 Ray
became interested in haiku poetry after photographing
the Kurimoto Japanese Garden near his home in
Edmonton, Canada. He searched the Internet for
Asian poetry to accompany a web site on the garden
and found a similarity between photography and
haiku. As he puts it, "Both attempt to vividly
express nature while focusing on small, isolated
aspects [or moments] and both produce a meditative
focus-in short, for both, the process is perhaps
more important than the product."
In
his search for Asian poetry sources, he established
a relationship with the
World Haiku Club and helped to design its web
site. He then began to create modern haiga [both
photo-haiku and digital art haiku] web sites
to illustrate the haiku of members of the WHC
and other haijin whom he found on the Internet.
In time, he began his own excursion into composing
haiku - a path which he initially thought would
be relatively easy [the haiku poem is so small,
it must be easy to write one] and discovered
that writing a good haiku is rather like producing
a good photographic print Š a long term
proposition at best!
Ray is especially appreciative
of the early guidance he received from WHR Editor
Debi Bender and the inspiration of her own work,
and the later guidance from the WHC beginner's
lessons [where an'ya, Alison Williams, Sue Mill,
and Kirsty Karkow served as mentors] and finally
from the members of other haiku e-forums which
he joined [Basho's Beatniks, Timothy Russell's
shachihoko e-forum and lessons, Paul Conneally's
mentorship of the WHC haibun e-forum, to name
a few]. He is also appreciative of the inspiration
and help from haijin like soji whose own haiku
web site is so beautifully crafted and from Museki
Abe whose photo-haiku site was an early inspiration.
He is also appreciative of the leadership of
Susumu Takiguchi who has organized the WHC network
and initiated the WHR, from which he does much
of his reading and learning about the haiku form.
Still, he points out that he is but a few years
into the writing of haiku and is unsettled about
his own present abilities-thus, he has a preference
for illustrating the work of the acknowledged
haiku masters and of contemporary haijin.
Presently Ray serves as the Editor
of the World Haiku Review's Multimedia section
and has crafted several of the special sections
of the WHR. Initially, he served as the moderator
of the WHC's Multimedia e-forum and he remains
an active participant. In his own work, he finds
the haiga and haibun forms of expression most
personally compelling. He also participates in
World Haiku Association's Haiga Section. His
current interest is to acquire a sense of the
senryu form of poetry as a means of further developing
his skill in composing haiku.
Ray's work can be found on his
extensive haiku-related web site: http://raysweb.net/haiku/
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