:51 PM

Subject: Re: further-further-further

Hi David,

Your last message flew across the pond just as I left to go to Winnipeg for Christmas (my sister lives there). I was blessed with an idle evening in which I wrote 75+ haiku and senryu, a pleasant little burst, with quite a few decent poems, all winter and holiday-related. The kids got to try tobogganing for the first time while we were there, too—and I rediscovered by coccyx. [One of the poems I wrote was “toboggan run— / I discover / my coccyx.”]

Mainstream poetry’s despising of haiku may be more in our minds than theirs, but to the extent that it really does exist, I think it’s because a) they think haiku are “easy,” b) they equate shortness with having little value (thus they’re used as filler), and c) when they’ve tried haiku, they think they have been easy, without knowing how far wide of the mark they’ve been. So what else are they to think than to feel that haiku aren’t worth much—just a little poetic exercise for kids on the way to “real” poetry. I think we will always have that attitude among some folks. Whatever! But I also think there are quite a few mainstream poets who have a great deal of respect for haiku. I recently had some discussions with Nancy Breen, editor at Writer’s Digest Books and longtime editor of the Poet’s Market publication, about this very topic. She said that for years she was hesitant to try haiku because she had so MUCH respect for it—and didn’t want to screw up with it the way she had seen so many other people screw up. She and a partner had some interesting blog entries on the subject. See http://www.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Haiku+On+September+11.aspx [link no longer works, but you can read the content at “Haiku on September 11”] (which has links at the top of the blog entry to two other blog entries worth checking out [see the additional commentary and follow-up postings]). Not sure that her haiku quite make the grade, but she is clearly entering into the exercise with respect. And as an editor of a prominent poetry resource book (alas, she’s about to quit), I think her respect says a lot.

Still, I think it’s true that a) haiku is too widely held in low regard by most poets, and b) haiku is still amazingly/widely misunderstood, not only by the general public, but even by the majority of serious poets, who should know better. I think the misunderstanding is the chief reason for the measure of low regard. To me, the solution is to actively educate leading poets, anthologists, and teachers, and to try to correct teacher curriculum guides at all education levels. So, if I win the lottery, I’d like to systematically do that.

Yes, the haiku community being so friendly and supportive DOES have a downside. It’s shocking to me how quickly newbies rush out to publish books of their haiku, and even instructional books ABOUT haiku. How deeply misguided. Yet it naturally stems from the back-patting friendliness of the haiku community, doesn’t it? Of course, these days it’s so much easier, with computers, to publish little books of ANY kind of poetry. The problem is that, with much haiku, those books will get praised by someone. As a private comment, someone like [name withheld], who has written some nice haiku, has WAY too many people singing her praises, lauding her prolificness, hyperactivity, and even her poems, when, to my mind, the great mass of the poems are weak at best—and her many publication choices are very poor decisions. Yet many people “support” her and laud her. It strikes me as so misguided. A similar problem has occurred with Jane Reichhold, though at least she has more poetic talent. But how often Jane has been misguided! Her acceptance has spilled over from the haiku community to the travesty of Kodansha publishing her error-riddled book on how to write haiku—one or more errors on practically EVERY damn page [see William J. Higginson’s review of Writing and Enjoying Haiku on the Modern Haiku website]. Yet some people suck it up. Perhaps such people should be left to wallow in the mire, if they either don’t know better or can’t be bothered to notice the flags being waved to say what the problems are. And now Jane is about to publish a book of her translations of all of Bashō’s haiku—with an introduction by no one less than Billy Collins. I fear another travesty in that book. Jane’s translations are frequently poor, even to me, and I hardly know Japanese that well. And yet she had the audacity to denigrate the Ferris Wheel tanka collection by Amelia Fielden and Kozue Uzawa even though it soon thereafter won Columbia University’s Keene translation prize! How stupid and petty and clueless can she be? So, Jane might be the poster child for this back-patting problem in the haiku community, and [name withheld] and lots of others are examples, too. It’s even seduced me, though I’ve resisted publishing a book of my own work (although now that’s gone on way too long). Hard to find the right balance. And yet folks like Jane and [name withheld], if you “criticize” them, will just cite (clueless) people who praise them. They just don’t get it.

