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Volume 39.1
Spring 2008

book review:

Big Sky: The Red Moon Anthology 2006

Reviewed by Peter Yovu

Big Sky: The Red Moon Anthology 2006 (Winchester, Va.: Red Moon Press, 2007). 176 pages, 5 x 8, perfectbound. ISBN 1-893959-60-0. $20.95 postpaid from the publisher, PO Box 2461, Winchester, VA 22604 or from <www.redmoonpress.com>

In “The Seed of Wonder: An Antidote to Haiku Inflation,”the essay that concludes Big Sky, the Red Moon anthology for 2006, Michael Dylan Welch calls for a renewal of wonder in how we approach and appreciate haiku and, inseparably, the world. He writes about an “inflation of expectation” that afflicts many readers, whose chief symptom is “haiku ennui,” perhaps characterized as “been there, read that,” and recommends slowing down to find out what we may be missing in our quest for the “superior poem.” I was grateful to have Welch’s reminder so available, a pleasant undertone from within the book itself.

Welch’s thoughts helped me slow down and appreciate many of the poems in Big Sky. Here are four, selected somewhat at random. They represent much of what can be found in the anthology.

autumn sunset ...
she lowers the silk
into the dye

     Francine Banwarth

winter rain ...
the light
from the flower shop

     Timothy Hawkes

 

rainy season ...
a smile on everything
the child draws

     Paul Pfleuger, Jr.

spring rain
a snail emerges
from the watering can

     Andrew Shimield

These are gentle, likeable poems, “seeds” that, dropped into the soil of the imagination, invite feelings, unexpected associations, and reverie, a world, if one wishes to linger — with wonder — long enough. It is possible to rest in them awhile.

An anthology such as Big Sky is more than a collection of individual poems. It gives us the opportunity to study a bigger picture. We see not only what people are writing but to some extent how. We get a glimpse of trends and patterns. One might argue that multiple editors, even working independently (as is the case with the RMA series), will tend to make relatively middle-of-the road selections in what they consider best, whereas a single editor (as in David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series) might feel more willing to make controversial or quirky choices and have the opportunity to say why. Despite inevitable limitations, however, the RMA gives us the best picture available of what is happening in the world of English-language haiku.

The poems I have quoted and many others in Big Sky fit into a dominant style and are examples of an approach that becomes evident as through recurrence. The poems contribute to the trend, and the trend reveals (and to some extent creates) the weakness in the poems. This is the situation I want to explore in this review, and to look beyond, guided not only by wonder, which on its own wants everything to be, well, wonderful, but also by discrimination.

I notice that many who write about haiku resort to statistics to support ideas they have. I will do the same here, in support of the idea that a kind of sameness has settled into much of what gets published. It is evident in Big Sky. The sameness goes beyond particulars of form, but I will begin there. Of 171 poems in the book, more than 100 begin with a noun preceded by an adjective. Tom Tico, in a brief essay he wrote for Frogpond , [1] noticed how frequently one finds this construction in the major haiku periodicals. He was careful to say, and I agree, that good poems are being written this way, but calls nonetheless for more variety.

The most common approach overall is the use of a first line giving context to a poem, followed by a significant detail. I think of it sometimes as a cinematic approach, whereby an establishing shot, taken from a distance, gives a sense of time and place and is followed by a closer look focusing on something tellingly specific.[?2] It as an enactment of the way perception works for most of us much of the time: we tend, in new situations, arriving at work, etc., to take in the general sense of things before focusing on details. We look to see what mood the boss is in, then gaze a moment at the glass paperweight. We wake and check out the weather, then notice the cardinal in the sumac tree. It is mostly a habitual thing, probably based on the need to know we are safe — where we are — before we can relax and take in the interesting or pleasurable things available to the senses. Often it happens the way we want it to happen, as an easing into situations and into our life. It is this mode of perception that is mirrored most often in our haiku and senryu.

It is perhaps more difficult to talk about the quality of sameness as regards the tone, energy, or subject matter of the haiku in Big Sky, all of which is certainly affected and even determined by the cinematic approach in general, and the adjective + noun approach as its principal means. I would say that the most common characteristic of the haiku in Big Sky is that they are poems of gradual or gentle awakening. The first line — “morning frost,” “November rain,” “country town,” “autumn light,” — invites the reader to rest a moment, to bring one’s own memories and associations into play; there is no verb or other indicator to propel us immediately out of our reverie. We know where we are — we know, because we have read and written so many poems that begin this way, that what follows will likely lead us further in and invite us to stay. In particular the adjective + noun first line construction signals that we will not be too rudely awakened, that we will not be dropped out of the poem into a space of unknowing but will be gently held in it in a kind of maternal embrace. Many of these poems feel domesticated.

