All True Haiku are the Anchors of Experience During this Plaguetime, I continue to ransack old notebooks; the problem is that one thing keeps on leading to another, one photo to other photos, an endless stream of things all written down in various kinds of exercise books, stapled to start with but from 1957 onwards […]
In Blithe Spirit Volume 10/2 (June 2000), Kai Falkman refers to a persuasive model he created – ‘The Pyramid of Meaning’ – which eventually became the title of the book published by Red Moon Press.He considers how Bashō’s old pond a frog jumps in the sound of water illustrates the model:- …the first line evokes […]
If It’s true that haiku is a state of mind, as I believe it is, the next question is: What is the right state of mind for writing haiku? But before that you must answer this question: What is mind? And that’s a question which pre-supposes that there is only one mind to bother about; […]
IntroductionFor a whole week to the 9th April 2018, I suspended all other daily avocations to set about reading John Redwood Anderson’s three volume poem Triptych which I’ve had on my shelves for some years, unread, many pages uncut. Oh, the pleasure of slitting them as you read with a sharp kitchen knife. Can’t get […]
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 […]
At the British Haiku Society Spring Gathering in May 2012 a new phrase was invented: ‘Knotweed Hykoo’. This refers to ‘Modern’ or ‘Gendai’ little poems. Most people know that Japanese knotweed is a pernicious weed whose roots can burrow through concrete and undermine houses. It seems to me that the House of Haiku is under […]
‘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 […]
Flow A couple of weeks ago I delivered a sort of entertainment to the British Haiku Society’s AGM Festival in which I argued that writing haiku was akin to ‘taking your mind for a walk’ in much the same way as Paul Klee advocated ‘taking your pencil for a walk’ in order to make drawings. […]
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