DEFINITIVE
DEFINITIONS
ruminations on modern haiku
by
Tim Chamberlain
Personally
- reading English language haiku, i.e. haiiku written by contemporary poets from
Western backgrounds, generally sparks one of two distinct reactions in me.
Sometimes such poems will enliven and inspire me and it’s not long before I
have a pencil in my hand in place of the haiku magazine I had been reading.
More often than not though, my reaction is one of acute ridiculousness which
usually progresses into the dispirited feeling that finds me resolving to
abandon my own pretensions in haiku. How can any non-Japanese really write true
haiku? Can a single word, set isolated and alone upon a page, appended by the
poet’s nominally possessive assertion, amount to a legitimate expression? No.
No - might constitute a suitably concise and apt response. Yes. But equally -
yes - (a most poetic opposite) could supply itself as the definitive answer
and, thus, just as sensibly find itself the final word on the matter.
What
is the end though? What resolution can be drawn? The defining
of a “haiku movement” in English? Necessarily, to find a serious sense
of comprehension we need to refine a cogent terminology. Set up guidelines. Hem
the skirts of this particular poetic parade. This would all be very well if the
“movement” which we are trying to pin weren’t itself intent on breaking its own
conventions!
Perhaps
the current climate of haiku in English is too changeable. No pithy epithets
can possibly define it. It seems not to want to conform, yet oddly it
simultaneously appears to break the strictures applied to it almost as though
it were unaware of its own creative anarchy. This characteristic wilful versus
unconscious inconsistency is its present dynamic. Like a river in its thundering
torrent it is moving the unseen boundary markers of the fields it has
overwhelmed, engulfing its own natural landscape so that it can shape and then
re-shape that landscape over and over. This constant process of transformation
is what, for me at least, makes the current flow of English language haiku so
captivating - it’s what inspires me both to creativity and to despair. I would
urge all poets taken by this tide to jump off the rafts of rules and strictures
being floated by anyone who wants to still the waters! The time for critical
reflection will come once the waters have receded, once the deluge has dried
into the salt crystals of piquant memory - only then will it be possible to
peal back the sediments which will be left and accurately describe the formation
of this landscape that is currently being created in its first era of flux, an
epoch which seems to be lengthening over some decades now already past,
continuing perhaps into even more yet still to pass. We might well have to
leave off defining this Diluvian for quite some time
yet, realistically it might not even be up to ourselves at all.
© Tim Chamberlain, 2004