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First Thoughts - A Haiku Primer by Jim Kacian

By David A. Giacalone

First Thoughts — A Haiku Primer

(© draft; 2005; title subject to change; all rights reserved)

 

by Jim Kacian: poet; editor/publisher of Red Moon Press;
co-founder of the World Haiku Society; past editor
of Frogpond, journal of the Haiku Society of America

 

- see jim’s Haiku Glossary, also found at the foot of this page

Introduction

freshly fallen snow–
opening a new package
of typing paper

………………nick avis

It has happened to all of us: in the course of our ordinary day, doing something we have done a hundred times before, we are arrested by something we see, or smell, or feel. For whatever reason, this time it strikes us in a way that it has never done before, and yet it seems as if we have always known it to be this way. It may be deep, it may be transitory, but regardless, we are changed: we can never feel the same about this experience again. We have had a moment of insight, a seeing deeper into the workings of the world.

Sometimes these moments are private in nature, springing from deep within us, and so might resist our attempts to verbalize them. But often they are so persuasive, so attractive, that we want to share them, and so we do our utmost to find a way to make them communicable. When we make this attempt, we enter the realm of poetry; and the poetic form we most often find meets our needs in such a situation is haiku.

Haiku have been around for hundreds of years, and, like other poetic forms, have been written for contests and greeting cards, parties and recreation, therapy and instruction; they have been floated down streams, hung from trees, and sung. From the beginning, however, the primary reasons for writing haiku have been to record our insights about the world, and to communicate them to others.

These reasons suggest that haiku take for granted a common ground, a tacit agreement between poet and reader that there is a real world out there, and that we share it. Haiku generally are not about exotic locales and unusual circumstances: haiku are the records of revelations we have about our ordinary lives. All poems, like prose, record information about our universe and ourselves. But poems are concerned with more than just information: they contain ways of linking this information together within the poem, and also to other poems, other stories, other ways of knowing which help us to understand more deeply, more broadly, and with more integration.

The more a poem compels us to imagine its reality, the more we may fill in gaps our personal experiences have not brought us directly. A poem can be as full and evocative as the direct experience, and often is the only kind of experience we might have concerning persons, places or things outside our normal lives.

Haiku have long exploited this truth. Typically, a poet who chooses haiku to express his moment strives to place his reader directly at the scene, not so that he may tell of the experience, but so that the reader may experience it directly for himself. The attentive reader will find all the input to recreate the moment–a setting, the conditions of the moment, the senses fired, the action, the entire packet of information–so that, through the act of close imagining, the reader may actually relive the moment, and arrive at the realization himself. The poet’s reality is mapped onto the reader’s, like an overlay, and when there is a sufficient overlap, the experience is shared.

Haiku is a poetic form, and does hold some things in common with other poetry. However, it has developed, over its 400 and more years of practice, techniques specific to itself, a sense of how language best works within it, and several theories of poetics. We will examine these elements which make haiku unique among all the poetic forms of the world.

But haiku is changing, too, and what has characterized it in classical times in the country of its origins, Japan, is not necessarily what has been preserved or considered most valuable in its adoption by the west. So we will also want to acquire an understanding of what haiku has been, but also what it is becoming, and what it might look like in the future as it is shaped to meet the needs of people whose realities must be very different from agricultural, feudal Japan.

And it is this flexibility, this ability to be shaped to the needs of its practitioners which will determine how well haiku fares in the future, and for how long. Just now it appears to be thriving in its many adopted lands around the globe. It has adapted to a variety of languages, cultures and circumstances, and appears to have gained energy from these transformations. Haiku, it would appear, has not only a wonderful classical history, but an adventurous future before it.

So what is this form, practiced for hundreds of years, and giving promise of hundreds more, in dozens of lands and languages around the world? One of the greatest of haiku masters, Basho, the son of a samurai and a wandering poet, once said it this way: haiku is what is happening, right here, right now.

– your comments would be much appreciated; just click here to join the discussion –

Chapter One - What is a Haiku?

So let’s begin right here –

red light.
and right now–
these few seconds

What is going on right now, right where you are? Is the sun shining or has it clouded over? Is the wind blowing or has the day gone still? Is that bird singing, or has it just left off? In the house, has your furnace just clicked on, or the air conditioner? Is water gurgling through the pipes? As for yourself, can you feel your blood coursing, lungs expanding or contracting? Are you aware of your emotions rising, your thoughts racing?

And we should ask at this point, is this haiku? Or is it merely a catalogue? To take Basho’s statement literally, everything–every action, feeling, thought–is a haiku, provided it is what is happening right here and right now. If this were true, then this book would end here–and haiku would be endlessly clogged by the minutiae of life.

John Cage, the 20th century composer, once said, in the same vein: “Everything you hear is music.” And he composed music designed to prove his point, including his famous “silent” compositions wherein the ambient noise of the environment was featured: we might hear the creaking of the chairs in the auditorium, or an airplane passing overhead, a cough (or several), and increasingly, whispers.

The fact is, we distinguish between music and noise. Even granting Cage a great deal of latitude, not all music is of similar interest: some works you want to hear again and again, some are exhausted in a single playing. The ambient noise which Cage wished us to focus upon, while occasionally capable of capturing our attention, generally does not interest us because it goes on from moment to moment into more of itself, and is not organized into areas of greater interest in the way we consider music to be.

