Haiku and Nature

March 2013

ACADEMIA

We at the World Haiku Club have developed, encouraged and disseminated various discussions on higher levels about the haiku literature from all sorts of points of view. This has been done through international conferences, public lectures, private meetings, World Haiku Review, internet mailing lists (fora), written articles, essays and the like. WHCacademia is one of these more serious platforms to present, exchange or debate important issues in the genre.

ACADEMIA in WHR is just such forum and in this Issue we present K. Higuchi to discuss modern Japanese haiku with special reference to nature.

Japanese Modern Haiku ~ with Respect for Nature

By K. Higuchi

There was an old pine tree near my parents’ house. People call it oikakematsu. It means “a pine tree following behind”. It was cut down more than 40 years ago owing to a street widening project. Nobody in our village was against. Neither was my family.

But the night oikakematsu was cut we had mourning offering sake. We thanked a lot for many year existences with us.

My mother believed that kids could go home before sunset because of this tree. It was enough dignity to scare kids.(I remember that I looked back a couple time in order to make sure the tree wasn’t following behind me.)

My father wrote haiku for this pine tree. It is a poor one though, I like it very much.

old pine tree

not just following me

he wanted to talk

(oikakete hontowa matsu wa kataritashi)

A pine tree is (used to be) a kami (god) in Japan. The sun, the moon, star, wind, thunder, ground, mountain, mountain pass, bush, forest, rock, stone, the sea, river, lake, pond, marsh, island, water, fire. All of those are kami of nature.

We make animals divine, such as snake (a messenger of water kami) shark, deer, boar, wolf, bear, monkey, fox, rabbit, crow, pigeon …etc.

In our living and social life, such as house, family, village, birth, disease, love, death, grain, rice field, hunting, fishing, sailing, well, toilet, storeroom etc.

When I was a child, I saw a small rock on the ground. I sat down there and stood on it singing often. Later I learned it was kami that protects village from a disaster and bad lucks.

To be truthful, oikakematsu wanted to talk and express feelings, not just following me behind. As I have a moment of imaging and photographing, there is a frightening and beating creation opening up and spreading… In that way, how good it would be if I could describe a nature that the kami is in. I always think this.

I shouldn’t decorate a nature. Something…nature comes to me by itself and tells me its powerful, dynamical and mysterious existence and moment. I really want this.

a wild boar comes stepping on a vine

and feasts on air- the dew on the whole mountain

spring mountain pass stirred all at once

Tohta Kaneko Sekitei Hara

(shishi ga kite kuki wo taberu haru no tohge) (tsuru funde ichizan no tsuyu ugokikeri)

the leaves will never a wolf

cease to fall-do not make haste with a single firefly

don’t ever hasten! clinging to it

Syuson Katoh Tohta Kaneko

(konoha furiyamazu isogunayo isogunayo) (ohkamini hotaru ga hitotsu tsuite ita)

with a piece of stone one day

the burning red dragonfly a nameless spring mountain

has fallen in love began to smile

Hakusen Watanabe Nobuko Katsura

(aru ishini akaku horetaru tonbo kana) (aruhi yori warai hajimeshi na nakiyama)

cutting to a youth

the white leeks a spring bird comes and

like shafts of light introduces itself

Momoko Kuroda Nana Naruto

(shir negi no haikari no boh wo ima kizamu) (seinen ni haru no tori kite na tsugerikeri)

blowing from behind god of the toilet

the autumn wind tells me with a round face

to get on board autumn persimmon

Mutsuo Takano Shizuo Miyasaka

(ushiro yori kite akikaze nore to iu) (secchin no kami wa marugao kakino aki)

[haiku and English translation from Japanese modern haiku 2001/2008 published by modern haiku association in Japan]

My father already followed after oikakematsu. His photo is inside Buddhist Altar. My mother never forgets offering a glass of water and meal for him every day. She prays with palms put together. Flowers always near his photo.

Many people in Japan , they believe that they become kami (hotoke) after death.

Ichiro Hori, an ethnologist, explained this in his book “Japanese Shamanism” by quoting Charles Eliot’s words.

