AVOID “CLEVERNESS” IN HOKKU

Many people are confused about just what hokku is because historically, it has differing levels with different qualities.

Hokku originated as the first verse of a kind of communal poetry game, so it is not suprising that there are many old hokku on a low quality level.  There is for example, the verse of Moritake:

落花枝にかへると見れば胡蝶哉 守武

Rak-ka eda ni kaeru to mireba kochō kana

A fallen flower
Returning to the branch?
Looking — a butterfly!

This is just a clever twist on an old comment by the Chinese Ch’an (Zen) teacher Baoji Xiujing, that became a Japanese folk saying:

Rakka eda ni kaerazu, hakyou futatabi terasazu
The fallen blossom doesn’t return to the branch; a broken mirror will not illuminate again.

And Sōkan wrote:

Tsuki ni e wo sashitaraba yoki uchiwa kana

If to the moon
A handle were attached —
What a good fan!

Now we may think this sort of “cleverness” in hokku went out with Bashō, but that did not at all happen.  In fact in the 1700s, Buson wrote this autumn verse:

Ichi gyō    no kari hayama ni   tsuki wo insu
One line   ‘s    wild-geese  foothills at  moon wo seal

A line of wild geese;
Above the foothills,
The moon as seal.

Ichi gyō/ichigyō（一 行）– “one line” calls to mind the vertically-written, single-line sayings — ichigyō mono –particularly Zen sayings — that were often painted on wall scrolls.

Though superior as poetry, Buson’s “line of wild geese” verse is very much like Sōkan’s verse.  Where Sōkan added a handle to the moon and made an uchiwa (a kind of roundish fan), Buson has turned a line of wild geese flying in the sky into a line of calligraphy, and has turned the moon above the foothills into a painter’s round signature seal to complete the scroll.  Both have used “cleverness” of imagination to make something in Nature into something made by humans.

Now one may find such verses interesting as a form of poetry because of their “cleverness,” but cleverness is not really a part of the best hokku.  In good hokku, geese are geese, not a line of calligraphy; the moon is the moon, not a fan or a seal on a painting.  In good hokku Nature is allowed to be what it is, undistorted by the cleverness of the writer.

Gakoku wrote (my loose translation) this spring verse:

Kasumi yori tokidoki amaru hokake-bune

Out of the mist
From time to time —
A sail appears.

In that, the mist is mist, the boat sail that appears now and then above the mist is a sail.  Each is what it is, nothing is made into or imagined to be or symbolizes something else.  Hokku at its best should not exhibit human cleverness, but rather should be a clear mirror reflecting Nature and humans as a part of Nature.

 

David

 

SOUNDS IMPLIED: BUSON’S MOUSE

One has to be really careful with the hokku of Buson, because he can often be quite contrived and artificial.  Now as you know, I favor objective hokku, and to find that in Buson one must carefully pick and choose among his verses.  You will recall that Buson was a painter as well as a writer of hokku, and often his desire to create a certain effect wins out over realism.

Today we will look at a winter hokku of Buson.

Shigururu ya   nezumi no wataru   koto no ue
Cold-rain ya   mouse   ‘s    crossing koto  ‘s on

Cold rain;
A mouse walks across
The koto.

Shigeruru  is winter rain falling, thus cold rain.  Technically, nezumi could be translated either as “mouse” or “rat,” because Japanese did not make a clear distinction, but in this case a mouse — because of its size — is more appropriate.  A koto is of course a quite long stringed instrument placed on the floor.

This hokku gives us a sense of being in an interior as cold rain falls outside.  We hear the rain, and along with it, we hear sudden, faint musical sounds as a mouse walks or scurries across the strings of the koto.

We could emphasize the sound by translating it as;

Winter rain;
A mouse creeps across
The koto.

That way we hear the mouse making “k”- “k”-“k”  sounds as he moves — formed by the “c” in creeps, in across, and the same sound in the “k” of koto.  That rendering makes the movement of the mouse across the koto rather slow.

Some of you may have seen the translation of this verse by W. S. Merwin.  He makes the hokku into a question — asking “Is it a winter shower / or a mouse running / across the koto strings?”   But that, in my view is doing damage to the verse through mistranslation, because it is not at all written as a question, and the writer is not asking a question.  Instead, the original hokku gives us the chill of the air in the room as cold rain falls in the background, and against that background, we hear the faint sound of the friction of the mouse disturbing the strings (unmentioned but implied in the original) of the koto as he passes over them.

