[Skip banner] [Home][Sources][How Do I?][Overview][Help] [Return To Search Form][FOCUS][printdoc][emaildoc] Search Terms: haiku, Cho [Document List][Expanded List][KWIC][FULL format currently displayed] Document 1 of 18. [Next Document] Copyright 2001 Journal Sentinel Inc. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel April 1, 2001 Sunday ALL EDITIONS SECTION: CUE; Pg. 01E LENGTH: 2533 words HEADLINE: Haiku casts big Net; An old and clever form of Japanese poetry is making a global splash BYLINE: JIM HIGGINS of the Journal Sentinel staff BODY: An ancient pond A frog jumps in A sound heard 'round the world Haiku, Japan's centuries-old traditional poetry, has evolved into an international passion. Thanks in part to the global reach of the Internet and the increasing dominance of English as a world language, haiku that might have been shared only through letters between distant friends or seen in tiny- circulation journals can now be read by anyone who can open a Web browser. Between what he discovers himself and what he's invited to list, veteran poet, editor and critic William J. Higginson is adding new sites every week to the Open Directory Project's haiku-related pages. Haiku activity is growing in the United States and Canada, and really burgeoning in Europe -- not only Western Europe but Eastern Europe, too, even in the Balkans, where warfare has left some people electrically challenged, Higginson said in a phone interview from his New Mexico home. "The Internet is drawing people into physical togetherness as well," by encouraging more face-to-face meetings and group get-togethers, said Randy Brooks, director of the creative writing major at Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., and a haiku poet and publisher. And publications that began as online magazines have evolved into print journals, such as Acorn (home.earthlink.net/=missias/Acorn.html). Big names are picking up the haiku pen, too. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass has translated the classic Japanese masters Basho, Buson and Issa. Prominent Irish poet Paul Muldoon wrote an extended sequence of "Hopewell Haiku," named after the New Jersey town where he was living (though his haiku rhyme, a no-no among purists). Even outlaw country-rock singer Steve Earle has committed himself to writing a haiku a day as a "spiritual and literary discipline." With free verse having been the dominant mode of poetry for decades now, haiku may be the one example of formal poetry many people would still recognize on sight. Your letter carrier or phlebotomist might be hard- pressed to identify a sonnet or terza rima, but show her Basho's famous verse: The old pond A frog jumps in -- The sound of the water and she'll know it's haiku. With April being National Poetry Month, it's an opportune time to consider the ripples in the frog pond. Haiku evolved in 17th century Japan out of earlier poetic forms. Masters such as Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), Yosa Buson (1716-1784) and Kobayashi Issa (1762-1826) made it a national Japanese practice. A haiku is a short poem "in which Nature is linked to human nature," according to a Haiku Society of America definition. Haiku's brevity isn't the only reason why the form is a good fit for the Internet Age, Brooks said. "It's an art that depends on reader response," he said. "A haiku is never said to be born until a reader finishes it in their own imagination." Brooks calls that haiku's postmodern quality: The art isn't in the possession of the writer, but in the interaction of the writer and reader. While a few pioneers, notably Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets, produced haiku-like poems early in the 20th century, the form's arrival in English- speaking countries is largely a byproduct of the end of World War II. After the war ended, Higginson notes in "The Haiku Handbook" (Kodansha International paperback, $14), R.H. Blyth, a British POW who'd been held in a Japanese internment camp, and Harold G. Henderson, an American military man, began to evangelize about haiku in the West. Blyth's four-volume edition of haiku masters and related philosophy attracted the attention of Beat writers such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Kerouac gave the form a double boost: first through his thinly disguised portrayal of Snyder in his novel "The Dharma Bums," then by writing his own haiku: In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. Just as many contemporary haiku poets do, Kerouac rejected the notion that haiku in English had to be 17 syllables. Robert Spiess of Middleton began reading English translations of Japanese masters such as Basho and Issa when they started appearing in 1940s. "They just grabbed me," he said in a telephone interview, citing their simplicity and their ability to comprehend the interrelatedness of life. Spiess began writing and, in 1977, assumed editorship of Modern Haiku, the oldest continuously publishing English- language haiku magazine. He still edits the magazine today. In the popular " The Haiku Anthology" (Norton paperback, $15.95), editor Cor van den Heuvel writes that many of Spiess' haiku "reflect his love of canoeing the lakes and streams of Wisconsin." The chain saw stops; deeper in the winter woods a chickadee calls As an editor, Spiess has been an important apostle for