--------The reality of Buddhism which made Eliot amazed was;

most of the Japanese who almost never had interest in Buddhism and visited temples in their lifetime are buried according to funeral service of Buddhism and most of the family’s Buddhist altars are not intended for Buddhist image enshrined. They are not more than shelves for a memorial tablet of the deceased, people call dead people “hotoke sama” without doubt and use such expressions “ hotoke’s curse” “consolation for hotoke” commonly.

“Generally, this fearless expression “ hotoke” instead of dead person is used only in Japan among Buddhist countries as far as I (Eliot) know. It is nothing but imitation of Shinto.

Dead person becomes kami in Shinto. So Buddhist people couldn’t put dead people in the lower status than shinto’s dead people. “kami and hotoke” is completely same for the Japanese people.”-------------

newly picked tea leaves

first cup

offered the Buddhist altar

Tokiko Hirata

(shincha kumu mazu issen wa mihotokeni) [tsuchibina, translation by M. Hirata]

on the waste land moonrise-

both stones and dead together with the dead

rise in the wind awaiting a train

Sosyu Takaya Murio Suzuki

(arechi nite ishi mo shinin mo kaze hassu) (tsuki node ya shindamonora to kisha wo

matsu)

another one the dead sprit

of the deceased coming by which entered into me is healthy-

and dancing blue sky as always

Kazuko Nishimura Kohji Takahara

(mata hitori mohja kitarite odorukana) (bokuni noru yurei sukoyaka itsumono sora)

butterflies flutter in the offing

while I talk the father lives

with the dead once a day

in the offing the sun sets

Hakkoh Yokoyama Shigenobu Takayanagi

(cyo hirahira kojin to karari orutokini) (okini chichiari hini ichido oki ni hi wa ochi)

“kagemusha” vanished, a firefly comes-

“kurosawa” has vanished comes carrying the sorrow

into the lightning-flash of my brother

Aiko Kumagai Momoko Kuroda

(inazuma e kagemusha ga kie kurosawa kie) (hotaru kuru anino kanashimi sagete kuru)

after I have gone

at the foot of the mountains

cherry trees in bloom

Sumio Mori

(ware nakute yamabeno sakura sakinikeri)

[haiku and English translation from “Japanese modern haiku 2001/2008” published by modern haiku association in Japan]

It will be my long-cherished desire to describe my feelings with a great nature in my words.

Contemplate this:

a snail

dreams a blue dream

on the back of a leaf

R.H. Blyth

(END)

HAIKU LIKE IMAGES IN THE MAINSTREAM POETRY

(Transcending Hierarchy of Genres)

There's a nice quote in the 2009 issue of The Brief, the newsletter of the British Haiku Society (www.britishhaikusociety.org): "The movie's far from perfect, but then neither is the book: if you want perfection, go and read a haiku." [Philip Pullman in a Sunday Times interview about his new novel Northern Lights (2/12/07).]

Thanks to Kaji Aso Studio I received exposure to some Japanese art including haiku. I wrote bad haiku but it seems to me that I was able to see good ones! And I see them not only in haiku paddies but in the textual fields of the so called "mainstream poetry".

Years ago I started to whisk out haiku from the lines of my favorite writers in Russian.

I enjoyed this process.

winter evening

in the book of forgotten poets

an old breadcrumb

The more I tuned into haiku the more I saw certain patterns in their distribution among famous, not so famous and not well known masters of verses and poetic prose of the Russian language.

Besides according to the Russian literary critic Yuri Karabchievsky and an American essayist, poet and translator Anne Carson a small part of the longer text—fractal— may reflect the main thought, the main idea sufficiently good and sometimes even better than the whole rambling creation.

A well known Japanese author Haruki Murakami said in his Harvard address:

“If you want to say something, write a haiku. If you are brimming with more elaboration, write a poem. If you want to share a plethora of the cohesive thoughts, make a short story. Only if you are on the brink of epic discoveries attempt to write a novel”.

