Report on the Bindii Meeting 23 March 2024





Steve Wigg, Julia Wakefield, Stella Damarjati, Lynette Arden, Jake Dennis and Ewan Rourke joined the Google Meet meeting, and apologies were received from Subha Goonaratne, Maureen Sexton and Kirsten Johnston. Most people sent their haiku in advance, which made it easier for us to critique them.

            We workshopped our haiku and then arranged to have our next meeting on Sunday April 14 at 3pm, before the AHS meeting that takes place on International Haiku Poetry Day on April 17.

            There was general agreement that the ‘nature poem’ can be satisfying on its own without an obvious reference to the human condition, but our use of words to describe a natural scene can often evoke human associations. The less we directly refer to an emotional state, the more room there is for the reader to imagine a parallel human situation. We didn’t discuss the concept of ‘ma’ at the meeting, but the most successful haiku often seem to imply this ‘negative space’ in the same way that graphic designer Alan Fletcher describes ma in his introspective book The Art of Looking Sideways:

“Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space”. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words…”

Perhaps a good example of this is Basho’s haiku:

Stillness--
the cicada's cry
drills into the rocks.

 

Matsuo Basho
Translated by Robert Hass

 

Many thanks to Colleen Keating who alerted me to the concept of ma in her report on the White Pebbles meeting https://australianhaikusociety.org/2024/03/14/white-pebbles-haiku-group-autumn-meeting-2024/#more-18319

           

 

Julia Wakefield 

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