Michael Dudley performs in Collingwood

Michael Dudley is a good poet:  enthusiastic, a performance artist, his words ring true.  But of course they do!  They are based on his personal experiences!

He is also a student of Haiku and came to Collingwood's Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts to read Haiku and to present a workshop.  The reading was accompanied by a jazz saxophone player and it was so good, it wasn't enough!  It ended too soon!  Dudley promised a longer CD after he makes a full presentation of his cooperative work with the Saxophonist in Ottawa next month.

We learned that Haiku came out of a form of communal poetry composition the Japanese used to practice where a group of poets would sit around the master and receive inspiration from either the master or from each other.  One such master, Basha, saw the merit of the individual poem, and Haiku was born.

Once the Americans took over the administration of Japan after WWII, they imposed their own form of order on Japan, which included a restructuring (or a reinterpreting) of the Haiku as a structured, three-line poem with 5-7-5 syllables, with lines one and three rhyming.  American Haiku has remains structured as such to this day, while untainted Japanese Haiku is free form.  Debate as to which one is 'genuine' contiues.