My Dear Poets/Readers:
One aspect of kire – or disjunction – has to do with the reader-sense of how at the moment of entering a haiku there can be experienced an instantaneous cutting away of linear time and space, in terms of reality-sense. At the completion of the haiku there is again, an abrupt return. In the English tradition, the kireji has been heretofore seen as the only significant element of juxtaposition, which has also been limited in function to juxtaposing realist-oriented, naturalistic imagery
-- Richard Gilbert, Poems of Consciousness, p. 300.
I just uploaded Cutting through Time and Space to Scribd, the largest online library. This document consists of three widely read and quoted “To the Lighthouse” posts -- titled “Three Formulations about the Use of Cutting,” “Cutting through Time and Space,” and “Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting” -- published on NeverEnding Story. These posts provide an in-depth and aesthetically contextualized analysis of kire (cutting)/ kireji (cutting words) employed in classical Japanese haiku and contemporary English language haiku, encouraging readers/poets to re-examine the concept and practice of cutting from a different perspective, one that is informed by the Japanese aesthetic of “ma” and modern psychology. This document also includes scholarly references, commentaries from haiku masters, such as Basho and Buson, and fine haiku examples.
falling snow –
hairs of the willow
turned white
Shigeyori
in the mountain village
the New Year dancers are late --
plum blossoms
Basho
An evening breeze blows.
The water ripples
Against the blue heron’s legs.
Buson
It is early dawn.
The castle is surrounded
By the cries of wild ducks
Kyoroku
Over the even sea
The wild ducks' cry
Is faintly white
Basho
the brightness
of the full moon
deepens the cold
T. D. Ingram
eyes of the ancestors
the twinkle
in winter stars
Rebecca Drouilhet
For more haiku examples and detailed comments, view Cutting through Time and Space
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