In the previous posting, I discussed how Shiki developed a theory that a “haiku” should be a quick sketch from Nature in words, and how that theory led to shallowness, taking the new “haiku” farther away from the old hokku.

Fortunately, not all of Shiki’s verses are so afflicted; a few retain some of the spirit of the old hokku and its emphasis on sensory experience, for example this summer verse:

A summer shower –
It beats upon the heads
Of the carp.

We hear the sound of the rain as it falls; we see the drops beating upon the heads of the carp, risen to the surface of the water.  There is no separation between writer and subject, precisely the “Zen” of which some in modern haiku are so phobic.  If haiku had remained here, it would have been just hokku under another name.  Sadly, it did not.

Instead, we have his move toward illustration:

Willow, cherry,
Willow, cherry,
They were planted.

That reminds me of a house I passed often last spring; all around it the lady of the house had blooming tulips in a single, long line, but they were in an unfailing sequence of yellow tulip, purple tulip, yellow tulip, purple tulip….

It is the kind of thing on which Shiki liked to remark, but it is rather thin as verse, and not nearly so effective as the first verse, which deals in the sensory experience that is the real realm of hokku, all too often lost in the development of first traditional haiku and then post-traditional haiku.

David

By the late 19th century, hokku had grown rather stagnant in Japan.  People were writing the same things about the same subjects, over and over again.  In addition, the country was experiencing a wave of Western influence in art, literature, and technology, and suddenly the hokku seemed to some no longer a part of the future, but only of the past.

One of those predicting its imminent demise was a failed novelist who worked as a journalist — Masaoka Tsunenori, better known today as Masaoka Shiki, or simply by his pen name, Shiki (”Cuckoo”).  He thought the hokku too complex, too old fashioned, and decided to come up with a revised and simplified version.

Being strongly influenced by Western art and its concept of open-air (plein-air) sketching, Shiki “came to believe that haiku poetry and painting were in essence identical arts.” (Dawn to the West, by Donald Keene)  Shiki gave his revised form of hokku a new name — haiku.

In actual practice, Shiki’s new haiku (what we now call traditional haiku) was not all that different from the old hokku.  Yes, it had been separated from its former position as the first in a series of linked verses, but then hokku had been presented on their own since the time of Bashô in the 17th century, so really all that was new in Shiki’s approach was the notion that linked verse was not literature and therefore obsolete.  And yes, Shiki’s aesthetic approach — viewing hokku as a kind of Nature sketch in words — tended to make for shallow and sometimes even two-dimensional, pictorial hokku, but then as long as they had the basic characteristics of the old hokku — seventeen phonetic unit verses with Nature as their subject and set in the context of the seasons — they could still qualify technically as hokku.  But of course having set his revised hokku off on a new course and under a new name, neither Shiki nor his followers had the desire to turn back; so while some verses could still be considered hokku, that term and all it implied gradually began to fall into disuse, though some old people continued to call the verse form hokku right into the early to mid 20th century.  In fact it was as hokku that the writings of those from Bashô up to Shiki were first introduced to the West.

We can see that had haiku remained at this conservative stage, there could still have been a reconciliation between the old hokku practice and the new haiku; but things did not remain there.  Shiki had begun introducing modern technology into some of his verses — trains and propeller-driven ships, opening the way for the haiku to gradually move away from Nature and to deal more with all the new, more “Western” subjects.  Shiki had deluded himself into thinking that mathematically, the old hokku had nearly run out of possible subjects, and because he also held that  ”contemporary affairs and things are totally unlike those of the past,”  he saw introducing newer and more “Western” subjects as a virtue.

Japanese hokku today has continued the trends introduced by Shiki.  In traditional haiku, it has introduced a more modern grammar and a variety of subjects — including romance and technology — that would not have been acceptable in the old hokku, nor is it acceptable in modern hokku today.  But the ultimate result of Shiki’s changes was precisely as Blyth tells us:

“...he enabled people to write without any very definite spiritual or religious background; to write haiku though not walking in the the Way of Haiku [by which Blyth meant the Way of Hokku].”

Shiki — an agnostic — had also virtually separated his new verse from the spiritual basis it had inherited  – what people generally call its connection to Zen.  Of that connection, Blyth wrote in his History of Haiku,

“The Japanese have always felt, rightly enough, that poetry must not be philosophical or religious, but they have never realized that they were unconsciously resting on the paradoxical, non-egoistic, universal, democratic basis of Mahayana Buddhism.  The influence of the West was towards the weakening of this basis, formally and spiritually.”

And that is what we find in Shiki — a pictorial verse reminiscent of the block prints of Yoshida and Hasui, a verse pleasant in its way and untiring, but also a verse undemanding of the reader and without depth.  That is why Blyth says of him,

“We may say then that Shiki was both the product of and the hastener of this tendency, a world-tendency indeed, towards irreligion, unpoeticalness, and mechanization.”

