Wing Beats
Back to The Bittern's
Neck

LW: John
Barlow, welcome to 3LIGHTS. It's not only a pleasure to welcome another
exceptional poet to the gallery, but also a thrill to present work from a
British writer. I'm interested to find out how a writer from England
causes Haiku North America to call him one 'of the
best haiku poets writing in English' – where did it all
start?

JB: With a fistful of dollars!
Seriously, I think I first became aware of ‘haiku’ in Adrian Henri’s
self-published short collection of that name, as reprinted in
his Collected Poems 1967–85 (London:
Allison & Busby, 1986). I was 16, with some romantically naïve notion
that I only wanted my name, dates, and the word ‘Poet’ on my gravestone,
and in the following decade I wrote mostly short poetry, which
occasionally included what I referred to as ‘travel haiku’. In fact they
involved precious little travel – a few stops down the line at most – and
my understanding of haiku was even more limited. But I think writing those
early poems instilled a personal need to write experientially, and, for
me, haiku is essentially about realities. To borrow a quote from Carol Ann
Duffy, “In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a
fictional beginning”.

I’ve since realised that I had brushes with
your more-usual haiku epiphanies in that time – in reading Kerouac and
Salinger, for example – and I’d also come across a few self-styled haiku
in the works of poets such as Frances Horovitz. But nothing really clicked
into place until a breezy summer’s day in 1996 when I was sitting on a
delayed train at Chester station and a few goldfinches landed on the
track-side weeds. I suppose this moment of simple existential transparency
must have resonated with a childhood passion for birds, and I scribbled a
few lines down that subsequently became what I now consider to be my first
haiku: ‘summer breeze / swaying the ragwort / goldfinches’. I then read
haiku (and about haiku) avidly, sourcing books and journals not only in
Britain (of which at that time there were few), but elsewhere, especially
North America, where English-language haiku was far more embedded. I was
also very fortunate to receive encouragement and advice from several
notable haiku poet/editors at this time, such as the late Bob Spiess at
Modern Haiku. Amongst other things
I soon realised that there was considerable value in editorial processes:
that a good haiku must be true to the poet and open for the reader.
I also learned the virtues of patience and attention to detail, especially
when it comes to publishing collections. “summer breeze” finally appeared
in my first book-length haiku collection Waiting for the
Seventh Wave – which was thankfully well-received – in 2006.
By then all the haiku included had been published for at least 5 years and
had collectively been subject to years of
tinkering.

LW:
I
think one of the key aspects of the modern haiku and tanka is its ability
to thrive in the poet's own environment, whatever and wherever that may
be. Your poetry demonstrates that haiku and tanka function perfectly well
in your own area of interest as well as in your own corner of the world.
As you release a book that celebrates not only British birds but British
haiku, would you agree that haiku and tanka can be both local and
global?

JB: Definitely. They
can be, but the reasons
why they can be are not
always obvious. The majority of tanka involve lyrical expression of the
human condition, so while the stimuli might be local, the expressed or
implied emotion is near-universal. Haiku, on the other hand, are more
austere. Emotions are usually implicit, and if there is any subtle
connection between the expressed exterior reality and the poet’s interior
reality it should be seamless. Rather than being buoyed by overtly
emotional content, a haiku might immediately succeed or fail for a reader
on three main fronts: its faithfulness to the haiku tradition; its
‘poetry’; and the resonance and intelligibility of its images.

The
argument that readers are most comfortable with presentation, phrasing,
subject matter and terminology with which they can immediately relate is
compelling. It has recently been expressed and discussed at major haiku
conferences and in leading haiku publications. The issue is widely
considered to be geographic and cultural, informed not only by historical
interpretation of the Japanese haiku tradition, but by the literary and
cultural heritage of the poet. It follows that most readers will more
readily identify with haiku written in their own language than with
translations of haiku written in other languages, and also that the
majority of American readers are predisposed to relate to American haiku,
the majority of British readers to British haiku, and so on. But is the
geographic location or cultural disposition of both the poet and reader
really key to the question of whether haiku can be both local and global?
If we consider that it is, then the above familiar reasoning would suggest
that haiku are generally far more successful on a relatively local, or
even national, level. So, if we were to deal in absolutes, the answer to
your question (for the sake of discussion) would be ‘no’. But if this is
the case do we not concede that only the Japanese can write haiku, as
indeed many Japanese hold to be true?

