Report on the Bindii Meeting Sunday November 30, 2025

 

Julia Wakefield, Lynette Arden, Ewan Rourke and Maeve Archibald met on Sunday, September 28, at 4 pm, using Zoom. Apologies were received from Maureen Sexton, Subha Goonaratne, Stella Damarjati and Radhika de Silva. The attendees brought some haiku for review, and Subha sent her haiku in spite of her absence.

Maeve reported on the poetry event she had been invited to present at, at the Poetry Lab, where she discussed haiku forms, focusing on Basho and Issa, and compared their work with that of modern English-language haiku poets. Ewan reported on his mentorship with Rob Scott, remarking that it has been extremely valuable so far. He described how Rob encouraged him to do much more self-editing and to move away from a cerebral approach to something more immediate. We all commented that his current haiku are definitely improving in this regard.

We looked at all our haiku with the ‘immediate’ approach in mind, and this helped us to understand how to improve them. We also discussed the effectiveness of using a single finite verb https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/finite_verbs.htm that expresses action or motion, as a way of animating the scene. But a verb is not always necessary. This article is food for thought: https://nzhaiku.wordpress.com/essays-articles/verbless-haiku-a-lesson

Another aspect that we looked at was the use of metaphor. This article https://www.graceguts.com/essays/metaphor-in-haiku demonstrates that metaphor can work in a haiku, but it should serve to clarify the experience, rather than confuse or distract from it.

Another article https://medium.com/@deborahchristensen/use-of-metaphor-in-haiku-45d69086fd9e goes into this in more depth, quoting the article by Dawn Blasco and Dennis Bleski, Haiku Poetry and Metaphorical Thought https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326934crj1101_5?journalCode=hcrj20

 

“Haiku is unusual among poetic genres in that poets are cautioned to avoid the use of figurative language such as metaphor, which may obscure the expression of a simple perceptual truth.

In the same breath, the poet is told that good haiku usually have two elements in tension that create in the reader a new insight — a definition that sounds remarkably like modern views of metaphor.”

This might be an interesting topic for future discussions.

We will hold the next meeting on Feb 7 or 8, depending on people’s availability. The topic will be writing a collaborative haiku sequence. Please bring a selection of haiku on the theme of ‘coast’, and we will try to create one or more sequences together. Let your imaginations wander: beaches, cliffs, wetlands, estuaries, rockpools, reefs, coral, marine life, etc. – anywhere in the world.

 

Julia Wakefield