Cid Corman, Sam Hamill, Haiku

I think this Clayton Eshelman bit is a great extension of something I read in an Alice Oswald interview, how she works toward experience in the process of formation as opposed to experience "remembered" in her poems. Language as enactment vs. language of interpretation in Eshelman's case.

"Two American poets translating haiku by Basho. Corman: language as enactment, the reader interprets. Hamill: language as interpretation, the reader abandoned. Corman is deft where Hamill is pleonastic and inaccurate (crickets don’t sing; cicadas don’t cry)."

C
wild seas (ya
to Sado shoring up
the great star stream

H
High over wild seas,
surrounding Sado Island:
the river of heaven

C
summer grass
warriors
dream ruins

H
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams

C
cruel!
under the helmet
cricket

H
Ungraciously, under
a great soldier’s empty helmet,
a cricket sings

C
quiet
into absorbing
cicada sounds

H
Lonely silence,
a single cicada cry
sinking into stone

In a haiku-like poem of his own, Corman writes:

The cicada
isn’t singing;
that sound’s its life

Thoughts, preferences? Agree, disagree with Eshelman.