If we go beyond the obvious
linguistics – translations of Japanese haiku (and tanka) having proven
that the poetry can certainly resonate beyond its native shores and
culture – and consider only English-language haiku, then the immediacy
argument is still compelling. If the aforementioned local or national
predispositions are considered by individuals to be preferences, then
there is nothing chauvinistic about them. Such preferences might betray an
unwillingness to go the extra mile to engage with haiku written beyond
one’s own locale – unfamiliar terms and phrases being easy to research –
but a given haiku is inarguably more successful for a given reader if it
is immediately intelligible and resonant. But does that make it a good
haiku? And by extension, does the nationality of a poet, or geographic
origin of a haiku, make a haiku a good haiku? ‘American haiku’ (as a
complete entity) is arguably more advanced than ‘British haiku’, or
‘Australian haiku’, simply because more poets have considered and
contributed to its canon over more years. But that doesn’t make any given
American haiku better than any given British haiku, or any given American
haiku poet better than any given British haiku poet. It just means that
one is more likely to come across a good American haiku than a good
British one, and it contributes to the fact that Americans will relate
most readily to haiku that are comparable to those in their own canon. If
we allow language back into the equation the argument is, of course,
extendable. Is an American haiku better than a Canadian haiku? Is a
Canadian haiku written in English better than a Canadian haiku written in
French? Is a Japanese haiku superior to an English-language haiku just
because it is Japanese? If the answer is no, and language, nationality,
location and culture do not make any given haiku better than another haiku,
then a poem must contain aesthetic or other elements that essentially
define it as a haiku, and these must be both recognizable and, to some
degree, measurable across international boundaries.

Appreciation of
any haiku is, of course, both objective and subjective. Each poem will
work, or not work, for each reader individually, and whether it works or
not on this basis doesn’t make it a good or bad haiku. A single haiku can
be perceived and valued very differently by different readers, even given
commonality of language, culture and geography. The question of whether
haiku can be both local and global cannot therefore be addressed solely in
geographic and cultural terms: issues over intelligibility and resonance
are not necessarily geographic or cultural. Even at a vernacular level,
any poet can make a choice about homogeneity of expression every time they
write a haiku, though such matters are more often than not determined
subconsciously.

Our alienation from the environment, however, is
just as significant a consideration as geography and culture, and one that
is exacerbated in an increasingly urbanised and virtually-centric world.
Many readers (and poets) do not immediately relate to natural phenomena,
even on a generic level. Yet haiku has its roots in nature, and is
essentially concerned with the connections between ourselves, our planet
and our universe. We might not be central to that universe, but we are
part of it – biologically, chemically and atomically – and human presence
is implied in almost every haiku, certainly every experiential haiku. It
could be theorized that for many people the natural world is somewhat
detached from reality; that ‘nature-only’ haiku have little to offer the
general reader; and that consequently the human element should be
paramount if a haiku is to reach as global an audience as possible. Human
life has always been considered to be a part of nature in haiku terms, so
such poems can remain within the
haiku tradition. But if poets only wrote haiku in order to appeal to as
wide an audience as possible, then even haiku itself could eventually
abandon its deep connection to the natural world. It’s a depressing
thought. Thankfully some haiku poets recognise that there is an essential
interconnectedness between nature and humans; that the human spirit is
inextricably linked to the physicality of the natural world; and that
consequently apparent ‘nature-only’ haiku can just as successfully
“illuminate the human condition”. As I said earlier, a good haiku begins
to be ‘good’ when it is true to the poet and open for the reader.
If a haiku poet is also a botanist, or a birder, or any kind of naturalist
or wildlife enthusiast, and experience, passion, language and tradition
all combine to create a haiku, this haiku can be just as open as any haiku
solely concerned with human life. It might not have the potential to
connect with as large an audience, but that audience will not necessarily
be limited by geographical concerns. To my mind, as haiku poets, we should
each plough our own furrow, and write about what we know and what matters
to us, regardless of whether that fits with the thinking of the
day.