It is the organization of sound that we appreciate as the art of music. In just this way haiku which is only a list of the objects and processes of “right here, right now,” would soon weary us, and we would quickly lose interest. And so to Basho’s famous dictum, we must append “and also something more than that.”

red light.
these few seconds
of robinsong

In this example we can find the here and now of the poem easily enough, but it is the something more which brings the here and now home to us. In haiku, most of all it is this something more that we will seek. We will attempt a working definition of haiku at this point. Definitions are made not to burden us with restrictions, but to make it possible to have at the ready information which will help us know what to look for when considering haiku.

Bear in mind that a definition may be slippery, and especially so for so lively and active a process as poetry. All definitions are retrospective rather than predictive. They comment on what has been the case in the past, and may be less useful when encountering something new. It is even possible for a definition to interfere with our understanding of what haiku is and may be, if we make it too restrictive or inflexible.

On the other hand, a definition can be useful and inspiring. It is an arrow, aiming us towards a target, indicating a direction that we may follow. It can be vital. It can inspire. It can open more than it closes. Haiku, as a still-vital entity, defies any sort of comprehensive definition. It is still engaged in the process of fulfilling its destiny, and what that will be no one can say. What we can say is that haiku has undergone dramatic change on several occasions, most recently in the last half of the twentieth century. At any moment when things are in flux, as now, we need to choose our definitions with care, and with a little bit of skepticism.

So to begin, let us say a haiku is

. . . a brief poem . . .

There are two parts to this opening phrase–let’s look at them in order. “brief”: nothing characterizes haiku, at least superficially, so much as this point: haiku are the shortest poems in the world.

snow drifts
on the driftwood
Geri Barton

There have been some forms–the epigram, the couplet, the monostich — which also produce short poems. But all haiku are short, and this is part of their distinctiveness on paper, to the ear and in the mind. How brief is brief? We will consider this in detail later, but for now consider the examples in this chapter. All have two images laid out over two or three lines, and vary between 6 and 15 syllables, with the average being around 12. Haiku usually are somewhere close to these numbers; we might think of 17 syllables as an upper limit, only occasionally approached.

And then: “poem.” A haiku is a poem, which means it is a literary work using metrical, rhythmical and other poetical means to achieve an aesthetic point or moment. When published, it is a public sharing, and subject to the same kinds of scrutiny, criticism and appreciation that other art forms are. Throughout its history haiku has been used as many things: as meditation –

thinking about
mindfulness
I pee on my shoe

… Michael Ketchek

therapy–
after chemo
only wanting to read seed catalogs

…. Pamela Miller Ness

journal–
the village at dawn;
a bird’s song is part of the silence

… Larry Gates

memoir–
dad’s wake
the weight of my new shoes

… R. A. Stefanac

teaching–
while she counts syllables,
the haiku slips away

… Mildred Rose

farewell:
skipping stones
talking of people no longer here

.. Jack Barry

to name but a few. And it succeeds in each of these contexts. But only when considered as poetry, as literature, does haiku realize its highest potential and fullest range. R. H. Blyth, in considering this very issue, writes, “. . . if there is ever imagined to be any conflict between Zen and the poetry in haiku, the Zen goes overboard; poetry is the ultimate standard.”

Blyth was a believer that Zen was the proper attitude from which to consider haiku, and we may in fact substitute, for his use of Zen, what he would say in the larger context: if there is conflict between the poetry in haiku and “anything else”, the “anything else” is jettisoned. His final phrase–poetry is the ultimate standard–is ours as well. Of courses, what we mean by “poetry” will need to be defined, and it may be that we will have to dispose of some of the notions of poetry we inherit from our culture to come completely to a realization of what it means in haiku.

In fact, it is only when we understand haiku in this way that its other uses become available to us to full effect. Only at this point does haiku become what poetry must be for all poets: a way of life. Of course, there is more to consider in how haiku realizes itself as poetry: and we will examine issues of form, content, language and qualities best served by the haiku form. But it is important to establish that we mean to consider haiku first and foremost as literature. Everything else will devolve from this principle point.

. . . which records an experience . . .

Haiku always begin with an experience. This experience can take many forms: it can be something actually witnessed or participated in–

garden work–
talking to each other
back to back

. . . Dimitar Anakiev

or something from memory–

wind against
my pantleg–
cat gone for years

. . . Edward Beatty

even something imaginary –

pulling light
from the other world . . .
the Milky Way

. . . Yatsuka Ishihara

Throughout the history of haiku, the first of these kinds of experience has been preferred by poets, editors and readers, and because of this haiku is often referred to as the poetry of the real. Many of the most revered and quoted haiku that have been of this sort. But memory and imagination are powerful providers of experience, too, and many poems fulminated from them achieve a resonance within us, since they reach the truth of a situation and of a feeling.

Walking with you again
in the snow . . .
only my footprints

. . . Frances Bradford Neighbors

While experience, of whatever sort, is primary to the creation of haiku, it is the radical step of recording the experience which opens it from a private experience into a work of art.

Moments of insight are usually actual rather than verbal, so the act of “translating” the moment into words is the artistic leap, the act in which the catalog of “what’s happening right here, right now” is selected, organized, alchemized into poetry.

. . . of a moment of revelation . . .

