LEARNING HOKKU: First Pattern

Here is the first pattern for learning hokku.  It is by Gyōdai:
The autumn hills;
Here and there
Smoke rises.
And here is how one uses a pattern for learning:
All parts of it can be changed, as long as one keeps the same basic form.
We can see that this is a standard hokku, meaning that it has a [...]

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HOKKU IN AUTUMN

In hokku it is essential to write in harmony with the season.  The most important quality of autumn is transience — the fact that everything changes, all is impermanent, nothing stays.  Autumn is transience.
In autumn hokku, we experience and express this transience through the subjects we choose.  We favor things withering and changing, things aging [...]

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PREPARING TO LEARN HOKKU

Only a single day remains before August ends and September begins.  The Summer months — June, July and August — give way to the Autumn months — September, October and November.
Through hokku we are taken away from the excessive obsession with the self and with the thinking mind that characterizes modern society, and returned to [...]

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JUMPING FROG, WALKING BIRD

The previous posting dealt with the correct translation of Bashō’s spring “Old Pond” hokku into English.  But what is significant for us is understanding the verse as an example of hokku.
The old pond;
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.
Unlike most hokku, in English (not in Japanese) this one has a double pause, indicated by [...]

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ANOTHER LEAP INTO THE OLD POND

Someone asked me today about the correct translation of Bashō’s famous “Old Pond” hokku, a spring verse.  What prompted the reader’s question was seeing a version in a recent book in which the last two lines were rendered as,
“…a frog jumps into the sound of water.“
The question was, is this what Bashō intended — a [...]

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LINGERING HEAT

Modern people tend to view the world as a collection of separate and unrelated things, without seeing the whole.  But life is not that way.  In reality, everything is connected to everything else.
No event happens in isolation, as an abstraction.  All events have their necessary contexts.  That is why in hokku, “rain” by itself means [...]

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IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT JAPANESE HOKKU WAS LIKE….

By chance I flipped open a book to the Japanese original of a hokku by Onitsura, one of the two “patriarchs” of our kind of hokku.  Though it is out of season, it gives me a good opportunity to show you exactly what old hokku were like, and how they are translated into English-language hokku [...]

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HOKKU IS NOT FOR EVERYONE (BECAUSE EVERYONE IS NOT FOR HOKKU)

It often seems to those who practice other kinds of brief verse that hokku is unnecessarily laden down with lots of rules, while they can write however they like about anything they like.
Hokku does have its principles and standards, but there is a reason for them.  The “rules” of hokku are just the manifestation of [...]

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THIS AUTUMN: BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING

My teaching method is simple, but not at all new.  It is the same method used by Onitsura in the 17th century, and it is traditional in the teaching of hokku.  I present the student with good hokku models, which I draw from the best of the old writers, and I translate and present them [...]

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A QUICK LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF HOKKU

Hokku is an art of spiritual poverty, of simplicity, and of transience.  Because its one and only subject is Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, it keeps as near to Nature as possible.
Hokku is one of the contemplative arts — arts that take us away from the madness [...]

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DIRECT EXPERIENCE AND CREATIVE SELECTION

In hokku as I teach it, we may write both from direct experience and from creative selection.
What is meant by direct experience?  It is a hokku written from viewing an actual event, with everything in it faithful to that direct experience, whether the hokku is written on the spot, or hours or days or weeks [...]

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AUTUMN BEGINS

In some parts of the country summer lingers.  In others autumn has already come.  Here is a hokku by Taigi, which expresses the transition from one to the other:
Autumn begins:
The summer shower becomes
A night of rain.
Taigi thought the sudden sprinkles of rain were just another brief summer shower; but when the rain persisted into the [...]

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WHAT COLOR IS THE BACK OF A MORNING GLORY?

As mentioned in an earlier posting, traditionally morning glories in old hokku are flowers of the last part of summer and beginning of autumn.
Kyoroku has an interesting verse:
It shows
The backs of the morning glories –
The windy autumn.
The reverse side of morning glories, as anyone who has grown them will know, is pale and whitish.  When [...]

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A LOOK BACKWARD: THE HOKKU OF SŌGI

Bashō — the best-known writer of hokku — tried to follow the overall aesthetic in his verse that he found in the other contemplative arts of tea, of ink painting, of waka, and of renga.  He mentioned a representative master of each, and that for renga — the linked verse that preceded the kind of [...]