Notice that in the original, the sound (like the strings) of the koto is not even mentioned, nor is that of the rain — but they are understood by implication.

 

David

 

THE SPIRIT OF HOKKU

The most difficult aspect of hokku to teach is also the most important — the “spirit” or “atmosphere” or “aesthetic” of hokku.

The form of hokku is very easy and can be quickly learned.  But without the right spirit, the results — even if in perfect hokku form — will not really be a hokku.

Why do so many have trouble in learning the spirit of haiku?  Part of it is cultural.  We live in a society based heavily around the ego and the satisfaction of its whims, and consequently a very material culture.  We also live in a society increasingly separated from the natural world — from Nature and the seasons.

Hokku aesthetics, by contrast, are based on a spirit of poverty and simplicity.  In  hokku, poverty does not mean having no money or resources at all.  It means a life not based on acquisition of objects nor the endless accumulation of material wealth.  To write hokku, you should learn to be “poor in spirit.”  To be “poor in spirit” means to learn the value of living simply and without the need for many possessions.    And because hokku is all about Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, it is important to re-establish our connection with the natural world and the seasons — the seasons that our double-paned windows and central heating and air conditioning carefully keep out.

The fundamental principle of hokku is transience — impermanence — the inescapable fact that everything around us and within us is constantly changing.  Nothing in the world or in the universe remains the same.  We cannot hold on to any experience or to any moment of time because time will not stand still.  And we and everything around us are not so much nouns as verbs, because all is in a state of perpetual change and transformation.

That is not just the condition of Nature;  it is also the human condition — birth, growth, old age, and death.

Hokku sees everything as a part of this cycle.  We see the changes of human life reflected in the day, from morning to noon to afternoon, evening, and night.  We see the same changes in the seasons, from spring to summer to autumn and winter.

Because we live in constant change, we also know the feeling this impermanence gives us.  It is not exactly sadness, though sometimes it can be that.  It is the feeling we get on realizing that no pleasure will last, that because of impermanence all happiness is temporary, and cannot be grasped and held.  It is the feeling we get when spring passes, the feeling we get when an old friend moves to a distant town, or perhaps suddenly dies.  Everything and everyone we “have” in life will eventually be gone — and ourselves along with them.

That leads us to the next step in hokku — the de-emphasis of the “self,” the lack of importance of the ego.  In hokku we do not generally write about ourselves, our wishes, or our desires.  Instead, hokku is a very “selfless” form of verse.  When we do mention ourselves, we do it in the same objective way we would write about a crow on a trembling branch, or snow falling into a stream.  This gives us a perspective that takes us out of the everyday ego.

In everything I have said here, we can see that hokku is just an expression of the nature of existence as it was and is expressed in Buddhism, out of which hokku grew.  Buddhism teaches the three marks of existence — in Pali, Dukkha, Anicca, and Anatta — loosely meaning unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and no permanent self.

The impermanence of all things means that existence will inevitably bring dissatisfaction.  We cannot hold on to anything that pleases us, and too often we are in contact with things or events that do not please us at all.  In addition, this “self” that is our constant obsession is just as impermanent as everything else.  It does not last.  We are not who we were as children, nor are we as we shall be in old age.  And whether one accepts the notion of rebirth or assumes consciousness ends in death, in either case the end of this life is the end of the person we think of as ourselves.  So the illusory “self” is just a process, an ongoing transformation like everything else in Nature.

When you begin to understand all of this — to see how inseparable one is from the rest of the ever-changing universe — one begins to get the spirit that is behind hokku.  Then one sees it is not just another form of poetry.  It is a kind of seeing into the nature of existence.  Hokku shows us the depth behind the most ordinary things and events.

Buson wrote:

Bags of seeds
Getting soaked;
Spring rain.

That simple verse is like an explosion of the growing Yang energy of spring, because all of those seeds — each one containing a minute life force — will begin to sprout with the warmth and wetness of spring.  In that verse we see the nature of spring — its character of fresh beginning of activity, of growth, of vitality — of change.   Note that all of that is not explained in the verse, which gives us only the essentials to light the fuse of feeling.  A hokku is the raw material of experience, and when we read it, that experience “explodes” into being within us.

 

David

 

FIRE AND ICE: HARMONY OF CONTRAST

In hokku, as said many times here, one looks for a harmony of the elements included.  But the technique used to create it varies.  Two main types are:

1.  Harmony of Similarity:
We find this in Chiyo-ni’s excellent verse that lets us feel the desolation and silence of winter:

In field and mountain
Nothing moves;
The snowy morning.

