20th February 2025
Jan Dobb, Glenys Ferguson, Hazel Hall, Kathy Kituai, Marietta McGregor and Gregory Piko gathered @ The Oaks café for our first meeting of the year. There was lots of sunshine and good cheer as we caught up on recent happenings before launching into a range of haiku matters.
• Hazel shared a copy of the 2024 British Haiku Society anthology, Shining Wind, which presented haiku on the theme of Light.
• There was talk about how the prose for a haibun sometimes just doesn’t need the addition of a haiku. In which case, it might be best for the piece to stand as a prose poem.
• We considered the use of ‘first person’ versus ‘third person’ when writing haiku, and why poets are often advised to avoid the use of first person.
Much of our discussion related to a short essay Marietta had circulated prior to the meeting. The essay, available on The Haiku Foundation website, is titled Can You Write Haiku in the Past Tense? by Julie Bloss Kelsey.
Haiku are generally written about the ‘here and now’ using present tense, however it seems some interesting poems can emerge when we relax this practice. On occasion, we may wish to use the past tense of a verb, or we may simply wish to reference an event in the past. As Bloss Kelsey says, a haiku can be effective where ‘a past experience informs the present’.
Marietta circulated the following haiku by John Stevenson which works this way – where the writer seems to be reflecting in the present about a past event:
cold moon
a moment of hesitation
years ago
As always, we enjoyed catching up in person and our chat provided lots of ideas to inspire our writing.
Gregory Piko
Australian Haiku Society 