But you’re totally right—the haiku world is not set up to discriminate. About ten years ago I had a long conversation with Dana Gioia (currently chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; also on my Tundra advisory board). He said that the haiku community should do two things to promote itself and gain more respect (and I still think these suggestions are true): One is to be much more discriminating, and to have much more rigorous criticism. Another is to champion some of our best poets in nonhaiku publications (he suggested that Nick Virgilio would be good to champion, but then Dana has a soft spot for Italian-Americans!). Personally, I think Virgilio, though he wrote some great poems [and was very influential in his day, including breakthroughs to mainstream poetry and culture], is overrated (the way Hackett is a haiku pioneer, but not, to me, a haiku “master”). But there are others who could be promoted as Gioia suggests. Folks in the haiku community should indeed be writing reviews and criticism and analysis articles for NONhaiku poetry publications. Why not? (It’s something I’ve done a little bit of and I’m continuing to work on.)

I think there’s much good change in haiku that’s happening online. But I think a fair percentage of it (for example, in Simply Haiku [see the Haiku Foundation website archive]) has to do with volume, frequency, and accessibility, and not enough to do with academic rigour. A few of the smaller poetry-focused haiku online magazines (Heron’s Nest and a couple of others) show some real cutting-edge stuff [by this, I did not mean experimental, but leading in originality, quality, and distinctiveness], as well as solid (informed) tradition. But Modern Haiku and sometimes Frogpond and Blithe Spirit are really the showcases [for English-language haiku], I’d say. But the Web is increasingly the place to watch for haiku, although it’s hard to keep up!

I’ve enjoyed visiting the Hailstone group in Kyoto a few times. Nice people, but surprisingly in the dark about the larger English-language haiku scene—and thus clearly without valuable influences that would improve their poetry. It’s very hard to go up to Stephen Gill and say, “these poems suck” (even if they’re not his) because he basically doesn’t realize some of the influences that HE is missing, and thinks the poems are successful [I feel like I’m being overly harsh here, and should also remember that there are worthwhile Japanese haiku influences that have not reached me and others in the West]. He just sent me the group’s latest anthology. A bit too much apparatus and explanation for my tastes, and the poems are clearly uneven, but there are a few nice ones here and there. But such a book is doomed to unevenness because it represents the group, not quality, and those things are fundamentally at odds.

In many of the haiku workshops I give, I usually just present a lot of haiku, and let the class identify what they see as their common characteristics. It’s heartening indeed when they say, without prompting, that each poem seems to have two parts. It’s quite another thing to get them to write that way reliably, but at least recognizing it is a key thing.

All for now,

Michael

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:03 am

Subject: 4 x further

Hi Michael, thanks for your long mail—the mind boggles that anyone could/ would write 75 haiku in a session, even at Christmas, or especially at Christmas, but I’m glad you feel some good has come of it. Over the past 3 weeks I’ve ‘produced’ three or four—but even that counts as ‘prolific’, these days. (I’m heavily locked into left-brain activities, such as massive amounts of proofreading, and ‘genderising’ books for a country that has apparently just become aware of the traditional imbalance between male/female authors—and now wants that situation rectified to the point where male authors are a threatened species. Lysistrata remains relevant.

Back to haiku: We have a worrying phenomenon, that has popped up from time to time in the past, but is become particularly evident of late: defection from haiku (or BHS) of those who feel the genre isn’t making progress. They are apt to declare the standard of BS [the British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit] is going down, when the truth is, it just doesn’t rise very much. So, they go off and either find other outlets for their haiku or turn to writing ‘longer poems’. Or just pack up writing. I find this slightly egocentric; by staying in the ‘fold’ there might be some prospect of their (supposedly luminary) standard attracting notice and inspiring the more pedestrian to quicken their step and follow in their exemplary stride. A new twist to this is the complaint that those who are capable of setting a ‘good example’ too often exercise little self-criticism / discrimination and are happy to see published stuff that is far from their excellent best (almost ‘playing down’ to more mediocre talents). They should be setting an example of not trying to get as much published as they possibly can. Well, there’s perhaps something in that—but do any of us, even when very experienced, always know what is up to our best standards? And don’t we sometimes want to try out something that seems to be treading near the bounds?