The snow, the stillness — both express the deep Yin (cold and inactivity here) of the season.

2.  Harmony of contrast:
There is a verse by Issa that gives us the contrast between extreme cold (Yin) and extreme heat (Yang):

Scattering out
On the morning frost —
The blacksmith’s sparks.

The frost and the sparks are quite opposite, yet when joined in this winter verse they form a harmonious unity — fire and ice.  The blacksmith in the original is a nokaji (野鍛冶 ) — literally a “field” blacksmith — but the term means one who makes agricultural tools like scythes and hoes, etc.  That is too specific to convey in an English language hokku, and it is not really necessary to be so specific in translation.  We get the essential meaning of the verse as it stands in English.

There is a hokku by Buson from the opposite season — summer — that shows us a similar contrast of Yin and Yang, yet it has quite a different feeling because of the seasonal difference:

Clear water;
The stonemason
Cools his chisel in it.

The metal chisel becomes hot from the friction of cutting stone, so the mason places it in the flowing water to cool it.

The hokku of summer and those of winter have this in common — that those using harmony of contrast correctly often give a strong sensory impression, which in hokku is good.  It is a common effect that we all easily recognize, like coming in out of winter’s finger-numbing frost to a hot bowl of soup.

David

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SMALL THINGS

One of the first problems a new student of hokku encounters is the selection of material, and this question arises: What subject is worth making into a hokku?

The answer is that to make a hokku interesting, one must pick an interesting experience. But how do you recognize one? As the old saying goes, “That which interests is interesting.” If an experience does not interest you, does not catch your attention, it is unlikely to interest anyone else. But keep in mind that hokku is generally interested in small events that seem to have a significance we cannot quite put into words, and should not try.

What then makes an interesting experience in hokku? We can find out by looking at some good examples.

Buson wrote:

(Spring)

Bags of seeds
Getting soaked;
Spring rain.

Why is that interesting? Because of the relationship between seeds and water and spring. Not only do we see and feel and hear the spring rain when we read it, be we also feel a kind of hidden energy in it, because we know the rain soaking into the bags of seeds will make them sprout. And sprouting seeds really make us feel the spring. We can almost sense the power in the seeds, ready to burst out in sprouts.

To make such a hokku, someone had to notice — had to pay attention to — the rain falling on the bags of seeds. A great part of writing hokku is simply paying attention to things that most people do not bother to notice because they think them of no importance. But hokku are all about such “unimportant” things that are nonetheless felt to have significance if one only pays attention.

I have written before that it is not seeing what others see that makes a poet, but rather seeing the significance in what others see but think of no importance.  That is certainly true of a good hokku writer. If you do not notice and feel the significance in small things, it will be difficult for you to write hokku.

That principle applies even to Shiki, the fellow who, near the end of the 19th century, decided to call his hokku “haiku,” which later became the cause of much confusion. Here is what Shiki saw:

(Spring)

Turning to look
At the man who passed —
Only mist.

The interest here is in the quick feeling of surprise and puzzlement. The man was there just a moment ago, but now only mist is seen. This sense of someone disappearing into mist is felt to be somehow significant. If we try to explain why it feels significant, we lose the poetry. So in hokku we only present the experience, so that the reader may sense that odd feeling of significance in such a small event as well.

In both hokku we have looked at, there is the sense of seeing something in a different way, a way that feels new to us, a different perspective. In Buson’s verse, instead of stacks of dry seed bags, we see them in the rain, getting wet. In Shiki’s verse, instead of turning around to look at a person who passed and seeing him, we see only mist. It is such little differences of perspective, of things slightly out of the ordinary, that make us see the world in a fresh way. And it makes for fresh and interesting hokku as well. So when choosing a subject, look for things seen in a different way, from a different perspective.

Rofu wrote:

(Spring)

Ebb tide;
The crab is suspicious
Of the footprint.

There are lots of things to see on a beach at ebb tide. Most are rather ordinary. But then we see a crab scuttling along the wet sand, and suddenly pausing at the impression someone’s foot has left. In that pause we feel the crab’s hesitation and uncertainty, his suspicion of this out-of-the-ordinary depression in the sand.  Rofu has selected this out of everything else on the beach because it enables us to see the crab in a different way, from a different perspective — and we also see the footprint in a different way, from a “crab’s eye” view.

Ryōto wrote:

(Spring)

Someone passing
Over the bridge;
The frogs go quiet.

