Cuttings

James Shea and Grant Caldwell’s essay compilation on haiku is, according to the editors, the first of its kind. While this might suggest that the book is well overdue, the time lag also makes it possible for the editors to review a greater geographical and temporal range of haiku: from its origins in Japanese poetry to its proliferating influence on world, particularly Anglophone, poetry cultures, and, most contemporarily, to its emergence as an abundant, digital form.

Shea’s introduction quotes Haruo Shirane’s chapter, and Shirane’s characterisation, following Basho, of haiku as ‘oppositional’, of having folk ‘roots’, but also a tendency to reach out to a broader world. These characteristics, in suggesting haiku’s resistance, as well as its historical and anti-provincial aspects, arguably pre-empt any queries along the lines of why haiku? why now? – a mode of critical objection which has become clichéd. As evidence of its cosmopolitan tendencies, Shea links haiku to modernism, for example, through Ezra Pound, while also including references to other, exceptional, critical texts on haiku, noting the form’s importance to Paul Éluard, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, W.B. Yeats, and others; his introduction also deprecates a purely academic approach, deferring to translators, critics, and poets. The impression is that, while haiku itself has a broad reach (including the common resort to haiku as a model for writing poetry in school), studies of haiku are, if not universal, not as limited in their scope – or appeal – as we might think.

The initial chapter by Shirane, ‘Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths’, sets out to challenge received (Anglophone) definitions of haiku, through demonstrating that Japanese haiku, from which such definitions are derived, is not so strictly formulated. Shirane worries at syllable count and theme, but these have never been completely stable. The significant challenge Shirane makes is to the three-line formula, which, in English, makes the poem a stanza: perhaps because English readers are not as ready as Japanese to accept a solitary line as an example of poetry – as if making more than one line were the requirement of poetry as a general concept, form, or genre.

Nothing makes an Australian poet (although probably the Irish, Scots, Welsh, and Canadians have their own quibbles) feel more non-Western than a book about, or an anthology of, transatlantic contemporary, or modernist Anglophone poetry that typically only includes British and North American poets, and yet proceeds as if worldly, general, and inclusive. It is gratifying, then, to read Hiroaki Sato’s recovery of Australian haiku poet Janice M. Bostok within a formal context, too, that is, of one-line haiku, and not as a national necessity or token. Given their excellence (betraying Sato’s taste), and fugitive nature, here are all four:

In the care taken with syntax and rhythm, one-liners create something that sounds like haiku without the explicit lineation. To write (well) in this way requires the poet to have confidence in the use of, and the reader’s skill in discerning, caesurae. Knowing that Bostok was Australian, I’m inclined to think that the poems, with their church and cow, and their avoidance of anything explicitly native, in favour of crow and moth, image the colonial, as well as the ecological, or ecopoetic. That an ‘envelope’ might be the equivalent of an animal, or living being, points to the thing-ness, the object-related ontology, of ecopoetics.

With these and other examples in the chapter, Sato makes his argument regarding the sufficiency of one-line haiku. To my ear his two concluding examples – both from Allen Ginsberg – are only ambivalently successful. The first is unusual in being an explicit sex haiku:

There’s a lot that could be said about this as poetic black male representation by a white male poet, and of a heterosexual representation by a queer poet, but that’s part of the problem: there’s too much going on in the words, rather than in what they evoke. It’s clunky rather than resonant, yet nonetheless impressive in its seventeen-syllable ambition.

The second is very different (and both are late Ginsberg, written in the last years of his life; he died in 1997):

One advantage of the one-line haiku is that a polysyllabic word such as ‘infinite’ can be used anywhere in the line without the awkwardness of breaking it (as in this case where it falls across syllables 5-7). We can project some (biographical) interest into the poem (why ‘window’ rather than being outside? is the speaker in hospital?), but it evokes nothingness (and Ginsberg’s long interest in Buddhism). The only real image is the blue sky, so there is no interaction, or context, produced – nor any astonishment: it appears that the speaker is already in a state beyond astonishment.

