An Interview with Michael Dylan Welch by Colin Stewart Jones
Colin: Hi Michael, and welcome to the pages of Nts fro h en. You have been interviewed oe m te Ga
quite a few times so I will endeavour not to go over previously covered ground. But I did notice from a previous interview that you quoted William Blake. I was recently reading So So s ong f Exe ncprie eagain and noticed these three lines from Blake‘s poem ―The Blossom‖:
ng f Is o nnoe e ad cnc n
. . . Pretty Robin! Under leaves so green, A happy blossom
Would you regard this as a haiku, and if so, could you tell us why? And if not, could you tell us why not?
Michael: These lines appreciate nature and colour, which are clear haiku sensitivities, but no, I wouldn‘t consider this a haiku. Aside from whether haiku was intended, I would say that ―pretty‖ and ―happy‖ demonstrate too much authorial intrusion. These words are a little too sappy for haiku, too, to my tastes. Even the word ―so‖ speaks too much of the author. The right touch of subjectivity in contemporary English-language haiku can work well (one needs to control it, not avoid it entirely), but for the most part I think the author should get out of the way. Let the poem imply its meaning, not hit you over the noggin with it. Furthermore, the last line here may not be describing a blossom but interpreting the robin as if it were a blossom. The metaphor points at the author (―this is what I think of the image‖) rather than letting a carefully chosen image or experience do its own talking. It‘s the difference between the first and second parts of Robert Frost‘s ―Dust of Snow‖ poem (even though it‘s a poem I like very much). Explicit metaphors and similes succeed only rarely in haiku because they are detours to the image, or substitutes for it, and not the image itself. In attempting to be postmodern or post-whatever, some poets treat haiku as if it celebrates the poet. They‘re welcome to do so. But for my money it seems vital for haiku to celebrate the experience, not the experiencer. Of course, such an assertion begs for its opposite—for some haiku poet out there to turn all Whitmanesque in celebrating himself, which I think we already see with some gendai haiku. However, haiku poems succeed best, I think, if they trust the image (read Robert Hass‘s ―Images‖ essay), and juxtapose images carefully to create implied emotion by what is left out. I like to refer to this space as the ―vacuum‖ in haiku. InT
h e Bok o e 57 o f Ta, though not speaking of haiku, Kakuzo
Okakura said ―In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of
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