What moments are so compelling that they are worth this exacting artistic treatment? It is not enough that the moment be beautiful, or touching, or closely observed, although all of these are elements which the best haiku evince. Haiku are about something more than these things: they are about those moments when we see the world clearly, as it is, and not as we have become habituated to see it.

not seeing
the room is white
until that red apple

. . . Anita Virgil

Insight may be profound –

trembling
as the grape next to it
is plucked

. . . Dhugal Lindsay

it may be slight–

In the wake
of a gliding swan
ducks rocking

. . . Gustave Keyser

but once we have had it, we cannot ever see the world in quite the same way again.

. . . into the nature of the world . . .

But this is not to say that haiku is merely close observation. Neither is it simply the statement of discovered significance. Haiku is the poetry we make of our experiences of significance and close observation. The revelation that is inherent in haiku is tied closely to the way we regard the world. It is alternately dependent upon the newness of our observation, as if we are seeing something for the first time, but at the same time it hinges upon our feeling that, once seen, we know this observation to be true, as though we’ve known it before and all along.

So a sense of familiarity is critical to our sense of revelation: revelation, and therefore haiku, is not novelty, but renewal.

Summer night:
we turn out all the lights
to hear the rain

. . . Peggy Willis Lyles

This insight may relate to the natural world–

Canada Geese
suddenly from the heart
the field takes wing

… James Tipton

One of the reasons for this is that the natural world is the common ground between all poets and readers of haiku. There is virtually no one who has not experienced a wide array of natural phenomenon, and stood in awe of its incidents and effects. This common ground helps situate the poem, and therefore the poet and the reader, quickly and usefully in much haiku. Our attention therefore may be given to the rest of the experience; and, at the same time, the background of natural phenomenon serves to broaden our response to the experience, giving us a natural sounding-board for our feelings and responses.

Or again, it may take a more human face–

second husband
painting the fence
the same green

. . . Carol Montgomery

However, while haiku may explore interior space, they are not by nature personal. Haiku are not poems we write about ourselves, not another form of confessional poetry; in fact, they are moments when the poet loses his own self-consciousness because of an identification with his subject –

yellow daffodil
I look for something
very blue to wear

. . . David Cobb

Haiku attempt to objectify reality, and look outward upon it, rather than inward.

. . . in an effort to share it with others . . .

Spring.
The child sharpens
the green pencil

. . . Elena Manta Ciubotariu

to its most obscure recesses–

snowstorm outside
inside the bloody
rain of the month

. . . Kaye E. Bache

As the body of poetry grows, so too does our picture of the world, and not merely by the accumulation of facts. Instead, we have the means to see directly into the nature of reality, untinged by personal considerations, moment to moment.

Haiku create a reality. Like all good art, they persuade. In the sense that our map of the cosmos is changed by reading and entering haiku — that is, in the sense that haiku have power — they have, they are, reality.
Chapter Two: Form

Poetry, like music, unfolds over time. The manner in which we present a poem has an impact on the way it is read, heard and received.

We unconsciously acknowledge a series of conventions every time we read a poem in English: we begin at the top left of the page; we read from left to right; we pause a bit after each line (unlike prose where we simply continue on); and most of all, we read and listen with a different attention than when we’re reading something like the newspaper.

Everything within the presentation of a haiku matters: where one line ends and another begins; where we place our words; where we insert pauses. This is because we know that poetry, being heightened and compressed, requires different tools to read it well. Poetry is performance. And if poetry is performance, then poetic form is its stage. When we look upon the stage we willingly suspend our disbelief, if only for a moment, and accept the conventions which permit its magic and truth to become available to us.

Presenting our poems well, with a clearly identifiable stage, allows the reader to prepare himself for what comes next, to know what role he is to play in the communication which is to follow. At the same time, once we acknowledge the stage, we want it to disappear, so it doesn’t interfere with our direct interaction and enjoyment of what is presented.

So, too, with haiku: ideally, we would like the vehicle of the moment (the poem) to interfere as little as possible with the transmission of the moment itself. Form is the transparent scaffolding which supports the poem by which we transmit the moment. There have been a variety of forms which have been utilized in haiku in English. All of them have some historical claim to authenticity, and good poems have been written in each.

It might be useful here to consider the classical Japanese form, since it has been the model for all the English-language varieties. Classical Japanese haiku were most often written in single vertical lines (contemporary publication of Japanese haiku still utilizes this layout) in 17 “on” (an on is a sound unit, like ga, wa, tsu or no, which, combined, form the words of the Japanese language). Although line breaks were not physically apparent, it was apparent from internal considerations (and from the voiced punctuation available in the Japanese language) that most poems were divided into 3 divisions, the first of 5, the second of 7, and the third of 5 on, with a grammatical pause after either the first or second “line” (and less often in the middle of the second “line”).

This tripartite form, with its asymmetrical grouping of either 5-12 or 12-5 on can be considered the standard format of Japanese haiku, and when the poem was being assimilated into English, attempts were made to emulate this form in different ways.

At the same time, concessions were made to accommodate the vast differences between the Japanese and English languages. Differing emphases result in the proliferation of forms in English, and each of them brings something unique with it. Let’s consider each of them.

a lure
dragged through lily pads–
August afternoon

. . . Burnell Lippy

We may consider the three-line, short-long-short form to be standard in English. One recent study suggests that over 90% of all haiku published in English in the past three decades has appeared in this format, and there is no evidence to suggest that this is changing. In imitating the classical Japanese poem, the divisions of the pattern were accepted by early translators as justification for line breaks. What this offers in English which is less apparent in the Japanese is an interesting use of enjambment as a sort of corollary for the Japanese kireji, or cutting word. Overall, this form has satisfied the needs for most poets in English for the principal time of its practice.