This book, then, through its broader formal premise, performs what Arthur Mitchell, one of the endorsers of the Reader, refers to as ‘geopolitical sophisticat[ion]’, which he describes as ‘cut[ting] through the distortions and exoticisms of the Japan/West binary in which the commentary [on haiku] has been entrenched’. ‘Geopolitically sophisticated’ crossings (of seas and borders) can have their costs, however. Sato notes of the New Zealander, William Maxwell Bickerton: ‘For his involvement in translating the work of Proletarian writers, Bickerton was arrested and tortured by the Japanese police in 1934’. Despite haiku’s reputation for being occasional and hobbyist, it is not a form of poetry without danger, historically speaking at least. The second of Sato’s two chapters, ‘From the 2.26 Incident to the Atomic Bomb’, notes haiku poets’ registration of Japan’s role in WWII, demonstrating that the form has a greater range than that of the philosophic everyday:

We recognise that these war haiku retain an imagistic focus: yet, in a sense, Watanabe’s haiku declares victory over the plum blossom, as does Yamaguchi’s over the train’s smoke. When English is forced into such terms as ‘battle-victory’, such haiku create new challenges for translation.

One of fifteen haiku poets gaoled for being critical of the Japanese government’s ‘military expansion in China’ (the chapter by Yūki Itō that follows Sato’s goes into this incident in more detail), Watanabe Hakusen appears to reject politesse, as well as censorship and repression, in his poem:

Onishi Takajuru, a Vice Admiral who disembowelled himself when Japan surrendered, wrote:

Itō’s chapter tells of the persecution of what we might call more progressive, avant-garde, or non-traditional, haiku poets, during WWII by the Special Higher Police. Writing haiku without kigo (season words) was, as Itō states, considered treasonous. Poets were arrested, tortured, and made to make false confessions. Many of the newer haiku magazines were suppressed. After the war, the New Rising Haiku poets who had been repressed during the war published lists of poets they considered Haiku War Criminals for various levels of state and pro-war collaboration and complicity. Some of these poets made public apologies.

When the chapters are read in order, it seems that the first two Japanese scholars accept the approximation of the seventeen-syllable definition, whereas Shea explains that the apt Japanese unit is actually the ‘on’ or, in linguistic terms, ‘mora’, which is closer to the sound of each letter than to the syllable.

Shea is contextualising a discussion of Buson, who, with the earlier Basho, is one of the two historical haiku greats, although Buson is still less well-known. While Shea is generally helpful with dates of publications and historical periods, I felt the lack of a Buson-related ‘works cited’ list at the end of this chapter (something which other chapters include), especially as neither W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento’s book of Buson translations (despite being a focal point in Shea’s chapter) nor some of the earlier editions of Buson translations mentioned are included in the book’s bibliography. (Robert Hass’s translations are included, as they are in co-editor Caldwell’s extensive ‘Works Cited’ list.)

Shea cites Donald Keene’s saying that haiku should provide ‘“two electric poles”, between which the “spark will leap”’. Yet if the two poles are the images of the first two lines, and the spark is felt on reading the third, we might also describe haiku as a form of dialectic, an image-dialectic, perhaps. The end of a haiku is often surprising – as a spark or an electric shock, rather, but it is a satisfying surprise – and we may be disappointed if we don’t get it.

An advantage of haiku studies over studies of other kinds of poetry, is that the reader almost inevitably gets the bonus of a lot of (mostly excellent) complete poems. The critic is not restricted to the most pertinent lines in a poem (often for copyright as much as for critical reasons). Here are a couple of Buson haiku (translated in Merwin and Lento’s selection) quoted by Shea:

It’s well known that the isolation of imagery in haiku, and in other forms of Japanese and Chinese poetry, had an influence on twentieth-century Anglophone modernist poetry, especially via Imagism. But the influence of haiku probably also had an effect on the shortening of line length (in William Carlos Williams, for example; in Australian poetry, this brevity resonates in Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan, and Dorothy Porter, as well as in younger poets, even to the point of decadence) and on punctuation (in e.e. cummings at least: the unpunctuated line of Gertrude Stein probably owes more to the Henry James sentence).