There is no right and wrong here, of course. We can, for
example, choose to appreciate the tradition of English-language
‘wilderness haiku’ that began in America with John Wills and Robert Spiess
– to whose memory and legacy the title The Bittern’s
Neck is a tribute. Or we can choose to overlook, or
look beyond, that tradition. I personally write from direct experience,
and whether I happen to be on the Sefton coast , on the Lancashire mosses,
or in Moss Landing or Big Sur, the avifauna tends to frequently appear in
my haiku. To date, the ones without birds are probably better known. But
then up until now the intended audience for any ‘serious’ English-language
haiku or haiku collection has almost invariably been a local or global
‘haiku community’ of poets and editors. Appreciation of haiku aesthetics
can be expected; familiarity with a range of natural phenomena cannot. At
the Haiku North America conference in 2007, Matthew Paul and I opened our
presentation on our Wing Beats project
with an acknowledgement that haiku poets often talk about being accepted
by the ‘mainstream’, by which they mean ‘mainstream’ poetry, as if it is
the holy grail. In doing so they fail to appreciate that very few
contemporary mainstream poets are known beyond their own shores. Yet
Wing Beats is coming from an
entirely different perspective. It combines our love for haiku with a
passion for birds that is very much part of the British cultural
mainstream, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds having over 1
million other members. So despite being a serious book of ‘serious’ haiku
poetry – with extensive appendices on haiku considerations such as season
words – Wing Beats’ widest appeal may
not be to haiku’s traditional audience. Of course we very much hope the
subject matter is embraced by seasoned
readers of haiku, but ‘serious’ haiku can be resonant in many ways, and we
anticipate that the book will also have a wider local, or even global,
appeal.

LW: When 3LIGHTS launched, we invited British
writer Ben
Barton to feature as our first solo artist. He was
responsible, some years ago, for the HAIKU_TXT project, inviting writers to submit
‘text haiku’ via mobile phone. As a writer whose projects, such as
The Haiku Calendar, straddle the boundaries
of serious and popular, high street haiku, do you see books such as
One Hundred Great Books in Haiku
as detrimental to the life of the
haiku?

JB: The Haiku
Calendar is an established publishing project – the 2009
calendar will be the tenth – but my own haiku have never appeared in it,
and, as editor and publisher, I’m as concerned as ever with the quality of
both the haiku and the ‘product’. Despite being a calendar it’s not really
a populist thing – though it does get quality ‘serious’ haiku in front of
a handful of people who wouldn’t otherwise consider or appreciate them,
and however that happens it is definitely a good thing for
haiku.

On the other hand, while it’s a predictable soapbox answer,
I do find books such as One Hundred Great Books in
Haiku to be detrimental to furthering the popularity of
‘serious’ haiku. As John Cooper Clarke knew, it’s very basic stuff taking
a 17-syllable form and forcing words into it, and it doesn’t take a
mathematician or an attorney to count to 5-7-5. But there will always be
‘spoof’ haiku, and they really aren’t worth getting upset about. In fact
they may even generate some interest in ‘serious’ haiku. It is not ‘spoof’
haiku then, in themselves, that pose a threat to ‘serious’ haiku. The
problem really arises when ‘spoof’ haiku or, even worse, ‘pseudo’ haiku,
are placed so prominently in the public consciousness. It’s not a problem
for the public – why should we care less what a haiku is? – and it’s not a
problem for the publisher when the money rolls in, and it’s certainly not
a problem for Manhattan attorneys turned haiku humorists – and why should
they care? But if nothing else it doesn’t help publishers of ‘serious’
haiku, and it doesn’t encourage the development of ‘serious’ haiku poets.
If your man or woman in the street only ever buys one book of haiku it
will likely be this or something similarly commercial – and there is
nothing about such a book that might encourage the general reader to
engage with 'serious' haiku. I was actually given One
Hundred Great Books in Haiku as a gift, and while
the person who gave it to me correctly guessed that they wouldn’t be
duplicating something I already had, I’d far rather have had another copy
of The Haiku Anthology,
or Haiku World, or any of the other
haiku books I return to regularly.  And I imagine that the revenues
of barely-read gift copies of One Hundred Great
Books in Haiku would keep most publishers of
‘serious’ haiku going for some considerable time. But what are we supposed
to do? I would rather not publish haiku than be compromised on what I
publish: but is it better to chop off an arm or to chop off a leg, or to
somehow find a way that means you don’t have to make that decision? While
there are a few people who are consistently supportive, I think it’s fair
to say that most poets don’t appreciate the precariousness of small
presses, and as haiku poets we’re particularly selfish in that we’re
typically only interested in buying publications in which our work
features. But poets are unlikely to develop as poets, or become
‘successful’, unless they read avidly, read quality work, and are prepared
to work extremely hard both on their writing and publicizing that writing.
It may be years before their work merits publication in major anthologies,
and it is no coincidence that most notable first collections of haiku are
written by poets who have been writing haiku for a decade or more. So, to
put it bluntly, if you’re interested in haiku – and if you’re reading this
you must be – small presses need the support now, and they need continuous
support. It really is a case of use them or lose them. For a poet there
are no short-cuts to ‘success’, but buying and reading quality books of
‘serious’ haiku considerably increases the potential for that success.
Haiku needs readers. There’s little point in a great book that no-one
reads (and there’s an idea). But Penguin won’t have to stop publishing
books just because someone wasn’t given One Hundred Great
Books in Haiku for Christmas. Why not buy one
book of great haiku instead? A
book that you might want to keep and read. You can always get another copy
to give away. And why not tell other people where they can get hold of
such a book? And if that sounds like a plug for Snapshot
Press then it won’t do any
harm!