These then are the poems that the English-language haiku community, as evidenced by their inclusion in this anthology, does very well. They are the haiku we know how to write, the haiku we can write. We write them often. It would be foolish to say that every poem that begins with a noun preceded by an adjective or with an establishing image is going to be a poem of gentle awakening. Here is one by Gonzalo Melchor that is not (and later we will look at others):

lunch alone
I catch the shadow
of my jaw chewing

There is nothing comforting about this poem. It begins with an establishing shot, but not one to settle into easily. It has humor, yes, but it is disquieting more than funny. It is disjunctive at every turn; we understand “I catch the shadow” in its colloquial sense, underlying which is the more disturbing sense of catching something we would rather not. It feels like it could be the beginning of a film noir. The emphasis on “ch,” “sh,” and “juh” sounds and the oddness of the disembodied jaw add to the feeling of aching loneliness. This haiku by these means has allowed something painful to come into it, whose force may have surprised the writer (“No surprise in the writer,” said Robert Frost, “no surprise in the reader.”) The writer did not resist it, and that gives the poem life, which allows it to both inhabit and break out of the mold. There is a dimension present in the poem that many lack. We will treat this again later.

All too often poems that use this technique feel controlled, which means essentially that the author stopped writing before anything surprising or unexpected could enter into it. A mood was evoked sufficient to call it a haiku. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it is merely the product of what we know how to make, as if from a kit. It is most evident in what Ken Jones, writing in Blithe Spirit, [3] calls “haiku of closure, which are end-stopped for the reader,” poems in which “metaphor is closed, and all that remains for the reader is to chuckle, or admire the ingenious contrivance.” There are haiku and senryu of this nature in Big Sky, some more subtle than others. The haiku I quoted earlier are not end-stopped, but the sense of having settled for a familiar effect remains. I admit that the prevalence of so many haiku employing the same technique may influence my judgment in this regard, which nonetheless does not speak well of prevalence.

It is difficult not to believe that in many poems the form determined the perception and not the other way around. As a means of exploration this procedure may be useful if the author is able to follow it to the point of discovering what the true impulse is and allowing that to dictate the form. If a sense of control or construction is foremost, however, there will inevitably be a sense of something missing, images coming across as having been juxtaposed arbitrarily, a marriage arranged by some parenting notion of how a haiku is supposed to behave. Every poem is an act of the imagination; even the most spontaneously written haiku or senryu relies on the translation of the raw data of the senses into an image. Every poem is constructed, but there must be present at its core some other factor that burns through the poem’s own making to stand naked ... and alive.

Here is a haiku of Ed Markowski’s that is located unpretentiously in the realm of mind and of imagination, which by the strength of its juxtaposed images remains embodied but artfully casts off all sense of construction and control:

fog ...
I’ve got to begin
somewhere

This is not a poem of gentle awakening. It kicks us out of bed — or rather, its humor disarms and charms us and then it kicks us out of bed. Richard Gilbert, writing in Modern Haiku, [4] says: “One of the dynamic properties of haiku is the ability to rapidly, shockingly irrupt habitual thought.” The poem has an all-at-once integrated feeling. The word “fog” was not a response to an ad in the haiku classifieds: “lonely image seeks compatible mate to help make sense of its life.” It does more than provide context. It holds its own as equal to what follows. There is a dialog going on, layers of juxtaposition, implicitly between thing and idea, between outer and inner reality, fog as something palpable, condensing on the skin, and existential. It is funny and scary both.