The lack of punctuation in Merwin and Lento’s translations is, however, a problem for Shea. Citing Fukumoto Ichirō, Shea emphasises the need of a ‘cut’ word in haiku: the break that makes the poem a whole. In Japanese, the cut word can function as a form of punctuation, and Shea argues that an explicit punctuation mark aids in the production of an English haiku translation. Merwin and Lento, however, rely mainly on enjambment. While their approach helps to create a rhythm that is recognisable in English as being the way haiku conventionally moves/sounds, it elevates rhythm above imagery – reversing the priority, as Shea sees it, of the original forms. Ultimately, Shea’s complaint refers to the lack of any critical apparatus accompanying Merwin and Lento’s Buson translations, which, in presenting the poems as a fait accompli, tends to reify them and obscure their non-Anglophone origins. Further, given that Merwin is a well-known and experienced translator, his comments on his process – decisions relating to form, rather than the usual focus of translation commentary on semantics and idiom – would be illuminating for readers interested in haiku itself, rather than in the passive reception of its Western formations.

Sato’s defence of the one-line haiku is supported by Shea, who mentions this argument’s influence on John Ashbery, whose ‘37 Haiku’ (all one-liners) appear in A Wave. Shea also cites a related argument by Mark Morris that if we consider the Japanese poetic line as a ‘deformation’ of a Japanese sentence, then one line makes sense – presumably the further deformation of line breaks is going too far (which suggests to me a question regarding reading all poetry: whether, in reading a line as a sense unit, we do, in some sense, read it as a sentence, even if ungrammatical). Referring to Hass’ discussion of this issue, Shea suggests adding em dashes to a line – a notion that goes too far for me, and, further, seems ugly; as a substitute for a cutting word, it is too brutal and overstated. Why not merely have spacing, or let the grammatical disjunction function as a caesura, the way it would in English? What Shea does get across is how rich the translation of haiku can be: his examples show how one small poem can be endlessly reinvented, to the extent that an entire book can be filled with different versions of it. Translation can, then, be thought of as a form of conceptual poetry, one that aims at reproducing possibility.

On its own, each translation (especially if the haiku in question is already well-known) can seem mannered; it is up to the translator to offer enough interest, range, and variety across a group or book of iterations. Shea objects to translations of a bird in a Buson poem as a blue heron, rather than a grey heron (as the species is known in English). A blue heron could refer to a number of different birds – the North American blue heron, or the Australian white-faced heron (colloquially known as a blue crane). Common names of similar species, or of similar-looking, birds can be very slippery as it is, and poets, Shea implies, should not add to the problem. But might we not want to translate a species of bird from one familiar to speakers of one language to one more familiar to readers of another rather than strictly observing what the words denote? In haiku or otherwise, should the (fictional) scene of a poem remain Japanese, or accommodate the terms of the (translated) poem’s new audience? Without reference to a specific species, place, or culture, it might seem easy enough to ‘universalise’ a poem. But there is, of course, no universal reader, and what might seem universal in a poem can be specific to a native, or someone like Shea, who is familiar with, for example, Kyoto’s humidity. Such deficits in cultural capital can be made up for in those cases where the poem is accompanied by commentary, which as Shea notes, is customary for Chinese poetry.

The idea of a haiku as the deformation of a sentence implies a suggestive problematic for haiku writers in English: to deform an English sentence might take the haiku, for good or ill, away from its conventional cadence. But there’s a difference between deforming a sentence as we write it, and deforming one that’s already been written, or one that we have in mind, however vaguely, as a conventional sentence. An already written sentence – from this review, for instance – would not likely possess anything haiku-like, or poetic, about it, except for perhaps the cadence and the aiding, readerly, context. But here goes – my first sentence, deformed:

Certainly flat enough to prove my point. Perhaps Shea would prefer an em dash after ‘seems’? Yet I think that the cut, if it is made there, is late. I can’t help but think that the haiku is being deformed as much as the sentence is. An em dash might well work after ‘Ed.’s’ too – and I see, then, the correspondence between Dickinson and haiku, how a dash can hold rhythm and syntax in suspension, in an attempt to avoid flatness or disposability. (Personally, I like the challenge of a 5-7-5 syllable count.) It is Shea’s name that brings the most to the table soundwise, and Caldwell fits well enough beside it. To give it a sustained lift, though, it needs an image, a metaphor stronger than the weak figuring of ‘the first of their kind’.

