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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
