Greg Bryant wrote and posted a fine haiku over at his site. I immediately caught the use of personification in it — giving a non-human object human traits. This, I had always read and been told, was one of the big no-nos in haiku, no matter how good the result might be.
Haiku (so I was taught) is the poetry of simply noticing and letting the reader draw his own conclusions. Simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, and all the other staples of Western poetry have no place in a form that seeks to describe in the plainest terms that which is.
But is that the case?