About myself

Hello. Welcome to my website. My name is David Taft, I live in London, and I have been writing poetry for many years. This website gathers in one place poems of three or four lines in length. These are influenced by my ever-growing interest in Chinese and Japanese poetry, in particular Japanese haiku.

I began by writing what I considered to be haiku, based on the traditional structure of 3 lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. I was never, however, a purist (whatever one of those is exactly), for example using titles on occasion – which you never see in traditional Japanese haiku. After a while I began to find a rigid adherence to a 5-7-5 structure, though in many ways satisfying, somewhat restrictive. I started to experiment with a more free-form approach, using fewer than 17 syllables or using more, as it suited me, stretching to four lines on many occasions. Ultimately, I think, you have to do what suits you best, in order to try to best express what it is you want to say.

I don’t find it in myself to be very finicky about definitions or categories; I will simply say that some of these poems I regard as haiku, others I probably don’t – hence the reference to “Other Miniatures” in the title of this website. What does remain common to all the poems here is their brevity – none are longer than four lines. At the core of each is a single image, a single idea, usually one that more or less came to me in an instant.

My hope is simply that you will find some of the poems in this collection interesting and illuminating. Please feel free to drop me a line, letting me know what you think; my email address is davidtaft999@icloud.com