I have written previously about this statement by R. H. Blyth on hokku. He tells us that a hokku
“...is the result of the wish, the effort, not to speak, not to write poetry, not to obscure further the truth and suchness of a thing with words, with thoughts and feelings.”
Some people no doubt find that statement — short as it is — confusing. But that is because they mistakenly assume that Blyth does not mean what he says or say what he means. But he does.
What does it mean to wish not to speak, not to write poetry, not to obscure the truth and suchness of a thing with words, thoughts and feelings?
In this question lies one of those keys that can open up the real nature of hokku to us, if we will only use it. It is simple to explain, but one must pay attention in order to understand.
If you sit in the woods on an autumn day, with its weak, honey-colored sunlight, and the leaves of the trees slowly falling one by one, that is “truth” — that is “suchness.” It is that experience we want to convey. But if we want to write “poetry” about it, that means we want to make it into something other than what it is in itself. It means we want to “doll it up” literarily, and to do that we have to add things to it — our words, our thoughts, our feelings.
The experience as it is, is truth — is suchness — is poetry — but it is not the poetry of humans, who think they have to make things over, “soup them up,” use them as symbols or metaphors, add comments, add “thinking.” But in hokku we do not want all of that, because the real writer of hokku has precisely that urge “not to speak, not to write poetry.”
People in modern haiku, not understanding this at all, often ridicule it. They have no idea what we mean when we say that hokku is not poetry. “Of course it is!” they insist.
But really, it is not. At least it is nothing like what we are accustomed to think of as poetry, and this is where modern haiku goes horribly wrong. Instead of letting the thing itself speak through its existence, through its action, they think there must be a “poet” who interferes, who somehow stands between “truth” and the laity as a priest used to be considered the only way for people to approach a deity.
It is true that hokku uses words, but only the minimal number necessary to convey the experience while maintaining normal English. It does not obscure the experience with words, but rather uses them transparently in order to reveal it, as Boshō does here:
A chestnut falls;
The insects cease their chirping
In the grasses.
That is precisely the truth — the suchness — that we do not want to obscure with words or distort by making it into “poetry” through adding our thoughts and feelings to it. Now do you see what Blyth meant? If you do, it can open up a completely new way of writing. If you don’t, you will spend your time trying to be a “poet” who writes “poetry.”
Hokku is not writing poetry; it is simply allowing the poetry inherent in an experience to be seen. And those are two very different things.
David
HOKKU 