The Unswept Path: Contemporary
American Haiku, edited by John Brandi and Dennis
Maloney. Preface by William J. Higginson. (Buffalo,
New York: White Pine Press, 2005). 222 pages, 5
x 7 , perfectbound. ISBN 1-893996-38-7. $15.00 from
booksellers.
At the first biennial Haiku North America conference, in 1991, George Swede made a
case for the value and need of what he called elite
haiku anthologiescollections not of a great
number of fine poems, such as Cor van den Heuvels
venerable The Haiku Anthology, but of fewer
poets, showing a greater depth of work, that could
be held up not only as truly exemplary poetry but
as a focus on the poets rather than upon their common
genre of poetry. The Unswept Path, a new
anthology of contemporary American haiku,
shows significant depth, but, despite showcasing
only thirteen poets, still has a greater focus on
breadth. It may be this breadth, its demonstration
of the variety of approaches to haiku,
that keeps it from being the elite sort of anthology
that Swede predicted would be valuable to the still-burgeoning
haiku community in North America a dozen years ago.
Nevertheless, the breadth of this book remains significant,
and it serves as a further indication that American
haiku is past burgeoning and, as William J. Higginson
puts it in his preface, claims its place as
a full-grown member of the family of American poetry.
Perhaps this maturity comes from
variety, and Higginson writes that this book includes
a greater variety of English-language haiku than
any other book I can think of. It lacks the
visual / concrete approach to haiku, as well as
surreal, avant-garde, political, and social-justice
haiku that can be found elsewhere, but the variety
here is still astonishing, though some readers may
feel that it embraces some work that is less than
successful.
Writing separately from the poetry
that prevails in the North American haiku community
are such voices as Diane Di Prima and Michael McClure,
both often associated with the Beat era, though
still, of course, continuing to write today. Their
window into haiku looks out from a different side
of the teahouse (or abattoir, if you prefer). One
gets a sense, too, that the poems selected for inclusion
form a greater percentage of their output in the
genre than it does for most other poets in the book.
This seems particularly true for Sonia Sanchez,
who comes across here and elsewhere as a dabbler
in haiku, where many of the poems seem naive to
the full roundness of haiku aesthetics, choosing
instead to strike the poets self-defined targets
for what a haiku is missing so many others
that are widely considered more important. The point
of this book, of course, is to show what targets
are important to her. The book thereby demonstrates
the prediction that Harold G. Henderson made several
decades ago that haiku will become whatever the
poets make of it. Cid Corman, too, bends the haiku
genre to his own needs, not out of ignorance, to
be sure, but because poetry in his own voice
is a higher calling than fitting a form, believing,
too, as I think he did, that forms should be dynamic
rather than static to remain vibrant, gaining energy,
as he says, by being a little off track.
These poets mentioned so far are
primarily not haiku poets, whereas the majority
of the books other writers have written a
great deal of haiku, including Margaret Chula, Patricia
Donegan, Penny Harter, Christopher Herold, William
J. Higginson, and Elizabeth Searle Lamb. Between
them sit John Brandi, Steve Sanfield, and Edith
Shiffert. Brandi and Sanfield have written haiku
for decades, but largely aloof to the English-language
haiku community, preferring for many years, even,
to call their work hoops, using a term
other than haiku seemingly in deference
to how their work differed from haiku in Japanese.
By virtue of living in Kyoto, Shiffert would seem
to have been more connected to haiku in Japan than
in North America. She, like Penny Harter, also writes
mostly longer poetry, but Harters haiku work
exhibits a much closer connection to the aesthetics
common to North American haiku. As Shiffert opines
of haiku, There never were any rules, just
fashions and preferences, a useful injunction
that points out our own predilections as habits.