LW:
You’ve worked closely with the outstanding
photographer Sean Gray for Wing
Beats and for this exhibition – I’d be interested to
know if you’ve ever produced haiga and what your feelings are concerning
the companionship of image and poem, particularly as we welcome the launch
of Modern English Tanka Press’s Modern
Haiga?

JB: I first came
across Sean’s work when I was looking for a cover image for
Waiting for the Seventh
Wave. The title haiku features Sanderlings, and while
these are recorded generically as sandpipers in the poem, I ideally wanted
to be as faithful to the actual experience as possible. Sean’s photograph,
which was taken just a few miles further up the Sefton coast from where
the haiku was written, was perfect – not only in these respects, and in
that it is a superb photograph, but also because it epitomized the whole
mood that had led to me writing the haiku in the first place. I then asked
him to become involved with Wing
Beats, which Matthew and I had been working on for some
considerable time, and he enthusiastically agreed. And now we’ve obviously
done The Bittern’s Neck. With
Wing Beats the poems came first
and I then made appropriate image selections from Sean’s extensive
portfolio to illustrate the book. Originally I had planned to use
photographs in the book, but Sean suggested an alternative – and given the
extra work this commission entailed possibly wishes he hadn’t! But somehow
his photographic watercolours seemed perfectly attuned to the spirit and
aesthetics of haiku, and they complemented and contributed to the
contemporary yet nostalgic feel that I wanted the whole design to capture
– as if it were a bird book I might
have discovered on a shelf in a holiday cottage in
the 70s, or a haiku book I’d stumbled across that might
have opened my eyes to haiku. The images are
intended to illustrate the birds, not the haiku, and of course neither the
illustrations nor haiku were created in response to each other.
Nevertheless, as with the Waiting for the Seventh
Wave cover, the fact that all images and haiku were
based on real-life experiences of particular species ensured that the
illustrations and haiku were occasionally serendipitous. (There’s a
wonderful haigaesque combination involving a Stonechat in
Wing Beats, for example, though
people will have to buy the book to see
it!)