2008 Nobel Prize winner Le Clezio confides with us:

“There is no need to envisage the course of the whole life, the whole does not speak; what matters is detail, a second of a life, but a second so rich with past and future that it tells all one can know about the being."

(Harvard Review of Books, Fall 2008, page 9, Julian K Arni—A Look at Laurels: Le Clezio and the Nobel).

In the end of the last century I started to share my observations with the Moscow lierati.

In 2001 a full article has been published in Arion, the most prestigeous poetry magazine in Russia.

In a nutshell:

The more famous poet is the higher probability that his columns are "japanned" with three liners making good haiku.

It is easy to see haiku in a good poet’s work.

And of course this correlation is statistical, not an absolute one.

It is like the American poll—the taller person is, the higher his or her salary is.

But it may well be that a short guy becomes a millionaire.

The second trend deals with a time axis.

Before the 19th century poetic texts of Europe were poor with haiku-like lines.

In the span of the last 200 years poets produce more haiku-like images than our generation. Poets divided in groups and the mainstream poets, especially young ones, do not use haiku-like imagery, only tidbits of the haikuesque strophes.

Conclusion:

The mainstream poetry is getting rid of haikuish lines in its textual universe.

Haiku movement separates itself from the mainstream avalanche of poetry. By doing so balance of people, ideas and genre perseveres.

Abandonment of life conveniences, unrequited love and proximity to nature generally give some boost to "haikuishness". However mental anguish does depress this parameter.

Idleness helps to write good haiku-like snippets of stanzas. Good senryu-like humor is mostly born in the cities.

It is also interesting to attempt some forecasts, some futurology.

It seems to me that this divide, this chasm between the haikuists and mainstream poets will continue to exist well beyond 2030 though some poets will manage to cross it. It will happen mostly in the senryu domain.

I will share with you (time permitting) some other observations and haiku-like lines of the poets who wrote in English:

Philip Larkin:

towing

at her back

a huge and birdless silence

the figurehead

with golden tits

arching our way

Walt Whitman produced a lot of haiku-like images

Low-hanging moon!

What is that dusky spot

in your brown yellow?

Wallace Stevens is widely anthologized

among twenty snowy mountains

the only moving thing…

the eye of the blackbird

13 ways of looking at a Blackbird

Ezra Pound composed in The River Merchant Wife:

The paired butterflies

are already yellow

with August

all afternoon

it was snowing

and it was going to snow XIII Canto of Ezra Pound.

Anne Sexton (She was famous, close to nature.) In her Lullaby

…summer evening

the yellow moths sag

against the locked screens

and in her The Fury of Sunsets

cold in the air

an aura of ice

and phlegm.

Charles Bukowski (A strong haiku ambiance in his poems.), in his The Ice Cream People:

The ice-cream people

make me feel good

inside and out

eating a watermelon

I spit our seeds

and swallow{ed} seeds

Ralph Waldo Emerson (He was a haikuish philosopher.) published in The Snow-Storm:

Arrives the snow

and, driving o’er the fields

seems nowhere to alight

Philip Levine writes this haikuesque lines:

down the mountain

tiny white jump-ups

hiding underfoot

E.E. Cummings is the most published poet in the Anglo-Saxon world.

His writings prove to be difficult for mining haiku and maeku. He is too modern for such a “nonsense”. Still he cannot get rid of the manifestations of pristine remnants of the world entirely—“the voice of your eyes is deeper than all the roses”.

James Merrill:

the mother manatees,

Brought here as babies

bring their babies here

And, of course, such a popular “album” poet as Emily Dickinson created tons of haiku-like images in her rhymed verse:

when butterflies

renounce their dreams, I shall

but drink the more!

Robert Frost is an absolute haiku champion of the American English poetry; in his Spring Pools:

Such a stalwart of the English poetry as W.H.Auden has a sprinkle of shasei in his highly admired writings.

