In the past I have talked about the four kinds of verse, which can further be reduced to two kinds:
1. The “facts” of the verse viewed subjectively.
2. The “facts” of the verse viewed objectively.
An important stage in the development of one’s understanding of hokku is the realization that these two categories apply to old hokku just as they do to other kinds of verse. So we have “subjective” hokku and we have “objective” hokku.
Because the kind of hokku I teach and prefer is “objective” hokku, we need to know and recognize the difference. We can find both kinds even within the verses of a single writer, for example in the hokku of Bashō:
There is the well-known verse:
The sea has darkened;
Cries of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.
That is, however, a hokku tainted with subjectivity. Why? Because we know that the cries of the ducks are sounds, and sounds cannot be “faintly white.” There is an exception for the very, very tiny number of people who experience synesthesia, who are able to “see” colors — but we have no evidence that Bashō or any of his readers had that ability. We must say, then, that Bashō has phrased the hokku in this way to make it obviously “poetic,” that is, to add his fantasy to it instead of just letting it be what it is.
Bashō also wrote:
Suma Temple;
Hearing the unblown flute
In the tree shade.
Bashō saw an historically-significant flute at Suma Temple, and he tells us he heard the sound of that unblown flute. Well, no, he did not. What he heard at best was a sound he imagined in his mind, leaving aside the issue of how this verse borrows from an old waka verse. What Bashō has done is to take the silent flute and to romanticize it, to add from his own fantasy to consciously make it more “poetic.”
And of course Bashō also wrote:
The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of water.
That, by contrast, is an objective verse, without the added fantasy of the writer. Now some might say, “Well, Bashō did not really see this exact event, so he did use fantasy,” and they would be right. But the distinction we want to make here is between those verses that use obvious additions from the imagination for “poetic” effect in contrast to those verses that are — or in the case of this last verse, that seem — to be entirely without the addition of fantasy from the imagination of the writer. In other words there is nothing “untrue” about the experience of seeing a frog jump into an old pond and hearing the watery “plop!” But there is something untrue in saying that the cries of wild ducks are “faintly white,” or that one hears an “unblown flute.” We know right away that neither of these things is “true” to reality, and that is the distinction we make in hokku between subjective, “”untrue” hokku supplemented from fantasy to make them seem more poetic, and objective, “true” hokku that do not say anything out of keeping with the way things are in reality.
Now note this: The truth of hokku does not mean a verse happened exactly the way the writer gives it. But the writer must not put anything in it that could not have been experienced in just the way the hokku presents it. In other words, Bashō may have seen a frog jump into water at some time, and he may have tried to come up with a fitting first line, trying different settings, such as mentioning a kind of flowering shrub. But in any case, he finally decided on “The old pond” as the appropriate setting. And the verse has a “true” effect when read.
Remember that in writing hokku, we use the principle of the old Chinese painters — that one went out into nature, looking at mountains and rivers, trees and birds, blossoms and stones, studying their character. And then one went home and composed an ink painting using the character of the elements one had seen. The painter likely did not see precisely the landscape in the final painting. But because he had studied the nature of these things, back in his studio he could combine them into paintings that have the effect of being “true.”
It is the same with hokku. We write from actual experience, but a particular hokku may combine experiences from more than one occasion, in order to express the character of a season. But what we cannot do in the kind of hokku I teach is to add fantasies from our imagination that make a hokku obviously “untrue.” For example, if I write a spring verse about apple blossoms, and throw in that I hear the whistling of Johnny Appleseed as I view them, then obviously I am adding fantasy, and am being “untrue” in hokku.
This matter of adding fantasy from the imagination to a verse, throwing over it what Wordsworth called the “coloring of the imagination,” is very important in understanding the aesthetics behind our kind of hokku — objective hokku — which carefully avoids adding such coloring of the imagination.
Why? Because our verse is contemplative hokku. We want to be faithful to Nature and to its character, so we cannot simply add fantasies to events to make them seem more romantic, more “poetic.” In our kind of hokku the poetry is not on the page, it is in the sensory experience of the verse — touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing. When one has that, one needs nothing more.
I hope readers will think carefully about this, and will look again at old hokku by different authors to see which are “true” hokku, and which are “untrue.”
David
HOKKU 