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