Besides the form shown here, with all three lines flush left, variations of indentation of any of the lines is often noted, especially as modeled by Blyth in his copious work.

after the fall moon shadows under my eyes

. . . Alexis Rotella

a purple evening in the window she folds her underwear

. . . chris gordon

This form is usually called a one-line haiku, or a one-liner, and is clearly an imitation of the Japanese practice of writing the poem as a single vertical line. Also, the customary display of a poem’s transliteration into romaji (the English syllabary rendering of the sounds of a Japanese poem) is today conventionally laid out in a single horizontal line, as is the transcription of the poem in its original katakana or hiragana syllabaries. This can be cited as further evidence that haiku are intended to be one-line poems. What this does not take into account is that in Japanese the one-line is composed of three distinct metrical lines, and is perceived as such. Sometimes in English additional space is used to signify slight pauses, as in the second example. The one-line form is the second most practiced form of haiku today in English.

in the woodpile
the broken ax handle

. . . Michael Facherty

Our next example is correspondingly called a two-line haiku. While two-line haiku are relatively rare in classical Japanese practice, many examples, especially from translation, may be found in English to justify this choice. An early and important collection of translated classical haiku by Asataro Miyamora in 1932 employed the two-line form. It was also the form of choice by such early important personages in the haiku world as Lafcadio Hearn and Harold Stewart. A large measure of the transmission of haiku understanding is due to the work of translators, and we cannot dismiss the considerable influence these people have had on not only the content and ethos of haiku, but also its form.

As we shall examine in the chapter on technique later in this book, haiku is most often the juxtaposition of two elements, and on the surface the two-line form might seem ideally suited to the haiku. What it loses,

however, is the sudden shift, the “surprise” element which English haiku may have in their third line. They also lose the asymmetry inherent in the Japanese original, where the 5 on of the first line is poised against 7 and 5 on in the second phrase, or else 5-7 posited against the final 5. The English 1 line against 2 lines, or 2 lines against 1, is the closest approximation we have of this effect. Most often, two-liners seem more like epigrams (which one early translator, Basil Chamberlain, called them in his most influential study of the form) or couplets than haiku as we have come to know them. They remain a relative rarity.

elevator
we step back
to make room
for her perfume

. . . Nancy S. Young

Further down the cobble beach
The face of another
Sunset-watcher
Loses its copper glow.

. . . Tito

The four-line form is another rarity, but has been seen a bit more often recently in the work of poets from the United Kingdom. Though the first example (a senryu) uses the fourth line as a means of surprising the reader, most often the material of a 4-liner might have fit into three, as in the second example, and so is a style choice. Occasionally it may indicate the poet has need for additional words and/or ideas; this sort of packing is at least a debatable issue within this form.

Additional considerations must take into account by the poet when deciding on the right form for his or her poem. The next 3 models all emphasize different aspects available within the form.

The names of the dead
sinking deeper and deeper
into the autumn leaves

. . . Eric Amann

The first of these is a three-line poem with an emphasis on syllable count. As mentioned before, classical Japanese haiku were usually written in 5-7-5 on. The intent of the form of this poem is to mimic this count pattern in English syllables. The syllable and the on are not equivalent, and so to treat them as equivalent is simply an aesthetic decision. This may be considered a sort of maximum format for haiku, and the poet needs to take care that the language does not become padded to accommodate the count, and that extraneous information is not brought into play, as often happens. When caution is taken, this form has been used to create many beautiful and lasting haiku, though it is not seen as any more essential to the form today than these other formats by a large majority of practitioners.

on the padlock
snow
melting

. . . Penny Harter

Next is the converse of the 5-7-5, the minimal haiku. Here emphasis is placed on the greatest compression possible. The dangers here is that not enough information or detail is offered by the poet, and the poem

therefore becomes hermetic or overly private. Minimalist poems seem, by their very nature, to be experimental, and few have shown great lasting power, unless they have also employed other elements, such as a visual appeal, as well. Nevertheless, some excellent examples, as the one shown, indicate that in the hands of the best poets, very much can be done with very little.

“HONK TO SHOW
SUPPORT”
nothing
from
fall
ge
es
e

. . . LeRoy Gorman

Our next example is a visual poem. The intent is to convey the experience of the moment in a visual as well as verbal and/or auditory fashion. These have proven to be very difficult to do, at least in part because maintaining a just balance between verbal and visual surface is an extremely challenging task.

Sometimes these formal choices are combined, as, for example, in one-word haiku such as “tundra” by Cor van den Heuvel, and “shark ” by Alexis Rotella. In both of these examples, a single word is arrayed against the solid whiteness of a whole page. Both are dependent upon context (or lack of context) for their impact, and so are more visual than one-line in function.

on this cold
spring 1
2 night 3 4
kittens
wet
5

. .. Marlene Mountain

Finally, we have the organic form. This form owes least, perhaps, to the Japanese models, and arises instead out of the free-verse tradition, while still maintaining the way of functioning which haiku affords. Space and arrangement of the example poem reminds one more of William Carlos Williams than Basho, and yet the import of the poem is decided by the revelation of a moment through the juxtaposition of images. This technique has not been explored to any great degree yet in western haiku, but seems to be a natural amalgamation of traditions, and holds much promise for the future.