With The Bittern’s
Neck I was able to consider my own body of work and
Sean’s portfolio together, and make selections that hopefully work as a
unified whole – whether considered from the perspective of the poetry, the
images, or the combination of the two. The haiku and tanka are arranged
traditionally by season – seven poems per season – and several of the
haiku include avian season words. The image and haiku combinations also
play on traditional haikai
sensibilities, particularly the Jay and Greenfinch ones with their
explorations of colour, light and juxtaposition. The combination of the
Purple Sandpiper image and haiku (“the pale undersides / of purple
sandpipers . . . / waxing moon”) also comes close to haiga aesthetics.
When I wrote the haiku – again on my ‘local patch’ at the Alt estuary – it
was a piercingly cold, clear evening at the beginning of November, and the
moon was even paler than the clouds. The visible juxtaposition between the
hunkering birds and the cratered moon – and the intense sense of
sabi – ensured that the
haiku remains one of my personal favourites amongst my own ‘bird haiku’.
But it’s also previously unpublished, and not for want of trying. This
goes back to the intelligibility and resonance issues we talked about
earlier. ‘Moon’ is well-known season word so will suggest autumn to
readers familiar with haiku (and, while it isn’t important, some might
intuit the general ‘paleness’ of the imagery to suggest that it is late
autumn in haiku terms). (Shigi, which is
the Japanese name for the Sandpiper family Scolopacidae, is also an autumn
kigo, but the Purple
Sandpiper has never actually been recorded in Japan.) Furthermore, a
waxing moon is most visible in the evening, setting shortly after sunset,
so the time of day is also suggested – though one of the advantages of
writing experiential haiku is that the poet doesn’t necessarily have to
know or remember things such as lunar phases! Similarly, haiku editors can
hardly be blamed for not being familiar with (or not expecting their
readers to be familiar with) the habits and appearance of Purple
Sandpipers, and in this sense the haiku might be considered obscure. But a
birder, who might not be aware of the haiku tradition, might well
intuitively appreciate the juxtaposition. Sean’s photographs of Purple
Sandpipers are amongst my personal favourites from his work, and it struck
me that this one in particular might make the juxtaposition in the haiku
clear for all. But it is this explanatory sense, with the close
relationship between haiku and image, that would make me question any
supposed haiga credentials for the combination. I think the haiku and
image are strong enough to each stand alone, given an informed audience,
but the content of the photograph of the Purple Sandpiper and the content
of the haiku is not juxtaposed. While the combination might prove
enlightening, it does not in itself create new associations that were not
already inherent to the haiku. So is it a haiga? There is nothing wrong,
of course, with illustrating haiku with photography or other images, or
with suggesting interpretations of images with haiku. The combinations can
be very rewarding, but to my understanding it takes other associative,
non-representational subtleties to produce a bona fide
modern (western) haiga.
However, in many historical Japanese haiga the words and image are
analogous, so in that sense ‘Purple Sandpiper’ could be considered a
‘modern’ haiga. As with haiku, it all depends on which references are
favoured.

Personally I find that haiku and tanka best align with my
experiential/autobiographical leaning, and I have never intentionally
produced or collaborated on haiga. But I’m not saying I will never try.
Perhaps in a few more decades when I’ve got my head around haiku a little
more? I think haiga can be very interesting, and there are some excellent
individual and collaborative western haiga artists out there, several of
whom appear in your inaugural issue of Modern
Haiga. But as with any art its practitioners bring to
the table a range of different skills and abilities, and a fine line has
to be taken between inclusivity (for potential haiga neophytes such as
myself) and excellence. (Both of these, within reason, are positive
traits, and the online and even-more-selective print format is one I have
also considered to offer optimum results.) It will be very interesting to
see how Modern Haiga develops. At present,
to my mind, it is both what it says on the tin – with some excellent
“modern haiga” – and what it says in the small print: “modern graphic
poetry”. Many of these graphic/poem combinations are also rewarding in
their own right, but will there be fewer illustrative examples as time
goes on, or will analogous equivalence come to be widely accepted in
contemporary western haiga?

For me, the quality and authenticity of
the haiku, and the quality and authenticity of the image, are all of equal
importance. A haiga works best when both the haiku and image are honest to
experience. This certainly does not preclude collaborations, and neither
does it preclude abstract art. For proof I need look no further than
Raffael de Gruttola’s collaborations with the abstract expressionist
Wilfred Croteau. Both the poet and artist more than hold their own in
their respective fields, and their collaborations amount to a sum even
greater than that of its parts. ‘arpeggios’, in
Modern Haiga, is a haiga I would
definitely hang on my wall, or a
gallery wall, the last line of the haiku alone being worth the admission
fee. (It would make a fantastic book title, despite the fact that it is
reminiscent of the last line in the haiku of the artists’ earlier haiga,
‘Stretched
Out’, which appeared in their ground-breaking
Echoes in Sand portfolio.) Such haiga
give me considerable encouragement that the two independent media can be
brought together successfully, both in the haikai sense and with honesty
to experience. All too often I find that the haiku in a haiga has been
written in direct response to an image – often a photographic image that
has been captured by someone else – and at that point the haiku almost
invariably becomes an exercise in ‘creative writing’.

