The first day of May has passed, and it was not at all what it once was.

Some will say it is now a day to celebrate labor; others will say it is “Law” day; and this year those favoring illegal immigration even tried to convince us it was a day to celebrate immigrants – as if Americans, who are virtually all immigrants including Native Americans, who arrived several thousand years earlier than Europeans and others – need another day on which to celebrate themselves.

But May Day traditionally is one thing and one thing only – an observance of spring, a festival of rejoicing in Nature. 

It was celebrated with flowers.  Only a few decades ago one would pick spring flowers,  put them in a paper cone, and leave it on the doorstep of someone loved (whether a sweetheart, a relative, a friend, a teacher, etc.).  Then after a  knock at the door one would quickly run away and leave them to happily discover the bouquet.

And there was dancing, with gaily-dressed children holding colorful, long ribbons attached to the top of a Maypole, and skipping and weaving in and out among one another to form a decorate pattern in colored ribbons on the pole.

And singing.  When I was a boy, after the Maypole Dance we sang in chorus,

Welcome sweet springtime,
We greet thee in song,
Murmers of gladness,
Fall on the ear….

A bit old-fashioned those particular words today, but the point was to express joy and gladness in the rebirth of flowers and greenery and the return of the warmth and happiness of spring, to celebrate Nature and to celebrate our joy in Nature.

Put that way, it sounds very hokku-like, doesn’t it?  And of course it is.  What could be more appropriate to our present times than to once more turn to expressing appreciation of, and kinship with, Nature?  It is the forgetting of such observances that not only encourages, but also is symptomatic of, the unhealthy, arrogant exploitation of Nature that has become so characteristic of the modern world — an attitude that has led to our present climatic disruptions and the destruction of the environment.

So think about these things.  Perhaps next year, when May Day comes again, you will have greeted it by restoring the old celebration of flowers, dance, song, and springtime to something approximating in some way its former glories, and perhaps you will even think of new ways to celebrate these things and our joy in the return of spring of the first day of May — May Day.

An old German song celebrates the time:

Der Mai ist gekommen,
May is come,
Die Bäume schlagen aus,
The trees are budding,
Da bleibe, wer Lust hat,
So stay, who will,
Mit Sorgen zu Haus!
At home in sorrow!
Wie die Wolken dort wandern
As the clouds wander there
Am himmlischen Zelt,
In the firmament of heaven,
So steht mir auch der Sinn
So my mind too goes out
In die weite, weite Welt.
Into the wide, wide world.

 

David

Some time ago, on a hokku sharing and learning forum that I operated previously, there were occasional contributions from a writer identifying herself as Cerridwen.  Her works were simple, direct,  down-to-earth and very pleasing.  She has kindly given permission for me to post some of them here.  One can tell from such terms as “scrumpy,” “samphire,” and “water butt” that Cerridwen lives in Britain.

SPRING

The newborn lamb,
Unsure which leg
To move next.

Spring returns;
At the kitchen window –
Two houseflies.

The blustery shore;
Gulls brace themselves,
Knees backward.

An April shower;
The chicken’s mucky beak
Rinsed clean.

SUMMER

On each porch,
The morning paper
And a cat.

Milking time;
White goats appear
Out of the fog.

Two chickens,
Jumping higher and higher
To reach the raspberries.

New cement;
Across one corner –
Chicken tracks.

Just out of reach
Beneath the porch;
A broody hen.

Midsummer drizzle;
A droplet on the tip
Of each blackberry.

A moonless night;
Everywhere around my bed –
The mosquito!

In each ripe tomato,
A hole the size
Of a chicken’s beak.

Grinding dried herbs;
The kitchen hazy
With sweet dust.

Shucking corn;
The cool silk
Between my fingers.

Among the windfalls,
A Browing goat –
Scrumpy on its breath.

Late summer;
The red currants burst
When picked.

Summer ending;
Clearing spider webs
From both galoshes.

Summer’s end;
Airing on the fence –
Winter quilts.

A windfall apple;
One by one
The wasps settle.

Twilight –
Only the chimneys
Still sunlit.

AUTUMN

No more roses;
Overnight
The aphids disappear.

Cool against my ankles –
The first dew
Of autumn.

An approaching storm;
The sound of windows being closed
All down the street.

Boiling samphire;
The smell of low tide
In the saucepan.

The fixed glares
Of two cats passing;
Autumn cold.

A heavy dew;
All over the car –
Catprints.

The autumn greenhouse;
A bunch of grapes
Shrivels to raisins.

All through the night –
The soft thud
Of falling chestnuts.

The chestnut tree;
With each leaf that falls –
More blue sky.

After the harvest,
A pile of scarecrows
In the barn.

In autumn sunlight,
The brown dragonfly
Turns gold.

Autumn light;
How black the depths
Of the water butt!

Bleak October;
The click of hailstones
On the window.

It is a pleasure to present these verses.  Such hokku deserve to be widely read and enjoyed.  Sincere thanks again to Cerridwen for allowing me to share them with all who read here.

David

Chiyo-ni, in one of her best hokku, wrote:

Low tide;
Everything picked up
Is moving!

The key point in reading hokku — in “getting” hokku — is that all the poetry, all the significance, is in the experience; and a hokku is simply that — a sensory experience.

Do not look for symbolism; do not look for metaphor or simile.  In hokku one thing does not mean another, one thing does not represent another, one thing is not another, one thing is not even “like” another.   So we should not add anything to the verse. 