In Memory W. B. Yeats:

the airports almost deserted

and snow disfigured

the public statues

And Yeats himself is a haiku-rich poet; he said in The Lake Isle:

Dropping

from the veils of the morning

to where the cricket sings

His anthropomorphic snippets-senryu are much easier to find, though

flash fishlike;

nymphs and satyrs

copulate in the foam

But if we apply a haiku sieve to such a witty guy as Ogden Nash we find an absolute zero of haiku-like lines

His senryu-like three liners are spectacular, though:

Here’s a good rule

of thumb:

too clever is dumb.

He is a very humorous writer and it looks like haiku and humor are not step in step. But senryu and humor are very compatible. It is possible to write laugh-inducing senryu with haikuish streaks.

…I suppose

every piece of crabgrass…

would much rather be an azalea,

writes Ogden Nash.

I find this exercise of haiku extraction from longer poems very beneficial. It brings out a reader in all of us.

One student asks his professor.

No day without a line? Should I write every day?

Oh, no, said professor. You should read every day.

Let's read some Italian poets:

*Giacomo da Lentini a 13th Century poet who is believed to have invented the sonnet.

*Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255 - 1300) Tuscan poet, and a key figure in the Dolce Stil Novo movement.

*Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321) wrote Divina Commedia, one of the pinnacles of Middle Ages literature.

*Francesco Petrarca (1304 - 1374) famous for developing the Petrarchan sonnet in a collection of 366 poems called Canzoniere.

*Ludovico Ariosto (1474 – 1533) wrote the epic poem Orlando furioso (1516).

*Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) wrote La Gerusalemme liberata (1580) in which he describes the imaginary combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade.

*Ugo Foscolo (1778 - 1827): best known for his poem "Dei Sepolcri"

*Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837): his Canzoni are highly valued

*Giovanni Pascoli (1855 - 1912)

*Eugenio Montale (1896 – 1981) won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1975.

*Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970)

*Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)

The asterisk shifts above show the relative frequency of haiku-like images in poems.

Let's contemplate Montale's

fiori di bufore-

e un labbro di sangue

farsi pi'u muto

[stained glass flowers—

and a blood-red lip

go stiller still]

Cesare Pavese is very senryuish.

Nel Parco is yet in the golden age of the autonomous (influenced by French, German, Spanish and English) poetry embedded with haikuish lines:

con fili di paglia

il tuo viso

[and I needle your face with bits of straw]

Two hundred years ago and earlier the Italian poets (similar to the French and Russian poets) did not display too many quasi-haiku within their stanzas. Their styles looked pompous and bombastic.

Come the 19th century and haiku-like images started to proliferate. They keep this march unabated for 150 years until the great upheaval of the European WW II.

They were not pushed away by some neoturgid poetry but rather by arcane individualistic verse libre supported by academia while the masses turned to the pop songs.

As a result their tidbits of haiku lines are not sustained and are not agglomerated into full blown haiku-like tristichs.

Marco Giovenale (born in 1969) poems show well how quasihaiku disintegrate into snippets of some passing nature observations. Even senryu is vey difficult to mine from his texts.

Gherardo Bortolli (b. 1972) with his non-haikuish non-suggestive statements openly talks about the Anglo-Saxon cultural assertion.

Marina Pizzi (b. 1955) is capable of noticing "this rough hewn fence scarlet in the midday morning"but in her elevated solitude and slaps us with "the tortured hoards of fog".

Vanni Santoni (b.1978) simply writes prose poems devoid of the parallels to the medieval Japanese sensibilities.

Florida Fusco (b. 1972) "plants nails into earth".

Michele Zaffarano (b. 1970) shares with us some wild phantasies.

Alessandro Broggi (b. 1973) is a Conde Nast Traveller editor! His poems are phantasmagoric and almost no haikai are available in his long poems.

Our very superficial attempt in literary analysis shows that the mainstream poets and haiku poets diverge nowadays. They are more or less separated. Only humorous aphorisms may bring them together. Poet laureate of the US Billy Collins comes to mind; he also writes his own haiku.

It looks like the way to put haiku on the maps of such renown magazines as New Yorker, Poetry, New Republic, etc. will be paved by the poets who already made their names in the mainstream poetry. Thus the hierarchy of genres will become much less pronounced.

(END)