David died on the 6th November 2020 aged 94 Shiki said that in order to write a haiku a good mental discipline to follow was to look down at the violet at your feet and then look up at the distant mountain. David’s version of this might have been to take infinite care of a […]
In recent years there’s been an attempt to brainwash anybody involved in haiku-writing with the idea that haiku is a ‘poem of consciousness’. The profound objection to this as a bald mantra is firstly, as RHBlyth points out, a haiku is NOT a poem in the ordinary sense of the word; the corollary of which […]
I write a fairly regular ‘essay’ in a series called RANSACKING THE PAST for display on The British Haiku Society Website. Sometimes I dredge books of my own early haiku for ones I could have done better (most of them) and write a critique, sometimes I look at old articles in Blithe Spirit (the BHS […]
I was on a train to London the other day. Sitting opposite & next to me were a couple of blokes on their way to Twickenham to watch a rugby match. When they’d run out of their own conversation about things happening in the construction industry, the more obviously affable of the two turned to […]
Discovering Haiku I arrived at haiku sometime in the 1960’s while I was reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. I was very drawn to his argument that went something like this: in Western philosophy (and, as a result, pervasive throughout western thinking processes) there’s a habitual cognitive dichotomy between thinker and thing-thought, between mind […]
Here’s another hundred haiku—that’s three hundred posted to Facebook since January 1st 2012. Meanwhile the dreadful lurch towards so-called ‘Modern Haiku’ continues and seems likely to act as a virus in the wrinkles of the human brain. My own approach to haiku is that these little three-line poems come from a different place in the […]
‘A haiku a day keeps the doctor away…’ James Kirkup [RIP]—who also said, ‘I follow no path; the path follows me…’ At the beginning of 2012 there was talk on Facebook of putting up a haiku a day for a year. Half way through the month of January I decided to give the idea a […]
It’s often recommended that in order to operate effectively at all levels in the world one needs to be firmly in the present moment. The recommendation often comes without practical guidance. A pleasant and painfree way to be firmly in the present is to write haiku. The habit of haiku-writing keeps one centred in the […]
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