This comes as a bit of a shock to people brought up on the interpretation so essential to much “literary” poetry of the 20th century.  How many times have English Literature teachers asked students, “What does the poem mean?”  In fact much of the discussion and writing around “modern” poetry consists in trying to determine what it means, whether to a group or to the individual.

Hokku does not “mean” anything.  It has significance, but not meaning.  When we read Chiyo-ni’s verse, we FEEL the significance of it, but it cannot be explained intellectually.  In fact to explain it is to take us away from the experience into talking about it.  Talking about a thing is not the thing itself.  If you do not feel the significance in hokku, you simply do not get the point of hokku, and it will mean nothing to you.

As it was put by a Chinese poet,

In these things there is true meaning;
Wanting to say it — finding no words.

This “true meaning” is what we call significance — a meaning beyond meaning, beyond intellectuality, beyond words, deeper and more fundamental than thinking.  We cannot tell you what it is — we can only show it to you so you may experience it as well.

This understanding is critical to hokku, and it is a perspective so new to many people, so different from their expectations of poetry, that they can find no value in hokku apart from all the interpretations, symbolism, metaphors or similes one might (mistakenly) add to it.

And this is where we find again that hokku relates to spirituality, in which experience, and thinking or intellectualizing about experience, are two completely different things.

Traditionally, this is explained in hokku as two levels.  When one has an experience, first comes the deepest level — the sensory experience itself.  This is level number ONE.  On a hot summer day one might come to a stream in the mountains, and bend to touch the water with one’s fingers.  That first touch of cooling water IS the experience.   Then one begins to think about the experience, perhaps to compare it with other such experiences, or to wonder how clean the water might be, or where the stream meets a river.  All such thinking is on the second and superficial level –level number TWO,  and it is not only more shallow and superficial than the deeper level one,  it is also beyond and outside what we want in hokku.

All such added  ”thinking” is superficial compared to the experience itself.  It is unneeded and unnecessary.  All that we want in hokku is the first level, the experience itself, without anything added to it.

That is why when we study old hokku in translation in order to learn how to write hokku in English, we do not need to know anything about Japanese cultural associations of this or that flower or bird or animal.  All we need to know is what the verse is in the English language, in an English-speaking cultural context.  That explains why, in using old hokku, I might sometimes change a word to make it “American” instead of Japanese, for example, I might use the word “floor” instead of “tatami.”

Now admittedly an American floor and Japanese tatami are different — one is hard and solid and the other a more resilient floor covering of woven grass — but (and this is very important) my purpose here is not to present you with old Japanese hokku treated like artifacts in a museum that must be explained according to original time and culture.  My purpose is to give you useful models that enable you to understand hokku as a verse form in English, and to learn, gradually, how to write it in English.

Thus the way I teach hokku is quite different from those who regard it as a perpetual outpost of Japan, thinking that anyone who studies it must learn some Japanese language and culture, and that those who do not will remain forever at a disadvantage.  There is nothing wrong with learning a little or even a lot about such things — but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the learning and writing of hokku in English.

So it is fine if one wants to delve into grammar and usage in Japanese hokku, or into Japanese culture and religion in “old hokku times,” and there are numbers of scholars who have done and still do that, and some write books on the topic.  But all of it is completely unnecessary if one wants simply to learn to write effective English-language hokku. 

In English-language hokku, if we mention a carp, it is JUST A CARP, and not a symbol of a male persevering and overcoming difficulties in life.  If an old hokku is of no value without such a cultural background affixed to it, I will likely simply not use it as a model.  There are many old Japanese hokku that fall rather flat outside their cultural context, so there is no reason to present them to students, because they are not useful for learning how to write good hokku in English.

I always wince inwardly when a prospective student comes to me using a Japanese pseudonym he or she has chosen as a “poetic” name.  Often such things are found among Western writers of haiku, but in hokku we avoid such affectations.  We are not Japanese, and we have no reason to pretend to be.  When we write hokku, we want it to be American hokku if we are American, British hokku if British, Australian hokku if Australian, and so on.  We do not play-act at being Japanese poets.  That kind of thing is a sign of immaturity and a failure to understand what it means to be a writer of hokku.  It reminds me of the ladies who become interested in Vedanta and think they have to buy and wear a sari — as if that has anything at all to do with spirituality.  Nor does, for us, Japan have anything at all to do with writing hokku in English.

That does not mean we do not respect the Japanese origin of hokku, or Japanese culture – but we do not confuse that with the nature of hokku itself, which is quite independent of geography and culture, and thus can manifest itself in ANY country and in any cultural context.

R. H. Blyth once wrote an essay titled, “No Japanese Zen, Thank You.”  We who write hokku in English, even though we use translated models for learning and to maintain a continuity with the old hokku tradition, may similarly say, “No Japanese hokku, thank you!”  But we must understand in the saying that it implies no disrespect for Japanese hokku written in Japanese — it is simply that we write English-language hokku; and that is how hokku is reborn in whatever country and language it may be taken up.  It should not be an exotic import, carefully tended in a hothouse environment.  Instead hokku should be a native plant wherever it sprouts, grown in native soil.  In Japan it might manifest as a yamabuki blossom, in America as a trillium.

 

David

Hokku has deliberate limits on its subject matter, and one of those boundaries excludes what we loosely call “technology.”  

