Tag: Haiku

• August 16, 2013

  Beginner’s fingers: A study in Ensō

  Beginner’s fingers / follow bristles lengthening / and thickening breaths.
• June 20, 2013

  Basho’s poetic spirit: A mode of radiance

  For Basho (1644-1694), in whose hands the haiku form achieves its essence, the poet must submerge himself within a natural object, to perceive its delicate life and feel its feelings, out of which a poem forms itself. A poem may skillfully delineate an object; but, unless it embodies feelings which have been naturally emerged out…
• June 17, 2013

  The quivering haiku

  ‘The brevity of haiku,’ writes R.H. Blyth in Haiku: Volume III–Summer/Autumn, ‘is not something different from, but a part of the poetical life; it is not only a form of expression but a mode of living more immediately, more closely to life.’ Here is Arakida Moritake, a sixteenth century Japanese poet cited in Alan Watts’…