haiku in America. Just ask Mark Alan Osterhaus, who met Spiess in a haiku- friendly way: They both liked to watch the sunset over Lake Mendota in Madison. Osterhaus was a University of Wisconsin-Madison student then. Spiess shared some issues of Modern Haiku with him and nurtured the younger man's early writing. "He helped me understand what the art form was all about," Osterhaus said in a telephone interview. Today, Osterhaus runs Out of the Box Publishing, his Madison-based games business. But he still writes and publishes haiku, and maintains a comprehensive, frequently updated collection of haiku links (www.execpc.com/=ohaus/haiklink.htm). Spiess "has mentored many people to a higher quality of art," said Brooks at Millikin University. Brooks also joked that Spiess is an old-fashioned editor who still uses a manual typewriter with a few blobby keys. In recognition of his service to the haiku world, Spiess shared the Shiki Masaoka International Haiku Prize in September with a Chinese researcher and a Belgian scholar. At age 78, he made his first trip to Japan. As an editor who looks at thousands of haiku submissions each year, he's bullish about their quality. "People have gotten away from the very early days of the pseudo-Japanese concept or expression," Spiess said. "They are generally less sentimental and pretty- pretty." But as international as haiku has become, Spiess believes the best haiku come from people writing about their own backyards. They achieve more depth, he says, than "travel haiku" or "vacation haiku" that merely record stimuli. SPAM-ku The Internet has also brought the noise as well as the content, unleashing a torrent of humor, satire and zaniness all labeled haiku. The biggest brand name is SPAM-ku (pemtropics.mit.edu/=jcho/spam). MIT researcher John Cho launched the site in praise of the processed-pork meat in 1995; to date, it has spawned more than 17,000 verses by more than 40 contributors, as well as a greatest-hits book, "SPAM-ku: Tranquil Reflections on Luncheon Loaf" (Harperperennial paperback, $7.95). Here's a slice: Mars, the red planet, contrary to old beliefs, is covered with SPAM. -- Ohio-Gremlin Then there's Presidential Haiku (haiku575.blogspot.com), Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Thomas Nord's assemblage of 17-syllable poems about our nation's leaders, which achieve a certain historical pith: Theodore Roosevelt Speech in Milwaukee Shot! But kept right on talking Bull Moose? No kidding! Nord needs a title to make his haiku work; generally, though, both serious and funny ones are left untitled. Sniffing the interactive possibilities, both Salon and Slate, the popular online magazines, have jumped into the haiku pond. Last September, Slate football columnist Gregg Easterbrook invited readers to send poems in response to a trivia contest. When one sent a haiku, Easterbrook encouraged more, reminded readers of the form with a few samples of his own: On Brett Favre's helmet Beer falls, and the cup crumbles Sideline in autumn From that point on, Easterbrook included a Haiku Corner in most of his weekly columns, mixing his own creations with reader submissions: Pity Dick Jauron Bears Shane and Cade throwing bad Jim Miller much missed. -- Steve Gozdecki As for Salon, its popular Haiku Error Message entries (www.salon. com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html) have enjoyed a healthy afterlife on the Web. Here's David Dixon's winner: Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred. But the oddest pseudo-ku on the Web isn't humor, but an act of social commentary and subversion. In February, an anonymous author uploaded to the Internet the DeCSS Haiku, which Carnegie- Mellon University computer scientist David S. Touretzky called an "ingenious poem (that) is both a commentary on the DeCSS situation and a correct and complete description of the descrambling algorithm." Hundreds of stanzas long, it includes instructions for reading encrypted DVDs. Here's a section of its opening: And all mathematics is full of stories (just read Eric Temple Bell); and CSS is no exception to this rule. Sing, Muse, decryption once secret, as all knowledge, once unknown: how to decrypt DVDs. The entertainment industry has sued several people over various attempts to publish the source code for decrypting DVDs. Touretzky maintains that source code is a form of communication and protected free speech. The DeCSS Haiku can be found online at his Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers (www.cs.cmu. edu/=dst/DeCSS/Gallery/). The popularity of pseudo-haiku causes varying degrees of vexation for serious haiku poets. "SPAM haiku and automated haiku demean and diminish what haiku is all about," said Osterhaus. But Higginson takes a more philosophical view. Many haiku purists dislike SPAM-ku, but he argues that these forms of humor could easily lead people to look a little deeper into the real stuff. Higginson also sees Internet activity helping to create new forms. "I'm very pleased with scifaiku," he said, referring to science-fiction-oriented haiku (www.scifaiku.com). "(The people writing it) understand the Japanese tradition. They're writing good poems." The future of haiku The humorous haiku and the DeCSS Haiku have one thing in common: They're written as three lines of five, seven and five syllables, adhering to what's commonly