| An Interview with Matthew Paul |
| LW: Matthew, it's a pleasure to welcome you to 3LIGHTS for a solo exhibition of your work. You've always been very supportive of our online gallery, for which we're extremely grateful, and it's great to share more of your work with visitors to our site this Autumn.
Can you begin by telling us when, where and how you first encountered and began writing haiku and, in particular, your very accomplished senryu? MP: Many thanks for inviting me, Liam - it's a pleasure. I first encountered haiku at school when I was about 14 (in 1980/1981), when my then English teacher encouraged my class to have a go. I daresay it was very much 5-7-5, but that same teacher, Jim De Rennes, was also very keen on William Carlos Williams, so through him I discovered Imagism in general and Williams' fantastic poetry in particular. Williams is one of the great poets, with an unquestionably huge influence. The dictum of "No idea but in things" inevitably led back to haiku, via the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, so when I went to university a few years later I quickly gravitated to Harold G Henderson's Introduction to Haiku, and to collections of Basho, Buson and Issa. By 1990 I was trying my hand at writing haiku again and then my brother, Adrian, sent me a flyer for the newly-founded British Haiku Society (BHS) and I've been writing haiku ever since. However, I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that if it hadn't been for John Barlow's Snapshots venture I would probably have given up haiku around 1997, as my interest was definitely waning around that time. With regard to what you kindly call "very accomplished senryu", I prefer to think of them as 'haiku about people'. That may sound pedantic, but I believe that the commonly-held distinction between 'haiku' and 'senyru' is unhelpful, especially since the boundaries of each inevitably merge in a fuzzy grey area. Dee Evetts, who was one of the three co-founders of the BHS, outlined at the launch of the Iron Book of British Haiku about ten years ago his theory of haiku and senryu being on a spectrum, and I completely agree with that. The problem, as I see it, with the 'senryu' label is that so many people regard it as being an excuse for one-dimensional 'ironic' stuff, more often than not reliant on a dodgy pun, which may be mildly amusing on first reading but which has no depth and is as boring as anything when you come to read it for a second or subsequent time. I much prefer haiku about people that relate their activities, and, implicitly, their state of mind and emotions, to their natural environment. So, for me, 'haiku about people' is a more helpful term. Regarding my own 'haiku about people', I guess I'm a bit of a miserable so-and-so underneath and not a great one for company, so I've repeatedly been drawn to write about people who are working on their own, out in the elements. I hope that doesn't sound patronising and I'm fully aware that there's nothing especially heroic about solitary working - whether as a roadsweeper, a one-man band or whatever - but I'm full of admiration for anyone who just gets on with things, on their own initiative and all that. For all I and anyone else knows, people doing such work may have the most complete and rewarding lives imaginable and what I aim to show, if anything, is that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover. As Shakespeare wrote, "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face". Never a truer word was ever written. LW: I'm glad you mentioned the common misunderstanding concerning the line between haiku and senryu as it's something on which I've always had strong opinions too, and we at 3LIGHTS subscribe wholly to your philosophy on that subject. I believe that your haiku, as well as that of John Barlow and Dee Evetts, lends the argument some fine examples of the flexibility and possibilities of haiku. You each have something else in common, and it's something that I referred to in a recent review of John Barlow's work as well as in an interview with him earlier this year, and that is that you manage to infuse much of your work with a sense of British identity. Whether it's Hula Hoops, Punch and Judy, football or even Doctor Who, you have a satisfying knack of making the modern British landscape seem universal. Is this an important aspect of your work, and do you feel that it should be natural for a writer of haiku to "think locally", making reference to such features of the cultural landscape as TV shows and sports? MP: I’m glad you mentioned that, Liam. Although writing haiku with a local flavour is not something that I consciously set out to do, I am aware of the fact that my writing often has a local flavour to it. I very much appreciate local flavour in other people’s writing, wherever they may live in the world (check out http://haikudreamingaustralia.info/, for example), and I do think that it is important to convey a degree of cultural background in haiku – whether that means writing about local flora and fauna or for example, in the case of American haiku, simply sitting next to the jukebox in a diner. That’s not to say that I feel that English/British haiku should contain as much cultural resonance as, say, some classical Japanese haiku. Keith Coleman, who’s a fine haiku poet in his own right, is translating the entire corpus of Basho’s writings and many of the haiku require extensive footnotes simply to be comprehensible, and even then the allusions that Basho made inevitably have limited emotional impact for someone, like me, who has never even set foot in Japan and does not have a full knowledge of Japanese culture and history. Yet it seems to me to be entirely right and proper that the cultural references, the baggage, should reach far back into the writer’s background if s/he sees fit. I also like to think that the use of idiom in English-language haiku ought to be much greater than it is: Keith, for instance, being the Yorkshireman that he is, often uses phrases or words – e.g. “folk” instead of “people – that sound a little strange to my soft Southern ears, but I would defend to the death his right to use them. It would be a very boring world if everybody spoke and wrote in ‘Received Pronunciation’. Where it becomes more difficult is if the words or references are so idiomatic or obscure that the reader can’t find them even by undertaking an internet search. Some of the examples of mine that you have quoted may be strange to readers in other countries, and although I presume that Dr Who has been broadcast throughout the English-speaking world (and probably beyond) by now, that’s not to say that everyone is familiar with it and with the Cybermen that appear by proxy in my haiku. It would be a very tedious world, though, if a haiku were to be rejected by an editor just because of a perception that it is not sufficiently generic. Haiku as written in English is homogenous enough without editors denying readers the opportunity to broaden their