hokku

stumbled into david coomler's wonderful hokku site from this interesting haiblog cheekily titled that was zen, this is tao. started a lively correspondence with david who started this site, fed up with the three lines of punctuation-less, often, subjective ambiguity, passing off as haiku. he spells out very clearly the rules that underlie classical hokku, a form honed by such masters as basho, buson, issa and ryokan. hokku focuses on objective expression of experiences (as opposed to thinking or conceptualization) and is intimately in harmony with nature and the seasons. the form eventually degenerated into hackneyed themes of moon watching and sakura watching; shiki masaoka is credited with the revival of the modern day haiku. however, shiki also introduced modernity (including ideas such as baseball and glass into his haiku), something which david views like a vegetarian eyeing a caterpillar in his salad. he accuses shiki of hokkucide by his introduction of the less rigid haiku form. there is definitely a lot of validity to his criticism of modern day haiku with is arbitrariness of form and subject matter but his view (esp on insistence of capitalization of the starting word of each line) seems equally dogmatic.

so david (rightly) dismissed my

sunny winter morn
water drops await rebirth
on icicle tips!

as haiku (not hokku). the rebirth is my thinking added to nature, he said. of course, he was critical of my lack of capitals and punctuation.

so here are a couple which might qualify -



tiny footprints on snow
end...
a walnut tree.

birches creak;
dancing in the snow-
a lone leaf.