Contents:

Aleksandar Ševo: Our Daily Haiku

Anita Virgil: A Prize Poem

Dragan J. Ristić: Haiku: East and West

Jim Kacian: Speech on Haiku in the Balkans

H. F. Noyes: A Favourite Haiku

Susumu Takiguchi: Can the Spirit of Haiku be Translated?

Saša Važić: Roads and Side-Roads

Jim Kacian: What Do Editors Really Want?

Interview with an'ya

Interview with Dimitar Anakiev

Interview with Robert Wilson

 

H. F. Noyes, Greece

SILENCE AND OUTREACH IN HAIKU

One feels the depth, the sabi, of haiku perhaps most of all in poems of quietness. The omission of the period in the modern haiku allows an opening out to the silence of the Universe. Haiku can be a way of sensing life's wholeness, that oneness which spreads to infinity, to all eternity. In silence, one feels no interruption in this boundless expansion. What a limitless reach in this Bashō haiku:1

 

A rough sea! 
Stretching out over Sado 
The Milky Way. 

 

We may experience silence more intensely in the presence of sound:

 

Rose petals tumbling 
in silent succession— 
the roaring waterfall. 
- Bashō2 
  

 

We are all familiar with the amplification of silence when a loud sound ceases. This haiku is based upon Boris Pilnyak's prose:3

 

the bell toll wanes— 
streets sink into silence 
even more deeply 

 

I recently had the pleasure of reading the remarkable American collection, Midwest Haiku Anthology, and was especially drawn to the stillness in two of Virgil Hutton's haiku:

 

how quietly 
the rain changes to snow— 
winter evening 

dusk over the lake—
a turtle's head emerges  
then silently sinks 

 

Both well illustrate William Higginson's description of sabi, in The Haiku Handbook as “beauty with a sense of loneliness in time.”

What I look for, over and over, are haiku that suspend the kind of time Wordsworth deplored in “The World Is Too Much With Us:”

...for everything, we are out of tune...

An Aegean holiday always gets me back in tune with eternity:

 

halfway home 
old summer pleasure boat 
slowed by the moon 

 

In Kōko Katō's Four Seasons, I find two of these rare haiku that carry one reliably beyond time:


Autumn afternoon— 
without a ripple three white clouds 
cross the pond 
- Patricia Neubauer 

Summer's going— 
a bird shadow follows 
a winding stream 
- Anna Holley 

 

And here is a haiku with an infinite extension of sound:


phoebe cry faint    
in the mist—  
everywhere    
- tony suraci 

 

1 trans. by Dana B. Young

2 ed. from 4-line hokku by H. F. Noyes

3 ed. by H. F. Noyes

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