MASKS (AN INVITATION)
The mask. The mask confers difference. And difference is necessarily experimental. Not experimental in a limited aesthetic sense, but experimental because it allows what has not been permitted before. It engenders new voices. And for the haiku in the West, with its formal insistence on a lack of so-called ego, of authorial presence, of narrative intention, a mask has the ability to permit even an initial voice, the poet’s own voice, that is so often missing in typical haiku. And so an opportunity not only to develop another voice, another persona, another approach to one’s own work, but to bring one’s original voice to a form that so often lacks uniqueness of vision due to unnecessary aesthetic constraints that center on the narrow function of the haiku as a spiritual tool or a metaphysical snapshot. The haiku, like any poetic form, can accommodate a broad spectrum of voices and styles. So, go back to your dreams, your journals, your Halloween costume from last year, and construct a new identity capable of novel and different things.
:
http://roadrunnerjournal.net/pages93/MASKS_No_One.pdf
:
http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages94/MASKS_2.pdf
:
http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages101/MASKS_III.pdf
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