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea, but I put it forward for consideration, that BS should not print all submissions in the same point size, packed into the same serried ranks, irrespective of the editor’s perception of their quality; but rather pick out a few that he thought outstanding, and give them a page of their own. No need to label them, as some mags do—‘haiku of the month’ or whatever; but seeing this discrimination might more subtly make the point [Japanese haiku journals do this, printing more prominent poets in larger point sizes]. Anyway—and I suppose predictably—the ‘democrats’ immediately got up on their heels and ruled that one out. One-nil to populism.

Recent ‘defections’ from BHS include several people the society can ill afford to lose: John Barlow, Matthew Paul, probably Martin Lucas (and they seem to think I should join them). All for the reasons of frustration / dissatisfaction just stated, but also, rather paradoxically (if what they want is finer discrimination) because they or their pals have been ‘hurt’ by reviews that were less than totally positive. You would think the haiku world was too tiny to have factions within it, but the truth is people tend to develop one style of haiku and think this is supreme.

How many times have you heard people say, “I’ve never been very interested in literature, or never had poetry turn me on, until I came across haiku”? This must be worrying; or it is for me, because it suggests these people regard haiku as a sort of anti-literature. Or at least, antidote to it.

Whether the ‘fault’ for the rift lies with the haiku poets or the ‘other poets’ is perhaps not worth spending any more time on. We can’t change ‘their’ perceptions; we can only do something about making our work so good that it’s difficult for some parts of the ‘other poetry world’ to overlook it. (Brings to mind an experience I had in Slovenia last October, at a meeting of literary magazines (mostly interested in doing deals with each other to swap ‘special issues’). The editor of the UK’s ‘flagship’ poetry magazine, Poetry Review (organ of the Poetry Society) declared that hers was a ‘journal of record’ (i.e., if you got into it, you had made the grade—her grade) and at the same time it was ‘open to all genres’. Now her fucking magazine has never published a single haiku or reviewed a single book of, or about, haiku (except on one occasion of nepotism). I didn’t challenge her and say, so is haiku not a genre in your estimation, or are you simply lying? Smug, supercilious, ‘clever’ little bit of Oxonia, her. Has just brought out her own first collection, probably won’t sell 300 copies, even though she reviews for The Guardian, and always gets a byline beside the review to draw attention to her wonderful book.

I don’t have a view of [name withheld]—see the name under haiku regularly, but nothing has particularly struck me about them—she (he?) might just as well be ANON. Must admit I’d probably be put off at first sight by the apparent pretentiousness of what I assume is a pen name. Also reminds me of [name withheld], another very vain puss—when approached about the inclusion of one of her haiku in the Iron Book of British Haiku, said she deserved at least ten, and she wanted to choose which ones they’d be, because she knew better than the editors. (That accounts for her absence from the book!)

As for the Jane you mention, I ceased to be interested in anything she wrote from the time she published [in 1992] her A Dictionary of Haiku (and I was mug enough to buy it) and found that her almanac of season words was based on the quirks of her own experience; so she records ‘pregnancy’ as a ‘summer season word’, because that was the time when she forgot once to take her pill.

I agree with you about the ‘mastery’ of Hackett (though he was an inspiration for me for a couple of years) and Virgilio, and I think perhaps all those who are held up to me as ‘greats’. Little fleas have less fleas and so on ad infinitum. I think it’s more a matter of the frequency with which a haiku poet hits the target: some hardly ever, some relatively often. But no one all the time. Are there, in fact, any masters? Even in Japan, in truth. I once asked Ban’ya [Natsuishi], over breakfast, how many really great haiku poets he thought there were, now alive in Japan. Four, he said. And are you one of them, I asked. His eyebrow arched a little in surprise: Of course! he said. And how many are there in Britain? He asked. None, said I. Not even you? No, I said. I think I meant it; I don’t think he believed me, or perhaps couldn’t even fathom out why I would answer like that.

