Uketorinin: Haiku

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

Uketorinin is a 16-page chapbook of unconventional poetry in haiku style. Author Wayne Ray calls his poems shashin-haiku after Japanese words for photograph and picture. They retain the traditional three-line haiku form with a fixed number of syllables or feet in each line. However, in the new form Ray has created, “the object of the first and second lines is to ‘paint a picture’ that will leave a very strong impression on the mind of the reader. A ‘photograph’ that says everything.... The third line, as in the haiku, is the contrast line around us.”

In a short introductory essay, Ray describes this form, comparing it with the traditional and modern haiku of Japan as well as with other modern haiku. A number of his own poems follow, the selection ending with two longer pieces titled “The Juke Box” and “Right to Life vs. Freedom of Choice.” The most appealing poems to me, like traditional haiku, convey personal feelings (“whispering”) or describe something in nature (“valentines”). The subjects of other poems (abortion, strippers, a “virgin’s dream”) have some shock value but seemed to me to jar this delicate form. Most of all I wish the book were physically more attractive: the three-poems-per-page layout seems crowded, there is no “artistic” title page, and the text is reproduced from dot-matrix printing. These anomalies of design and subject mar an otherwise interesting effort to create a new form within the haiku tradition.