A thanks for the responses.  I have no argument with the observation that
new and interesting ways of writing short poetry or prose poetry in
English are being discovered or that good writers write in these ways. 
I think we have to be careful, though, in calling these efforts haiku,
renga, haibun, haiga, etc., simply because of our ignorance.  The fact
is, most of this writing has little to do with the forms as they are
written and understood by the Japanese simply because of the difference
(essentially a dif. in thinking) in the use of kanji and parataxis
versus the grammatical connections we use in English and other romance
languages.

My distaste for Zenglish--or attempting to sound Asian in English--stems
from my experiences with the poetry of James Wright, Robert Bly, Mark
Strand, Charles Simic--folks who set a generation or two of poets off on
the road to writing poetry that at its best attempts to sound like a
translation of a poem from another language.  Of course, to accept these
poems as translations is one thing, but often Wright and Bly--especially
Wright--is just plain silly and really wooden in his writing the middle
and late stuff.  If you take a look at old issues of American Poetry
Review from the 70's you'll see lots and lots of examples of this.

Kanji is really complex, fascinating stuff.  Forget the misunderstanding
foisted upon us by Fenollosa and Pound of Kanji as pictogram--it goes
well beyond that.  A great intro. to this subject for laymen and ladies
is The Art of Chinese Poetry by James J. Y. Liu.  However, Liu doesn't
address one aspect of Kanji that Mark questioned years ago when I
brought up this subject on another list.

Can Kanji act as metaphor?  Or doesn't it act the same as a symbol in a
romance language poem?

If you could imagine writing a poem in which almost every word (even the
least significant) acts as an "intense" metaphor as well as a
signifier of sound, then perhaps one could get a sense of what writing
poetry with kanji in Japanese entails.  But I'm groping a bit here.  Of
course in English almost all words--including the articles if you take a
look at Tender Buttons by Stein--have the potential to assume the
intensity of metaphor given the right conditions, but romance language
poetry works by constellating metaphors--that is, a certain number of
"intense" metaphors drive the poem, along with the sound of the lines,
to a sense of closure.  Kanji however works by parataxis--a stark
juxtapositioning of units of meaning, with each unit often having sub
and sub and sub-sub categories of meaning not to mention the further
resonances.  It is this starkness and also the internal logic of the
creation of kanji "words" as well as the visual component that adds to
the intensity of the metaphor.  Along with this starkness, there is also
a sense of immediacy--and, if you will--simultaneity--and even speed of
comprehension--along with compression--that alphabetically created words
lack.

Mark wonders if the difficulties of translating from one romance language
to another are the same as translating from Japanese to
English--attempting to capture the cultural contexts and subtexts.  I
think that lots of this work has already been done for us when we
translate from one romance language to another.  The big plus is the
standard use of logic and argument in this system.  Whether we are
English, Spanish, or French, the cultural mechanisms as well as many of
the "givens"--as in the use of logic-- of meaning and culture are
similar and can be delivered by the translator.  Not so with someone
attempting to deliver a Japanese poem by recreating it in
English--because essentially that is what one has to do.  The "givens"
of translating from English to French or Spanish and etc., are simply
not there, and we have to take what essentially is another mode of
thought (Kanji and its immediacy and compressions) and fit it somehow
into the logicality and linear framework of a romance poem.  There's
also the added problem that much of the culture of Asia is still not
known generally in the West to the extent--say--of Spanish or French
culture.  So my answer to Mark is: the first problem is to transcend
this major underlying difference between grammar-based/argument
assumptions of romance language poetry and paratactically written
poetry, and then assume that the problem you point out of somehow
delivering the cultural context are the same, (although much harder).

Still pondering this stuff.  Your insights appreciated.  Jess