HAIKU A PERSONAL NOTE

MY first, and thus far only, assay against that perplexing and oft-misconstrued poetic form known as haiku occurred about thirty years ago in Mrs. Barkman’s first-grade poetry class. Along with the standard regimen of Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, Eugene Field and Jack Prelutsky, we were administered a salutary dose of haiku. I am sure we were given the necessary cultural background and a selection of haiku, which surely included Bashō. The crux of the class was producing our own example, and I can vividly recall my classmates and I, dutifully counting out the prescribed syllables on our fingers.

My resultant opus was this, tersely titled “Shipwreck”:

That was the full extent of my engagement with the form, and I quickly returned to my preferred genres: Tolkienesque epics and action-packed space operas. It was not a successful meeting, and I doubt if I gave Bashō a second thought for a good 30 years afterwards.

The poet and teacher John O’Connor admits to using the form on days he was being supervised, thinking he had found a shortcut to the teaching of poetry, only to have his own efforts rejected by the few poetic journals dedicated to the form. Clearly, there is more to these laconic little poems than meets the eye.

Let us take as our example the foremost practitioner of the form, Matsuo Bashō. Born Matsuo Kinsaku to a minor samurai near Kyoto, Bashō entered the world at a time particularly suited to the poetic and artistic life he was to lead. Soon after Bashō was born, Japan placed a moratorium on immigration. Whatever else the consequences of this policy, it provided for a purity of cultural expression that would cement the poetic oeuvre of an obscure samurai’s son as the archetype of a genre.

At the time, poetic conventions called for the composition of narrative linked verses called renga. These collaborative verses alternated initial stanzas of three lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables each and a couplet of 7 syllables per line. With deep roots in Japanese mythology and legend, renga were a social form of poetry, dependent on a shared cultural identity and a common artistic tradition. Often serving as an introduction or an exposition to the rest of the longer poem were prefatory verses called hokku (literally, “starting verse”). Hokku were intended to give a sense of the geographic setting or the season in which the narrative of the verse took place—similar, though more specific, to our conventional “once upon a time”. It was not until the late 19th century that these snapshots in verse were given a name: “haiku”. Bashō himself would not have referred to the form of which he would become the generally acknowledged master as “haiku”, but “hokku”.

These hokku were epigrammatic in form, and were written under strict social and poetic conditions. Traditionally composed nearly extemporaneously, they were originally composed by the guest of honor at a poetry recital and followed strict conventions, most notably effusive praise of one’s host and self-effacement at one’s imposing on his hospitality. They often included a sense of time and place, thus references to the particular season or scenery were common. Then, in a show of good form, the host would compose a verse of gracious acceptance. The exchange of hokku were thus an important social ritual deeply embedded within Japanese society, much like epic poetry was in Greek, Germanic and Roman cultures. It is fascinating to note the difference in scale: from gods and men and the founding of cities to a thank-you for a good meal and a good night’s rest.

Bashō would have heard many of these social compositions as the page of Ueno Castle and the chosen companion to the son of the castle’s lord. Though Bashō was embarked on the traditional path to becoming a samurai like his father, his friendship with the young man exposed him to the traditional arts of Japanese nobility, especially poetry. Both boys shared an interest in poetry, and most likely were trained in the common classical curriculum, but it was only after his lord’s death that Bashō began his tutelage in poetry under the poet Kigin at Kyoto, and shortly thereafter to produce both the traditional renga and its shortened form with which he is most closely associated: the haiku.

APART from academic specialists and elementary school students charily dipping their toes into the wider world of poetry, haiku seemed relegated to the status of poetic oddity, almost a punchline. Because of their brevity, haiku are often foisted upon children or novice poets as “a good starting point” in the study of poetics. Only seventeen syllables, and no rhymes? Shouldn’t be too hard. What “Chopsticks” is to piano, the haiku has become to poetry.

They are more than what they seem. The problem is that transposing the haiku from its native Japanese to English necessarily violates its own rules at the fundamental level, and we have simplified the form to the point where it no longer resembles what was intended. Take the counting of syllables: the basic element of the haiku form, indeed of Japanese poetry in general, is a unit called a mora, which roughly approximates a “syllable” in English.

However, being a tonal language, Japanese tends to give longer tones more weight, typically one beat for a short syllable, two for an elongated vowel or diphthong. Take, for instance, the word “haiku” itself. Our English renders it as the disyllabic “hy-koo”; it is more precisely pronounced “ha-i-kü”. Perhaps that is the first thing that we learn from this ancient and odd verse form: the sounds of words matter—indeed sound is the matter of poetry. The concept of poetry as something to be read silently to oneself is a fairly modern one, as is the death of poetry as a public performance. Poetry was, and is, intended to be read aloud, and the seemingly arcane abstractions of meter and rhythm are technologies intimately linked with the human instinct for symmetry and harmony.

This is perhaps disheartening to the would-be practitioner of the form, but there’s more dismaying news. The newcomer to haiku invariably finds herself wrestling with one of the great nagging questions of studying the form: so what? These ephemeral wisps of versification seem to slip away from analysis like oil in water. Too brief for a narrative, too subjective for aphorism; the question of and? hangs in the air like a bad smell. This applies to the material as much as to the structure.

The particularity of Bashō saddles him with a lurking triviality. Why is this flower, this tree, this cuckoo bird worth immortalizing in verse?

