From my earliest years I was fascinated by poetry and song. Around the age of ten I began scribbling. A decade or so later I stopped. A friend had lent me The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by a long dead poet called Matsuo Basho. The translation was by a man called Nobuyuki Yuasa.

I was shocked by the grace of the writing; I was bewildered by its depth. In fact, but for the patient amusement of the voice whispering in my ear, I would have been humiliated at the thought that I had dared to dream of 'poetry' for myself. So I gave up writing and concentrated instead on what I did best, or better anyway - playing percussion. But I had gained something - a question: how much of what I had read was Basho, and how much Yuasa?

Fifteen years and several foreign languages later I had the outlines of an answer. I had also begun to dabble in poetry again, finding myself increasingly drawn to formal verse, particularly experimental short patterns, preferably in association with a kind of anti-lyrical imagism. Eventually, finding myself in possession of a computer with an internet connection, I typed in the word 'haiku'.

The result was not good. A single click on 'enter' revealed an entire search engine full of faux-orientalism, factional infighting, and good old fashioned ignorance. This haiku-land was a place with more gate keepers than Buckingham Palace. And about as much refinement. But one topic the self anointed seemed to agree on was that haiku in English must necessarily be written as free verse, and on three lines.

There were people who thought otherwise, but these were treated as cretins, to be reviled and ostracised. To my horror I learnt that one such pariah was a certain Nobuyuki Yuasa, his crime: to have adopted the quatrain (four line stanza) for his translation of Basho's haiku (sic) in The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.

Clearly I was missing something here. This book had been the most formative I had ever read. Mister, or rather Professor, Yuasa came across as charming, personally unassuming, and utterly dedicated. His English, I noted, was rather better than that of his critics. So what were their grounds for such calumny?

I started reading. Everything I thought might be relevant: neurology, semiotics, comparative linguistics, aesthetics, teach-your-self-Japanese, early translations in both French and English. I asked questions, engaged in online arguments, made enemies. Eventually I got angry.

The corpus of scholarship I had assumed must exist, doesn't. The blind certainties I had everywhere encountered turned out to be no more than assertions. Often very flimsy ones, hence the vehemence with which they were voiced, all too often wrapped in a cloak of gift-shop Buddhism tinged with a tablet or two of post-Keruac "cool".

And so the 'Zip' - in part a genuine attempt to explore the nexus between Japanese poetics and English language prosody, in part what the soviets would have termed 'a provocation'.

The best way to find out about the Zip is to write them. Alternatively you can read the examples in these pages. Me... I don't write them any more. Not for the moment any way. In part this is because haiku-land leaves me cold. In part because I am rubbish at writing haiku, no matter what the style of prosody. But mostly it is because I am passionately interested in linked verse, particularly in how Shomon haikai-no-renga might be written in English.

So I currently adopt conventional three line and two line stanzas, not because I have recanted, but because I don't want the opprobrium which the Zip attracts to deflect from the rather more important task of furthering an understanding of renku.