re:Virals 535

End of year roundup, nominations, and idle thoughts

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Keith.

Season’s greetings to all. Reminder: you have until midnight EST on Tuesday December 30 to submit commentaries on last week’s new poem via the submission form below.

Host comment (Keith)

The approach of the New Year is a time for recollection and rumination about the old year. For re:Virals, the recruitment of three co-hosts to run this weekly haiku commentary feature has been a refreshing development, providing variety as well as sharing the load. I think the new team members are finding, as I have done, that the discipline of having to reflect on a verse in the round, and with different perspectives offered by our contributors, deepens our understanding of haiku and senryu significantly. Our collective thanks to all those who have contributed commentaries. Many have taken that plunge for the first time, and enjoyed it.

As about two-thirds of the verses appearing in re:Virals  are first published in the current calendar year, put forward as haikuists’ favourites, and benefit from commentaries, we’re licensed to submit a few nominations to the Touchstone panel and to the Red Moon Anthology. This year, the team made some picks and voted on them. Interestingly, no verse received more than two votes out of four, not unexpected in a genre where the reader can play almost as large a part as the writer, and tastes and life experiences vary. Here are the verses we’ve nominated:

December wind
through the kitchen door
my mother motherless
—Antoinette Cheung
FemkuMag #38: Spring 2025
re:Virals 495

what I saw was thorns
until one day I passed by
and saw blackberries
—Kelly Shaw
The Mainichi, January 10, 2025,
re:Virals 500
mangroves
the promised manatees
never come
—Agnes Eva Savich 
Presence 81, March 2025
re:Virals 505
the garden snail
on our driveway
Ukraine talks
—Archie G. Carlos
tsuri-dōrō Issue #27 – May/June 2025
re:Virals 516
wishing
for grandkids
the silence of stars
— Ann Sullivan
Prune Juice Issue 46, August 2025
re:Virals 520
her child answers
in the nanny's tongue
end of summer
—Roland Packer
The Heron's Nest xxvii No. 3, September 2025
re:Virals 532
Congratulations to the poets.

Establishing a small team has also led to many lively conversations among the four of us behind the scenes. Most enjoyable and informative, they must remain confidential!

Idle thoughts: Haiku-dō

I know from background correspondence that I’m only one of many who find much of the haiku and senryu published to be repetitive and often banal. I could list manifold obvious reasons for this.

We are not the first: it’s a recurrent refrain from early rival schools of the genre, through Buson, Shiki (whose views were trenchant), to Reginald Blyth, William Higginson,  Peter Yovu,  Jim Kacian, and latterly in 2009-2013, Robert D. Wilson whose comments lambasting many quoted haiku of the times were somewhat  over-egged, detracting from the force of his argument.

One underlying factor may be a yearning always to make of haiku something more than it usually is, into a form of high art as we conceive of literary ‘art.’

Then… I tell myself to relax!  Through the ages, in any art form you can choose, only the finest or most notable works are handed down. The bulk has been discarded. Hence we often think that the art of those times was of better quality than now.  While some haiku may indeed approach high poetic art, or be memorable for any of the other reasons a haiku may be memorable, they are few. They always were. Bashō said that if you write one good verse during a lifetime, you’ve done well. Write ten, and you’re a master. He left us only a thousand or so of his own verses,  having doubtless culled many more.  Frankly, not all of them are standouts, but quite a few  are ineffably great and precious, while Bashō’s standing makes the others at least interesting. This past fortnight I’ve been reading another thousand by Shiki’s friend Natsume Soseki and have copied only ten or so to my file of notable haiku. I’m a voracious reader of old journals of English Language Haiku when they are made freely available online, and it’s evident that even in the heyday of 1980-2010 the proportion of good verses, of wider and enduring value, is pretty small.

Haiku is more than ‘art’ in our sense of the word. It is, as Bashō felt, ‘a way’ (道, michi, path).  It’s a practice.  As aikidō, or karate, or chadō (the way of tea), or sodō (the way of calligraphy), are practices.  Let’s call it haiku-dō, 俳句道.  A path, the cultivation of a discipline for its own sake. For our own sake. Thus, anyone who begins on this path is to be encouraged. It is not to be expected that all will become a 10th Dan.  Or that an acclaimed poet will write a masterpiece every time.  The fact that people come to haiku and are moved to try their hand, to open their senses, to reflect more deeply, to be creative, to risk writing and sharing, is marvellous. That their experiences when shared in haikai are rarely unique, is wholly to be expected.  Indeed universal meaning is part of the genre’s appeal.  That few verses seem novel in a form of very few words where plain language and direct images are strongly favoured is unsurprising.

Each autumn, leaves turn red and gold, and fall; but we do not yawn and say “we’ve seen all that before.”

So, as we scour the journals and the internet and think the bulk of the verses in them are okay but little more, one shouldn’t mind that many are repetitive or unoriginal.  One shouldn’t expect to find many that are fresh, original and of sufficient lasting merit to add to the acquis.  I’m happy that each year I clip as many as two or three hundred newly-published verses to my file of possibles, of which about thirty have particular impact on me.  They make it worthwhile.  That is, in view of the above, pretty good!  And I find them in all sorts of places. Here’s one in the HSA Newsletter from September: members Terri L. French and Peggy Hale Bilbro taught a four-session course on haiku and related genres for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Alabama. One of the resulting examples by their students was:

men cut down trees —
their truck parked
in the shade
—Lisa Brunegraff

Haikudō. Lisa, a bow.

A Happy New Year to you all, from the re:Virals team.

This fortnight’s poem, chosen by last week’s winning commentator Urszula Marciniak is repeated below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by next Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.

Poem for commentary:

     
Grasshoppers...
I can't run or jump
anymore
— Satoru Kanematsu
  Asahi Haikuist Network, October 4, 2024

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

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