Here the writer has again been paying attention to something that seems very unimportant on the surface, but nonetheless is felt to have unspoken significance. I have put it into the present tense because I like it that way; it seems more immediate and present.

Shiki wrote a similar verse:

(Spring)

Stepping onto the bridge,
The fish sink from sight;
The water of spring.

So the subjects appropriate for hokku are in general just ordinary things, written down in ordinary language. But they are ordinary things that when seen from a new or different or unusual perspective, give us a sense of unspoken significance.

Wakyu wrote:

(Spring)

At the sound
Of one jumping,
All the frogs jump in.

As an event in our modern, busy world, it does seem like much; but we feel the nature of frogs and their green and watery world in it. Hokku is often about the little things that, as Blyth says, we knew, but did not know we knew until we read the verse.

We could call hokku the verse form for people who pay attention.

WITHERED LOTUSES: A WINTER HOKKU BY BUSON

Today it is grey and cold and raining where I am, so this slight variation on a winter hokku by Buson seems appropriate.  I can omit the seasonal heading because it is in the verse itself:

Lotuses withered,
The pond is bleak;
Winter rain.

The original is:

Hasu karete ike asamashiki shigure kana

Lotus withered pond miserable winter-rain kana

You may recall that kana was largely a kind of filler word used to pad out the 17 sound units customary in old hokku.  With punctuation and the greater freedom of English language hokku, we no longer need such padding.

 

David

 

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE DOG SLEEPING?

I have mentioned before that in old Japanese hokku there is a term for staying shut up indoors during cold winter days.  It is fuyugomori, which R. H. Blyth translates as “winter seclusion.”  Yet Westerners may fail to grasp what is meant by that translation unless already familiar with hokku.  So it is rather an “in” term.

Some hokku that are interesting in Japanese are a challenge to try to fit into the English language.  There is, for example, this verse about winter seclusion by Buson.  Here is the original transliterated, and with a rather literal translation:

To ni inu no negaeru oto ya fuyugomori

Door at dog ‘s turning-over sound; winter-seclusion

The tricky thing is that the Japanese verb implies the dog is turning over while sleeping.  So if we just say what is happening in this hokku, we get something rather awkward:

At the door,
The sound of the sleeping dog turning over;
Winter seclusion.

Now obviously the second line is excessively long for hokku in English.  What can be done?  Well, we have to take the hokku completely out of the Japanese form and make it thoroughly English, and we could even using a rather informal expression for “seclusion,” like this:

Turning in sleep,
The dog bangs the door;
Holed up in winter.

That way we give the sound instead of actually using the word “sound.”

Or if we prefer the traditional translation of fuyugomori — which one familiar with hokku understands, we can just present the verse as

Turning in sleep,
The dog bangs the door;
Winter seclusion.

That actually has a bit better rhythm.

The verse — whether in Japanese or English — is effective in giving us the sense of the boring, drowsy, long passage of time indoors in the cold of winter (minus the noise of television, of course).  The monotonous silence is suddenly broken by the banging of the sleeping dog against the door as he rolls over.

It is little moments like this — little events that express the nature of the season — that hokku delights in.  And this emphasis on such little but expressive things is what makes hokku so very different from other verse forms, as does its focus on Nature and the seasons.

 

David

 

HEAPS OF TIME

Tomorrow evening is Halloween — Samhain in the old agricultural calendar.  It is a very ancient holiday.  Traditionally, it is the beginning of winter, and the time when the spirits of the Dead return.  So it reminds us of all that is withering in Nature, and of our own mortality.

Buson wrote a hokku very much in keeping with this time of year.  You will recall that in traditional Japanese hokku, fallen leaves relate to winter, and winter corresponds to the latter part of old age and to death:

(Winter)

Heaped up
Around the old man’s shack — 
Fallen leaves.

The very old man is in keeping with winter, as are the fallen leaves piled up around his dwelling.  Being so old, he does nothing to sweep them away, and in the leaves that have fallen on one another, we feel the accumulation of the many years of the old man’s life.

Where I have “old man,” the original has “long-life [person]”

 

David

 

 

MEETING THE GOD: BUSON’S SUMMER GROVE

There is a hokku by Buson that may easily be misunderstood.  R. H. Blyth presents it as

(Summer)

Not a leaf stirring:
How awesome
The summer grove!

The problem is the word rendered as “awesome.” We might think it means “very pleasant” or something similar. But using “awesome” in that sense is very recent in English. Buson’s term osoroshiki, which has the underlying sense of “fear-inspiring” — is much like the older usage of “awesome,” which similarly included an undertone of fear and dread.