The other mistake Shiki made because of his painterly aspirations in haiku, was to assume that the goal in writing should be beauty; but in hokku though we may find beauty, it is, as Blyth writes, not the standard:

“Haiku [hokku] does not aim at beauty any more than does the music of Bach.  The universe does not aim at beauty.  Beauty is a by-product; it is a means, as Darwin showed us; it is never an end.”

And Blyth adds perceptively,

Haiku [hokku] should always have been what Wordsworth calls “seeing into the life of thingss.”  Buson was an artist; Shiki was a sick man; and what Thoreau calls “the health of nature” was not their chief concern.”

One cannot deny that Shiki had an immense effect.  He nearly obliterated the hokku as it had been practiced, including even its name.  Blyth comments:

“Shiki died in the 35th year of Meiji.  His view of haiku had been accepted by everyone without dissent, and his own haiku had been the models for all contemporary poets.”

We should not be surprised, then, to find that Shiki is the ancestor not only of all modern Japanese haiku, but also of haiku written in English and other European languages, with all that implies in aesthetics and attitude.

But events did not cease with Shiki’s new haiku; before long his student Hekigodô was already publishing verses that discarded the connection with season that had been shared by hokku and haiku, and he began widely varying the length of his verses, which in both hokku and haiku had previously been the 17-phonetic-unit standard.  Eventually he settled into a version of haiku that was a kind of lyrical free verse.

And Hekigodô was only the beginning of even further experimentation with and variations on the new haiku.  That is why historically we describe the more conservative verse of Shiki as “traditional” haiku and that of Hekigodô and other even more radical writers, whether in Japan or the West, as “post-traditional” haiku.  Thus we find in post-traditional haiku such un-hokku-like verses as Santôka’s

Hitori de ka ni kuwarete iru

Alone,
bitten by mosquitos.

and Hakusen’s

Kanna akashi yue ni fumikiri-ban kuroshi

The canna is red,
so the railroad crossing guard
is black.

And with verses such as those, what was once Japanese hokku, transformed into first traditional then post-traditional haiku, becomes virtually indistinguishable from Western “modern” poetry in tone and substance.  Whether this is viewed as a failure or a virtue depends on the eye of the beholder.  From the perspective of hokku, it is seen as a loss and a degeneration.

David

There is a tendency in modern haiku (not in hokku) to say that R. H. Blyth was wrong in making a connection between hokku and Zen.  But to say that reveals either a misreading of Blyth or a complete misunderstanding of his thought, which was in fact an all-too-common characteristic of many who became involved in the “haiku” fad of the 1960s, and who, failing to understand, went on to bend and twist what had been hokku to fit their own misconceptions and preferences.

What exactly did Blyth mean when he talked about Zen in relation to hokku (I use the historically-correct terminology here)?  We find it clearly stated in his volume Eastern Culture; there Blyth distinguishes organizational Zen — the Zen sect of Buddhism found in Japan, as well as its history — from the Zen he is commonly referring to in connection with hokku.  He writes of the latter:

“Usually, throughout these volumes, it means that state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed identical with them, and yet retain our own individuality and personal peculiarities.”

One could hardly find a clearer explanation of the intimate link between hokku and Zen, or one more obviously self-evident.  Take for example the best known of all hokku, Bashô’s

The old pond;
A frog  jumps in –
The sound of water.

That is the written manifestation of precisely what Blyth felt hokku to be –

“…that state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed identical with them, and yet retain our own individuality and personal peculiarities.”

Further, Blyth said that in hokku,

“the intellectual element is absent, or is so completely fused with the intuitive-poetical that no analysis can separate them.”

We find the embodiment of that in verses such as Shirô’s

A huge ant
Walks across the floor;
The heat!

Blyth knew that “Zen” as a mere concept could be used to distort the verse form; he knew that hokku had

“...little or nothing to do with poetry, so-called, or Zen, or anything else.  It belongs to a tradition of looking at things, a way of living, a certain tenderness and smallness of mind that avoids the magnificent, the infinite, and the eternal.”

Is it any wonder that some simply dismiss all of this, having never achieved that way of looking at things?  To make that mistake is to do exactly what Blyth warned the reader not to do:

“The great danger is mistaking the explanation for the poetry, the pointing finger for the moon, the sermon for reality.  The aim of the explanation, like that of the pointing finger and the scriptures, is to make itself unnecessary.”

David

I have mentioned before that some old hokku are rather vague and obscure, and may be understood very differently by translators today.  Obscurity is not something to be emulated, and we should be careful to avoid it in modern hokku.