One of the haiku mags that frankly puzzles me is Randy’s Mayfly [edited by Randy and Shirley Brooks]. Issues are so few and far between [actually, twice a year], and it publishes less than a dozen haiku per issue, so one might imagine this would be the perfect vehicle for an elite brand of haiku. But I never see anything that isn’t as averagely average as average ever gets.

I use much the same technique as you in a public workshop, and have the same experience. If I had the choice, I’d always stop after the appreciation stage. Everything they have seemingly embraced as a principle of good haiku goes out of the window the moment they start to write.

Well, there’s a nice long gripe for you!

Best, David

From: Michael Dylan Welch

To: David Cobb

Sent: Tue, Jan 22, 2008 1:15 pm

Subject: Re: 4 x further

Attached is a small sampling of the poems I wrote at Christmas, including a short haibun that explains how I found the time for my little burst [see below]. We had put the kids to bed very early, to catch a flight very early the next morning—everyone else had gone to bed, but I was still awake, and just started writing! I have bursts like this with some frequency. My old “Thornewood Poems” were like that, too—all written in the space of an hour or so.

For years before I had kids, I used to have the goal of trying to write at least one haiku a day. I usually missed days here and there, but always made up for it on other days with multiple haiku. In recent years (with kids), I go weeks at a time without writing much (sometimes nothing), but I still manage to write 200 to 400 distinct haiku a year, but more in big batches than I used to. If someone gives me the right topic or some other inspiration, I can usually come up with something on demand fairly quickly. Whether it’s any good is another matter, but occasionally it’s not half bad. Everyone works in different ways, of course. And I sit on most poems for a few years before sending them out (most poems of mine being published now were written three to six years ago [as of late 2025 this has now extended to a typical delay of nine to ten years]).

Regarding the “defection from haiku” and the belief that quality is decreasing, I recall going through the same feelings myself in years past. But my answer to that was my “The Seed of Wonder: An Antidote for Haiku Inflation” essay in Frogpond in late 2005 [actually 2006] (reprinted in the 2006 Red Moon Anthology). Perhaps it would be useful to reprint that essay for BHS folks?!? (I’m also currently trying to finish off what is more or less a companion article, called “The Joy of Haiku.”) [This text is still unpublished as of 2025, but has expanded into being more of a book than an article.]

Basically, my opinion is that the quality of haiku in our journals and organizations doesn’t change that much. It’s just that, as a reader, you become numb to haiku, and it seems that the quality has to be ever higher for it to impress you. Another variation on the theme is folks who go into avant-garde or otherwise weird or strange haiku, or other experiments (you can see this in much of Jim Kacian’s haiku, for example). So, it’s really the person who changes, rather than haiku. And so, when people complain about lowering quality, I think they’re misunderstanding what’s happening. It’s (usually) emphatically NOT that they’ve grown “taller” (and are better than others), but that they just don’t see haiku with the same freshness that they used to enjoy. My essay offers a possible solution, to return to the childlike wonder that inspired you with haiku in the first place (hopefully). Actually, this paper was the keynote/welcome address for the Haiku North America conference in September of 2005 [in Port Townsend, Washington], and printed in Frogpond that fall (or was it the winter after that? [it was in the winter of 2006]). A lot of people responded to it. Did you happen to see it? Maybe more British folks could benefit from it? On the other hand, some folks just like to stay aloof (ai li, Tasker, Sir Susumu, etc., and some other folks, maybe including Martin Lucas, just need a break—over here, McClintock was “gone” for decades, Anita Virgil and Alexis Rotella took long breaks, and so on). I knew Martin Lucas was wanting a bit of a break, but has John Barlow defected too? Why?!? And Matthew Paul, too?

I’ve got a positive review of new books by Barlow and Paul slated for the next Modern Haiku [see these reviews]. I find most of the Snapshot Press books to be very good, certainly with their production values. Although there are some quirks in the selections of poems, mostly I find them to be successful. Sometimes a negative review says more about the reviewer than anything else, and everyone who reads reviews should learn to take that into account.