Content aside, all of these poems fall into an acceptable form of the haiku as it is practiced today. Further, all of them have historical precedents which date back for, and have been refined over, several centuries. All, therefore, have at least some claim to being authentic forms of haiku, and not merely innovations brought about in adapting the form to modern practice or modalities.

What can we conclude from such varied practice within the single form of haiku? And how do we make choices as to which of these formats, or another, best fits our poem?

A haiku should be as long as it needs to be, and as short as it can be. Its arrangement should depend upon the needs of the poem, not the needs of the tradition.

While there are arguments for each of the various forms illustrated, no one form is best for all poems. An organic approach is more flexible than any formula can be, and permits us to shape the poem according to the needs of mood and content, rather than to the demands of something as extraneous as the number of syllables in a line.

Choosing the form best suited to the material at hand is one of the challenges to mastering form. We will give further consideration to this in the chapter on technique.

Chapter Three: Content

Is it too much to presume that all writers have something to say? We’ve all read things where we have wondered what the writer might possibly have in mind. Or else we might see why the author has an interest in his topic, but it is not apparent why anyone else would consider it. Nevertheless, it is useful to assume that there is a purpose to all writing, although we should also be aware that the purpose a reader might think a piece of writing has, and that which the author intends, are not necessarily the same

If we begin with this presumption, then it follows that the writer knows what it is he or she is trying to convey, and has adopted a strategy designed to do just that. This is true for all communications, whether we are aware of it or not. Whether or not the author succeeds in realizing his goals is a separate issue. In virtually all cases, what we mean when we say someone is a good writer is that he has something of interest to say, and says it interestingly; that is, he succeeds in realizing his goals. We may, as aspiring writers, even adopt this as our motto.

Take, for example, the following :

where: a pasture

when: twilight

what: frog sounds; a bucket

These raw materials are not promising, and yet in the hands of a master were used to create one of the great poems of the haiku form.

twilit pasture-

voices of frogs fill

the forgotten bucket

Ross Figgins

This brings us to another important consideration. When we choose a form we think will help us succeed in reaching our goals, we are doing more than simply selecting what is best for the material: we are also announcing a specific relationship to that material. No one attempts to squeeze the material of an epic into haiku form. There are conventions which must be present for a poem to be considered an epic: the calling down of the Muses, a loftiness of language and subject matter, a thoroughness of treatment, to name but three. It is possible to write other large-scale poems, but in order for it to be an epic, it must contain these elements.

Haiku is exactly the same. It is possible to write short poems that look like haiku, but unless they contain the elements which make a poem a haiku, then they are just another short poem.

These, then, are the two issues we will seek to address in this chapter. What may a haiku contain? What is its range of expression? Is it capable of expressing all the truths of our times? And in this vein, what is it most, and least, effective in expressing?

And, what must a haiku contain? What are the particulars which mark a poem as a haiku?

Let us begin by saying that anything we experience may be the subject of a haiku. When the Japanese masters were writing, they wrote about their environment, which was pastoral and feudalistic. Some contemporary editors have considered that these elements are the only appropriate subjects for haiku. But if BashÙ were alive today, would he choose not to capture a moment of significance because it was occasioned by his use of a computer, or his location in a skyscraper? Of course it is impossible to know for sure, but it seems evident that he was an innovator in every way, and would not shrink before the realities of his time. And so, should your moment include computers and skyscrapers, or any of the myriad other elements which constitute our contemporary life, do not feel that you may not include them in your haiku. To insist only on a view of life which is centuries out of date is a certain way for haiku to become moribund, and even worse, dull. Writers may choose many things, but they may not choose to be dull.

Of course, some things may seem to recommend themselves more readily to haiku, but this is due to at least two biases that we may have already formed. The first is, we already know a certain number of haiku, and if we think our haiku must be similar to those we know, we may find ourselves taking on the same kinds of subjects. Hence there is a proliferation of haiku about cherry blossoms and frogs, and while these are laudable subjects, they are not by any means exhaustive of the options we have. In fact, they may not even be part of your personal environment, and more than anything else, your haiku ought to reflect the space and time in which you live.

The second bias is a bit subtler, but perhaps even more pervasive for that. Since BashÙ helped redefine the form four hundred years ago, certain qualities have been favored in haiku over others-things like sabi, wabi, aware and yugen (see the glossary at the back of this book)-and as a result poems which favor other qualities are not so readily published and therefore found. Again, these are laudable qualities, but they do not compose the entire range of what is admirable in haiku, nor of what haiku is capable of expressing.

And let us append one other idea here, suggested by R. H. Blyth and no doubt true for all the very best haiku: He once noted “. . .the true subject of a haiku is never mentioned in the haiku. It is what a haiku implies that makes it a great or worthless haiku.” And so it is:

rain-swept parking lot
headlights of a locked car
grow dim

. . . Charles B. Dickson

What is left unexpressed is the true expression.

So it may be surprising to hear, but haiku is capable of containing every subject in the world, and conveying every quality and emotion. And isn’t this what we would expect of a form that has lasted so long and been so vital to so many people? A form which limits what things we can consider and what they might mean and feel like would be certain to lose its vigor and die out. Haiku show no indications of doing that.

