We Invite Comments on Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness (Red Moon Press)

The unkindest cut?
An Invitation to Contribute to the Ongoing Conversation


Richard Gilbert’s book Poems of Consciousness is a “before and after” text -- the most important book on haiku poetics in a long time. Its impact on haiku theory and practice should be like that of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) on 20th century poetry. By exploring the structure of haiku in terms of the principle of kiri --“cut” -- it provides a new approach to haiku (traditional as well as modern and contemporary). The fact that the book also introduces the voices of several contemporary Japanese haiku poets makes the arguments even more compelling.
The issue of “consciousness” raised in the title has many ramifications. From our point of view here at SIP, consciousness is very much at the center of haiku practice, and Gilbert’s approach to “cutting” provides many testable insights into form as shaped by a crucial fact of consciousness: consciousness turns on a “gap” or “cut” in reality.
Conversations of the “metaxy” – the word for conscious reality as the “between” -- will become part of this blog, along with more practical matters. In a model of the style we hope to see in contributions, the contemporary Japanese poet Hasegawa Kai discusses how this “cut” in reality impacts our interpretation of one of the iconic poems, Basho’s old pond haiku. The “old pond” of the poem exists in a dimension different from that of the base, which includes the sound of the frog. The dimension of “the old pond” is named “mind.”
We believe that Gilbert’s book will have a profound effect on the way we see haiku – what we think haiku is – and how we write haiku. So, we are devoting the blog to a conversation begun in its pages. To participate send us a short essay (no more than 400 words) which addresses a specific passage. Cite the text and comment.
We will get back to you as soon as possible if we feel your brief commentary would advance the conversation taking place in this space.


--Tom D'Evelyn, Single Island Press