What this book is about, ultimately,
is influences. Though influences are not overtly
apparent from or much discussed by the book itself,
informed haiku readers will be sensitive to a sort
of similarity in the work of Chula, Donegan, Harter,
Herold, Higginson, and Lamb; see a difference but
cousinness in the work of Brandi and
Sanfield, with Corman close behind; and notice another
sort of difference in Shiffert. That leaves Di Prima,
McClure, and Sanchez, probably in that order, as
increasingly distant from the prevailing influences
upon North American haiku (they may fi nd this distance
irrelevant to their haiku, mind you, preferring
instead to be closer to or farther from Japanese
aesthetics as they see them, to the extent that
they differ). The influences that prevail in much
English-language haiku run the danger of producing
a sameness in the poems, yet the opposite danger
is that receiving too few of the valuable influences
that have shaped haiku in English can lead to a
bastardization of the genre, a naive co-opting of
the genre that does disservice to haikus history
and aesthetics (witness the nonliterary pseudohaiku
trifles of haiku error messages, Spam-ku, honku,
and their ilk). Yet, as Higginson reminds us in
the preface, haiku may have too many faces
to appreciate it fully from only one point of view.
McClure writes under the influence
of Open Form, and if one closes ones eyes
to his centering of words down the page, and the
wordfull use of capitalized words and
other eccentricities of typography,
as he himself calls them, the images are frequently
striking. The poems vary greatly in length, and
sometimes lack the two-part juxtapositional structure
and overt seasonal reference common to the haiku
aesthetic, but there is still something there for
there for there the poet that calls him to associate
his work with haiku, perhaps at least the idea that
he wants readers to approach these poems with a
haiku mind-set, whether they are haiku
or not. The visual gimmicks function as his way
of making the haiku genre his own. At the very least,
these poems are honest with the self, listening
closely without prejudice, speaking clearly without
emotional censorship, a state of flow akin to jazz.
Even more of a jazz riffiness occurs with Sonia
Sanchez, who writes with a black vernacular to release
moments of poetry and poetry of moments, but it
seems that her work is included more for who she
is and the specific otherness of the work than for
the success of her work as haiku. One can read Is
there a fo rent / Sign on my butt? You got no /
Territorial rights here, and question whether
its haiku. There are no end of beginners who
write in a similar way. It is easy to imagine that
she (and perhaps McClure and Di Prima) has never
read or deeply understood such cornerstone influences
as Higginsons Haiku Handbook and van
den Heuvels Haiku Anthology. But the
point of this new anthology, so it seems to me,
is to make the reader think: Whether a poem is a
haiku or not could be asked not just of Sanchezs
work but of any poem in this collection.
How important should these cornerstone
influences be? What if they never existed? What
if the Haiku Society of America school
of haiku, if there were such a thing (as has been
claimed), had never existed? The haiku community
is frequently blinded by an us and them
mentality. If a poet is successful with haiku, the
haiku community claims that poet proudly
if he or she uses its aesthetics. If
not, then he or she can be rejected, perhaps even
scorned for being naive, or not knowing
the secret Henderson handshake. The
haiku community risks ghettoizing itself as a result.
While the community craves broader acceptance of
haiku in the mainstream poetry world, it seems unwilling
to agree to the terms of such acceptance, prompting
nonhaiku poets to say, as I once saw in an online
poetry discussion forum, that haiku poets
are touchy. Perhaps its an inferiority
complex prompting this defensiveness, and the haiku
community is touchy because it believes it is misunderstood
or marginalized, yet also believing it has seen
the light and that all others are haiku heathen.
In contrast, books such as The Unswept Path
may signal a maturing out of this inferiority complex,
a step towards a mutual acceptance of haiku in the
mainstream with the most necessary step coming
from the haiku community itself. As such, it seems
significant that this books lead editor, Brandi,
sits in a bridge position between the haiku community
and those who may be unaware of it. Herold, for
example, would surely have produced a very different
anthology, and it is useful for the haiku community
to have its assumptions challenged by the fresh
perspective provided by this book. If English-language
haiku is ghettoized, it is the haiku community itself
that has put it there. The world of mainstream poetry
has not rejected haiku nearly so much as haiku poets
have rejected mainstream poetry, or at least mainstream
understandings of haiku. Certainly there is some
measure of misunderstanding of haiku by the mainstream
poetry world, such as the trivialization that anything
in a 575syllable pattern is a
haiku, or even that the 575 pattern
is relevant in English, but there is also misunderstanding
an excess of limitation among haiku
poets as to what haiku can be, or should be, in
English. Some Western haiku poets act as purists
(whether they claim it or not), and there is some
virtue in that, but not in being puritanical. In
Japan, haiku has much more variety and fracturing
than the Western haiku community believes it does
or wants it to have in English, and The Unswept
Path is a cracking open of the door to legitimizing
or at least recognizing the variety also evident
in English. This book indicates a reaction against
puritanism, a puritanism that the haiku community
needs to know that it has.