The issue of translation arises, however, whenever one reads an old hokku put into English.  The average reader does not know, first of all, if the original was clear or vague, or whether the English translation simply transfers the meaning from language to language, or if the translator has added considerably from his or her own imagination.  So what one reads in English as hokku is not always what was originally intended, nor does what one reads always even make sense.  Blyth of course was not always literal in his translations, but his intent was to give us the overall meaning of the verse, and in that he succeeded.

There are, however, some hokku of Bashô that defy understanding in the original language, making translation a hazardous venture.

One such verse is:

kumo nani to ne o nani to naku aki no kaze

That is why the average reader on seeing, for example, David Landis Barnhill’s translation of the verse, likely could not make head nor tail of it.  It reads thus:

spider, what is it,
in what voice–why–are you crying?
autumn wind

(from Basho’s Haiku [sic]: Selected poems of Matsuo Bashô, State University of New York Press, 2004)

Commentators remark that the original verse is based on a mention in the writing of Sei Shônagon of a bagworm that makes a certain chirping sound (it doesn’t, really, and neither do spiders); but even though Barnhill dutifully notes that allusion, it gets us no farther than we were before.

So let’s look more closely at the original verse.  Literally translated, it is::

Spider what sound what cry autumn wind

And my own translation would be

A spider –
What is its sound – its cry?
The autumn wind.

The meaning of this is to me rather obvious.  Crickets chirp, geese honk, and these are expressions of autumn; but with what sound, with what voice, can a spider express the feeling of autumn, the poverty and loneliness that we sense in the autumn wind?  To understand this, however, one has to realize the importance of season in hokku, and the truth of the old saying that all of autumn is in a single fallen leaf.

We could also put the hokku into the vocative, like this:

Spider –
What is your sound — your cry?
The autumn wind.

Is my translation “right” and those of others such as Barnhill wrong?  Is what I wrote really what Bashô intended?   Whether my interpretation is what Bashô intended or not, I can only say that given the words of the verse, it is the meaning that he should have intended, a unified and harmonious expression of the season presented as a question hokku.

My difference in reading of this verse, however, does not mean one should avoid Barnhill’s translations.  Quite the contrary, if readers here really want to delve into the hokku of Bashô, the best way to do it at present is to buy either the translations by Barnhill of both the hokku (ignore the anachronistic “haiku” terminology), and the travel journals, or the superb two-volume set by Toshiharu Oseko, which gives word-by-word analyses of each hokku.  Ultimately, however, the reader must recognize that not all of Bashô lends itself to clear reading, and that not all of Bashô’s hokku are even worth reading, unless one plans to specialize in his verse.

David

Because it is helpful in ending decades of confusion and problems, I am posting this quick summary of historically-accurate definitions again.

HOKKU —-  The Japanese verse form written prior to the reforms of Shiki made near the end of the 19th century, as well as modern verse — in any language — following the aesthetics and essential standards of the old hokku.  Hokku was written by Onitsura and Bashô in the 1600s (Genroku Era), by Buson and Taigi in the 1700s (Temmei Era), and by Issa and Shirô in the early 1800s (Bunka and Bunsei Eras).

TRADITIONAL HAIKU —- The Japanese verse form introduced by Shiki near the end of the 19th century (Meiji Era, beginning 1867), keeping such characteristics of the hokku as seasonal setting and a connection with Nature, but with a somewhat different aesthetic approach and gradually-expanded subject matter, allowing in some cases the inclusion of modern technology, romance, etc.  It is still what most modern Japanese think of as “haiku.”  In the West it is continued by such groups as Yuki Teikei.  It was from its origins influenced to some extent by Western poetry, though some conservative verses in the tradition may be nearly identical or even identical to hokku (in English and other European languages, the non-use of capitalization and full punctuation may be all that distinguishes a few verses from hokku).

POST-TRADITIONAL HAIKU —-  The variety of verse forms that began to appear as modifications of traditional haiku continued to be made.  It was introduced by Shiki’s disciple Hekigodô (died 1937), and it is widely practiced with great variety in the West today.  Post-traditional haiku, which now may be written in any language, requires neither a connection with Nature nor a connection with season nor does it accept firm boundaries on length or subject matter or form.  Post-traditional haiku is that advocated by those groups and teachers who encourage writers to go beyond traditional rules and standards.  It is the variety most influenced by Western poetry, and it is generally the most common in the English language.

Seen from the perspective of hokku, both traditional haiku and post-traditional haiku are degenerations — one lesser, the other more extreme.

Seen from the perspectives of both traditional and post-traditional haiku, hokku is limiting and old-fashioned.

Seen from the perspective of post-traditional haiku, both hokku and traditional haiku are limiting and old-fashioned.

But viewed in a broader literary perspective, all three verse forms have a right to exist and to maintain their individual identities and to perpetuate themselves, and interesting verses — though differing in aesthetics — may appear in all three.  There is thus no reason why there should not be harmony and good will among those who practice them, no matter how they may differ in their views of what constitutes an acceptable verse in their own tradition.