cultural horizons. Readers of haiku magazines are intelligent people (half of them are academics!) and I sometimes wish that editors would trust their readers’ knowledge more than they seem to do. For me, haiku, like any form of writing, springs from the cultural background of the people who write it and it is perverse to try and deny that. I’m British, or, more specifically, English, so even though I detest overt nationalism in the form of flag-waving patriotism, rabid monarchy-loving, etc., I feel very fortunate to live in a country which, remarkably, still contains a huge variety of beautiful and exciting landscapes, both rural and urban, so I like to think my haiku reflect that. I live in the suburbs of London , where the pace of life is fairly, but not bewilderingly, fast, with the ever-beautiful Thames just a few minutes’ walk away, and I like to get about and visit different places and learn more about the land in which I live. I believe that’s a very natural impulse and it constantly surprises me when people are apathetic about their environment – but then as the crowd in Life of Brian say, “We are all individuals!” LW: You've just published Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku with John Barlow. It's interesting to see how haiku can become a joint effort, particularly one that unites two renowned writers of the form such as John and yourself. I wonder if you'd tell us a little bit about that particular experience and how your interest in both birds and haiku have overlapped. MP: John and I have been friends ever since I was the first person to submit haiku for his then fledgling magazine, Snapshots, in the mid-‘90s, and we share a similar outlook on the things that matter (to us at least), like haiku, music and football. From 1997 or so onwards we’d discussed various collaborative ideas, including one of compiling a collection of haiku about zoos – ‘zooku’, as we called them! – but we only found about 20 examples and nearly all of them included the word ‘cage’ so the idea never got airborne. We then thought of compiling an anthology of crow haiku, but that concept didn’t really take off either. Gradually it dawned on us that we’d written a fair few bird haiku, some of which were created when we were together ‘out in the field’, that we thought weren’t half bad, so our initial Wing Beats concept was of a joint collection. Quite early on we felt it would be good to order the book by the birds’ taxonomic classification and so it seemed a logical next step to open the book up to other haiku poets, so as to get as broad a range of species and experiences as possible. It was an absolute delight for us to be able to include the haiku of many writers that we admire. Consequently, the haiku in Wing Beats cover an enormous diversity of bird (and human) behaviour and environments. The book is something different, within the realms of both poetry and natural history, which should, we hope, introduce birders to haiku and encourage haiku poets to write more nature haiku. Birds and haiku are made for one another, in that birds are always in the present; always, it seems, engaged in the business of existence; and haiku, at its experiential best, deals with capturing existential moments and the oneness of life. That may sound high-falutin’, but I’m positive that Wing Beats exemplifies that. It’s been a pleasure putting the book together, although that’s easy for me to say because John wrote the appendices and – painstakingly and brilliantly, as ever – took on and solved all the design difficulties, not least of how Sean Gray’s wonderful illustrations could be successfully incorporated into the book. It’s worth saying, too, that we put as much critical engagement into the consideration of each other’s submissions for the book as we jointly did in considering those of the other writers, and we both felt that that was crucial so that we didn’t get above ourselves. We also put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that every aspect of the book was just how we would want it to be if we were the readers. From that point of view, the collaborative aspect to the project enabled us to bounce ideas off one another and to keep each other grounded, rather than drifting off into the fantastical. I just hope that the end result will connect with its readers, and hopefully raise the bar of British haiku, so that it can earn attention and respect outside the ‘haiku world’. LW: Finally, I always like to ask writers if they have any advice for those who are beginning to write and publish their haiku and tanka, and I'm sure many visitors to 3LIGHTS would be interested to read any tips you might have. MP: I’m not sure that I’m especially qualified to give tips on writing tanka, but with haiku, as with any poetry, I feel that it’s important to write first and foremost the sort of poetry that you would like to read if it were written by anyone else, and then to ask yourself does the haiku contain sufficient originality and musicality to warrant it being read and enjoyed by anyone else. It’s good to sit on haiku for a while, and see if they stand the test of time of at least a few weeks or months, before submitting them to editors (not that I’ve always had the self-discipline to do that myself!); and, if you can, find someone whose opinion you respect to be your writing partner, who will give you critical feedback. That’s much better than simply submitting haiku to editors and expecting them to be able to undertake that critical engagement. And make sure you read your haiku aloud so that you can hear its rhythms and hear where the line breaks, if any, should be. Don’t be afraid to experiment, especially with the one-liner form, but remember that haiku has core elements without which it isn’t really haiku. Another thing is that when people first try writing haiku, if they are naturally perceptive and take the time to observe the world, they can very quickly learn how to write the sort of haiku which have an immediate impact on the reader, but to write haiku which have layers, and reward many re-readings, takes years of practice and craft. Last and not least, although the tradition of ‘desk’ haiku is as old as haiku itself, I believe that haiku is at its best when it stems from direct observation and sensory experience, whether that’s at home, in the street, in a field, up a mountain, underwater or whatever! Many thanks for giving me the chance to share my views and my haiku, Liam. |
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| Matthew Paul has contributed haiku to journals in the United Kingdom and the United States for more than fifteen years, and many of these appear in his collection The Regulars (Snapshot Press, 2008). He is an associate editor for Presence haiku magazine, has a poetry blog at http://matthewpaulpoems.blogspot.com and lives and works in London . His latest book, Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku, written and compiled with John Barlow, is available from www.wingbeats.co.uk. |