Haiku with an Agenda

Are haiku important? Not by a long shot. Not when there is hunger in the world, and poverty. Not when there is suffering, or hatred. Not when illness and disease and homelessness and a hundred other issues still persist around the world. But I am also reminded of the song “Bread and Roses” (I like the version by Judy Collins best). In it, she sings that “Hearts starve as well as bodies—give us bread but give us roses.” The story behind this lyric is compelling to me, and reminds me why art is important in life (you can read about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses).

If haiku are not important in the face of human suffering, the obvious question might be to ask if haiku should try to alleviate suffering in some way—by promoting world peace or by employing some other agenda. Hell no. Please! Haiku with an agenda such as this makes the aesthetic ideal subservient to the political or activist agenda—and thus, in my opinion, nearly always destroys the art. Yes, art can be political, and some good art does have an agenda, but my feeling is that, most of the time, haiku is better off without it.

Haiku has a sort of importance—as with other arts, it’s something we live FOR. We seek to overcome the suffering in life so that we can enjoy the magnificent pleasures of being human. But haiku should not, in my opinion, ever have an agenda—other than an aesthetic one. Haiku will be what it is, and I don’t see how it matters whether it has “importance” or not.