Why haiku?
If you have stumbled across this blog, you probably thought, 'why haiku?' Some may also have thought, 'what is haiku?' and a smaller number will think, 'this isn't haiku'. This page seeks to supply some responses.
In responding to these thoughts, I hope also to show why haiku is one of the most subtly powerful literary forms for connection with the reader and evocation of imagination.
Let's start with the what.
What is haiku?
Ask a crowd what haiku is and someone will quickly to say they are short poems of 17 syllables, arranged in a 5, 7, 5 order over three lines. E.g.
This is the first line
And then comes a longer line,
And then the last line.
Someone might also say haiku originate from Japan. This is usually as far as the explanation goes.
These things are true, but they are incomplete in considering other key structural elements and miss all the magic. Reducing haiku to 'a 5-7-5 poem' like summarising Shakespeare by much of his work being written in ten syllable patterns of iambic pentameter. Yes, the meter is part of what provides the form but there's much more going on under the surface. Let's uncover some of it.
James Kirkup's introductory poem gives glimpse of his magic
Haiku should be just
Small stones dropping down a well
With a small splash.
James' scene is a wonderfully meta introduction to haiku. We have a simple scene, told elegantly, we can visualise and hear all elements and it ends with a surprise that seems to echo out beyond the words. Like those stones, haiku are small things in a much larger world, but when captured elegantly, ripple out beyond the page into the active listener as a smile, as emotion. The best haiku are surprising - in how they land and what they inspire in us. This will become a theme as we continue.
To be clear, I mentioned active reader in the last paragraph. Coming from longer Western poems and prose, there is a tendency for many to see the short form and simply stated imagery of haiku as underwhelming. This is a mistake you should not fall for.
By way of analogy, anyone could throw back a glass of the finest whisky or wine and find little in it. The connoisseur however will take a small sip, give it a moment and explore their own experience and find so much more within it. There are two parts here, the created thing and the audience. The finest works of a creator are only understood by the recipient who is open and active in their engagement. You have a choice and I encourage you to be open.
If you are on the fence, try just for this short introduction at least and hopefully I will change your mind for life. Let's keep going with structure.
Haiku (or hokku at the time) was diminishing in popularity in 17th Century, until the writing of a Zen monk, Matsuo Bashō, transformed it and brought it back to popular acclaim. Bashō's' story is an incredible one, especially many of his haiku were written in his later life.
This 'origin' to much of the haiku we know today is important as many of the early writers were Buddhist and this mentality influences much of the imagery and metaphor. For instance,
Empty cicada shell -
from within, or nearby,
the cicadas cry.
Bashō
The cicada's shell brings up Buddhist themes of impermanence, transience, emptiness and the fleetingness of embodied life - the distinction between form and what animates it.
Similarly, we have,
Absent-minded
I'm the scarecrow's
replacement
Kobayashi Issa
These words carry with them the themes of loosening of ego, emptiness of pretension, the loss of self and connection with the everyday and ordinary - common throughout much Buddhist poetry of the time. With that said, we should not overly ascribe these works to religious influence and lose sight of the poet's character. Issa's poetry is rich with parody and comedy - his pen name literally means "One cup of tea". Issa's words in this poem evoke scenes of his lonely path, touched with alienation and wrapped in some typical self-depreciating comedy.
Most haiku focus on a visual scene - the 'where' and 'when' - sometimes to celebrate the subject in its own right. Other times as part of a larger metaphor. Where might be an actual location (Mount Fuji) or could be somewhere such as as pine forest. The when might be a time of year, such as an autumn moon, which infers associated natural phenomena, traditions, celebrations, labour tasks or spirituality that contextualise the moment within the haiku. For instance, Shinoda Teijiro writes
Big waterfall
joining its constant roar
autumn's voice
Shinoda Teijiro
Another key structural component of haiku is the use of a 'cutting word', kireji, used to connect or divide two separate images. These words are often left out of the English translations, but we see hints of their existence. For instance:
Old pond -
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
Bashō
In Japanese, this is:
古池や 蛙飛びこむ 水の音
furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
The 'ya' (や) is the cutting word, after 'the old pond', signalled in English here using the hyphen. This cutting element separates the the old pond from the rest of the sentence. In doing so, it adds a pause, space and with it, weight. Adding this space creates the room for the stillness that the action of the frog brings change to.