It’s always bugged me when people refer to “poetry and haiku.” What?!? Since when is haiku not poetry? Yet people do make that distinction, even in the subtitles of books. I haven’t probed him too much on it, but Charles Trumbull has said on a number of occasions that he doesn’t think of haiku as poetry, at least not primarily. Well, what is it, then?!? Perhaps that’s just a personal stance, which is his business, and fortunately that stance doesn’t cause too much harm in his editing of Modern Haiku, that I can tell. But it’s still a stance that I find problematic, and not one that’s unique to him. Blyth and Alan Watts and the Beats have added to that stance, I think [with their presumption of haiku as a “Zen” art]. One of these days I’d really like to have a good talk with Charlie about the matter. It’s really a fundamental issue for haiku, I’d say, perhaps a good debate topic for the next HNA conference! Sure, haiku is a “way of life” for some people (I confess it is for me). And that’s all touchy-feely, and some people get very defensive about any attacks on what is their own spiritual quest, understandably. But I like what Marlene Mountain once said: Haiku is not a port in a storm.

And then there’s the old product vs. process debate, where for some people it’s all process (actually, they delude themselves, or they’d never publish, or a poem would never reach a “finished” state to be publishable). There are multiple ways of looking at all of this, of course, but I think the notion of haiku as anti-literature has something to do with the attraction that some people have to haiku, and thus later the feeling of growing bored or dissatisfied with it. It also relates, as you say, to the notion some people have that they’re not attracted to poetry or other literature, except haiku. That’s always deeply mystified me, since I read and write all sorts of poetry and other writing. I think there’s room for whatever floats your boat (I think of Garry Gay who is a fine haiku writer, and thinks deeply and carefully about haiku, but has nearly zero interest in other kinds of poetry or creative writing, both to read and write it—surely he’s not wrong to have a focused interest that’s strongly akin to his photographic aesthetics). At the 2005 HNA conference, we had an open-mic reading one night with the theme of “No Haiku Allowed,” to promote an awareness/acceptance of other kinds of poetry, to connect haiku with this larger poetry world. I think a lot of people appreciated it. Let’s not keep haiku in a ghetto!

Not sure why Mayfly puzzles you. It comes out regularly just twice a year, as it has for ages. You’d think it would be elite, and generally I find the poems to be decent (rarely the head-scratchers that I usually find with regularity in other journals). But you’re right—it’s not the elite publication that you might expect. I think that’s because the number of submissions it receives probably isn’t that high, which is probably because people would rather see it more frequently, or with more poems. Still, I’m always pleased to be included (though, alas, whenever a new issue reaches me, I realize that I’ve missed the [submission] deadline again!).

Comments welcome on the attached poems/haibun! (It’s a Word file—hope you have no trouble with it.) [My attached file included an early draft of a haibun titled “Cowan’s Castle” and a set of thirteen haiku chosen from the 75+ I had written in Winnipeg.]

Michael

[The following are the thirteen haiku I shared with David, along with my “Cowan’s Castle” haibun.]

silent night—

the bell choir bells

at rest in velvet

veiled starlight—

what’s left of the garden

burdened by snow

hoar frost—

the shape of the garden

you’ll no longer tend

flying together

across the front yard,

our children’s snow angels

moonlit snow—

a puppy’s tracks

veer off the path

tick of the radiator—

my son not sleeping

while the snow falls

sundog—

the toboggan’s pull rope

shiny at the bend

the lamp tilted

to light my diary—

the year’s first snow

gathering snow

the grandfather clock set

not to ring after midnight

a zag in the icicles

from last week’s wind—

end of the year

midnight moon—

the upturn of snow

at the windowsill’s end

toboggan run—

I discover

my coccyx

silent night—

a dusting of snow

gathers at the wiper blade

From: David Cobb

To: Michael Dylan Welch

Sent: Tue, Feb 5, 2008 7:32 am

Subject: pearls

Hi, Michael: thank you for your ‘small sampling’ and Cowan’s Castle. Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you on these, have been (again) very busy. Life seems to be like a relay race where there’s always someone on your heels holding out a baton. The baton-holder having in recent days personified him/herself in various guises: the dog’s fleas, the bed bugs in my daughter’s London flat, the President of Ghana wishing to be thought immortal, someone in the Ministry of Culture in Bratislava worried about the state of her womb, my own sister ditto, and the hydra-headed publisher, Macmillan, just being hydra-headed, Haibun Today sending along a charming lady to interview me about all I don’t know about haibun. You get the picture: just normal life.

