It is difficult to write good haiku. Especially a volume of it. Nonetheless, the poet Béla Markó has published three haiku collections—the latest, Grass Blade on the Rock, consists of ninety-nine poems—in addition to numerous other works of poetry and prose. In one of his personal dedications, he refers to haiku’s three lines as morsels of verse. Today, in an era of clipped writings, when newspaper editors and internet authors opt for brevity, citing readers’ limited attention spans, we might say that Markó has discovered a modern genre: that through haiku, which can be quickly written, quickly read, digested, and forgotten, he tries to reach the masses. Yet such a judgment would be hasty and faulty—and it is not the first association that people draw between haiku writing and reading.
Author: Béla Markó and Diana Senechal
Béla Markó (born in 1951 in Kézdivásárhely, Hungary) is a poet, writer, editor, and politician. The author of over thirty books of poetry, essays, and children’s literature, he has also written textbooks and translated Romanian poetry and drama. His poetry collections have been translated into English, French, and Romanian.
Diana Senechal (pictured) is the author of Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018) and Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2012). Her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova are featured in his books Winter Dialogue (1997) and The Junction (2008). A member of the ALSCW Council and a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, she teaches at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. In addition to teaching, writing, and translating, she serves in a cantorial role at the synagogue Szim Salom in Budapest, plays the cello, memorizes poems in various languages, and takes long bike rides through the Hungarian plains and hills.