On the other hand, haiku is a small form, a vial rather than a vat. It is designed, like a vial, to hold essences, small and concentrated amounts of pure poetry. It is pointless to try to pour material which requires great elucidation, or narrative, or development, into such a form. And, since there is so little room within the constraints of a haiku, we wish also to find ways to communicate as much material as possible in the fewest words. So it is immediately useful to recognize that haiku lend themselves to the small, the momentary, the intimate. Haiku are most effective when they are used to express what is, rather than what should be. At their best, they do not put forth ideas or concepts-which may help us to define and articulate a truth, but do nothing to help us experience it directly and personally-but rather images which seek to embody intuitions. Intuition can be defined as the direct apprehension of reality without the intermediary of our logical minds-a direct knowing. Haiku seek not to explain reality, but to connect us with it.

close lightning
the metallic taste
in my mouth

. . . Charles Easter

Haiku are less well equipped to convey duration or process (although you may find poems where the insight of a moment is the result of prolonged observation or action). Traditionally haiku has been considered to be the poetry of the ordinary, the small, the un- or ill-observed. Blyth ascribes this tendency to a characteristic of the Japanese people and culture, and argues that geography may well be responsible for at least some part of this. And yet, if we look at classical Japanese haiku we will find such a magnificent poem as

wild boars
are blown along-
the autumn storm

. . . Basho

Rather than a proclivity towards the minute, it is perhaps more useful to think of the content of haiku in the way Shiki, the Japanese master who revolutionized haiku into a modern genre, describes it: Remember perspective, he advises us: larger things are large, but so are small things when viewed up close. It isn’t the nature of revelation to rank importance-all insights are equally valuable to the perceiver (if not necessarily so to the reader). Large or small makes no difference to the truth of the poem, provided it is truth. It is all a matter of perspective.

If we are free to call on any subject, and to convey any emotion, within a haiku, what must it contain to still be considered a haiku?

Haiku must contain a moment of insight. Haiku is not the only form in which such moments are essential-it might even be argued that all poetry is essentially the recording of such insights, and that this is the characteristic which unites haiku with these other forms-but without such a moment, there is no haiku. And what constitutes such a moment?

The moment of insight-termed the “ah-moment” by haiku translator and anthologist Kenneth Yasuda and a “seeing into the life of things” by Blyth-is that moment when the poet and his subject unite in a fundamental way, and he realizes that he is not just part of the universe, but one and the same with it. It takes place outside of time-that is, time seems to stop in such moments-and the poet loses his sense of self into a larger sense of belonging. It is this feeling which informs the moment to make it fresh and sincere, and quite beyond ego.

After it flew
feeling the butterfly
still on my finger

. . . Nelle Fertig

BashÙ expressed it this way: “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one-when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural-if the object and yourself are separate-then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.”

Besides the moment of insight, what other elements are essential to the creation of a haiku? Haiku often has been called “nature poetry.” In a basic sense, haiku have had as their content the close observation of and revelation about nature, in the broadest sense including the range of elements, weather events, flora and fauna, and human behavior as observed in the context of nature. In some instances the entire poem is infused with nature content, and in other cases only part of the poem evinces natural reference. In the latter instances, a kind of shorthand has been evolved which suggests, beyond its actual phrasing, the entirety of the natural phenomenon it evokes (for instance, “spring breeze” evokes the whole of spring, its tastes and smells and mists and sun). This system of shorthand is called season words, or kigo in the Japanese.

In the classical tradition it has been considered essential for a poem to include a season word to be a haiku. This tradition arises out of haiku’s historic origins in renga, when it was called the hokku. The function of the hokku is to indicate the time and place of composition of the renga. It was imperative, then, that the season be indicated somewhere in the body of the poem. Over time, a set of words which indicated not only the time of the year, but an apotheosis of certain natural events, came to be established and utilized for this purpose. For example, “full moon” indicates, unless expressed otherwise, the full moon of the harvest-that is, the finest example of full moon to be had each year. And so, “full moon” is a season word for autumn, even though full moons certainly occur other times during the year. When the hokku evolved into the contemporary haiku, this element had already been incorporated within it, and so it has remained an essential part of haiku into the twentieth century.

The seasons have been the underpinning subject of haiku-indeed, of all traditional Japanese poetry-for several centuries. And season words have evolved naturally from this need to include nature, with positive benefit. Their availability and codification of the natural cycle, their compression and common usage, have made their usage not just a rule to follow, but a shorthand which permits greater ease and breadth of expression and resonance, as well as association, throughout the corpus of haiku.

Additionally, in a volatile geophysical locale in a premodern agricultural culture, such a deliberate consideration of the natural cycles was essential, not only for literary purposes, but for survival. This close association made the literature of Japan an extension of its deepest needs, and it should be no surprise that such lore would support its most basic cultural presumptions.

However, even in traditional circles haiku have long been written on certain subjects, imported from earlier traditional topics of poetry, which are considered to lie outside the structure provided by the natural cycle-poems primarily concerned with human behavior such as love, religious belief, travel and so on. These are regarded no less as haiku, but because haiku are generally preserved by their appearance in anthologies and saijiki (listings of topics and words, with (often copious) illustrative examples, indicating the topics for use in haiku composition), which are arranged by season, such works are more difficult to find and retain. In fact, since such poems are difficult to place in saijiki, it was at first merely a matter of inconvenience for the editors, but over time, since examples of non-season word haiku were essentially neglected, it came to regarded that such poems belonged outside the tradition, and finally that they were evidence of poor crafting. And so what was an editorial difficulty became a traditional mandate.