As a result of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent great expansion in use of technology and consumption of fossil fuels, humans entered an Age of Illusion in which the misperception became common that Nature was little more than a vast repository of resources to be gathered and used however humans saw fit.   Humans saw themselves more and more as separate from — and in general superior to – Nature.

Hokku — and a life in keeping with hokku — reverses this trend.  One cannot write hokku without the realization that Nature gave birth to humans, and thus humans are a part of, not apart from, Nature.  That is the only realistic and healthy attitude.

It is also an antidote to the wrong thinking so prevalent in the world today — that the world was made for humans, that all of Nature “belongs” to humans to do with as they will.  And it is only by realizing how intimately connected with Nature we are that just possibly, humans might yet have a slim chance of averting a final environmental catastrophe brought on by decades of ignorance, arrogance, selfishness and greed.

So it is not simply a matter of aesthetics that hokku avoids technology and  never abandons Nature and the place of humans as a part of Nature as its inherent subject matter.  It is also a  tiny counterbalance to the immensity of wrong thinking and wrong action in the world today.  By avoiding putting “technology” in our verse, we have to pay greater attention to Nature and how we relate to it, and if anything might save humans from destroying themselves, it would be that realization of our inseparability from the same Nature that humans have so raped, battered and abused.  In harming Nature we harm ourselves.

It is worth mentioning that even Shiki, who ultimately caused much trouble by his somewhat short-sighted, revisionist creation of the new “haiku” as an offshoot of hokku near the end of the 19th century, did not go as far in abandoning Nature as many in the modern haiku community. 

What we call “technology” in hokku, Shiki called “artifacts of civilization,” and he wrote that most of them are “unpoetic” and thus difficult to use in poetry.  He said that those who supposed that his admonition to “write about new things” meant to write verse on such things as “trains and railways” were mistaken, but that if one does write about them, “one has no choice but to mention something poetic as well.”  If a verse contains an element of technology, Shiki felt, one had to counterbalance it — “make it more attractive” as he put it, by including such other elements as violets blooming by the railroad tracks or poppies dropping their petals after a train had passed (see Dawn to the West, Donald Keene,1984, pg. 51).

Shiki’s admonition, though it seems overtly based more on his ideas of what was “beautiful” in verse than on anything more profound, nonetheless resembles somewhat the principle in hokku that even though technology is generally avoided, if rarely some aspect of it not too inharmonious with hokku is included, the “technological” element should not predominate, but always be secondary to Nature. 

Hokku may be the ONLY verse form in existence today that strictly limits its subject matter to the intimate connection between Nature and humans as a part of, not apart from, Nature.  For that alone it should be valued and protected, and it should never be diluted by confusion with or admixture into the chaos of modern haiku, which in its fragmentation and endless bickering reflects the confused and blunderingly rootless state of modern society in general. 

 

Cooks and craftsmen know that it is important to choose the right tool for the right job.  The same applies to verse.

In my years of teaching, I commonly heard the complaint from haiku enthusiasts that hokku did not permit them to write about such things as their romantic relationships, or their attitude to a given war, or their cars or cell phones.  One phrase used so often as to become commonplace was, “If Bashô were alive today, he would write about these things.”

No, he would not — because hokku is specifically about Nature and the place of humans in Nature, and to make it other than that is to turn it into a quite different category of verse (i.e. “haiku”).  The root of the problem is that the would-be writer does not share the hokku aesthetic, and that is the reason for such dissatisfaction.

But the principle of using the right tool extends more widely than simply the differences between hokku and haiku.   Donald Keene gives an excellent example in his book World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976).   Kamo no Mabuchi, a waka writer of the 18th century,  made a verse on the death of his mother, and prefaced it with this:

“When I was told that my mother had died I could hardly believe it was true:  I had spent seven years away from her, able to see her only in dreams.  But the person who informed me was in tears.  I had supposed our separation would last only a little while longer, and had long looked forward to spending her old age with her, going together to different places, living in one house.  But what a vain and sad world it proved to be?  What am I to do now?“

His waka (in my translation) is:

I hoped
Like wild geese
We’d gather –
But all in vain;
The great village of Yoshino.

As Keene points out, without the preface one could not make head nor tail of the waka itself, but even more significant, there is more poetry in the prose preface than would be in the verse itself, divorced from the preface.

Mabuchi would have been wiser to have written this in the wider format of Chinese verse, which gives the scope necessary for conveying what he tells us in his preface.

Bashô made a similar error, as Blyth points out, in trying to write as hokku what required minimally the wider format of waka:

The autumn wind;
Brush and fields –
Fuha Barrier.

And the waka that preceded it:

No one dwells
At the Fuha Barrier;
Its wooden gables
Have fallen to ruin;
Only the autumn wind…

That is far superior to the weak soup of Bashô’s attempted hokku, but again, Bashô chose the wrong tool for the job in this case. 

Hokku, as I often say, was never meant to be all things to all men.  It has its tasks and it performs them well.  But when one chooses a subject requiring more scope, one should write it in the general form of a longer ”Chinese” verse (but in English, of course), or in some other suitable format.

Can you imagine Walt Whitman trying to put into hokku format his

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d, 
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, 
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. 
 
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; 
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,         
And thought of him I love. 

It would have been an exercise in futility.    And similarly, writing hokku does not mean one must write ONLY hokku.  Some subjects require more space, and so for them one should choose the format that is most appropriate for the task. 

In doing so, one must not try to make hokku fit whatever one wants to force into it.  Instead, use it for its purpose, and for other purposes do what a good cook or craftsman does — use other and more appropriate tools.

