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