As one can see, using this historically-correct terminology brings an end to divisive and unpleasant bickering and discussions about what is or is not hokku or haiku.  Hokku is outside the Shiki tradition and both predates it and now exists simultaneously with it.  Both traditional and non-traditional haiku are in the Shiki tradition, and can trace their histories back to his revision of the old hokku as “haiku” near the end of the 19th century.

David

A repeat of something I first wrote a couple of years ago:

Regular readers will have noticed that there is much more to
learning to write hokku than to learning modern haiku. And much of
what is learned in the study of hokku, unlike the vagaries of much
modern haiku instruction, is very practical and straightforward
and can readily be put to good use.

For example, a few postings ago I presented more of the forms
common and helpful in writing hokku.  Among them was one summarized thus:

Adding to the variety of hokku types, there is one we might call
“Also / Even.” Such verses rely on the use of the words “also”
“too,” or “even” to achieve a certain effect.

How does one put such information into practice?  It is very
simple.  Just learn the basic forms, and when the occasion
arises, it will pop into your head.

Here is a repeat of the posting on “Also / Even” hokku mentioned above:

Adding to the variety of hokku types, there is one we might call “Also / Even.” Such verses rely on the use of the words “also” “too,” or “even” to achieve a certain effect. We see this in Buson’s verse:

Tilling the field,
My house too is seen
As darkness falls.

And in this verse by Issa:

Evening cherry blossoms;
Today also is now part
Of the past.

It was even used by Shiki, who began the changes that nearly destroyed hokku:

Even the paths
Are deep in grass;
A stone Jizô.

(Jizô is that smooth-headed bodhisattva with a staff, very popular in Northern Buddhism as one who protects deceased children and saves from suffering.)

This use of “even,” “also,” or “too” gives a feeling of things being connected, of something being part of a greater whole, not excepted. It was used long before Shiki in the waka of Saigyo:

Even in the mind
Of the mindless one,
Sadness appears
When a snipe rises in the marsh
On an autumn evening.

And there are even more types of hokku.  Here are three of them:

1.  “Intent” hokku – verses that show the firm intention of the writer to do something.

2.  “Volition” hokku – verses that show the desire or impulse of the writer to do something, though he may not really intend to do it.

3.  “Exhortation” hokku – verses in which the writer urges or tells other humans (or even non-humans) to do or be something.

“INTENT” HOKKU

We are already familiar with the this kind of thing from Western verse.  It is found, for example, in the the poem by William Butler Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

We see the writer’s intent to get up and go to Innisfree, and to live there.  The writer may express such firm intent for “poetic” reasons, not really intending to do it, but as expressed in the verse, we see the intent as fact and firm.

We find such strong intent in this verse by Bashô:

“Traveller”
Shall be my name;
The first rain of winter.

“VOLITION” HOKKU

We are familiar with this concept as well.  We see it in a verse by Gerard Manley Hopkins, though because the speaker is a nun, we feel that the volition, expressed in the past, has been carried out:

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

We find it expressed in this verse by Shiki:

As companion,
I would like a butterfly
On the journey.

“EXHORTATION” HOKKU

This “urging” of others is also common in Western verse, as in this from Walt Whitman:

Allons! whoever you are! come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.

We find it also in the verse of T. S. Eliot:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Exhortation (usually of non-humans) is so common in the verse of Issa as to be almost characteristic of him, and it is unfortunately heavily imitated by novice writers of hokku, who do not realize that because they do not have the spirit of Issa, it comes off as an affectation rather than genuine:

If someone comes,
Turn into frogs,
You cooling melons!

The playfulness of that verse is obvious.  But again, this sort of thing should be done seldom if at all.  Otherwise it leads to the “talk to the animals” syndrome so prevalent among those just learning hokku, who are invariably drawn to Issa because they do not yet understand the deeper aspects of hokku, and think him “cute.”

All three of these categories have their pitfalls, which is why they are infrequently used.  And all three served generally to express the “poet” urges of the writer as somewhat different from those of others, as more in the tradition of the “poet’s life” which is why it is all too easy, in using them, to draw too much attention to the “self,” and why they should be used little and with care.  Otherwise they come off as much like the posing so often found among would-be poets in Western culture.

COTTONWOOD DOWN

Yesterday was one of those sunny, warm, pleasant days at
the beginning of summer.  The heat brought out the seed fluff
in the cottonwood trees along the stream, and soon it was
carried everywhere by the wind currents, filling the sky.  In
my garden, I watched dragonflies darting to and fro through
the fluff drifting on the air.  One could see and feel summer
beginning in the experience.  So deep was the effect on me
that I was able to write this hokku the next morning:

Cottonwood down;
It even blows into
My dreams.

