WHR Autumn 2020

The key items of the mission of the World Haiku Club since its inception 22 years ago include increasing haiku’s literary capability by expanding its scope, coverage, and objective over and above the traditional Japanese model.

One concrete measure to translate this mission into practice is to make it possible for haiku to be capable of dealing with hard and difficult issues of life and the world such as war, disaster, tragedy, sex, disease, death etc. Traditional Japanese haiku has rather shied away from these negative, controversial or abunai (dangerous) topics. If reference to them becomes necessary, it has avoided explicit presentation and used instead indirect, round-about expressions or euphemism.

COVID-19 is an abominable, dangerous, and tragic reality. It is therefore an ideal challenge and test for us to try and see if we can create such haiku as is capable, as a literary form, of dealing with this crisis and its ramifications. For this purpose, it was decided that this theme should be suggested for this issue. The result was a great number of submissions pouring in to ‘flood’ the capacity of the Vanguard Haiku pages, with far

too many of excellent works jostling for the limited best ten places in the first selection.

It seems that there has been not a single person in the whole world who has not been affected by the pandemic in one way or another, which in itself is an astonishing phenomenon. Statistics may differ from country to county but what we all are faced with is essentially the same, which is again a very rare thing to happen. Which turns the current crisis into a golden opportunity for us to find out in the shape of haiku what different individuals have felt similarly or differently about a single same thing.

Our samples are small in terms of the whole population of the world but in terms of a haiku organisation they are significant. The underlying feelings of all of us about COVID-19 as expressed in haiku seem to me to be the same, which have also been depicted in various famous literary or historical writings throughout human history written by the likes of Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, William Ainsworth, Daniel Defoe, Alessandro Manzoni, Albert Camus etc. Pestilence tends to reveal truths about humanity, good and bad. The present pandemic is no exception. These tiny viruses invisible to our naked eyes invade surreptitiously the fundamental system of our existence. So, our whole being gets shaken, with a significant number of us dead. COVID-19 has been proving what I have long suspected, which is becoming more like conviction in these days. It is that we human beings are all capable of anything and everything overtly or potentially, or halfway in between. What this means in concrete terms is that we are capable of being good and evil, kind and cruel, wise and stupid, honest and dishonest, strong and weak, thick-skinned and shy, elated and disgruntled, diligent and lazy, extravert and introvert, tidy and disorganised, polite and rude, and so on and so forth. It is not the case of either…or…but the case of both, all-encompassing.

What you are now is only a specific representation of all these attributes, possibilities, and potentials at this particular moment in time. So, we cannot say that a particular person is this and that and the other. All we have is phenomena characterised by tendency, inclination, mood, character profile or leaning which appear prominently in a person over time but with distinct possibility of becoming otherwise or either way given half a chance.

This is why humans are so difficult to get to the bottom of. There must be, and there surely are, unreported cases where humans have exceeded the viciousness of the present CORONAVIRUS.

This uncomfortable truth must be counterpointed with the spontaneous outpourings of human goodness, kindness, love, resilience, and other noble qualities which have been exercised, often away from the presence of cameras or the glare of publicity.

For all the good haiku on COVID-19, visit the Vanguard Haiku section.

They are all there. In the meantime, you might like to share with me

some of my own output:

self-isolation…

freedom to be in pyjamas

night and day

reading Camus

to compare which plague

is worse

wish fulfilled

to be away from people…

no, not like this

glorious isolation

from people, communities, and nations…

my life closest to nothingness

my melancholy,

mitigated by the smile of

the lady cashier

farting about…

a fart is a fart, not to be

quarantined

neither being an essential worker

nor having an essential travel to make,

I am surplus to humanity

this friend I’m missing

I’ve not seen since March, and

for a year before that

beware of little men,

take heed of a small sum of money, and

avoid tiny coronaviruses

not able, willing or

ready…shall we then get prepared

for the Sun’s demise?