Like that frog meeting the water, we often have haiku elements where an action brings two images together. For instance:
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
Bashō
Here, the 'staggers out of', draws together two subjects - the bee and the peony, bringing a sense of moment or movement to the scene. Combined, these connective elements of haiku carries huge potential and while it is not always present, it is often the driver of many of the best.
Notice also that many of these poems are not seventeen syllables. If you're situated in the west and read haiku collections and you'll find few in the set 5-7-5 meter. The first reason for this are that many are translations and good translator will likely prioritise meaning over the meter semantics. While the original Japanese rhythmically falls naturally into five and seven syllables, the translation might not.
Secondly, I would argue that the core elements of imagery, connection and moment are more important to what we are trying to express with haiku, rather than dogmatically trying to fit a syllable count. For instance, Kaga no Chiyo describes the reflection of the moon appearing to touch her fishing line.
Grazing
my fishing line -
the summer moon.
Kaga no Chiyo
Although the above is well short of the full syllable count here in this English translation, the style and components still express the essence of a haiku. But what are we trying to express in haiku?
My own take is that haiku is perhaps the most elegant or purest form of using the least words possible to create rich imagery, sound, emotion and meaning in the mind of the reader / listener. We can hear the raw of the waterfall. We can feel the stillness of the night. These expansive scenes are incited in us, and they were created by the smallest but carefully placed nudge.
A reaction of many reading haiku for the first time is that they are overly simplistic, as there is too little to work with. Actually, by stripping away and reducing back to the the fundamental essence of the scene, the writer provides the space for the reader to fill.
When we think on a moment in haiku, the poem is the cue, it gives the user everything they need to imagine the scene - forests, rain, cold weather. In this way we can think of haiku more like impressionist art. There is great artistic skill in photo-representational paintings where the artist communicates in perfect detail the content of the scene. Impressionist art however refrains from this detail, to invite the user to engage and make sense of the suggestion before them to find meaning within it. The engagement of the viewer is essential for this translation of the creator's marks to be understood as an image. It invites nuance between both parties. Much as two viewers might differ in how they recognise the scene an impressionist image invites, so does the space haiku leaves open invite a different projection within each of us.
Those who do engage will find the emotion that the 'simple truths' of haiku can communicate. Often this is humour:
Fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
near my pillow.
Bashō
or
Persimmon picking
my balls are cold,
autumn wind.
Ryokan
Sometimes sadness and grief, like Kaga no Chiyo's haiku below, written after the death of her son.
Dragonfly catcher,
How far have you gone today
In your wandering?
Chiyo
To the profound, such as Bashō's poem below written days before his death.
Sick on my journey,
my dreams go wandering
on this withered field
Bashō
To the openly honest experience of the human condition.
Slightly drunk
the leaves
are falling
Santoka
So in summary, there is a lot more to haiku that just syllable counting. Some of these elements have been introduced in this brief introduction and hopefully these parts help in your journey to enjoying more haiku.
Sadly, there is a lot we miss when reading haiku translations in languages other than the original Japanese - puns, jokes, colloquial meanings etc. but there's something beautiful too in reading different translators' interpretations, especially when they include notes about particular words or framing.
I hope the above explanation has helped open your heart to haiku and the huge worlds they seem to capture to those receptive to their invitation.
Why Haiku
The haiku I am adding to this blog were originally intended to be like disposable camera photos - far from clear in their depiction but powerful enough to conjure a window back the rich memory of a moment that I would have lost otherwise. The experiment worked shockingly well, and I would encourage others to try the same.
But I should say that I am no haiku poet, and these 'haiku' I post here are perhaps at best inspired by what haiku can do and some of the ways it works. Really, the haiku I have written are best thought of as extremely short free-from verse following some of the traditions of haiku. For instance, following examples such as Ezra Pound's Imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro" (1913):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound
As Pound puts it, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."
During my early 20's I had many overwhelming thoughts on the world around me that seemed to falter the more I tried to put words to them. Just as Pound puts it, I wanted to capture that moment when the scene becomes something inward and we find meaning within it. I found that this form of haiku helped me articulate some of that profound enormity without producing a simplistic sketch copy.
My haiku are not the paintings of a dramatic storm, but a small kite on the updraft that allows both my reflection and the reader to construct the greater tempest.