Haiku and the Japanese Garden

by Michael Dylan Welch

There's something poetic about a garden. Sometimes any garden will do, but a Japanese garden seems especially poetic. As you walk around such a garden in the flow of the year's season's, you may notice a fallen camellia blossom, a blade of grass set to swaying by a passing dragonfly, a drying oak leaf clinging to a mushroom, or frost sparkling on a bright red berry. These details inspire poetry the world over. In Japan, they often inspire a special genre of poetry known as haiku.

mountain morning—

all over the red berry bush

snow in tiny heaps

Haiku seeks to capture these details, these brief moments of keen perception and intuition, recording them so that the poet and reader—or listener—might share and celebrate their universal authenticity.

clicking off the late movie . . .

the couch cushion

reinflates

Haiku is a poetry of nature, but it is also a poetry of human nature. Haiku gives readers feelings, and shows human existence amid nature. Not all haiku are about beauty, but they are always about what is real. We have an emotional reaction to the poem's image, sense perception, and seasonal reference. On reading a good haiku, we are mentally and emotionally moved to experience what the poet experienced, yet we do so without being told what to feel. We simply see it, touch it, taste it, hear it, and smell it through the words—and thus feel it. We leap into intuitively feeling and understanding what the poet deliberately left out of the poem so we could figure it out for ourselves. This is the magic of haiku, and the Japanese garden is an ideal place to make the most of this magic.

winter wind—

kite string tangled

in the garden trellis

At a Japanese garden, you can walk around and notice the ponds, the bushes, the flowers, the fish, the birds. Or you can learn their names, notice their details, notice their seasonal changes. Basho, the great Japanese haiku master, said to “learn of the pine tree from the pine tree, and of the bamboo from the bamboo.” He meant to ground yourself in the authentic, to be in the present, and to see the thing itself deeply and freshly, rather than your interpretation of the thing, and not to be distracted by what is going on other than where you are and what you are doing at the present moment. By writing haiku about what you sense in the garden, you can make the garden a more vibrant place, and by learning haiku that others have written and sharing them with others in the garden, you can also enrich the experience.

tulip festival—

the colours of all the cars

in the parking lot

So what is haiku? It is a brief poem capturing a moment of deep perception of nature or human nature, using the techniques of pause or juxtaposition (kire in Japanese) and seasonal reference (kigo). The juxtaposition of two parts of the poem creates tension that the reader can resolve by figuring out their relationship. A seasonal reference grounds the poem not only in very real and present time but in the grand sweep of each season's metaphorical associations, as well as to other poems that use the same seasonal foundation. You can compose haiku well by writing about things themselves rather than your reactions to those things.

an old woolen sweater

taken yarn by yarn

from the snowbank

Haiku is often misunderstood as a “form” of poetry, being merely anything that can be written in a pattern of 5-7-5 syllables in three lines. That pattern applies to traditional haiku in Japanese (although they count sounds, not strictly syllables—for example, the word “haiku” itself is two syllables in English, but three sounds in Japanese), and is not used by the great majority of dedicated haiku poets writing in English. Also, the genre is too often tarnished by “joke” haiku that claim the name of haiku but nearly none of its highly developed aesthetics. Though haiku in English has been mistaught in schools as a “5-7-5-syllable” poem, such a focus on form, and specifically the 5-7-5 form that is considered incorrect for literary haiku in English, minimizes the much more significant characteristics of the two-part juxtapositional structure and the seasonal reference.

morning chill—

the bag of marbles

shifts on the shelf

Haiku are typically rooted in objective description (avoiding metaphor, simile, and other rhetorical or subjective devices, including judgment and analysis), and always try to leave something out (often the feeling one experiences) so that it might be implied. It is thus much harder to write than its deliberately simple language would imply. As French philosopher Roland Barthes once observed, “haiku has this rather fantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily.”

home for Christmas:

my childhood desk drawer

empty

In English, haiku objectively suggests a moment of here-and-now realization (an “aha” moment) about nature or human nature, or human nature in the context of nature, usually presented in three lines using no set syllable pattern. Haiku typically avoid using a title, rhyme, or other devices that call attention to the words themselves (or to the poet's cleverness) rather than what the words signify. American haiku pioneer James W. Hackett gave good advice on this topic: “A haiku,” he said, “is like a finger pointing at the moon, and if the finger is bejeweled, one no longer sees the moon.” Indeed, haiku are not meant to be obscure or private, and should, as Jack Kerouac once wrote, be as simple as porridge.

warm winter evening—

the chairs askew

after the poetry reading

Not only can a Japanese garden inspire poetry, but so can the rest of the world. Haiku is a means of sense awareness, of mindfulness, a poetic window to the suchness of the full range of existence. You can take haiku sensibilities cultivated in the Japanese garden and apply them to the rest of the everyday world, making the ordinary extraordinary as you write haiku and see the world with wider eyes.

—Michael Dylan Welch (WelchM@aol.com)