David

Many of you may not realize that you can ask for (free, of course) help in writing hokku both on this site (just use the “comment” form at the end of a posting) or, if you prefer, by contacting me privately via email.  It costs nothing but your time and effort.  Asking publicly is helpful because it enables others to learn from your difficulty as well.  Here is an example of a recent exchange, posted here with permission of the inquirer:

————————————————

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:03:30 -0700, Charles wrote:

Hi David,

I would like some feedback on a verse that I’m finding intractable.
I am torn between versions and even if it is a hokku or senryu.

Version one:

The young maiden
Smelling dogwood blossoms
Makes a sour face.

This was the initial/immediate verse.
The problem with this, I feel, is:  a. it is one sentence
                                                   b. no one uses “maiden” these days (though I personally like it)
                                                   c.  it most likely requires an explanation that dogwood blossoms have a rather foul smell that those smelling them do not expect from spring blossoms (thus the resulting behavior above and below).
At least I was told they were dogwood blossoms.  I certainly must be
accurate in this, yes? I smelled these particular ones and yes, they were
foul, almost fishy. Can you confirm that dogwoods stink?
                                                   d. I am unsure how to punctuate it.

Version two:

The young beauty
Smelling dogwood blossoms
Acts insulted.

This is stronger in its reactivity to the blossoms and says something more
about the character of the “beauty” I think, but does it throw it more into senryu? (if it wasn’t already). Also, without version one would the reader get version two?

I think I prefer a combination of:

The young beauty
Smelling dogwood blossoms
Makes a sour face.

Or should I be less specific about the blossom type and simply use:

The young beauty
Smelling the ill-scented blossoms
Makes a sour face.
(Acts insulted.)

Or is it all now lost?  You can see I am over thinking this one.  Any help would be appreciated.

Also–do you wish it that people (like myself) post hokku we may have
written or are working on to your blog site, that you can use as examples and instruction–or would you prefer
to use email only for this?

—————-

David responds:

As you guessed, you are overthinking it.

Go back to basics.  Look for the essential elements — the dogwood blossoms, the smell, the change of appearance of the maiden’s face –  in other words, the elements of the standard hokku — setting, subject, and action; for example:

Dogwood blossoms;
The maiden’s face turns sour
At the smell.

It is not a subject for great hokku, but there is nothing wrong in writing such things — after all, hokku should be enjoyed.  And if you want to use an “old-fashioned” word now and then, like “maiden,” don’t worry about it.  In this case it fits the humor of the verse.  The result is a modern illustrative example of how early “haikai” hokku used conventionally “formal” subjects found in Chinese poetry and waka, such as a beautiful maiden, and gave them an earthy, humorous twist to turn them into hokku.

It is up to individuals whether they want to ask for writing help online or privately.  Either is fine with me.  Do You want me to post this exchange on my site?  If so, let me know, and I will remove your email address when posting it.

———–

Added note:
The dogwoods I am familiar with do not smell badly.  Perhaps what you are seeing is a flowering pear, the blossoms of which are considered to “stink,” and would be commonly seen in the spring.  If you find that to be the case, just remove “dogwood” and add “pear.”

David

Here are more random older writings, posted for whatever students may find of use in them.
———————-

In the broken pot,
A water plantain–
Slenderly blooming.

Onitsura

This is elegantly simple. A water plantain rises, tall and slender, out of a damaged crock, and blooms. The interest here is the contrast between the broken pot and the slender grace of the blooming water plantain.

The setting draws the inward eye to the broken crock as a location for the rest of the verse. We first see the broken pot, then the water plantain growing out of it, and then the blossom on the slender plant.

To write this kind of hokku, first give the location, then what is there, then any further description, like this:

1. In the broken pot

2. A water plantain

3. Slenderly blooming.

 A cool wind;
The sound of pines
Fills the empty sky.

The sky is empty yet not empty; it is filled with the sound of the wind blowing through the pines.

This gives us as sensations the coolness of the wind, the pressure of the wind, and the sound of the wind and the pines. All these things combine harmoniously into a single experience.

 We should not think of this as a cause-effect relationship. There is no separation between the cool wind blowing and the sound of the pines filling the sky. It is all one.

The key to writing this kind of hokku is to take one important element of the total experience, and to use it as the subject; then the other harmonious elements are added, like this:

1. A cool wind (setting)

2. The sound of pines (subject)

3. Fills the empty sky (action)

 ———————————–

Workshop Introduction

Hokku is a short, simple, but profound three-line verse form in harmony with nature and the seasons. It is based on the principles of poverty, simplicity, and selflessness.

HOKKU IS NOT CONTEMPORARY HAIKU, and has different and definite standards of form and content. Haiku gradually began separating from hokku in the 20th century under the influence of “modern” poets and academics who favored weakening or discarding the traditional vital connection with spirituality and nature that characterizes hokku. Today “haiku” encompasses a bewildering range of verse, but hokku is what it always was–a reflection of unity in the context of nature and the seasons.

Members will find hokku more challenging than haiku, but also, if it fits their nature, ultimately more satisfying.

Because hokku and contemporary haiku seem superficially similar to the novice though they are quite different in principle, those learning hokku are easily confused IF they try to practice or participate in both at the same time. Therefore all who wish to become students here must agree to give up reading or writing haiku during their period of study with me. Those who cannot honestly do this should not join.

