There is something so perfect about a perfect haiku. Never mind the bad ones — they are inevitable. For every great haiku there are at least fifty or so bad ones. If you aren’t sure what a haiku is, or what a great haiku is, you might want to get a hold of this. If an entire journal of haiku seems too much for you, don’t worry: there is — surprisingly — quite a bit of prose and longer poetry scattered around. Is it haiku too? I don’t know. It only matters, I suppose, for semantic reasons in that while it is possible to say that this publication is devoted to the haiku, it would be wrong to say that it is devoted exclusively to haiku. There are, among other things, a few pieces that appear to be short-stories and a few essays on the subject of haiku — okay okay, let’s get back to the haiku. So many of them caught my eye that it would be difficult to list them all here. It’s better to just give you a few samples and then you will know not only what a haiku is but what a good one sounds like and you can just go ahead from there. So, Janice Bostok writes: “the affair over/my husband reclaims/his territory.” And from Gary Hotham: “today she’s ten–/the wind too big for the hand/she holds open.” There you have it, quick, simple; isn’t it amazing how the infinitely complex parameters of human existence can be so easily trapped in the archaic haiku format? Perhaps the multiplicity of narratives we face every day is making it easier to pin-point instant persistent moments in our consciousness? So then, is the emotive life getting simpler to articulate, but harder to appreciate? Are there Raw Nervz under the flesh of all these words?
lit-zine / publisher: proof press / main creator: Dorothy Howard (editor) / $6, $20 for 4 / 67 Court St., Aylmer, Quebec, J9H 4M1