As I edit my attempt in my head, I am no longer deforming the sentence consciously, but rather deforming the line, as conventionally broken. It remains ‘a sentence’ in my head as a unit of sense rather than as a unit of grammatical logic. A one-line edit would help keep the notion of a pre-textual sentence in view:

This last version appeals to me more, but by saying that I don’t mean to imply I’m against one-line versions of haiku in general. The greatest deformation in my example is, arguably, not to the grammar (which is pretty awkward) but to the sense: it drops the critical distance of ‘apparently’, or ‘it seems’, and gives the idea of the book an imagistic thrust, though one as yet unearned in being the first sentence of the review. So perhaps a haiku is what should end a book review, given the form’s tendency to condense and summarise, or, we could say, to index. But my haiku exercise does not index, being too metaphorical. What would we do with the meaning of black swans? Even metaphorically it suggests that it is an Australian book, which is only very partly true (Caldwell is Australian). But perhaps, rather, it indexes the Australian critic’s attempt to universalise an Australian image: to make the swan ‘swanny’. According to Viktor Shklovsky, this is the point of art: to make us feel the images. To make the presence of the thing felt, rather than assume a level of presence in the word.

Buson’s haiku do do more than make the haiku haiku-y: they create a sensation of imagery that relates to the real. If we have seen a bush warbler, the haiku adds sense to the memory; I have a visual sense of it without having seen that particular species: the ‘uguisu’, which is the Japanese term for this bird, ‘is more often heard than seen’, according to Wikipedia. Buson does us all a favour, then. Many of us may not have seen a beautiful woman’s forehead pucker while eating a green plum: perhaps we could image our mothers, or others, eating something sour.

The Reader is not merely a celebration of the form, either, notwithstanding the instances of criticality mentioned above. Takeo Kuwabara skewers the form with the title of his chapter, ‘A Second-Class Art: On Contemporary Haiku’. Although I had noted that Kuwabara died in 1988, I was surprised to see that his essay, translated into English in 2006 by Mark Jewel, is dated as being from 1946. In an experimental essay that notably mixes haiku from canonical and amateur sources, and includes reactions to these poems by people he knows as evidence (although we don’t know to what extent these people were influenced by the writer’s own opinions), Kuwabara highlights the problem of the artistic level of a form so widespread that even children learn to write them in school. Haiku has, he argues, become decadent since Basho, blaming his continued imitation (he does not mention Buson, which perhaps says something about the rise in Buson’s stock since 1946). He is highly critical of Japanese modern art in general, compared to French, avowing the worth of Paul Valéry and Auguste Rodin, for example. Kuwabara’s is, to some extent, a comparative literature chapter: he mentions his time in France, and his appreciations of French culture’s modernity – a modernity that appears to him to be lacking in both the practice and appreciation of haiku, where it is as if it were merely an aspect of traditional lifestyle, an ‘amateur’ art form. Against this, he aligns himself with what he sees as the French artistic perception: ‘modern art is the result of hard work that demands everything that an individual has to give’.  

What, then, might Kuwabara have made of Pound’s experiments? In developing his theory of the image, Pound was not just borrowing from Japanese poetics (as Yoshinobu Hakutani suggests, for Pound haiku was a vortex – an energy structure rather than merely a picture, or sound), but also from French prose, because that was what he saw as the tightest or most energised form of contemporary writing: the prose fictional style of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. This was the bomb he wanted to drop on Anglophone poetry – and, arguably, he did. Hakutani refers to an essay by Yone Noguchi from 1913 (Noguchi and Pound first met in 1914, but had been corresponding since 1911), which reflected on haiku as being a Zen practice that expressed Nature. But Pound was a modernist, a scientist, mixing up a compound of unlikely elements, roughly: Japanese poetic form, Chinese ideogrammatical form, and French prose style. All had a kind of concision, and precision, in common. The common suffix of these words (‘-cision’) comes from the Latin ‘caedere’, meaning cut. The unnecessary is cut from the image – the bits without flavour, those hard to digest. There is an unavoidable violence in cutting: yet this is an etymological inheritance affecting not just form, but an entire aesthetics. As Yakutani frames it, Pound was interested in juxtaposing images of equal weight, rather than subordinating one image to another as in a simile. I’m reminded of the different approaches to film composition implied by the French ‘montage’, and the Anglo-American term ‘editing’. With regards to poetry, montage evokes a compositional practice of addition and assemblage, whereas the suggestion in the craft of editing – whether by writer or editor, and although it may involve expansion – is that an excellent product is made through what is rejected: as with John West’s canned fish.

