DECEMBER AND YULETIDE

December will soon begin, and with it comes the holiday season.
How does one deal with holidays in hokku?  The same way one deals with a season.  A holiday verse is like a miniature seasonal verse — in other words, it should express the character of the holiday, how it manifests — with emphasis always upon [...]

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BLOWING LEAVES

A hokku appropriate to late autumn, by the woman Sono-jo:
A dog barking
At the sound of the leaves;
The windstorm.
It is an odd fact in hokku that the simplest are often the best, and this is a very good hokku because it has very strong sensation.  By sensation we mean that it affects the senses strongly.  In [...]

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NO DIVIDED ATTENTION

I have to confess that years of involvement with hokku have made me very leery of metaphor and simile in verse.  You will recall that metaphor is saying that one thing is another — for example when people say “We are just two ships passing in the night.”  Simile means that one thing is like [...]

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HOKKU TO MAKE YOU COLD

An old winter hokku by Sōgi, who lived long before Bashō:
In the freezing night,
The ceaseless flapping
Of duck wings.
We can easily see its form.  It is:
Setting:  In the freezing night.
Subject: duck wings
Action:  the ceaseless flapping of
In other words, we have what is common to many hokku — a setting, a subject, and an action — [...]

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THE FARTHER ONE TRAVELS THE LESS ONE KNOWS

On setting out on a journey, Bashō wrote:
Tabibito to   waga na yobaren   hatsushigure
Traveler to my      name shall-be   first-winter-rain
“Traveler”
Shall be my name;
The first rain of winter.
If that last line looks a bit long in comparison to the others, that is because Japanese translated into English does not always take up [...]

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ENTERPRISES THAT REQUIRE NEW CLOTHES

The almost frantic desire of contemporary society to drop whatever is perceived as no longer fashionable in favor of whatever is new holds no attraction for writers of hokku, who see such chronic dissatisfaction as just another manifestation of the illusion that abandoning what one has for what one does not have will make one [...]

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LEARNING THROUGH TRANSLATION PROGRAMS

I see that some people read my site in Italian, in Spanish, in Czech, Russian, and other languages by using Internet software.  I wish that I could write as fluently in all those languages as in English, but I cannot.  And Internet translation software does not often translate what I write clearly or even correctly. [...]

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THE HOKKU OF WINTER

Winter is at the door.  In some places it has already come.  So it is time to begin considering what a winter hokku should be.
Remember the Yin and Yang of the seasons, the interplay of the two universal forces.  Yang is the active force — light, warmth, movement; Yin is the passive force — darkness, [...]

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AUTUMN COMINGS AND GOINGS

Gyōdai wrote:
Aki no yama   tokorodokoro ni   kemuri tatsu Autumn’s mountains   here-there at   smoke rises
The autumn hills; Here and there Smoke rises.
It is a pleasant verse, and reminds one of Appalachia, of seeing smoke from cabins rising here and there among the gold and red leaves of autumn covering the hills.
But it [...]

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WHAT COMES FROM THE READER

There are some hokku difficult for young people to understand — difficult not because of complexity, but because one must go through certain experiences to fully appreciate them.  One of the most obvious of these is Buson’s verse:
Chichi haha no    koto nomi omou    aki no kure
Dad      Mom  ’s    matter only [...]

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FOG AND THINKING

Perhaps you remember my “Fall” hokku:
The river –
It flows out of and into
The fog.
Fog is very important to autumn hokku, and important to ink painting — one of the other contemplative arts — as well.  Fog both hides and reveals as it moves and changes.  I have always been fond of those wonderful old Chinese [...]

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DESCENDING GEESE, FALLING LEAVES

Some Japanese hokku seem to defy translation into English, even though their meaning is not difficult.  An example is Kyoroku’s:
Descending geese –
Their cries pile on one another;
The cold of night.
As one group of geese comes down from the sky, followed by yet another, their cries seem to layer one upon the other.  This piling of [...]

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LEARNING FROM OLD HOKKU

Every good hokku is simultaneously a pleasure and a lesson.  We enjoy the experience of it, but we can also learn how to write our own hokku from it.  Take this verse by Bashō:
In the original it is:
Ochikochi ni   taki no oto kiku   ochiba kana
Literally,
Far-near at   waterfall ’s sound hear   falling-leaves [...]

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WHITE DEW

Having spent enough time talking about why hokku is not the same as haiku (and why haiku is not hokku), let’s move back to the real subject — old hokku.
Buson wrote this autumn hokku:
White dew –
A drop on each thorn
Of the bramble.
It is very simple.  There are only two elements — the dew and the [...]

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SPILLING THE MOON

In the previous posting I mentioned that many of Shiki’s “haiku” would still be classifiable as hokku, though they often tend to be illustrations.  But even among his illustrations some are better, some worse.
Here is one of his verses:
An isolated house;
The moon declining
Above the grasses.
Do you see why I say that such hokku are illustrations, [...]

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WHAT DID SHIKI REALLY DO?

In previous postings I have written that the haiku did not exist until near the end of the 19th century, when it was “created” by a Japanese failed novelist, the journalist generally known today as Masaoka Shiki, or simply Shiki.  That is an historical fact, and easily verifiable by anyone willing to expend a minimum [...]

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