thought of as haiku form. But serious contemporary haiku poets don't see 5-7-5 as essential. The Japanese language is different than English: 17 syllables in Japanese is really like 12 or so syllables in English, the argument runs. Haiku poets in English also have experimented with one-line poems, two-line poems and other variations. Marlene Mountain, for example, has a large selection of her one-line haiku at www.hardtofind. org/hardtofind/marlenemountain/contents.html. It may surprise newbies stuck on three lines when they learn that classical Japanese haiku were often executed in a single line. Haiku is associated with nature, but poets are writing urban haiku, too. Consider this example from the late Nick Virgilo: New Year's Eve: pay phone receiver dangling Editors often distinguish between haiku and senryu, poems about human relationships in the same form, often satiric or humorous, such as this one by George Swede from "The Haiku Anthology": One button undone in the clerk's blouse -- I let her steal my change At September's World Haiku Conference in Tolmin, Slovenia, Japanese writer Susumu Takiguchi noted that "Japanese poets increasingly embrace international haiku, and even Japanese haiku societies are coming to recognize the value, importance and necessity of working in a larger sphere." The rest of the world continues to adopt, and adapt, traditions from Japan, too. People in the New Zealand town of Kati Kati have chiseled haiku on boulders along a river walkway, echoing the Japanese practice of engraving haiku on small stones. In the U.S., American haiku scholars and poets keep delving deeper into haiku's related traditions. For example, Higginson is working on a three-year project with the University of Virginia's Japanese Text Initiative (etext.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/) to translate an entire saijiki, a kind of seasonal almanac that lists kigo, allusion-rich seasonal words, and then demonstrates their use in one or more haiku. A.C. Missias, a Philadelphia poet who edits Acorn, continues to be thrilled by quality of submissions she receives and the personal connections she makes through haiku. "A lot of people find that haiku becomes an outlet or a way of getting quiet in a busy day," she said. "That's why it's become a hobby for a wide range of people." Where to find more in burgeoning world of haiku META HAIKU The Haiku Society of America, www.hsa-haiku.org. News, membership and contest information. "Links to Haiku Sites," www.execpc.com/=ohaus/haiklink. htm. Mark Alan Osterhaus of Madison's comprehensive collection of links includes many home pages of active haiku poets. Open Directory Project's list of haiku links, dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Poetry/PoeticForms/HaikuandRelatedForms/. Poet and scholar William J. Higginson updates this collection regularly. "Some Haiku Book Reviews," www.scifaiku.com/haiku/haiku-books. html. Tom Brinck provides extensive capsule reviews of anthologies and related books. "History of Haiku," www.big.or.jp/=loupe/links/ehisto/ehisinx. shtml. Samples of Japanese masters and brief essays about them, from the legendary Basho to the late 20th century. English-Language Haiku on the Web, www.family-net.net/=brooksbooks/. Poet-publisher Randy Brooks' collection of links and online publications. ONLINE PUBLICATIONS "Contemporary Haiku: Origins and New Directions," webdelsol.com/Perihelion/acmarticle.htm. An intelligent essay by Philadelphia poet A.C. Missias with plenty of examples. The Heron's Nest, www.theheronsnest.com/. A monthly online haiku magazine. Temps Libres/Free Times, web.wanadoo.be/tempslibres/. A multilingual reading room of contemporary haiku. Tinywords.com, www.tinywords.com. One haiku delivered daily. Read it online, or sign up for e-mail delivery (messages are short enough to receive on a mobile phone). "Those Women Writing Haiku" by Jane Reichhold, www.ahapoetry.com/twwhbk.htm. An online historical book about women who've written haiku (and its predecessors) from ancient Japan to contemporary America and Europe, with several interpolated anthologies of poems. AHA Books Online, www.ahapoetry.com/onlinebk.htm. Multiple collections of haiku, tanka and other short-form poems. Snapshots, www.mccoy.co.uk/snapshots/. Attractive British haiku magazine with a distinctive Web-friendly format. Haijinx, www.haijinx.com/. A new magazine that stresses the role of humor in haiku. HAIKU HUMOR SPAM Haiku Archive, pemtropics.mit.edu/=jcho/spam. John Cho's collection of more than 17,000 little poems about the legendary lunch meat. "Presidential Haiku," haiku575. blogspot.com. From George Washington to George W. Bush, each gets his 17 syllables, some many times over. Haiku Movie Reviews, www.igs.net/=mtr/haiku- reviews/. One of several Internet sites offering three-line movie reviews. Pop Update Poetry, www.popupdate.com. Overheard cubicle talk and withering sarcasm blended into a haiku-like format. -- Jim Higgins LOAD-DATE: April 2, 2001 Document 1 of 18. [Next Document] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [FOCUS] Search Terms: haiku, Cho To narrow your search, please enter a word or phrase: [About LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic Universe] [Terms and Conditions] [Top of Page] Copyright © 2001, LEXIS-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.