 This is a workshop for sincere students of hokku, a short, simple, but profound three-line verse form in harmony with nature and the seasons. It is based on the principles of poverty, simplicity, and selflessness.

In spite of superficial similarities, HOKKU IS NOT CONTEMPORARY HAIKU. Only hokku is practiced here, and those who want to learn or attempt to mix practice of hokku and haiku should not join. Trying to mix the two only leads to confusion.

Haiku gradually began separating from hokku in the 20th century under the influence of “modern” poets and academics who favored weakening or discarding the traditional vital connection with spirituality and nature that characterizes hokku. Hokku continues in its tradition of closeness to nature and the seasons, with its roots in selfless spirituality.

If you are beginning hokku, drop all assumptions you might have about it. Come to hokku with an empty cup, and then you may learn correctly and well.

—————————-

To begin hokku, we need to know what it is “about,” what its subject matter is.  Hokku deal with nature and the place of humans in nature, all within the context of one of the four seasons.  Hokku keeps the writer in harmony with the seasons, so we ordinarily do not write or read spring hokku in the fall, or summer hokku in winter (except for study purposes).  Each hokku is placed within a seasonal context by being marked by the writer with its season.  When such hokku are shared or anthologized, the seasonal context goes with them. So hokku are classified by season.

Traditionally, hokku was learned by imitating the verses of the teacher. That is still a very good way to learn. In teaching, I like to use the old hokku of Japan translated into English.  That gives us good models.  Inevitably the translations may differ in some respectes from the originals, but it is how they appear in English that we want to note, because we are writing in English.

We will begin with a hokku by Buson:

Bags of seeds
Are getting soaked;
Spring rain.

This is a standard hokku. It has three elements–a setting, a subject, and an action.

The setting is usually found in the first or last line.  It is the context in which an event takes place. It might be the time of year, or the weather, or a location, or something else.  It can be many things. In this case the setting is spring rain.

The subject is what the verse is about, whether a dove, or a panhandler, or a mouse.  In this case the subject is bags of seeds.

The action is the changing or moving that is happening in the hokku.  In this case the action is “are getting soaked.”

You will notice that there is nothing beautiful or unusual in the words of this hokku.  It is not openly “poetic,” and it does not seem to say anything profound.  That is what hokku are like, very simple, very ordinary.  Even their language is very ordinary, and the way they are presented is ordinary, using common language and punctuation.  A hokku begins with a capital letter and ends with a period or other appropriate punctuation.  That does not mean hokku are trivial, however.  In Buson’s hokku we feel all of spring with its potential for growth.

When the setting, subject and action are combined, they all work together in a kind of musical harmony, but we must know how to combine them.  We must also know how to punctuate, because punctuation not only guides the reader smoothly through the hokku, but it also gives fine shades of pause and emphasis impossible without it.  This is one of the most obvious things distinguishing hokku from most of contemporary haiku.  Contemporary haiku uses minimal or no punctuation, but hokku uses full punctuation, and it uses it carefully and purposefully.  It is not something added to the hokku, but an integral part of it in English.

Hokku consists of two parts.  One of those parts in a basic standard hokku is the setting.  The other is the subject and action. The setting is separated from the subject/action by appropriate punctuation. In Buson’s hokku it is a semicolon (;).

 

Bags of seeds
Are getting soaked;
Spring rain.

We could also shorten this to:

Bags of seeds
Getting soaked;
Spring rain.

The first version, however, has better a better visual balance.

We must be careful not to remove anything necessary for ordinary good English, however.

A semicolon makes a strong and definite pause that separates the two parts of the hokku.  It gives the reader time to absorb and experience the first part before going on to the second.  Sometimes, however, a different punctuation mark is required.  In a setting that begins with a preposition, for example, a comma is more appropriate.  A comma provides a very brief pause as well as a connective link to the next line. Here is an example by Shiki, who, though he began haiku, nonetheless still wrote some verses that would fit as hokku:

With wet feet,
A sparrow hops
Along the porch.

Notice how the setting here is a “circumstance” – ”with wet feet.”  The subject is “a sparrow.”  The action is “hops along the porch.”  And because the setting begins with the preposition “with,” it is separated from the subject/action by a comma rather than a semicolon.

Note also that the hokku begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. In hokku we capitalize the first letter of each line, which one finds also, incidentally, in the works of R. H. Blyth.

Keep in mind that if we were writing these hokku, we would mark each with the season, whether spring, summer, fall, or winter.  Both hokku presented here are spring hokku, because we are now in spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

————————— 

BEGINNING HOKKU

 The best way to begin learning hokku is to forget everything you think you know about it.  Many people have tried one form or another of contemporary haiku, and they mistakenly apply bad habits picked up from it to hokku.  That not only slows down learning, but also sets the student off in the wrong direction.  So in learning hokku, begin at the very beginning, without assuming that you already know anything about its form and structure.

It is also important to immediately drop thinking of hokku as poetry.  That causes many beginners to try to make hokku “poetic,” and that is a serious mistake that will distort your attempts.  In hokku the poetry is not in the words but in the reading of those words, that is, in experiencing the hokku.

 A hokku is essentially a sensory experience of nature in a seasonal context, presented in three lines of approximately seventeen syllables or less.  By sensory experience is meant an experience of one or more of the five senses–seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling.  That means a hokku is very concrete; it deals with rocks and stones and trees, with wind, rain, and snow, with dogs, birds, and cows, with dandelions, ants and clouds.

