3LIGHTS | An Interview with John Barlow

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 naļve 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