In ‘Haiku as a Western Genre’, Jan Walsh Hokenson argues for a modernist reading of haiku in the context of French and Spanish poetics – a history which, he says, is being erased by Anglo-American framings. He discusses, in particular, the significance of early twentieth-century French haiku translator and anthologiser, Paul-Louis Couchoud. Three examples suggest to me a modern, empathetic, relation towards women as subjects, in contrast to a long Western poetic tradition of presenting women as objects of beauty. Here is one:

Yet despite grouping these haiku together, Hokenson makes no commentary about their representation of women. Rather, he frames them in terms of the poet’s ‘sympathy’ with the world – particularly the world of ‘peasants and workers’. Such sympathy can further be seen in the WWI trench haiku of Julien Vocance, anthologised by Couchoud:

Other haiku poets of significance discussed by Hokenson include René Maublanc, and the Italian poet Guiseppe Ungaretti. Hokenson makes it clear that haiku, among other literary and non-literary forces (such as the war itself), was informing what European modernist poetry was becoming – for example with regard to arguments (rhetoric) about rhetorical eloquence. Mexican poet José Juan Tablada was an early innovator in haiku (from 1904), his influence spreading to other Latin American poets; whereas Spanish-language poets in Spain began practising haiku ‘around 1925’. Here’s Tablada:

Any haiku worth the name might be said to be eloquent, but its eloquence is not, at least in Western literary terms, rhetorical: Tablada is not making an argument about the strength of the moon, or the spider’s insomnia. The poem is not saying to the reader anything about its own style or poeticalness; it is merely performing it. For Pound, and other modernist poets, haiku, then, can be seen as a radical form of modern poetry: of getting back to the image.

There are further chapters, in the Reader, on Native American haiku, and another on the disjunctive possibilities of haiku. There is also a chapter on the poetic diary, with haiku written in the context of travel, a major Japanese form reflecting a Japanese mode of literary composition that perhaps has no Anglophone equivalent. There are chapters on experimentation.

The chapter by co-editor, Grant Caldwell, looks at the broader topic of non-English haiku, in dialogue with Japanese commentators. Keiko Imaoka is enthusiastic about what English poetry might do for haiku in its very inability to conform to Japanese language strictures. Hasegawa Kai, however, is more sceptical. Caldwell counters with his own scepticism regarding Japanese understandings of Western poetics and, in particular, this statement by Hasegawa: ‘Western languages are thought ultimately to belong to God, but in Japan, from ancient times, language has been considered exceedingly private’. Caldwell refutes the distinction and comments that the latter descriptor applies as much to Western poetry (so called). The extent to which either is also (paradoxically?) social is another question. Caldwell also alludes to Pound, and the fact that Anglophone poetry, in particular, had through Pound already been influenced by aspects of Japanese poetics before the practice of haiku became widespread.

Can non-Japanese renditions conserve (produce?) the spirit of haiku? Caldwell’s definition of the haiku spirit (‘haii’, included in his useful glossary) is Basho’s: ‘the antitraditional, anticonventional, character of haiku, including its freedom and unceasing search for new worlds, languages and perspectives’. It’s a pretty nifty defence against conservative critics, and perhaps obviates questions about haiku metaphysics, or what is lost in translation. Caldwell also includes a sample of Australian haiku. Here is one, by Quendryth Young, originally published in the now-defunct haiku-supporting Tasmanian poetry journal Famous Reporter:

Young’s haiku, presented in three lines unlike Bostok’s one-liners above, is nevertheless similar in presenting a scene that can be read as colonial: while the cruise is metaphorical, it evokes an imported, settler, image. There is something settled and comfortable about the bay-as-image; after all, ‘Pleasure’ is the dominant affect. A postcolonial reading is, perhaps, somewhat more than these three lines can bear: in any case, the haiku’s irony is that the human has become subject to the insect.  