Hokku is not abstract thinking; it is not intellectualizing.  Hokku is very plain and simple, completely without frills of poetic words and phrasing.  It must be very simple if the words are not to get in the way of the experience they convey.  In Buddhism it is said that various practices such as meditation are the raft that takes one to the other shore.  Once the other shore is reached, the raft is no longer needed.  In hokku words are meant to convey a sensory experience simply and directly.  Like a raft, they are not important in themselves. 

Hokku is not symbolic.  What it says is what it means. It does not use metaphors such as “the moon was a ghostly galleon,” nor does it use similes such as “the moon was like a white ship.” It does not compare one thing with another or say one thing is like something else. Because of this, everything in hokku is allowed to be just what it is. A round river rock is just that, and nothing more.

To summarize:

1. Begin hokku without assuming you know anything about it;

2. Think of hokku as a sensory experience, not as poetry;

3. Do not use abstract thinking, but deal with concrete objects and events;

4. Avoid symbolism, simile, and metaphor.

If you can do that, you are ready to begin hokku.

 ——————————–

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some miscellaneous writings on hokku from about four years ago, written largely in the season of autumn, but posted now for their instructional material.  They exhibit variations on the same themes.

———————————
Hokku begins in silence and emptiness.  It is only the absence of sound that makes sound possible, the absence of things and events  that allows things and events to be.  This eternal silence and emptiness is the background of hokku   Hokku is the interplay of  sound and silence, form and absence, time and eternity.

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

Bashô

Into the stillness a frog jumps, and suddenly, for a moment, there is sound.  Then all returns to silence.   We feel the temporary against the eternal, the perpetual transience of things.

Hokku are events, brief segments of time–but not just any time, not just any event.  They are experiences in which one senses an unspoken and un-speak-able significance.  Thoreau writes:

Dec 29th, Wednesday:

Let us walk in the world without learning its ways.  Whole weeks or months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mist or smoke, till at length some warm morning, perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, its shadow flitting across the fields, which have caught a new significance from that accident; and as that vapor is raised above the earth, so shall the next weeks be elevated above the plane of the actual; or when the setting sun slants across the pastures, and the cows low to my inward ear and only enhance the stillness, and the eve is as the dawn, a beginning hour and not a final one, as if it would never have done, with its clear western amber inciting men to lives of as limpid purity.

—————————

August;
First on the ears of millet–
The autumn wind.

In the fields of late August the millet heads stand ripe and densely packed with round seeds.  It is when the wind blows across these “ears” of millet, gently bending them and making them nod,  that we, along with Kyoroku,  have a sudden realization–the wind that blows the mature heads of millet is the wind of autumn.  Suddenly we feel the change of the seasons, the endless transformation of nature.
————————————————————-
Life and literature may focus on this world or on an escape from this world.  Humans may live in the world or in the imagination.  The farther one retreats into the imagination, the farther one gets from nature.  And the simple act of having retreated into the imagination, whether briefly or for long periods of time, affects how we view nature.

Hokku is the intuitive understanding of a thing/event through becoming one with it.   How do we become one with it?  Through not putting any obstacles between ourselves and the thing / event.  We do not write “about” a thing, we write only the thing in all its strong simplicity:

A heavy wagon
Rumbles past;
The peonies shake.

Buson

Buson has not told us what he thinks about this event.  He has not made the wagon into a symbol of something else.  He has given us the pure perception of the heavy wagon, its rumbling movement, and the shaking of the peonies.  Just as there is no separation between the rumbling wagon and the shaking peonies,there is also no separation between the reader and the experience.  That “no separation” is the very essence of hokku.  At the basis of all hokku is a profound unity in which there is no longer subject and object, no longer the writer looking at the thing, but rather the writer becomes the thing, just as the reader of Buson’s hokku becomes the heavy rumbling wagon and the shaking peonies.

In this process the writer of the hokku is not a “poet” who uses the intellect to add comments and thoughts to the thing / event.  Instead the writer becomes like a pure mirror in which the thing is clearly reflected through the hokku.  The more the writer can get himself or herself out of the way, the more nature can speak directly through the hokku.

Taking this essential oneness as the basis of hokku we can say that the universe perceives itself through human consciousness.  When someone writes a hokku about a smooth boulder, the boulder thus perceive tself through the human.

—————————

The autumn hills;
Here and there
Smoke rising.

Gyôdai
This is a very simple yet effective hokku.  It consists of  the setting:
The autumn hills;

the subject:
Smoke

And the action
here and there…rising

We could even rearrange it so that setting, subject and action are precisely ordered:

The autumn hills;
Smoke rising
Here and there.

That causes a change in how the reader experiences the poem.

Gyôdai’s verse is an example of a Nature hokku.  Of course all hokku are Nature-related, but when used as a classification this means that there is no mention of the writer or of other people in the hokku, and also that the hokku makes no attempt at a “romantic” effect in the literary sense.  It is a depiction of nature without a strong affect on the senses, though of course it does usually involve the sense of sight.

This very late and transitional verse by Shiki, who began haiku, falls into a different category.  Because it is understood that the writer himself is acting, as hokku it may be classified as a “Self” hokku.

Going out the door…
In ten steps,
The great sea of autumn.

Or we could weaken the sense of the self by writing it this way:

Ten steps
Beyond the door–
The great autumn sea.