Paradise Lost gives the Christian mythos its own epic vision; The Aeneid is the founding myth of Roman civilization, just as the Iliad and the Odyssey are the founding myths of Greece. Japan, although The Tale of Genji has earned a reputation on par with Shakespeare in its native country, has always been most closely associated with the haiku in the world community. Why are these little verses, so intimately tied to a particular fleeting moment, important to readers in the 21st century?

FOR the casual reader to gain a sense of its significance, a certain shift in thinking is needed. The western poetic tradition, from Homer onward, has followed a fundamental narrative structure: a protagonist acts within a story with action that has a beginning, middle and end. It is logical, and it is innate.

The great religious and philosophical traditions of the world have broadly espoused one or the other of these perspectives: either human events repeat themselves, like the seasons, or build toward a certain point, a climax. From the beginnings of human history, based on the recurrence of natural processes such as lunar phases, the change of the seasons and the cycle of life and death, humanity has viewed time as a pattern of repeated cycles, unchanging and predictable. The great innovation of the monotheistic religions of the Middle East was to conceive of time as a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end, with the action of human events preordained by an omniscient Power toward a definite end. Even the polytheistic Greek epics have a linear structure: Achilles and Odysseus begin from a certain point in time and space and move toward a teleos, a goal.

The epics of world literature follow, invariably, this pattern: a central heroic figure who embodies the values of a civilization undergoes a journey over great distances to found a nation or a people, at every point subject to the influences and oversight of the supernatural world. These journeys, in keeping with the grand scale of their setting, take place over great periods of time and provide the hero with numerous opportunities to evince the overarching values and moral code of his people.

Haiku sought, and seeks, much the same objectives. Haiku are not the pure antithesis of the epic, for they are similarly concerned with a central figure. and the preservation of cultural values. But the central figure of a haiku is not an epic hero, nor a hero of any kind, in the traditional sense. He is merely an observer—but he is not a passive one. He is acutely aware of the natural world and deeply appreciative of all its meanings, personal and subjective, literal and symbolic. There is an insularity to the ethos of the haiku; unlike epics, there is little effort in promulgating cultural norms and values, but only a quiet assurance in the regard with which one personally holds them. Epics are written to represent the cultural values of a nation, to idealize the virtues which a culture sought to embody, and to do these things in the context and presence of a nation.

Haiku have always been a part of the civic life of Japan, often composed and performed for kings and lords and nobles; but they were always produced and performed on a more intimate basis—person to person, face to face.

…What I have mentally coined “the western need for narrative”. The intellectual need for a beginning, middle, and end is so deeply ingrained in us, in the linear conception of eventual history, that we cannot easily remove ourselves from the emotional and intellectual impulse toward what’s next. Think of any standard modern thriller and the praise it garners: “plot-driven”, “compulsively readable”, “a page-turner”; think of the evening news: “coming up at 7!”

HAIKU is the poetic equivalent of sitting on a park bench and listening to the birds, a conscious rejection of the speed and stress of the modern world. Even among his fellow poets, Bashō’s preoccupation with the mundane and the ordinary was unorthodox, and deeply personal. Take Bashō’s haiku 771:

Andrew Fitzsimmons explains the context of this enigmatic yet wistful verse: written as a welcoming verse to a gathering of poets, it concerns a falling out between Bashō and one of his disciples, Shadō. Shadō was initially one of the strongest proponents of Bashō’s new style, but soon fell out of favor with the master for his impetuous personality. The hot-tempered “pepper” is elegized with regret and sorrow. “Green” refers to the color of a pepper, but also to his wayward student’s callowness. Does Bashō hope to gain sympathy from his fellow poets? Does he wish Shadō were there at the gathering? We don’t know, but we are given only the historical context of the poem and the text of the poem itself; any other meaning is up to us to decide.

Haiku are, like epics, poems of beginning—not of civilizations and peoples, but of observation and thought. They set the scene but leave the epic to the imaginations of their readers, beckoning us to become co-creators, co-poets. Haiku do not intend to tell the story of a nation, nor to recount the founding of a people. They tell of specific moments within the context of a larger story, because the specific moment is a cultural shorthand for the larger story. This makes them a difficult sort of poetry to understand without explanatory context; yet the more one reads Bashō, the more one acclimates, and the less one wants a technical explanation.

This is the inward action of haiku, the zen of the form, where the intense focus of the mind and the creative energies upon a single concrete subject serve to imbue it with a complete and sufficient meaning: the thing exists within itself and is therefore worth noticing, apart from anything it might symbolize. It is the poetry of existentialism:

To still the mind in order to see a thing, without explaining what the thing symbolizes. The epic journey is transformed from a literal experience to an intellectual one.

This inward journey could be inspired by outward experiences, and in the case of Bashō himself, actually took the form of a literal sojourn. Bashō was famously peripatetic, having lost his hut to a fire in the winter of 1682. “It was in that incident of a burning home that I understood that we are governed by change, and that my inclination for displaced life began”, he wrote.

Unmoored literally as well as philosophically, Bashō positioned himself in the tradition of the “wandering poet”. In this mode, the writer is the one embarked on a quest, the object of which to engage in poetry. One’s life becomes the epic journey, which itself becomes material for the narrower focus of haiku.