A number of haiku in Big Sky are successful in playing against expectations, but not many are examples of the “irruptive” dynamic Gilbert describes, least of all in the adjective + noun construction. Haiku seem to need this dynamic in some form, and the best will unmistakably possess it, but it is rare because mostly we do not want to live in a way that will genuinely produce such work. It is too unsettling. We rely too strongly on what we know, which is reflected in many of the poems in the anthology: they are well-crafted, earnest, and safe. Very few have a quality of being “right” and also inexplicable. Jack Galmitz’s haiku risks it:

My life
Belongs to everything?:
Beyond the Milky Way

Certainly our haiku and senryu come directly out of the way we perceive things, which is often the way we want to perceive things. Exploration ends where habits set in. Habits in writing are habits in perception, mutually reinforcing. A prevalent construction will lead, most often, to predictable results. Maybe it can’t be helped — after all, we cannot be vibrantly alive and alert all the time — but for the life and health of haiku, I believe it has to be. We need to challenge ourselves and each other. The current maternal embrace of the community, evidenced by the prevalence of a narrow range of work being produced, is not healthy. I am not advocating some kind of Rimbeaudian “disordering of all the senses”; more like a “disordering (irrupting) of all the habits.”

Another essay in Big Sky echoes my concern. In “When Haiku Was Poetry” Jim Kacian writes, “One way or another, we have been each others’ teachers, and to an inordinate degree, a very few writers and educators have shaped the discourse we have shared.” Also “The result of our haiku education is a diminished range of possibilities, which has consequences, some of which are not best for the future of haiku, or for our own practice.” Speaking of a few seminal handbooks and anthologies, he writes: “These books, taken as a whole, have done more to shape the community’s notion of what haiku is than all the individual collections of haiku ever printed.... The very idea of what we mean by ‘good’ is shaped by what appears in these volumes.” Surely it has not escaped Kacian’s attention that the RMA series is a considerable shaper of what is good.

Many have spoken of the fact that English-language haiku remains imitative, in diction, in subject matter, and form, of the Japanese. Gilbert writes: “A main element for constraint acting on haiku composition has emanated from Shiki’s ... compositional guidelines. [His] realist dicta for the beginner-poet regarding the composition of shasei (‘sketch of life’) haiku predominate.” This is no doubt true, but while Japanese haiku remains a powerful influence, sitting on the collective shoulder of the English-language community and whispering in its ear, a louder voice seems to come from within: in the light of what Kacian has written, it may be fair to say that much of what we are producing is imitative of itself, resulting in what William J. Higginson calls “the increasingly fixed and limited notion of haiku that currently pervades much of the English-language haiku community.”[5] It seems to have developed a momentum and mass sufficient to exert a kind of gravitational force. Essentially it means that what many value most about the “best” haiku, a quality of being mysteriously and unmistakably alive, is being pressured to fit into pre-determined and familiar forms, into the idea of what a haiku is. What results is something less like “sketches from life” and more like “sketches from haiku.”

Others have written about their concerns for the health of the genre and would likely focus on aspects different than those we have explored here. We have concentrated primarily on the use of the cinematic approach and of adjective + noun to open a haiku. The prevalence, in the RMA series and in the major magazines of poems using these constructions, has increasingly encouraged habits that go counter to the irruptive potential of haiku. The senses are dulled, not enlivened or revived. Many poems feel more tried than true. Wonder alone cannot restore them. Something else is needed.

Coming back to Welch’s essay in Big Sky, the author quotes Owen Barfield: “wonder is our reaction to things we are conscious of not quite understanding” bringing us closer to “strangeness,” which Barfield says, “arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own.” Welch writes: “We can more deeply appreciate ‘strange’ poems not only with a renewed sense of ... wonder, but with the realization that they may be challenging us with the very strangeness of the unique consciousness out of which every haiku is written.” Here’s a haiku by Ellen Compton that addresses this explicitly.

unsplit chopsticks
the fish stares back
from the bento

We know we have eaten things that once could see and mostly, habitually, ignore the fact. Sometimes, however, we open the box and the fact stares us in the face. The strange doesn’t mean weird necessarily, it is more that the sense that the box of familiarity — of habitual thought — has been torn open. It is the sometimes disquieting sensation that we have not truly seen this before, the wonder that something — anything — is. Paul Valéry says it directly: “Whatever is not strange is false.”

This gives us a way of looking at the haiku and senryu in Big Sky. It may help flesh out some of what I have so far only implied or left dangling — the sense that something is missing from much of what we write. In that light I want to consider “strangeness” and this notion of “a different kind of consciousness from our own,” by looking at the concept of the “shadow” without the presence of which “strangeness” will not be felt and the haiku will not have a life of its own. It will not have life.