————————–

What is hokku?
Hokku is a brief unrhymed verse of three short lines in which the reader becomes one with a thing / event.  It is not poetry as it is conventionally understood, because poetry usually means “dressing” up a thing or an event with cleverness or commentary, with metaphor or simile, symbol or rhyme.   Hokku is just the thing /event in itself, plain and unadorned.

Hokku are not written  “about” something,  they are just words presenting the thing /event in all its strong simplicity:

A heavy wagon
Rumbles past;
The peonies shake.Buson

Buson has not told us what he thinks about this event.  He has not made the wagon into a symbol of something else.  It does not mean anything beyond itself.  He has given us the pure perception of the heavy wagon, its rumbling movement, and the shaking of the peonies.   Between these there is no separation–the wagon rumbles past, the peonies shake.  And there is no separation between the reader and the event.  The reader experiences the event, becomes the event.  There is no longer subject and object, there is only sight and movement and sound, pure experience untroubled by the workings of the intellect–and that is hokku.

Just as there is no separation between the rumbling wagon and the shaking peonies,there is also no separation between the reader and the experience.  That “no separation” is the very essence of hokku.  At the basis of all hokku is a profound unity in which there is no longer subject and object, no longer a writer looking at a thing, but rather the writer becomes the thing, just as the reader of Buson’s hokku becomes the heavy rumbling wagon and the shaking peonies.

Hokku is profoundly simple and direct, and in the modern world these qualities have often been undervalued or forgotten.  It is the directness of Nature, and Nature and the place of humans in Nature are the subject matter of hokku.  There is no separation between Nature and humans.  Nature is not one thing and humans another.  That is why the writer of hokku, in mentioning himself or herself, speaks objectively, as one would in writing about a tree or a wheeling hawk:

Going out the gate,
I too become a traveller;
The autumn evening.

Buson

Change is also an essential part of hokku, because change is an essential part of existence.  All things constantly change; nothing remains the same:

August;
First on the ears of millet–
The autumn wind.

Kyoroku

In the fields of late August the millet heads stand ripe and densely packed with round seeds.  It is when the wind blows across these ears of millet, gently bending them and making them nod,  that we, along with Kyoroku,  have a sudden realization–the wind that blows the mature heads of millet is the wind of autumn.  Suddenly we feel the change of the seasons, the endless transformation of nature.

And because all things are connected, the nodding ears of millet are not a symbol of autumn or a part of autumn, they are autumn.

Hokku is thus a profoundly spiritual verse form in which the ego must be put aside and nature allowed to speak through the writer.

River mist;
The sound of the horse
Entering the water.
——————————————————————————————————————————-

August;
First on the ears of millet–
The autumn wind.

In the fields of late August the millet heads stand ripe and densely packed with round seeds.  It is when the wind blows across these “ears” of millet, gently bending them and making them nod,  that we, along with Kyoroku,  have a sudden realization–the wind that blows the mature heads of millet is the wind of autumn.  Suddenly we feel the change of the seasons, the endless transformation of nature.

At every house
The morning glory blooms;
The month of leaves.

Ryôta

In Ryôta’s verse we feel the omnipresence of the season.  A morning glory does not just bloom at one house, but following its nature and the urging of light, warmth, and time, it blooms at every house, as though it were one thing in many manifestations.   Just as in consciousness “The lamps are many but the light is one,” (attributed to Jalal-uddin Rumi) so it is in Nature, where summer’s end and the beginning of fall appear in the morning glory,  in its multiplicity, that blooms at every house.   That is why a single colored leaf is not just a part of autumn, but it is autumn in itself.

“Leaf month,” or “the month of leaves”  in Japan is August, but in the United States this verse would better fit September.

Seen
In the paper-maché cat–
The autumn morning.

Buson

There is a particular quality to the light of autumn, when the sun is low in the southern sky and its light takes on a soft, golden hue.  When that light falls on the old paper-maché cat, suddenly the cat is seen to express .  It too is part of the season.

Often overlooked by beginners is the fact that hokku have styles.  Perhaps most obvious is how the style of Issa stands out from other writers — stands out not because it is better (it often is not, and I do not use him much as a model), but because it is so different.

Less immediately visible but still apparent are the differences in style among other writers.  It is one of the oddities of history that when thinking of the beginnings of hokku, people often look to Bashô.  It is a shame they do think more often of Onitsura.

The style of Onitsura is spare and austerely elegant:

In the broken pot,
A water plantain –
Slenderly blooming.

The setting is “in the broken pot”; the subject is “a water plantain”; the action is “slenderly blooming.”  That is the pattern for a standard hokku, and Onitsura uses it well.  In English, notice how the first line ends with a separating comma because it begins with a preposition.   That is the “formal” cut of the hokku.  Hokku have two parts, one brief, one longer.  They are “cut,” that is, there is a separation, by an appropriate punctuation mark in English.

Onitsura could, in few words, evoke the spirit of place and season:

With blossoms fallen,
Once more it is quiet –
Onjô Temple.

The setting is “with blossoms fallen.”  Notice again how it is separated, “cut” from the rest of the hokku, by a comma, used because the line begins with the preposition “with.”  The subject, which does not come until the final line, is “Onjô Temple,” and the action is “once more it is quiet.”

And here is another such verse:

Flowing water;
A cicada cries in the bamboos –
Shôkô Temple.

The pattern is more unconventional and unusual, but the result – the evocation of a time and place, is quite effective. 

Similarly, we find:

Rustling
And shaking the lotus leaves –
A pond tortoise.