Things have changed over the past one hundred years. For one thing, the life of the average Japanese (and many others as well) is far less rural and agricultural than it was when haiku was finding its classical form. And despite an “official” policy which still advocates their use, and the fact that the great preponderance of haiku being written today still use them, season words are no longer considered essential to haiku, in Japan or elsewhere. Likewise, haiku still take nature as their primary content, but the definition of nature is much broader than was the case even fifty years ago. Today we might discover Japanese haiku to include work such as this:

From the turquoise
milk wells up
in December

. . . Ban’ya Natsuishi

This sort of poem, widely recognized as haiku, makes us reconsider what must truly be considered essential for a poem to be a haiku. And we might well ask: can we write a haiku without a season word?

The answer, as is the case so often, is that we are always free to do whatever we wish to do. The real issue is more a matter of what do we get, and what do we lose, from choosing one way or another. And this goes back to our original consideration: what is the purpose of our writing? And what is the best strategy to realizing our goals? And so the proper question is, does the use of a season word in my haiku help better convey the experience I wish to share? Or is the nature of my experience a moment of insight which is not focused within the natural cycle? And if this is the case, what alternatives do I have?

Season words will continue to matter in haiku in all cultures. The preponderance of our “haiku moments” will continue to be discovered within the parameters of the natural cycle, if for no other reason than that is where we look for them. And so in many instances a season word will prove a useful strategy in conveying these experiences.

But increasingly we will find that the traditional significances of season words will not embody all the moments we discover, especially as haiku is written in cultures whose climates are widely divergent from that of Japan, and as our increasingly urbanized environments become the locus for more and more of our insights. We will discover, then, that we want a system of words which function as season words do-that is, codify our experiences, provide a shorthand for expressing them, and unify our writings through association with other expressions in the form-but which more fully embraces the range of experiences which haiku may convey. This larger system we call keywords.

A keyword is a near kin to a season word. In fact, it may be a season word. But it may be other things as well.

The most useful way of thinking of the idea of keywords is not as a one-to-one replacement for season words but rather as an overarching system of correspondences available to the haiku poet which incorporates season words within its bounds. Consider, for example

moonlight
river divides the forest
into two nights

. . . Nikola Nilic

What we would have done in the past is to call this a non-seasonal haiku, or else assign it a season. It certainly could have been written in any season, and to place it in the “Winter” season, for example, would be arbitrary at best. This is the way we have worked within the mindset of season words.

In the new way of reckoning, however, a season word is not an assumed part of a haiku, but a keyword is. A word or phrase which opens up the poem is employed, in this case “moonlight”. There are thousands of others, including all the known season words. The poem is a haiku employing a keyword, with a seasonal feeling (since it is a natural event being described) but not a definite seasonal attribution. Season words operate as one large and important subset of all keywords, but are not the only words which a haiku may employ to the same effect.

Keywords can replace the notion of season words completely, and successfully, without radically altering the nature of haiku as we know it. This process is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Through such a development haiku will continue to be grounded in a universal system of value which is communicable to its practitioners and readership; there will be a smooth transition since none of the “classics” of haiku need be thrown out due to the adoption of this different orientation; and new work which speaks to a far larger and perhaps more contemporary audience will find acceptance within the canon of haiku because of the enlarged understanding of how such poems function.

Some examples of keywords:

tide covers the sandspit
evening snow falling
on open sea

. . . Randal Johnson

The keyword here, snow, is a season word. It grounds the poem in the specific, provides context, and promotes resonance: a great deal to expect from one little word.

This huge ocean-
I could stand here forever
it would still come to me

. . . Proxade Davis

The second haiku contains a non-seasonal keyword, ocean. It would be possible to imagine the season here-we might even be tempted to guess at it-but no matter our conclusion, it remains speculation. And rather than this being a problem for this poem, this ambiguity actually helps it. The poem is not dependent upon the season for its power, but rather upon the image itself. The ocean is powerful in its own right and commanding in all seasons.

funeral:
i brush back
my son’s hair

. . . Charles D. Nethaway

The third example also contains the keyword funeral which suggests a human and personal context to the poem. Of course all poets, all people, have their private universes, and a poem is an attempt to describe one’s personal universe in hopes that others might recognize a similarity. The important point is not that the poet mentions himself. What matters is that the poet treats himself objectively-another image in the nexus of images which constitutes the poem. The poem is not about the self as ego, but about pointing to something objective about the self, something that might be shared.

This is an important point: haiku which refer to the self can be very tricky to manage in a way that is appropriate to the haiku form. Many poets, coming to haiku from contemporary western poetry, mistake the form as another type of confessional poetry. This could not be further from the case. Haiku is not a form for self-expression, or about interior states of mind.

Haiku are, instead, a means of sharing perceptions of the world outside us, an interaction with the exterior reality, a looking out rather than a looking in. This distinction cannot be stressed firmly enough: haiku are expressions of intuitive insights we experience from our encounter with the objective world.

