Contemporary haiku ain’t your grandfather’s haiku. We live in a wild, buzzing world, and contemporary haiku drips through this world gathering together all the chaos and weirdness. Here’s a quick taste of the odd, wondrous enigma that bubbles up:

a moon with its own mouthfeel mother tongue

eros
falling on the bones
of kittens

fissures leaving the womb a skinless god

asleep in my arms
the part of the ocean
that slips through the net

alone pink nipple

the hand inside my head grasping at water

dog shit
or me
the fly doesn’t care

pulled from the cello
a one note
moon

*Writers are, in order, Jennifer Hambrick, Kelly Moyer, Rowan Beckett, Peter Yovu, Brendan Duffin, Dana Dulco, Stanford M. Forrester, Ben Gaa.

Who is Ban’Ya Natsuishi and What the Hell is a Flying Pope?

Flying Pope
visible only to children
and a giraffe

Ban’ya is a professor at Meiji University in Japan, and has been writing haiku for almost forty years. In 1992, he received the Modern Haiku Association Prize. In 1998, he co-founded the international haiku magazine Ginyu, followed by the establishment of the World Haiku Association. He has authored over a dozen books on haiku and haiku criticism, and has taught and lectured at universities all over the world.

With peacocks
the Flying Pope
enclosed in a cage

“An election is an election”
The Pope flying
in the gray sky

Ban’ya is sometimes referred to as the l’Enfant terrible of contemporary haiku, due to his experiments in the haiku form. One of these experiments is a series of haiku revolving around the character of the Flying Pope. This series of Flying Pope haiku was published in book form in 2021.

The reason why
the Pope Flies:
a dew drop

With a virus
and yellow sand
the Pope is flying

The character of the Flying Pope came to Ban’ya when he heard, in a dream, the phrase, flying pope. Haiku scholar Scott Mason writes that the Flying Pope is, “in nearly equal parts, projection projectile, slipstream-of-consciousness, and jazz riff.” The character is a bizarre, surreal entity that flies not only above our contemporary world, but also through it, through the fleshy core of it. What sticks to him, what he witnesses is wildness, magic, horror, and beauty.

The Flying Pope
at long intervals
pulls up a gravestone

Flying Pope
apologizes to
the thousand-years-old cedar

Flying Pope
caught on
an obelisk

Reflected on the mirror
of the lavatory:
future I and the Flying Pope

A boy shouldering
his old dog
Flying Pope

One hundred
Flying Popes gather:
merely darkness