There are two characteristics of hokku that were and are, in modern parlance, “non-negotiable,” without which hokku would not be hokku. The first is Nature and humans as a part of Nature as its subject matter; the second is a seasonal context.
When haiku was created by Masaoka Shiki near the end of the 19th century, many of his verses still qualified, structurally, as hokku. They had Nature as their topic and were set in a seasonal context. But Shiki’s new haiku, once it fell into the hands of others, began rather rapidly to change and evolve (and often to degenerate). Though conservative elements in Japan kept both the natural and seasonal elements, more radical writers gradually began dropping one element or both.
Hokku was transmitted to the West in two stages: in the first, early Western writers knew it under that name — hokku — but tended not to understand its structure or essentials. Later, in the mid 20th century, there was a second transmission through the works of R. H. Blyth and Harold Henderson, but this time it was unfortunately under Shiki’s revisionist term, “haiku.” That was a lamentable mistake, because given the rapid evolution and consequent fragmentation of haiku at the hands of various individuals, the term “haiku” began to carry less definite content, becoming ever more vague as additional variants of verse came to be defined by it. To the confusion created by this new problem of terminology was added a continuing misperception of the nature of the verse form in Japan. Many forgot all about hokku as it had been practiced for centuries, and instead looked to contemporary misinterpretations and individualistic modifications of the verse form now presented as “haiku.”
We can say in general that contemporary Western haiku developed as a result of Western misinterpretations and misunderstandings of hokku, offered under the term “haiku.” When Westerners began to read translations of old hokku, they commonly neither understood that what they were reading was in fact hokku and not “haiku,” and they commonly misunderstood the verse form, not seeing its inherent structure and essentials, but misinterpreting it in terms of expectations derived from the known — from Western poetry, particularly the experimental poems of the 20th century by such individuals as e.e. cummings.
The same thing had happened to waka, a centuries-old Japanese verse form. When transmitted to the West, it came largely under Shiki’s preferred term “tanka,” and in a revisionist mode, and it underwent a not-so-subtle transformation away from waka and into Western free verse. Again, there was a misunderstanding both of terminology and of structure and content. Most modern tanka written in the West today has little or nothing in common with the Japanese waka or its structure and content, but is essentially a Western misinterpretation, or to be less direct, a Western reinterpretation of waka under a different name. We can correctly say the same of modern haiku; it is a Western re-interpretation of hokku under a different name, the result of an ongoing process of misinterpretation and misperception of the hokku that has brought into being the modern haiku, which often has nothing in common with hokku other than brevity.
In his kitchen-sink compilation The Haiku Handbook, William J. Higginson sums up his view of the dropping of the seasonal and natural contexts in haiku by saying, “The point of haiku is not the content of experience, but the quality of experience and of perception. It makes no difference what experience a poet writes of, so long as it is an experience that can bring us to a new or deeper perception, and the emotion which arises from it.”
That is a radical Western reinterpretation, a complete misinterpretation. By subscribing to such an altered view, Higginson is promoting a new haiku that is far beyond the more conservative revisionism of Shiki. His statement is a kind of revolutionary manifesto overturning centuries of hokku practice, and none of the old hokku writers from Bashô up to the time of Shiki would have found it an acceptable definition of their hokku, which dealt with Nature and humans as a part of Nature, presented in a seasonal context.
What Higginson is doing is essentially giving license to a “new” kind of brief verse, based on Western notions about poets and poetry, but denominating it by Shiki’s term “haiku,” in spite of the fact that such a new kind of verse does not even follow the standards of Shiki. Is it any wonder that the average reader today has no clear understanding of what haiku is, since “haiku” has now become such a vague umbrella term, let alone having any valid conception of hokku and its structure and requirements? As Harold Henderson, the rather ignored figurehead at the founding of the Haiku Society of America wrote, “I would like to make it clear that I have no objection to any poem simply because it is not a haiku. I am only objecting to its being called a haiku if it is not” (A Haiku Path, Haiku Society of America, 1994, pg. 65). Had attention been paid to at least that remark by Harold Henderson, perhaps modern haiku would not be in its present deplorable state, and Higginson’s revisionist understanding of “the point of haiku” would never have gotten off the ground — at least not by appropriating the term “haiku.”
Haiku in the West today, then, is essentially the result of misperceptions not only of hokku, but even of haiku as expressed by its creator, Shiki. Haiku has become whatever any individual writer chooses to make it. And so the term “haiku” becomes ever more vague and meaningless as a useful definition.
In stark contrast, hokku is essentially what it was nearly 300 years ago. It is a brief verse dealing with Nature and humans as a part of Nature, set in the context of the seasons. It has definite standards and principles, and though it is today written in English, using the capitalization and punctuation common to good English-language writing, it can legitimately claim to be a continuation of the old hokku, not as a fossil in museum, but as something that is living, ever fresh and new. Most haiku written today, by contrast, generally have nothing at all in common with hokku other than brevity, and sometimes (I have seen “haiku” as long as five lines) not even that.
The point of what I say here is not that haiku is bad, hokku good. The point is that modern haiku is not at all the same as hokku, and should never be confused with it. The name is different, the practice is different, the definition (if one accepts that of Higginson given above, as many do), is completely different. It is only by keeping hokku free of the confusion and misinformation common in the modern haiku community that one can keep it alive and give it room in which to grow and flourish. It is a mistake to mix hokku and modern haiku, because invariably the latter will overwhelm and submerge the former, as happened as a result of the revisionism of Shiki followed by the more radical formulations that came later, particularly in the West and in the English language.
Hokku and haiku are two different things, and should not be muddled. Each has the right to exist, and individuals have the right to choose which, if either, to practice. But it is time to end the great confusion created in the 20th century, a confusion which conveniently served the cause of the kinds of “modern” haiku promoted by do-it-yourself authorities in books, journals, and societies, but which contributed to the destruction and forgetting of hokku as practiced from Onitsura and Bashô in the 17th century all the way up to the revisionism of Shiki near the end of the 19th century – a confusion that ultimately contributed even to the decline of the kind of haiku practiced by Shiki.
That is why today I make it very clear that what I teach as hokku is quite separate and distinct from modern haiku and the modern haiku community and its pundits, who generally either misperceive or misrepresent, intentionally or unknowingly, the history and nature of hokku, going even so far as to mislabel it, incorrectly and anachronistically, “haiku,” thereby continuing the confusion and misunderstanding created and promulgated by such groups and individuals in the 20th century.
We know better today, and should not be misled.
David