Easter evening-
the old woman gathers
her unsold flowers

. . . Ion Codrescu

The final example shows another orientation of the keyword, this time as a religious association. The keyword Easter allows the reader to recognize that a special understanding is being brought to this moment. The reader may or may not be able to enter this apprehension, and for this reason haiku with religious orientation can occasionally be seen as closed, or intended only for the “enlightened.” Often, too, such poems come across as dry and didactic.

Nevertheless it is worth considering the legacy of such an orientation in the transmission of haiku to western poets. Many of the first students of the form outside Japan came to haiku directly or indirectly through their interest in Zen. A substantial number of books and papers have been written espousing Zen as the true way of haiku. It is often noted that Basho was a Zen priest. Even the great R. H. Blyth goes so far as to state categorically that Zen is the correct state of mind for understanding haiku. All this and more have perhaps led us to overvalue the role of Zen in haiku, both classical Japanese haiku and that of today.

There is no denying that Zen has been an important element in the transmission of haiku understanding in the west. And there is no doubt that there are some poems, in Japanese as well as in English, that have been accorded value by readers and critics that nevertheless remain closed to us in some way. But the fact is that the vast majority of writers of haiku, Japanese and English alike, attempt as the fundamental concern to communicate a moment of insight to all their possible readers, not just the cognoscenti. While discovering the revelatory in the ordinary may sound like Zen, it also sounds like any other exhortation toward heightened perception: slow down, pay attention to what’s before you, write clearly and accurately. This might just as well be a step-by-step procedure in scientific enquiry as Zen understanding.

What may be more accurately said, then, is that Zen is one of several orientations of mind which holds in common many of the valued precepts of haiku. When two bodies of knowledge overlap to a great extent, it is perhaps inevitable that analogies be made about their separate practices. Here it seems almost inevitable that the “haiku moment” and the “moment of satori” (the attainment of enlightenment, according to Zen Scholar D. T. Suzuki) be conflated, and even seen by some as identical. Was the frog’s plop into the pond a moment of satori for Basho? I don’t know. Does it need to have been for us to appreciate his achievement in this poem? Emphatically, no.

The third element which we may consider to be essential to haiku is “presentness.” The moment of insight in haiku exists, as we have said, outside of time-or said another way, time stops when we realize our moment. And because of this experience of timelessness, we do not conceive of things happening during such a realization in the past or future, but only in an eternal present.

The practical effect of such a sensation is that we write haiku in the present tense. This is more than simply an affectation or aesthetic decision: this is the poetic analog to the ongoingness of our revelation. It has the further effect of allowing the reader to enter more directly into the poem: it is seen as vital and current, rather than reportage of an event once glorious but now gone. Consider how differently we feel about this poem:

the shell i took
the shell it took
ebb tide

and its present version:

the shell i take
the shell it takes
ebb tide

Another effect of locating haiku in the present is that this provides every poem with a sense of endlessness-it is the psychological truth that, given literary form, we can experience only the present moment. Any memory or dreams I can imagine, can only happen right now. Since this is true, it is true, too, that dreams and memories have a place in haiku. The present is the time of poetic truth, the time of the possibility of sharing, and the time of haiku.

So, finally, what is the content of haiku? Haiku are about all the things we encounter in the world each day, and what they tell us about the world, and ourselves. They contain some reference to nature, but nature in the broadest sense. And they are about the present moment, the moment in which we are capable of experiencing new revelations.

But there are some things which do not constitute haiku content: they are not about the poet, what the poet feels about or how he interprets the content of his poem. These are the greatest dangers to writing good haiku, the urge to interpret, to think logically, to draw conclusions: to interpose our selves and our words between the experience and the reader. It takes faith to let the images of our moment stand on their own, and to let the reader come to these images and intuit his own understanding. But this is exactly what we must do. Because, at the last resort, it is not the content of haiku which is essential to us: it is the growth in feeling, perception and connectedness which the content permits us to experience. And so we must not interfere with the things which allow us this growth. In the end, we are best advised to let things speak for themselves, and they will speak well for us.

Chapter Four: Technique

Haiku are always about relationship. Sometimes this relationship is obvious, sometimes implied, but haiku always are positing image against image, and allowing the energy contained in these images, and in the way we phrase them, to charge the whole of the poem. We might consider the images to be the two poles of an electrical element, like a Tesla coil, and the relationship between them to be the spark which shoots the gap. The more powerful, clear and certain the choice of images, the brighter and surer the spark, the more easily seen and shared. And the stronger the spark, the more likely we will find secondary sparks as well, which in haiku we term resonance. Our goal in haiku is to find the correct images to serve as poles, and to allow the energy in the things themselves, the images and the language, to provide the spark inherent in them.

Once we have had our “haiku moment,” and have decided to verbalize it in order to share it, we begin to be confronted with a plethora of choices: how do we help the reader to come to the same moment as we did? What should be the order of things? How do we make the things speak with each other, to create the gap? How do we charge the language to make the energy contained shoot that gap? How do we balance the whole of the poem to maintain the same relative feel as the experience? And so on.

In this section, we will consider the many ways in which the materials of haiku may be handled to best recreate the experience we have felt, so that we might communicate it as best as it might be.

Don’t insist on writing the moment right away — let it breathe and have its own life. Let it tell you if it is a haiku, or some other form, or something inexpressible. Don’t force.

If, after having allowed the moment to resonate in you

Full post as published by f/k/a . . . on August 07, 2008 (boomark / email).

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