I often say that we should not think of hokku as poetry, because in doing so we tend to confuse it with what we usually think of as poetry, and hokku is not that.
To understand this better, it might be helpful to consider another form of verse that originated in Japan and was both very popular and very old — the waka.
We know that hokku (in English) consists of three short lines, which are derived from its old Japanese form of 5, 7, and 5 phonetic units — seventeen in all. The waka, by contrast, has two additional segments, each of seven phonetic units, making the whole verse 5,7,5,7,7. Visually (in English) it looks like a hokku with two additional “long” lines added to the end.
We would be wrong to think, however, that waka is a hokku with two extra lines. A hokku is not poetry. That means a hokku does not use conventionally “poetic” words and phrases, does not try to be “poetic.” In hokku the poetry is not in the words but in the sensory experience they convey, and that is something quite different.
Waka, on the other hand, is very consciously poetic. It aims for a certain effect, specifically a beautiful effect, and to do that it may — as is often done in Western poetry as well — stretch the truth a bit to achieve that effect. Blyth says, quite effectively, that we can think of waka as “decorative.” It is not as much interested in things as they are as in making poetry out of them. That is something not done in hokku.
And that is also why waka, traditionally, includes romantic relationships, something hokku avoids. And used with a different meaning, we can say that waka in general aims for the romantic in the more literary sense — an emphasis on imagination, emotion, and introspection. In hokku the writer often disappears in the subject, and in fact must get out of the way so that Nature may speak; in waka the writer is often very evident, as is emotion.
It was often said that hokku was a “male” verse form, while waka was “female.” We should not take this too literally, because men too wrote waka and women sometimes wrote hokku, but in general it corresponds to conventional ideas of male and female — the male being more objective and realistic, the female being more dreamy and romance oriented. Of course we must be wary of using that rigid stereotype today, but it does help us to understand the differences between hokku and waka.
Many readers here will also have heard of renga. Renga is essentially a linked sequence of waka, composed by two or more people. The aim in renga, as in the single waka, was poetry. The language was formal and “high,” and the earthy and commonplace were excluded as inappropriate for the elevated tone of the verse. It was only with the rise of “playful” linked verse, called haikai no renga, that ordinary subjects and “common” language were mixed into linked verse, and that is how the hokku as we practice it came to be — a verse mixing high and low, dealing with ordinary things, and aiming not for beauty, but rather for significance.
But let’s return to waka. Here is an anonymous example:
Smelling
The fragrant orange blossoms
That wait for June –
Recalling the fragrant sleeves
Of someone in the past.
It is, as Blyth characterized waka, “the lyrical vague, the cloudy emotional, the dreamy forlorn.”
In the following 10th-century waka by Ariwara Motokata we find the same emphasis on beauty, a conscious effort at poetry that stretches the truth to achieve an effect:
Mist rises
On the far off mountains
Of spring;
Blown here on the wind –
The fragrance of flowers.
Here is another waka by a different poet:
The wind
Stirs the orange blossoms
Wet with rain;
The mountain nightingale
Sings among the clouds.
It is all just too perfectly beautiful, which is why Blyth calls it “decorative” verse. By contrast, Tohô, a student of Bashô, tells us that
Spring rain falling on a willow is, in general, renga;
A raven catching mud snails is simply haikai.
That is a good expression of the aesthetic difference between waka (here manifested in linked verse — renga) and hokku as found in the “new” kind of renga — playful linked verse (haikai no renga). A raven catching snails is definitely NOT a subject for waka or the old renga. It is not conventionally beautiful, and is certainly not the kind of elevated, traditional subject a waka poet would have used.
I often think, however, that it would be possible to “hokkufy” the waka form, just as the “waka” form of linked verse led to the “haikai” form of linked verse that gave us hokku as we know it. One need only apply the aesthetics of hokku to waka by removing the emphasis on the conventionally beautiful, by removing inappropriate subjects such as romantic love, and by introducing the simple and the common — ordinary things in ordinary words, as we find in hokku. If one were to avoid consciously striving for the conventionally beautiful, and instead used the form – as in hokku – to achieve significance, one would have a new kind of waka very much in the hokku aesthetic, a verse form that does not sacrifice truth for the sake of conventional beauty, and yet a verse form that remains intimately connected to Nature and the changing seasons. It might also be a helpful antidote to the excesses and oddities of what is now called the modern tanka, just as hokku is a healthy antidote to much of what is called haiku today.
David
