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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