If you have never seen cottonwood down filling the air on a
warm day at the beginning of summer, you might not “get”
this verse.  But anyone who has will get it immediately.

But note the form of the verse.  It is exactly the “Also / Even” form I
described in the preceding lesson.  These forms are
not just for beginners in hokku.  They are tools that remain
useful all through your maturing practice.  If you learn them
thoroughly, they will be at hand when you need them.

David

In a previous posting I mentioned the “set forms” of season words in old Japanese hokku.  Did you ever wonder why Blyth could so easily arrange all the best old hokku into various categories within a given season?  It is because virtually all common subjects had been assigned a season.

There was, for example, the term koromagae — “the change of clothes.”  In America or England or Switzerland or Finland we may change our clothes at any time of the day or year; but in hokku the set phrase “the change of clothes” refers specifically to changing from the heavier clothes of cold or cool weather to the lighter clothes of late spring and summer.  And so “the change of clothes” shows automatically that one is reading a summer hokku, and one will find countless hokku using it.

As I have also mentioned earlier, in modern hokku we keep to the essence but not the letter of old hokku practice.  If we want to write a hokku about changing clothes, we can set it in any season — but we must mark the hokku with the season in which it is written.  That frees us from set forms as season words, it liberates us from trying to compile season word dictionaries (saijiki in Japanese) of thousands of terms relevant to whatever bioregion we happen to live in (dictionaries virtually meaningless to other people not in on the program), and it enables us to concentrate on the practice of hokku without making it needlessly tedious and complex and mystifying.  As Thoreau wrote, “simplify, simplify.”  But the most important thing about this modification is that while it changes the letter of this most venerable standard of old hokku, it does not change the spirit; hokku remains as it was, a sensory experience of Nature set in the context of the seasons.

In the old hokku there were set forms for the first rain of winter, as well as for the rains of early summer, the “Fifth Moon rains.”  But in English-language hokku, we just use whatever is appropriate.  Thus Sampû’s hokku,

Samidare ni   kawazu no oyogu   toguchi kana
Fifth-moon-rain in   frog  ’s swim doorway kana

becomes in English simply

Summer rain;
Frogs are swimming
Right up to the door.

Or we could make the first line “June rain,” or “The June rains,” etc.

Let’s take a closer look at the verse.  I have said before that hokku consist largely of things and actions.  Here the things are “summer rain” and “frogs” and “the door.”  The action is “swimming,” though of course there is action in the summer rain as well.  Structurally, this is what we call a standard hokku, because it has three elements — setting, subject, and action:

Summer rain = setting
Frogs = subject
Are swimming right up to the door = action

In hokku a setting is the wider context in which something takes place.  It is usually the “biggest” element of the verse, whether the weather or the season or something else.  The summer rains are like the stage on which the actor (the frogs) and the action (the swimming) happen.

And now for punctuation.  In old hokku there were set words, called “cutting words” (kire-ji) that separated the short part of hokku from the longer part, and as you all know if you have been paying attention, all hokku consist of a shorter and a longer part.  In English, however, we use punctuation, which does the job even better because punctuation enables fine shadings of pause and connection and emphasis.  So we separate the setting of this hokku from the rest by using a semicolon, which in hokku indicates a strong and definite pause that enables the reader to take a moment to experience the setting before going on to what happens in it:

Summer rain;

And then we go on to the longer segment of the hokku, and then we end the verse with a period (or of course other appropriate punctuation in other hokku — other cases).

Hokku is just that simple.  But sometimes it takes a lot of work for people to learn to be simple!

David

A spring hokku by Bashô — not a good one, and out of season at present, but useful in illustrating that even he said that what he wrote was hokku (not haiku, as popular misconception has it):

Kakitsubata   ware ni hokku no   omoi ari

Irises;
In me is the thought
Of a hokku.

Contrast that with this verse by Shiki, who began haiku near the end of the 19th century (after centuries of hokku):

Waka ni yase   haiku ni yasenu   natsu otoko

Thinning at waka
And thinning at haiku;
The man in summer.

Shiki is, of course, speaking of himself and his spending long hours on his projects as his (already unhealthy) body grows thinner.  Note that in this verse he still speaks of waka, not yet using the revisionist term tanka, but he has already dropped hokku for his favored modification, the haiku.

But having gone on at length about proper terminology in earlier postings, I hope to spend more time now on the nature of hokku and how to write it — though of course I am always willing to explain to novices why what I teach and write is hokku, not haiku — the same as it was for Bashô and all other writers of the form (in the wider context of haikai) up to the time of the unfortunate changes begun by Masaoka Shiki near the end of the 19th century that gave rise to the haiku and nearly sent the hokku into oblivion.

