Afterlives' Leaves

Cast your mind back to a time when poetry was in the air and mystical experiences floated through collective consciousness as radio waves and instant messages do today.The taste of traditional poetry is the spice of flowing waves tickling the tongue of your ears with its delights, just out of reach but arriving with contemplation after you have dreamed the night away.Haiku and Tanka poetry has long been practiced in Japan but its use in English has been mostly confined to counting syllables and schoolchildren composing simple verses to practice their language skills. With the advent of the twenty-first century, though, this has changed. New poetic traditions are arising from English-language poets drawing on their ancient roots.The new haiku is more flexible, more fluid, less restricted by cultural norms or set-piece assumptions and bursts onto the stage of images in a way no standard English forms have ever had the potential to do. Leaping from the page like free-verse but with the underlying simplicity of a single pair of contrasting images and commentary, this is the embodiment of a new generation of young poets.