This issue featured two haiga galleries:
1
Between Word and Image: A Gallery Walk
Through Contemporary Haiga
It’s a good thing I broke my foot in the summer of 2017, because all the time I would have spent gallivanting around, I devoted instead to organizing an exhibit of haiga for the Residential College of Arts and Humanities (RCAH) LookOut! Art Gallery at Michigan State University (MSU). The idea for Haiga: The Poetry of Images, aka Between Word and Image, had come to me in a flash some six months before, as a means of outreach to students and community members for Evergreen Haiku, the monthly study group I facilitate for the RCAH Center for Poetry. With funding from the Haiku Society of America and MSU, and support from study group members, chief among them Steve Hodge and Michael Rehling, Evergreen Haiku put together a show focused on the picture-poems of two regional artists—Chase Gagnon and Lidia Rozmus—and placed them in a context of international English-language haiga.
The pairing of Gagnon and Rozmus evoked a number of apparent polarities, not only between word and image, but between novice and master, old and new visual arts, realistic and figurative approaches to representation, and the inspirations of man-made and natural environments. Gagnon is a young roamer of streets in down-and-out Detroit, relatively new to haiku and to the urban photography that lends his haiga their hyper-realistic power. Trained in the traditional black-ink painting called sumi-e, Rozmus has produced hundreds of ethereal haiga over the last twenty years or so, many appearing in her own books or as covers for haiku journals such as Mayfly.
. . .
2
Touching the Moon: Twenty-Four Skikishi
come outside!
we can almost touch
the spring moon
On September 17, 1978, for the tenth anniversary of the Haiku Society of America, the society’s annual meeting in New York City was a particularly special occasion. It included a visit by a distinguished haiku scholar and notable poet from Japan, and the donation of twenty-four shikishi, or poem cards, to the society. The society’s twentieth anniversary book, A Haiku Path, portrays the event as follows (163):
For the annual meeting of 1978, the critic Kenkichi Yamamoto and the haiku poet Sumio Mori were invited by the HSA to come from Japan to speak on haiku. Held on September 17 at Japan House in New York City, this historic occasion was opened by HSA President Cor van den Heuvel welcoming the distinguished speakers and thanking those who had helped make the event possible, especially the co-sponsor, Japan Society, HSA vice president Yasko Karaki, Kazuo Sato of Tokyo’s Museum of Haiku Literature, and Japan Air Lines. A short address by Yukio Sugano, representing the Consul General of Japan, stressed the universality of haiku and the value of the HSA’s efforts on its behalf. Yasko Karaki introduced the two speakers. Takako Lento interpreted for them as they gave their talks.
Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907–1988) is described in A Haiku Path as being “the most influential haiku critic and commentator in modern times” (163). Sumio Mori (1919–2010) was editor of the haiku journal Kanrai (Cold Thunder) from 1957 to 1971, and was one of Japan’s leading haiku poets. The talks given by these two poets and scholars appeared in Frogpond 1:4, 1978, and in A Haiku Path (pages 163 to 173).