But before giving this topic a break, I want to clear up the confusion so prevalent in terminology used in dealing with the history of hokku and of haiku, which developed out of hokku.  Even I have not been as careful in the past as I should have been in making proper distinctions.  I shall try to be more careful in the future.

Those who read my writings often will have noted that I am fond of the words “historically accurate.”  Well, here is the historically accurate terminology for both hokku and haiku, untangling the prevalent confusion:

HOKKU —-  The verse form written prior to the reforms of Shiki made near the end of the 19th century, as well as modern verse following the aesthetics and essential standards of the old hokku.

TRADITIONAL HAIKU —- The verse form introduced by Shiki near the end of the 19th century, keeping such characteristics of the hokku as seasonal setting and a connection with Nature, but with a somewhat different aesthetic approach and gradually-expanded subject matter.  It is still what most modern Japanese think of as “haiku.”

POST-TRADITIONAL HAIKU —-  The variety of verse forms that began to appear as modifications of traditional haiku continued to be made.  It was introduced by Shiki’s disciple Hekigodô (died 1937), and it is widely practiced with great variety in the West today.  Post-traditional haiku requires neither a connection with Nature nor a connection with season nor does it accept firm boundaries on length or subject matter or form.

Generally, when I refer to “modern haiku,” I am talking about both varieties of haiku (not hokku), traditional and post-traditional.  And of course when I talk about hokku, I am speaking of both old and modern hokku, regardless of the language in which it is written.

David

Abigail Friedman’s book The Haiku Apprentice is a personal experience of haiku as it is practiced by ordinary people in modern Japan.  A good part of the book consists of determining what writing haiku means to the contemporary Japanese and why individuals write it.   As a student of Japanese haiku, Friedman was taught to write in the “modern” way, which means essentially that she was taught to write haiku, not hokku.  The kind of haiku she was taught was (no doubt unknown to her) heavily influenced by Western concepts of poetry that had a strong effect on the Japan of the late 19th and 20th centuries.  She was taught the verse that evolved out of the revisions of Shiki — traditional haiku — not the verse of the earlier hokku writers.

After she left Japan, she wanted to keep up her writing, but was puzzled about how to do it in an English-language context.  Thus she found herself in the same position as earlier Western writers of haiku who had no direct guidance and who largely ignored the hints given by R. H. Blyth, listening instead to do-it-yourself experts.

In what form was she to write?  The same 5-7-5 pattern common to Japanese, but somewhat different when translated into English syllables?  Should she write in one line, or in the three generally used as “haiku” form in the West?   And what of the total absence of “cutting words” in English — should she simply use a dash, or perhaps something else?  And what about season words?

Her conclusion, oddly enough, was precisely the same that the Western haiku communities arrived at simply through lack of knowledgeable guidance — that “much of the challenge and excitement of writing haiku in the West comes from the fact that there are no commonly-agree-upon rules.” She is quite correct at least about the last part — there are no universally-accepted rules regarding the composition of haiku in English.  That is why modern haiku is so chaotic.  If one cannot even decide what constitutes a haiku, one has to either doubt that one is writing it, or one has to consent to call anything a haiku that someone determines to call a haiku (post-traditional haiku).

That is quite different from the situation in modern English-language hokku, in which there are definite standards of form and content, just as there were definite standards of form and content in old Japanese hokku.

And Friedman includes what might prove a revelation to those in the Western haiku community — something that I have said repeatedly — that the lack of agreed-upon standards in English-language haiku “…is not so far removed from the situation in Japan.  There, contemporary poets are challenging the existing haiku rules; in the West, we are struggling to create them.”

Actually Friedman is considerably behind the times.  The schism in “modern” Japanese haiku began as long ago as the lifetime of Shiki and the conflicts between two of his chief students.  And since then, segments of the Japanese haiku community — like the American and European haiku communities — have dropped season words and even a connection to season, cutting words, the 5-7-5 form, and have even moved the subject matter far beyond anything acceptable as hokku.  That ordinary Japanese tend to be a bit more conservative in making and accepting such changes just reflects the tendency of people to follow what they knew as young people, the same way ordinary people writing “poetry” in America tend to come up with something approximating rhymed greeting card verse.

In the West, however, many people are often exposed first to the most transformed editions of post-traditional haiku, and thus are totally lost as to what really constitutes a haiku, with the matter being even more confused by the haiku community’s habit of referring to both the most extreme modern post-traditional haiku as well as to all pre-Shiki hokku by the same term — haiku — something we never do in hokku, because hokku and modern haiku are generally two very different things (or perhaps one should say that there is hokku, and then there is a multitude of things that are called haiku).

In the West, modern haiku is generally just another form of Western poetry, though it may sometimes resemble hokku in its outer form (and sometimes not).  In Japan, modern haiku carries more of the outward form of the old hokku, but its content is often little different from that of Western poetry.  When viewed from the perspective of hokku, both are remarkably degenerate.