I’m a little worried about your fecundity with haiku. They seem to be pouring out of you, but maybe at the expense of enough really deep feeling? Or you prefer to keep emotion under lock and key, trapped in a chastity belt? I brush aside the persecution that besets (or used to beset) ‘desk haiku’ (one doesn’t hear so much of it nowadays) but I can’t help thinking of natural pearls and cultivated pearls. Some of your ‘sample’ seem to me to have the polish of good pearls, but no hint of the itch in the shell where they were created. The definite exceptions being where there is cause for laughter, e.g. (the masochistic or sadistic pleasure in ‘toboggan run.’ I’ve slipped down a rock face—a mere 3-4 inches—and pinged my own coccyx, so I know how it feels!) In contrast, ‘silent night’ is beautiful as a haiku of the shasei kind, but almost clinical in its avoidance of touching on a nerve [I’m not sure if he meant “silent night— / the bell choir bells / at rest in velvet” or “silent night— / a dusting of snow / gathers at the wiper blade”; I would argue that poems such as these have no need to touch any nerve]. I want you to write with blood leaking out from under your fingernails, not the point of a stylus or a scalpel.

As to Cowan’s Castle, it’s that rare thing—a haibun more memorable for its haiku than its prose. If it were my haibun (and maybe it’s just as well it’s not!) I’d prune the prose back. Perhaps one thing to bear in mind would be Blyth’s dictum about haiku ‘never being a matter of cause and effect’. It seems to me you have provided some circumstantial detail that is there to show WHY things had to happen as they did, but we don’t need to know it, e.g., ‘around the corner from my sister’s home, which was too small to house us all.’  Later on, ‘three-minute walk’ gives us all the proximity we might need to know; in fact, telling us earlier it was’ round the corner’ hasn’t precluded your need to tell us it again [I agree that he’s right with this criticism]. There is also, I feel, too much circumstance in ‘the architecture department where he had an office at the University of Manitoba.’ Wouldn’t ‘dad’s old office at the university’ be enough? [Yes, he’s probably right.] And ‘to catch a 7.00 a.m. flight the next day’ is another example of a cause we don’t vitally need to know [again, I agree]. Enough that you had the evening to yourself (for whatever reason.) Open-endedness, and often ellipsis, can be just as much virtues of haibun prose as of haiku.

[In response, what I shared grew out of my enthusiasm for having written so productively on my Christmas visit to Winnipeg. For some reason I didn’t internalize David’s suggestions enough to revise my “Cowan’s Castle” haibun, even when it was published in 2020 in the first issue of Drifting Sands Haibun, although its insufficient revision was at least in part because I lost track of David’s email and had forgotten its suggestions.]

I’m told Matthew P and John B both got the hump over the way certain books had been reviewed (negative things said about their own, and things they regard as too positive/ flattering said about the books of others). I don’t see the justification for this—John has operated in quite a censorious way with submissions to Snapshot Press (I rate him as having discerning taste in choosing haiku ‘of a certain kind’, but blinkered to the range of good different kinds of haiku); and people have been applauding Matthew for writing a series of hard-hitting reviews of recent haiku books.

If I didn’t think haiku was poetry (or could be) I wouldn’t be trying to write it! Though I have to admit that some five or six ‘verses’ of mine have, over the years, ended up printed on O-hi O-cha’s [Ito-En] cans of green tea, so perhaps haiku are also ‘thirst stimulators’? Haiku may be a ‘way of life’, but so is all poetic activity, surely? A way of death, too, if you think of Keats and the Romantics in general.

Now I must go. Another baton!

Best, David

Don’t be distressed by this, Michael; you’re doing good, old mate, but we can all of us most of the time do better.

~ ~ ~