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ENTERING AUTUMN

Summer is ending, autumn is beginning.
I have already mentioned the transitional verse by Kyoroku that leads us into the season:
August;First on the ears of millet –The autumn wind.
There is a related hokku by Chora:
It blew first
Upon the morning glories –
The autumn wind.
In Japan, morning glories were considered flowers of the beginning of autumn.  So [...]

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SEASONAL HARMONY

In hokku the concept of harmony is very important.  If a verse is composed of elements that are inharmonious with one another, the hokku will fail.  But beyond that, the hokku should be in harmony with the season in which it is written.
It often seems initially odd to many Westerners that one should read a [...]

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A LOAD OF WIND

Amid the heat,
He carries a load of wind –
The fan seller.
The arrangement of that summer hokku by Kakō is necessarily different in English.  The original is literally
Wind load carries heat ya fan-seller
But let’s look at the English structure:
Amid the heat,
He carries a load of wind –
The fan seller.
A setting in hokku is generally the [...]

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HOT THINGS

Today is another unusually hot day, so here is an appropriate old hokku by Buson:
Spider webs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.
Entering a grove of old trees on a hot day, we expect to find some relief from the heat.  Instead we discover that among the old trees not a breath of fresh air stirs; and in [...]

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THE SOLE HEIR OF THE WHOLE WORLD

Sometimes on this site I will seem to go far afield, but generally there is a thread leading in some way back to hokku or the spirit of hokku.
Johann Peter Hebel, who wrote in Swiss-German, has a very remarkable poem:
AN HERRN PFARRER JÄCK
S’isch wor, Her Jäck, i ha kei eigene Baum,
i ha kei Huus, i [...]

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A FEW SENRYŪ

Hokku deals with Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature.  But here are a few old senryū, which deal instead with human quirks and foibles:
When winter comes,
The pawn shop
Is in summer.
One could say the same thing of our modern thrift stores; people get rid of winter things in summer, [...]

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A MIRROR REFLECTING

I have talked about the simplicity of hokku, and of its poverty that allows us only a few ordinary words.  And I have talked about the selflessness of hokku, in which the writer does not try to draw the attention of the reader to him or her, but instead becomes a mirror in which Nature [...]

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UNKNOWING

There is something very mysterious and significant about a question.
In the Zen sect, one major practice is the continual asking of an internal question — “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” perhaps, or “What was my true face before I was born?”
These are questions that cannot be ended by an ordinary response.  In fact, [...]

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WELL BUCKETS AND I, ME, AND MY

In Western poetry the “self” plays a very large role.  In hokku, however, the self is not only minimized, but often does not appear at all.  That is because in much of hokku the writer is the mirror of Nature.  The self is like dust that obscures that mirror; the more of self, the less [...]

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ONE WITH THE WILL OF NATURE: OCCASION HOKKU

In a previous posting, I told you that hokku are not symbols for anything, are not metaphors.  Instead, hokku make use of layers of associations.  They do not say one thing is another (metaphor), nor do they say one thing is like another (simile).  This is a matter difficult for some people to understand, because [...]

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HOKKU AS SPIRITUAL VERSE

Hokku at its best was and is spiritual verse.
That does not mean “religious” in any dogmatic sense.  It is not about dogmas and beliefs.  It is spiritual in that it re-unites — if only briefly — subject and object, humans and Nature.
We are accustomed to verses in which a writer writes about himself and his [...]

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BEGINNING TO LEARN CONTENT IN HOKKU

The outer form of hokku is quickly described; the content of hokku takes more time, because it has so many aspects.
First, the basics.
The content of hokku is always Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature.  Knowing that, we can say that a hokku is a sensory experience — meaning [...]

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HOKKU AND WAR

Some people think that verse must concern itself with such things as violence and war, if that is what is happening in the world — and it usually is.

Hokku, however, has a higher purpose than importing into itself the chaos and fragmentation of modern society; hokku is and should remain contemplative verse, and that is impossible [...]

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HOKKU FORM IN A NUTSHELL

Hokku in English has very definite standards and principles, and these extend even to the appearance of a verse on the page, specifically to lineation, capitalization, and punctuation.
An English-language hokku is a verse of three lines, the middle line often — but not always — visually longer than the others.  Here is a typical hokku, [...]

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THE WHEEL OF THE YEAR

In her bittersweet children’s book Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt writes:
“The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.  The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those [...]

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BEWARE OF ANY ENTERPRISE THAT REQUIRES NEW CLOTHES

Dear Readers,
I have been teaching hokku on the Internet for some thirteen years.
Remember that hokku — or any kind of verse — is only important to the degree that it can help to change your life for the better — make you a better, kinder person and lessen the sense of ego.  And remember too [...]

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