Not surprisingly, Friedman’s consideration of form devolves until she is reduced to quoting the definition given by the Haiku Society of America:

“A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition.”

Friedman adds the HSA’s caveat that such a definition is “neither a lesson nor instruction for writing” (the Haiku Society of America has from its beginnings, in my view, played a leading role in obscuring public knowledge and understanding of hokku).

In short, at the end of her novitiate  of writing haiku in Japan and in Japanese, Friedman seems to have fallen on her return to the West into the same abyss of confusion as the rest of the modern haiku community.  She mentions  William Higginson and his book that in my view led many people into misunderstanding, and she quotes Jane Reichhold’s “Make rules for yourself and follow them exactly, or break them completely, outgrow them and find new ones.”  So Friedman ends up with a working definition of haiku that is quite in keeping with my long-time evaluation of its condition — that haiku, in contrast to hokku, is whatever anyone wants it to be or says it is at any given time.  And of course something that can be anything at all is really nothing at all.

The Haiku Apprentice, then, is a book that will simply confirm that the chaos of American haiku today is also the chaos of Japanese haiku today — though the Japanese are a bit more genteel and aesthetic about it.  And meanwhile real hokku, whether in Japan or in America, goes little known and often unnoticed, or is forgotten entirely.

David

I read very little published by the modern haiku community.  If I see a new book on the bookstore shelf, I will generally pick it up and read a few lines before dismissing it as a blatant waste of bound paper.

Yesterday I came across another book I expected to quickly drop as valueless:  The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan, by Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley,2006).  Skipping the non-author introduction, I read a few lines of what the writer herself had to say.  Then I found I had read a few pages.  The more I read the more I realized that though the book is not really about hokku (though a few hokku — mislabelled “haiku” — are included), it does, albeit unwittingly, provide an excellent contrast between genuine hokku and contemporary haiku as it is practiced by ordinary people in modern Japan.

One thing I emphasize again and again about hokku is that aside from its origins, essentially it has nothing to do with Japan or Japanese culture.  The author of The Haiku Apprentice, however, is exposed to the conservative though modern views of a female teacher for whom “haiku” has a great deal to do with both the Japanese language and Japanese culture, though remaining open to other possibilities for other people.  In that lies a great deal of the value of the book, because while it emphasizes that for most Japanese (as well as for Western Japanophiles), haiku is forever bound to Japanese culture, it has other possibilities in other languages and cultures.  Such a view avoids the syndrome one finds in those European or American haiku groups that are constantly referring back to “how it is done in Japan,” just as a Fundamentalist is forever thumbing his Bible to see “what the Bible says” as the final and authoritative word.

But what is really valuable about Friedman’s book is that it permits us to see clearly the distinctions between popular haiku in modern Japan and contemporary hokku as we practice it, though of course the latter is not discussed at all in the book.  It also enables us — through the eyes of a haiku novice — to see many of the misconceptions and alien influences that have crept into haiku since it quickly evolved out of and separated from hokku from the end of the 19th century to the present.

It is significant that Friedman’s teacher –Kuroda Momoko — initiates her into contemporary Japanese haiku by saying,

“We need to begin by going over the elements of haiku.  A haiku is composed of three basic elements:  seasonal words, seventeen sounds, and kireji, or ‘cut-words.’”

One could use this basic template to write genuine hokku in Japanese, but paradoxically while Friedman’s teacher clearly retains the outer form of old hokku, the content with which she fills it is that of modern haiku, specifically of traditional haiku rather than post-traditional haiku.   By contrast, in modern English-language hokku we do not regard seasonal words as essential; they have been replaced by the more practical seasonal categorization.  Nor do we keep the “seventeen sounds” — the seventeen phonetic units of Japanese hokku; instead we keep to a basic ideal of 2-3-2 essential words, a pattern we may vary as required, while keeping it as the standard.  Finally, the “cut-words” are replaced in modern hokku by ordinary English-language punctuation, which serves the purpose superbly.

Regarding season words:  Friedman’s teacher points out that the word “duck” is a winter word.  So any verse using “duck” is understood as a winter haiku.  To speak of a duck in any other season requires qualifiers, for example, “ducks arriving” makes it an autumn haiku; “ducks returning” makes it a spring haiku.  These are set forms that each student must learn to write correctly, and to learn one must have a “season word dictionary,” which is the reason why one sees so much standardization in the topics both of old Japanese hokku and of popular modern Japanese haiku.  It takes literally years to become proficient in recognizing and using these categorized season words, though Friedman’s teacher points out that by learning a mere 500 out of the thousands of season words, “…you will have great knowledge not simply of Japanese haiku, but of Japanese life, culture, and traditions.”