Robert Bly made a challenging statement in an essay about Wallace Stevens: “American haiku poets don’t grasp the idea that the shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku. The least important thing about it is its seventeen syllables or its nature scene.”[6] It would be also true to say that without a quality of strangeness, the poem is not a haiku, but shadow is more than a quality, it is an intrinsic element that may be difficult or impossible to isolate and identify, but that may nonetheless be accounted for in concrete terms.
We must avoid a too narrow view of what is meant by “shadow.” Jung said it was quite simply “the unconscious.” Bly, as far as I know, has not elaborated on his statement, though one may infer much from other things he and others have written about the shadow. He does not, however, seem to be suggesting that we allow only “dark” material, unresolved issues around sexuality and power for instance, to invade haiku. I think a broader sense is needed, one that sees the shadow as anything we keep hidden from ourselves, avoid, or feel uncomfortable about. It will not necessarily appear in subject matter, but in tone, feeling, and depth of observation, which will be evident in the language. It may certainly involve dark things, but also things like joy, grief, or tenderness, all of which are present in Carolyn Hall’s

so suddenly winter
baby teeth at the bottom
of the button jar

It may be instructive to look at Shiki’s concept of “sketches from life” again, which calls for a fresh, open look at the world, encouraging us to see things as clearly, and objectively, as possible. It is often considered a beginning stage for poets, perhaps because as one matures in ability to see, hear, and taste things clearly, something else can happen. It seems that the door we open to the experience of the outer world is the same door through which the inner, including shadow material, may emerge, sometimes forcibly. This is the point mentioned earlier at which many writers seem to bail out, locking the door as the knob rattles and settling for familiarity, because with the arrival of the shadow come feelings of raw emotion, discomfort, perhaps a bewildering elation — a disorientation that brings out the sense of strangeness buoyed by a release of energy. Perhaps we will not be able to tolerate this strangeness for long and will have to shut the door. Haiku is a door that opens, and stays open, if only for a moment.

Here is another way to look at it. I present it as an approach, a starting point for exploration, to be picked up or discarded as you will. Famously (according to his student Dohô) Bashô said, “‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree.…’ Description of an object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings that have come from the object, the object and the poet’s self will be separate things.”[7] A mysterious statement, which I suspect inspired Bly to write this in his preface to The Morning Glory: “If we examine a pine carefully, we see how independent it is of us. When we first sense that a pine doesn’t need us, that it has a physical life and a moral life and spiritual life that is complete without us, we feel alienated and depressed. The second time we feel it, we feel joyful.” Certainly the notion that a pine, or any object has feelings and a spiritual life goes counter to what many of us believe, or can conceive. Bruce Ross in his preface to Haiku Moment writes: “The movement from a special attention toward a non-human nature to some kind of union with that nature is a central facet of Japanese culture ... for the most part alien to Western culture.” He goes on to say: “In the West the mind tends to determine consciousness. Thus one great impediment stands in the way of Western attempts at haiku.”

The mind that struggles with Bashô’s statement or brushes aside what Bly says about the “spiritual life” of a pine, is the conscious mind, which, as Ross says, we mostly identify as consciousness. (Generally people refer to this as the rational mind, though it may not be as simple as that.) The mind that embraces the truth of what they say, which is not separate from it, is the unconscious mind. Intuition, you might say, is the breaking through of unmediated nature, of the shadow, into ordinary consciousness. It seems to happen with the kind of immersion and close observation Bashô and Bly refer to, and it seems to happen in the best haiku.
This is a little esoteric perhaps, but it gets to the idea of the shadow “invading” the haiku as well as to the idea of “strangeness” and “a consciousness other than our own.” Working with the shadow gives a framework for dealing with the “great impediment” Ross writes of, insofar as the honesty it demands can cut through the tendency to idealize Eastern concepts of union, a tendency that keeps many of us in a mode of imitation and sentimentality. Guided by the compass of strangeness (which points us past our comfort zone), we allow something other than what we want or determine to enter our poetry. It is the conscious mind that casts nets of familiarity on the world; it is shadow that wants to throw them off. It is not a question of the unconscious mind taking over the conscious mind, or overwhelming it, like some kind of explosive sap rising into a tree and destroying it. Shadow energy needs to be contained.

It is available in haiku whenever something is clearly seen, or tasted, or felt. It will be stronger in some poems than in others depending on the capacity of the poet to withstand the rawness of what is beheld, to take on the feelings of an object. Wherever strangeness is apparent, shadow will be sensed as an undercurrent, because of the danger we often feel, the fear that we will disappear in what we see or be changed by it irretrievably. Or to put it less dramatically, because of the fear that we will feel something deeply and be overwhelmed.

