Haiku Conference--More Sharing

OK, it’s been a month and I’ve barely written about Haiku North America. August got away from me with travel, work, hosting guests and the sheer lassitude brought on by the heat. Looking back at the conference, the sessions that stood out for me were the readings that people shared of their own haiku and the interesting keynote by Richard Gilbert in which he tied haiku’s development to modernism. But he also said that haiku’s modernist trajectory in the West has largely stalled. He urged North American writers to think outside the box and to push themselves in new directions.

Other compelling sessions were the two about the history of haiku: one focused on North American haiku, the second on Canadian (I already wrote about that.) I also enjoyed Richard Tice’s “Location, Location! Place in Haiku,” and David Lanoue’s talk that focused on Issa’s frog haiku. This Japanese haiku master wrote over two hundred haiku on this little amphibian himself. (Look out, cicadas, here I come!)

Marjorie Buettner put together a lovely memorial for haiku poets who had died in the past two years. It included photos, bios, quotes and haiku written by people that many people in the audience knew well. Music, including Marjorie’s own singing, made the tribute even more moving. Though I had never meant any of the talented poets being honored, I felt that I knew them after this memorial.

In terms of my own writing, the session that inspired me most was Jim Kacian’s “Monophilia: the History and Practice of One-Line Haiku in English." Ignore the academic-sounding title; this was a show and tell of compelling poetry that goes horizontal rather than vertical. I really like the one line form of haiku both for its speed and simplicity. Another lecture on “Stretching Western Haiku” provided many examples of haiku that uses new elements such as metaphors and similes (traditionally not considered OK to use in haiku) and fantastic elements.

A nice change from the focus on writing were two very visual programs: a session on haiga—the art of combining brush painting with haiku--and a session on concrete poetry. Carlos Colon’s images showed how concrete poetry relies just as much, if not more so, on the shape and design of words on the page as on the words themselves. More experimental but also interesting was Eve Luckring’s film that combined renku with moving images and sound.

Haiku North America began with nearly every one in the room reading haiku from the conference anthology Standing Still edited by Michael Dylan Welch and Ruth Yarrow. It was wonderful to hear haiku in the actual voice of the poet. Here’s my poem from the anthology:

full moon
scuttling past clouds--
silent swoop of bat