The problem, of course, is that Japanese season words are not only based on Japanese life, culture, and traditions, but they are also based on the climate and biosphere of Kyôto in their earlier use (because it was the old capital) and of Tokyo in later times (after it became the political center).   Attempt season words in the United States, for example, and one is faced with a multitude of local climates and biospheres that quickly make chaos of the notion.  In spite of that, a considerable amount of ink and paper has already been sacrificed in the attempt by some parts of the modern haiku community.   In English-language hokku, however, we retain the important essence of the seasonal connection by simply labelling each hokku with the season, whether Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter.

Friedman’s teacher adds, “But please remember that not everyone writing haiku in Japan believes in seasonal words or considers them essential to haiku.  I am teaching you what is important to me.”

From that comment we see that Kuroda Momoko is on the conservative (and for the most part, the widely popular) side of haiku in modern Japan.  The more radical elements (post-traditional haiku) have abandoned not only season words but seasonal connections entirely, and we find the same dichotomy in English language haiku; there are conservative groups that doggedly attempt to compile and follow lists of season words, or that simply follow as best they can the old Japanese season words, and there are the groups that have totally abandoned seasonal connections.

One of the more amusing and revealing incidents in the book takes place when Friedman sees a public service announcement on the side of a bus.  It is in seventeen phonetic units, and so she takes it to be a haiku; but when she asks people at her office about it, none of her Japanese co-workers considers it a haiku.  Instead, they insist, it is an advertising jingle.  One person adds that it cannot be a haiku because it has no season word, to which Friedman counters, logically, “But lots of haiku these days are written without season words.”

I cannot tell you the volumes this incident speaks about modern haiku, not only in Japan but in the West.  An immense portion of what is written as “haiku” today has no more relationship to hokku than an advertising jingle.  And yet people look at such things in the haiku journals and online sites and think, “Well, it is in three short lines, so it must be haiku.”  And really, haiku it is, because today haiku has become whatever anyone wants it to be, and that is one of its great faults when seen from the viewpoint of hokku, which has definite form and definite standards in English.

In regard to the seventeen-syllable “is it haiku or is it an advertising jingle” dilemma, Friedman’s teacher reveals that “Even in Japan poets differ on the importance to haiku of the seventeen-syllable structure.  Some reject the limitation entirely, while others recognize a number of exceptions.”  And of course the same is true of modern haiku written in the West, where there is no unanimity on what constitutes a haiku.

Another significant difference between modern haiku as Friedman was taught it and modern hokku is the emphasis on feelings and emotion.  Kuroda Momoko tells her, “Think of haiku as the vessel into which you pour your feelings.”  That is something we do not do in hokku.  Feelings and emotion are very important to Western poetry in general — particularly today — but in hokku what we want is just an experience of Nature, and that experience is the important thing.  In hokku one starts with the experience, while in contemporary haiku one often starts with personal feelings.

A very revealing segment of the book comes when Friedman raises the issue of the relationship between haiku and Zen.  She quickly finds that virtually no one she talks to in Japan makes a connection.  This is something that is constantly misunderstood and consequently is often misrepresented by those in the modern haiku community.  It even became common in the late 20th century for some Western haiku authorities to disparage the strong link between hokku and Zen recognized by such as R. H. Blyth.  But Blyth never said that the Zen so important to hokku (which he anachronistically called “haiku”) was that of institutional Zen; the link, rather, was with the Mahayana Buddhist influence in which Japanese culture had been steeped, a culture with aesthetics borrowed from Chinese Ch’an (Zen) and Daoism.  Historically, there is no evading the accuracy of this.  But it certainly does not mean that every writer of hokku was a practicing Zen Buddhist, though of course Bashô himself was a “lay monk” in that tradition.

The simple answer to this dilemma is that the Western as well as the Japanese haiku communities have in general simply misinterpreted the Zen-hokku connection, not understanding at all what Blyth meant by it, just as Western writers of haiku in the 20th century generally completely misunderstood the nature of hokku, and consequently took modern haiku even farther away from it.  That is why in hokku today, we refer to the “Zen” connection as being rather an intimate link with non-dogmatic, contemplative spirituality.

This connection manifests itself not only in the poverty and simplicity of hokku — its few and ordinary words — but it is found clearly in the objectivity of the best hokku, or rather in the disappearance of subject and object, leaving only the experience without an experiencer.  That is something we find often in the best hokku.

I will have more to say about Abigail Friedman’s book The Haiku Apprentice in part two of this article.  But for now I will finish by saying that it gives a very revealing picture of what modern haiku means to the average Japanese, and of how what replaced hokku in Japan looks and feels.  And thereby it also, paradoxically, gives a revealing picture of the true state of modern haiku in the West, as well as providing a contrast to the aesthetics and standards of hokku as it was practiced in Japan and as we practice it today in the Engish language.

David