This is obviously an enormous subject requiring more attention than I can give it here. We can begin to close the circle with a look at some of the properties that may be evident in haiku that have been invaded, at least partially, by shadow. It can be sometimes felt plainly in poems that involve the senses of taste and smell, but also touch, most evident where there is contact, as at the interface of field and forest, shore and sea, man and woman. (Haiku and senryu that use the cinematic approach are often exclusively poems of sight. Even while zooming in on a detail they may still keep a distance between the lens or observer and the thing observed.) In this poem by Dee Evetts the shadow realm of sexuality is strongly and almost disturbingly present:

dessert menu
the hairs on her arm
touch mine

the comic undertone notwithstanding, the comic undertone emphasizing. Quendryth Young’s haiku takes clear observation to another level. It incorporates all the senses so swiftly that we feel dizzy, transported.

salt spray
a taste of peat
in my whisky

That sharp “peat” penetrates and reverberates with the whole history of Ireland with such a strong sense of place that it can be tasted. It does not matter if that was not the intention of the writer. It is there on the page and in the ear. The shadow cares nothing for our intentions. It only needs us to lose our grip for an instant. It may be worth adding that poems that have been invaded by the shadow are not necessarily weighed down by it, as Young’s is not.

A great deal of shadow energy can be held by the sound in a poem. Pamela Miller Ness, in her essay “The Poet’s Toolbox: Prosody in Haiku,” which sang to me from the back of Big Sky, writes of this: “When used with precision and subtlety, the elements of prosody such as meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, enjambment, and repetition can add to the musical enjoyment of the haiku while simultaneously extending the meaning and expanding the emotional resonance.” Her phrase “expanding the emotional resonance” is most to our point. Listening closely to the pine gives us the sounds we need; they are crafted, yes, but they call through the open door to the raw energies on the other side which join them, and arrange them in ways that feel right beyond all of our craft. Ness quotes Bly to begin her essay: “Sometimes ohs and ahs bring us joy. When / You place your life inside the vowels, the music / Opens the doors to a hundred closed nights.”
Here are some haiku by Ann K. Goldring, Tim Singleton, and Dave Russo, respectively, whose sounds, I feel, open some doors, and through which strangeness shows its face and the shadow its body, at least fleetingly:

skinny dippers
the moon’s path broken
like laughter

introductions —
the cocktail’s cold
in her handshake

dirt road moon
frogs we gigged
heavy in the bag

Richness of sound by itself does not make for a good haiku, of course. David Rollins’s

the thaw sets in
a dog chews on
the snowman’s nose

is too cute. Here is another poem with an oddness of diction that I feel detracts from any sound qualities it may have. While skewing the language in a haiku may help in the service of “irrupting habitual thought,” that does not happen here. I bring it up for another reason though, and Margaret Chula, a good writer, will forgive me I hope for singling her out:

not seeing it
til darkness fills the pond
the white carp

The convention of using what I will clumsily call the “I-less present participle” saps the energy from most haiku and senryu that employ it. A number of poems in Big Sky share this fault. It comes from a notion, an ideal really, that the writer must disappear from the poem, but it usually ends up in a distortion that calls all the more attention to the writer. Chula’s poem would be greatly improved if she avoided this construction. It may be that poems about the nature of perception in particular require the solid presence of the perceiver. Hers is an example of a haiku that has allowed some shadow energy to enter but which has not provided a strong enough vessel to contain it. The poetry leaks out.

Sometimes the use of the “I-less present participle” brings out unwanted ambiguity. Knowing the convention, using it ourselves, we know how to read Valeria Simonova-Cecon’s

moonless night
reading your letter
by heart

but the fact is, prior to our haiku education, we learned to read this as “the moonless night is reading your letter.” We make the correction, we strike it from the record, but the innuendo remains. One other thing abut this haiku, nothing crushes or resists the shadow or strangeness more completely than sentimentality.
Sometimes, however, the “I-less present participle” can be effective, its ambiguity to the point, a portal for shadow, as in the haiku on the left below, by Jack Barry, and especially the second one, by Caroline Gourlay:

