Haiku speaks to haiku
The individual haiku started, after all, as the opening verse for a collaborative renga, so it's natural that the response to a fine haiku is to want to write yourself. A classic example from Buson -
butterfly
sleeping
on the temple bell
- prompted the poem Japan by Billy Collins (in which the butterfly, incidentally, becomes a moth):
Twelve people on the haiku course at Ty Newydd offered verse-responses, all quite different. I offered this -
the first quiver of its wings
will trigger the colossal clang
- to which somebody else said 'Chaos Theory!' So it goes.
Published: 20 July, 2018