In this the unseparated setting is the “pond.”  The subject is the tortoise, and the action is “rustling and shaking the lotus leaves.”

 A particularly striking hokku by Onitsura:

Beneath
The the leaping trout,
Clouds flowing.

The trout having leaped high from the water, we see the clouds of the sky reflected and moving in the water beneath.  The rather long setting is “beneath the leaping trout,” the subject is “clouds,’ and the action “flowing.”

We see how delicately Onitsura deals with the death of a child here:

This autumn,
With no child on my knee –
Moon viewing.

Donald Keene, the noted scholar of Japanese literature, calls it a “sincere but sentimental” verse, and seems to prefer what to me is a crudely overstated expression of loss of a child found in Raizan’s:

A spring dream:
I am not crazy –
Though bitter.

Raizan’s more personal, openly emotional bluntness does not have the spirit of hokku, but seems akin to modern verse like that of Dylan Thomas, and it is odd to note that both Raizan and Thomas suffered from alcoholism:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In another opinion I do not share, Keene finds Onitsura lacking in this verse:

No place
To throw the wash water –
Insect cries.

While I find this simply an honest manifestation of Onitsura’s rather noble nature and sensitivities, Keene compares it, unfairly in my view, with the excessively obvious aestheticism of Chiyo-ni’s

Morning glories
Having captured the well bucket,
I borrow water.

“Borrow” as used in translation here means, “I ask the neighbors for water.”  This kind of thing is unfortunately in keeping with Chiyo-ni’s verse on the whole, but it is not in keeping with Onitsura.

Onitsura gives us an interesting contrast of light and dark in:

Evening;
The bellies of trout visible
In the river shallows.

And one of the best spring verses in:

Daybreak;
On the tips of the barley,
Spring frost.

He offers us an excellent model in:

A cool wind;
Filling the sky –
The sound of pines.

Note how important punctuation is to the correct understanding of that verse.  The setting is “A cool wind.”  The subject is “the sound of pines” and the action “filling the sky.”

The fundamental principle of Onitsura’s hokku is an honest and simple sincerity.  It is said that a Zen priest once asked him how he would define his principle, and he responded,

In the garden,
Blooming whitely –
The camellia.

Onitsura’s simple and pure honesty in verse is as refreshing as a drink of clear water.  To Blyth, it had something akin to that of Robert Frost, who wrote:

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

One could do worse than learn from the simplicity and clarity so often found in the hokku of Onitsura.

David

 

Something from three years ago:
———————————

 

“Panta rhei” wrote Herakleitos of Ephesus many centuries ago–”Everything flows.”  One cannot spend much time in nature without realizing the truth of those words.  Everything flows, everything transforms, everything changes.  And everything is related to everything else.  We see it in the constant shape-shifting of clouds in the moving air high above the earth; we see it in the passing shower that suddenly rustles the leaves of the forest; we see it in the streams carrying the mountains to the sea bit by bit in tiny sediments and grains of sand.  And, of course, we see it in the endless passage of time and the seasons.

Knowing all this, how can anyone wonder why hokku keeps its intimate connection with nature?  It keeps us in touch with the essence of existence, which is transience.  It reminds us that we, like all of nature, are constantly changing, that we, ”our” bodies and minds, are no more free of time and its effects than a leaf on a tree.

Any verse form cannot avoid transience as an essential element without being false to existence.  To pretend that things or situations last, to pretend, that as teenagers often naively say, “I will love you forever,” to suppose that money will solve all problems,  to persist in using natural resources without any care for returning to nature what has been borrowed, means one is living in a fantasy world, not this turning earth in a universe of perpetual transformation. 

A few days ago I was on a bus taking me home from work along the usual busy, urban route.  I was absorbed in a book.  But suddenly I noticed an unaccustomed light on the pages.  I raised my head and looked out the window to my left, and saw that a huge apartment building that had been there “forever” had been torn down, and suddenly, for the first time in all the years I had travelled this street, there was the bright, open sky, with white clouds billowing high above!  Even knowing how soon, given the way of cities now, something else would be built there to darken the street again, I nonetheless felt as Masahide must have felt long ago when he wrote:

With the shed burnt,
Nothing blocks the view
Of the moon.

So even in cities there is change.  Though they mightily pretend to be separate from nature, they are not, nor do the face lifts and hair dyes of city inhabitants change the fact that years pass and people age.  As Buddhism teaches, nothing escapes anicca, transience.  And as Diogenes Laertius wrote in Lives of the Philosophers, change is the only thing that does not change.

As changing humans living in a world of change, we must learn not only to accept constant transformation but to live calmly amid a world that flows like water.  We cannot take ourselves too seriously by expecting things NOT to change–that will never happen.  The attitude of the writer of hokku is thus like that of Thoreau, who, devastated by the death of his beloved brother, nonetheless said:

“Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.”

He recognized that even emotions are subject to their dark and sunny days, but we cannot linger in the shadows of a storm when nature moves on to sunlight breaking through the clouds.  And if we do not try to avoid the obvious, if we pay attention instead of trying to ignore, ultimately we will begin to realize that these changes within nature, these changes within us, come and go, come and go, like white clouds moving and changing form and vanishing in the blue sky of summer.  It is in recognizing perpetual change and in simply accepting transience that we begin to get a hint of the vast peace and stillness behind and within all the transitory things of the world.  Then we will have some understanding of the depth that lies within the brevity and simple words of hokku.

David Coomler