In the last few years, Modern
Haiku has sought to bus poets between the haiku
ghetto and the larger city of poetry around it,
to take down the ghetto walls. My own journal, Tundra,
has also sought to cross-pollinate haiku and other
short poetry. Prominent poets such as Billy Collins,
Ruth Stone, Gary Snyder, Ted Kooser, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Paul Muldoon, and many others have taken haiku safaris
showing, as Higginson said at the 2005 Haiku
North America conference in Port Townsend, Wash.,
not only that haiku is mainstream, but has been
for some time. Whether one likes it or not, journals
such as Raw Nervz, too, are saying that haiku
need not be as narrowly defined in subject matter
as other haiku journals often are. Now The Unswept
Path contributes to the conversation by seriously
acknowledging a greater variety of voices than ever
before. These voices have long existed, but seldom
acknowledged like this, if ever. This may, in fact,
be a pivotal change.
A less positive thought about the
book is its nagging feeling of chumminess. The publisher,
White Pine Press, has separately published books
by at least Brandi, Shiffert, Chula, and Corman.
Chulas Katsura Press has published Herold.
Sanfield is a long-time friend of Brandi. With more
research, perhaps other close connections could
be found, and while these sorts of selection connections
happen all the time in poetry anthologies, the distracting
excess raises the question here of whether some
people were included because they were handy, of
who else could have been included, and why they
werent. No reason for the selection of these
poets is given anywhere. Also, though some of the
these poets is given anywhere. Also, though some
of the these poets live in Japan, all are American.
This limitation fulfills the promise of the books
subtitle, but are we supposed to believe that the
book is representative? And representative of what?
For better or worse, we are left to draw our own
conclusions. Still, though the book succeeds in
providing a deep taste of certain varieties of haiku,
perhaps the reader could have been served better
if the chumminess were lessened, or the selection
process explained. Otherwise, one may wonder why
American poets such as John Martone (vertical
haiku), Chris Gordon (horizontal or
one-line haiku), Marlene Mountain (political, feminist,
and concrete haiku), or even John Dunphy (social
activism) were denied the opportunity to provide
even greater variety. Allen Ginsberg, if his estate
werent charging arms and legs for even the
briefest of poems, could also have been represented
for his haiku variation that he called American
sentences. And what about Jack Kerouacs
pops as a further variation on haiku
that preceded Ginsbergs? Though space and
cost are surely the primary limitations for these
omissions, other more centrist haiku writers, too,
could have been added to balance poets chosen for
the sake of variety. As broad and important as the
panorama is here, the picture remains incomplete.
As Lee Gurga puts it in his afterword
to Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore, the
new book of haiku by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul
Muldoon (could one be more prominently mainstream?),
There is a battle raging for the soul of American
haiku. He defines the battle (or kerfuffle,
as the case may be) as being between word-based
haiku and image-based haiku. The Haiku Society of
America has long been under the spell of image-based
haiku, largely thanks to the Zen influence of R.H.
Blyth and others, yet this is not the only way.
Plenty of image-based haiku are written without
regard to Zen, of course, but perhaps the influence
of Zen suchness has led to this emphasis
on image-based haiku in America. In contrast, Word-based
haiku, Gurga says, is less lofty in
... intent, and exhibits greater fun and creativity
with words. Muldoons poems certainly fit this
style, as do the jazzy vernacular poems of Sonia
Sanchez from The Unswept Path, and perhaps
also Michael McClures. Occasionally the work
of Brandi, Sanfield, and Corman fits here, too.
The Unswept Path may not strongly articulate
this distinction, but it exemplifies it. If poets
reading this book feel inclined to reject some of
the word-based haiku, they are revealing their own
predisposition to image-based haiku. One has to
be conscious of such differences before one can
consider accepting them. This book helps to make
us aware of the differences. As such, The Unswept
Path is an important new haiku anthology
among the most important in the past decade
not just of haiku as it may become, but haiku as
it is (whether one likes it or not), embracing word
and image-based traditions by both the haiku community
and by mainstream poets. Perhaps, some day soon,
there will be no difference at all. The question
is, should we fight for this change, or fight against
it? Or is even the impulse to fight part of the
problem?