skipping stones
speaking of people
no longer here

evening firelight
drawing the dark corners
into the room

Strangeness can come into play in the interstices of ambiguity; it can also arise in more explicit ways, as in this poem by D. Claire Gallagher that speaks directly to the liminal, hypnagogic realm between sleep and wakefulness, or time zones:

jet lag —
escalator teeth
from the nether world

Cleverness, the domain principally of senryu, may also invite shadow qualities. I had hoped to find a haiku that had been clearly invaded by mischievous coyote. Lee Gurga’s may come closest:

night on the town —
how beautiful the girl
my wife finds fault with

Another poem with archetypal energy, is paul m.’s:

deep woods
a sapling with one leaf
changes color

This certainly could be read as a simple “sketch from life.” If one remembers myths and fairy tales and allows “deep woods” to resonate with Dante’s “When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, / I found myself within a shadowed forest, / for I had lost the path that does not stray” it takes on something deeper, more inward, a truth about the tender nature of the soul. It evokes an intimacy that many would prefer to keep unconscious.

Irony, another quality of senryu, can also carry the shadow into a poem, sometimes painfully. Marian Olson’s

winter sun
you choose to die
with a shrug

is an example, though I believe if she had stayed longer with this, she might have come up with something stronger than “winter sun.” I do not know how Marlene Mountain’s one-liner

passion for the garden some of it begins to end

manages to bring shadow in. It may be the breathless energy of it. It sounds like a sob that propels highly charged words — “passion,” “garden,” “begins,” “end” — at us in a way that catches us off guard. It feels like Christmas and Easter colliding. Mostly it reminds me that the shadow will be most evident in poems where its presence cannot be accounted for. It is simply the nature of anything that is complete, fully realized, even as a fragment, that silence, absence and transience will be palpably folded in.

I have identified a few ways by which poems in Big Sky embody shadow energy. I am sure there are others, and some people will surely argue that poems I have considered flawed for their domesticity do indeed have a quality of strangeness about them which some prejudice prevents me from seeing. One more example of the coyote poem I was looking for is the first poem in the anthology, written by Fay Aoyagi:

winter roses —
I am tired of reading
between the lines

I agree with Bly’s ideas about the shadow and haiku and am convinced that wrestling with the issue lands us more firmly in the domain of what a Western haiku aesthetic might look like. I think it is useful to ask what a writer’s orientation is: is it toward the familiar, to what can be done, or is it toward the strange, the unknown, toward what he or she does not know how to do until it appears on the page, palpably alive, in a form or using language you couldn’t have predicted. A haiku, like all art, is a balance between control and surrender. The best haiku, whose balance is in their asymmetry, lean in the direction of surrender, of bowing to what is at the risk of being bowled over by it. Another way of saying it is: they risk not being haiku. Looking at the poems in Big Sky and elsewhere, we should ask which way they lean, how much life they embody.

A number of haiku and senryu in Big Sky I do not find satisfactory. There is much to appreciate in them, and it would appear that for some sensibilities that is enough. Maybe I am not easily satisfied; maybe I have a case of “haiku ennui.” The reason I am going on about this is that, wonder notwithstanding, I want not to be dazzled by the superior poem so much as to be challenged by haiku where, to quote Cid Corman, [8] “each word is a matter of life and death.” Maybe to Welch’s call for a renewal of wonder could be added a call for a renewal of the sense of deeply loving something, of being in love. It is that quality that makes us want to know all about the beloved, wants to make love every possible way, even at the risk of looking foolish, or finding out what we do not want to know.

• • •

Notes

1 Tom Tico, “The Spice of Life,” Frogpond 30:1 (winter 2007), 62.

2 Allan Burns explores the relationship between haiku and film in depth in “Haiku and Cinematic Technique,” Frogpond 30:3 (fall 2007), 55–64.

3 Ken Jones, “Finding the Heart of Haiku,” Blithe Spirit 15:1 (March 2005), 39–46.

4 Richard Gilbert, “Disjunction in Contemporary English-Language Haiku,” Modern Haiku 35:2 (summer 2004), 21–44.

5 William J. Higginson,“A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku 35:2 (summer 2004), 45–53.

6 Robert Bly, A Little Book About the Shadow. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

7 Quoted in Lucien Stryk, Cage of Fireflies. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press of Ohio University Press, 1993, 2.

8 Cid Corman, Little Enough. Frankfurt, Ky.: Gnomon Press, 1991.

 

 

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