As this book demonstrates, haiku studies is a substantial field: both as a traditional, and contemporary Japanese form, and as a modernist form in translation. Charles Trumbull’s chapter on haiku relations with American Beat poets, as well as Latin American, French, and Russian poets, ends with an appreciative look at Brazilian haiku (written in Portuguese). Whereas other cultures received the Japanese form through translation, and in the context of varieties of modernism, haiku arrived in Brazil with Japanese migrants. He claims that the Brazilian haiku ‘scene’ is the ‘most active in the world’, apart from those of the English-language (and Japan?). There is a discernible metaphorical quality to Brazilian haiku; it is more humanist than traditional haiku, but uses the ‘kire’, or cutting quality, of haiku to create a disjunctive relation within the human, and sometimes, the nonhuman (or seasonal). Trumbull has a dig at his own sample of non-Japanese-nor-Brazilian haiku practice (of the poets he mentions, he mostly quotes just one example): ‘time and again we see the poets passing over opportunities to create tension or resonance in their work in favour of felicitous or witty language, or Western-style aesthetics, and didacticism in choice of subject matter’. Here are two:

Xisto is known as a concrete poet, and perhaps this practice is why his haiku is oddly undefined and conceptual. There is no nonhuman, nor even constructed, element: only the speaker and the addressee – we read (into it) that the other sees two images of themselves, but this is not detailed. It suggests a psychological meta-haiku of projection: that contemporary readers see only themselves in images, whatever they may be. Known for the uncommon practice of titling her haiku, Kolody appears more conventional in her poem, containing as it does the image of a rainbow: yet it is also humanist in a way that is not typical of Japanese haiku. The rainbow’s purpose appears to be as an image that helps us understand the human – either because the boy’s smile parallels sun after rain, or, more modestly, he smiles at the sight of the rainbow. Whatever the case, the image is sentimental and arrogant, despite the poem’s apparent depiction of a slight and sweet anecdote.

Readers of this book will gain their own sense of comparative global haiku, and inevitably, also one of comparative translation. Haiku of all cultures outside Japan has learned from translations of Japanese haiku; and haiku that reads like haiku is in a sense still a translated Japanese form, even if originally composed in English. The haiku from non-English cultures presented here are, then, further translated/mediated into English. Cécile Rousselet, in a chapter-length study on Russian haiku notes that translation in this field is even more complicated, as Russian haiku poets often also write in English or French (her own chapter has been translated from French). She writes of Russian haiku in terms of its proximal geographic relation with Japan, and notes that there is a preoccupation in Russian haiku with destruction; for instance, this, by Marcel Mart:

A different kind of comparativeness comes to the fore in Phillip Rowland’s chapter (he writes as the editor of NOON: A Journal of the Short Poem), which considers haiku in relation to other approaches to the contemporary short poem. The composition of his chapter is refreshing: after so many chapters of literary criticism combined with literary history, Rowland’s research also involved survey questions for poets and editors of poetry journals, regarding the publishing of haiku. He admits that his strategy was not completely successful (neither quantitatively nor qualitatively), but his questions remained useful as a method for structuring his chapter, and for reflection on haiku publishing. His imaging of editorial decision made me think that there is something particular about the headspace of reading haiku: that my appreciation of haiku is increased in the process of reading this (excellent) collection of essays with its quoted haiku (haiku being an ideal form for quotation, which makes me wonder about its failure to take off more generally as an object for graduate study, or one of close reading, as far as I can tell) because I am reading within a headspace different to my usual poetry reading headspace. While Rowland provides convincing examples (such as lines from a Jorie Graham poem) of haiku as a liminal and relational form, nevertheless its strength makes me think of it as its own genre – to an extent. Haiku is lyric poetry. But perhaps it – and maybe not it alone (think of short Persian forms, for example) – makes us realise to what extent lyric is a European form, and that to refer to lyric as a distinct category alongside epic, narrative, and dramatic poetry, while constructive, also conceals the ways that genre is, and has been, historically produced in non-European literatures.

The final, formal, chapter is by haiku poet Ban’ya Natsuishi: a short provocative chapter where he addresses the mediocrity of humanising haiku that is, ultimately, about the writer’s (clichéd) feelings, in contrast to haiku’s cosmic possibilities, as exemplified in Basho. Finally, a brief afterword, by Anita Patterson, reflects on the history of haiku as an influence on, and as a form that was useful for, African Jamaican and African American poets. Patterson refers to haiku as a ‘peacebuilding’ form, and for English poetry at least, haiku is a form that, while not outside history or colonialism, is nevertheless relatively free of the fraught class and race relations that operate in the Anglosphere. Or,

I regret not being able to instil these syllabically correct three lines with what Couchoud refers to as haiku’s ‘very definition’: ‘a brief astonishment!’