Of course
many stand-alone haiku are also written in a ‘creative writing’ process,
and such practice is of course embedded within the haikai tradition. Basho’s
crow hokku is a famous example,
and while opinion is divided it is likely that Basho was trying to
encompass his aesthetic and poetic principles in this poem. If so he
certainly succeeded, both at the time and in ways he could not possibly
have imagined, the poem ultimately being responsible for inspiring Imagism
and going some considerable way to priming the ground for English-language
haiku. While contemporary poets cannot lay claim to such lofty ambition,
to my mind there are a handful of consistent ‘creative’ haiku poets. But
these poets understand that, as with successful abstract painting, the
response to whatever the stimuli might be has to be deeply-felt, and that
this carries its own authenticity. Yet in most cases the key difference
with abstract art is that the stimuli are presented in the haiku as
objective references – as external, recognizable reality – so most
‘creative’ haiku essentially masquerade as ‘experiential’ haiku, and
depend on that masquerade for their success. Unfortunately the haiku world
is awash with ‘creative’ haiku that are not deeply felt, and many of these
have a “fictional beginning”. While many fall short of achieving notable
success due to factual inaccuracy or impossibility, or to aesthetic or
poetic shortcomings, such haiku have just as much potential to resonate
with a reader as ‘experiential’ haiku – and it is arguable that they are
even more likely to do so given that most are essentially written for
effect. It is no surprise, then, that many award-winning haiku are
‘creative’ haiku. But while ‘creative’ haiku have intrinsic value
as haiku, in the
haikai tradition, most are
not true to any intense experience, and essentially 'record' nothing other
than their creator's own creative ability. Such haiku contain little
worthwhile of the inner reality of the poet, and I question whether the
actual haiku, rather than any attention they might bring, can therefore
have much lasting resonance and relevance for the poet. (And as any
experienced haiku poet could surely turn their hand to writing haiku for
effect if they so desired, I doubt if there is much other than egotistical
reward in that attention.) The ‘global appeal’ of such haiku could be
construed as a triumph over intelligibility and resonance issues, and
again there are no absolute rights and wrongs, but at what cost is this
achieved? As an experienced haiku editor, and as a writer of
‘experiential’ haiku who’s been somewhat superglued in his ways for many
years, I can’t help but feel that most ‘creative’ haiku lack a certain
something, even if it is not always detectable on a conscious level. Some
might consider that certain something to be wholly unnecessary
conditioning of Shiki-filtered western poetic realism. I guess others
might call it soul.

At the end of the day, as I said earlier, we
must each plough our own furrow. For some that will be ‘spoof‘ haiku,
while others will see their uninformed attempts at ‘serious’ haiku
labelled as ‘pseudo’ haiku. ‘Serious’ haiku can be ‘experiential’ or
‘creative’, and while there are undoubtedly experiential and creative
elements to both, I consider it a fundamental distinction. Only ‘creative’
haiku can have a “fictional beginning”. ‘Nature-only’ haiku, and what we
might call ‘human-only’ haiku (not to be confused with senryu), on the
other hand, are related poles of a continuum, and any haiku on that
continuum can be either ‘experiential’ or ‘creative’. This exemplifies why
a simple, encompassing definition of haiku is elusive: a comprehensive
mathematical model of haiku would have to take into account so many
interrelated multidimensional factors that it would become
incomprehensible, and the model itself might become as big as, well, the
universe. Whether a haiku is ‘experiential’ or ‘creative’ it takes
experience, passion, language, tradition and ability to make it
compelling; and something rare and perhaps indefinable to make it truly
universal. Shiki knew that a key element of this was
makoto, or ‘truthfulness’, which he considered to be the
third and final step in the development of a haiku poet: a seamless
connection of their own interior and exterior reality. To Onitsura before
him, makoto was
essential
to haikai, and there is no
doubt that quintessential haiku express both the poet’s outer reality and
their inner being. So where does that leave us? It would certainly be a
start to attempt to write about what we feel and what we know; to write
haiku that are true to ourselves. The haiku field has many boundaries, and
paradoxically it doesn’t have any, but it’s not a bad way to begin to
plough it.

An Interview with John
Barlow
Conducted by Liam
Wilkinson, February 2008

Image © Sean
Gray