The vast grove of old trees, completely still and silent on a summer’s day, with not one leaf moving, was experienced as overwhelming and intimidating.

That may initially seem odd, but it makes sense to me because of an experience I had when I was a very young boy.

In those days, my best friend and I liked to go hiking and roaming all over the rural countryside.  One day we went beyond our usual territory, and came to the edge of an old forest.  In retrospect, it was likely the first untouched old-growth forest I had ever seen.

We left the sunny field that bordered it, and entered the wood.  At once everything changed.  We were surrounded by huge trees whose tops we could not see, and haphazardly lying among them were massive fallen and decaying logs.  Everything — ground and fallen trees — was covered in a thick layer of soft, green moss several inches deep, and the light of the wood about us was a shadowy green.

We had gone some distance into this ancient, silent and still wood when we stopped and looked all around.  Then suddenly, inexplicably, we were both seized with panic, and hurriedly turned and rushed out of the forest as quickly as we could, back into the sunlight.  We never returned there again.

If you had asked either of us what in that ancient wood had filled us with sudden dread, I doubt we could have answered.  It was only later that I learned our fear was nothing new, that the ancient Greeks had felt it too.

Their explanation was Pan, the god of forests and shepherds.  They said that if a wanderer were suddenly to stumble across Pan, the embodiment of everything wild and natural, the god would fill him with an immediate, irrational, overwhelming fear —panic — a word derived from the god’s name.  It seems my friend and I, coming upon that untouched primeval forest for the first time, were so struck by its sense of otherness — of tremendous wildness — that we too were overwhelmed with panic.

As for the hokku itself, I don’t think it works very well because it is so easy to misunderstand.  One would have to experience it, as I did, to “get” it.  So it does not make a good model for writing in English, and I include it here only because it helps to show both the difficulty in translating some hokku and the role experience plays in reading them.

 

David

 

HOT THINGS: THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

I often emphasize the importance, in writing hokku, of seeing something in a new way.  It is not that we constantly have to look for quite new subjects; it is just that when we see an ordinary thing in a new way, we perceive it differently; we have what Blyth used to call a “little enlightenment.”  We suddenly realize that the experience is telling us something we already knew, but did not know that we knew, until it was shown to us in a different way.

The seasonal context of a thing changes it.  We experience the same thing differently in different seasons.  Here is a good example, a “little enlightenment” of Buson:

(Summer)

Spider webs
Are hot things!
The summer grove.

Ordinarily we think of such webs as light and airy, open to the wind.  But in the heat of summer, entering and walking through a dry and windless grove of trees, we feel spider webs sticking to our face and hands, and suddenly we realize

Spider webs
Are hot things!

Like the verses in the two preceding postings, the bothersomeness of the spider webs on our skin in the windless grove only magnifies the heat.  One uncomfortable thing added to another uncomfortable thing makes both worse, with each bringing out the nature of the other.  And in doing so, they help to give the verse unity; the parts all work together as one experience, which in hokku is very good.

Suddenly realizing that spider webs are “hot things” is seeing something ordinary in a new way.  That is an opportunity we should use in writing.  Of course without the context of summer and heat, it would not be so.  In a different season and context, the nature of the spider webs — how we experience them — would also be different.

 

David

 

 

 

SPRING CONTRAST, SPRING SIMILARITY

Here is a variation on a hokku by Buson:

The heavy doors
Of a temple gate close;
The spring evening.

What is behind appreciation of this verse?

First, it is set in the season of spring, which is a time of new beginnings, freshness, and growth. But in contrast to this, we see the heavy, old wooden doors of a temple creaking shut. The weight of the doors is in contrast to the physical lightness of spring. The age of the doors, which being temple doors means they are quite old, is also in contrast with the newness of spring. Further, the time of the hokku is evening, when light (Yang) gradually gives way to darkness (Yin).

Now we know that spring, in the cycle of Yin and Yang, is increasing Yang. Evening, on the other hand, is increasing Yin. The weight of the doors is a downward, passive pressure, another Yin impression.

Obviously this verse uses harmony of contrast, a common hokku technique. The point of the verse is the combination of spring, the time of beginnings, with the closing of the great doors and the coming of evening, both “ending” events. So in this one brief verse we have Yin contrasted with Yang, beginnings contrasted with endings, and that is what gives the verse its effect.

In it we feel that even in the freshness of spring, there is already the sense of impermanence and things aging and ending.

That is how to understand hokku. A hokku, you will recall, expresses a season through an event happening in that season. And in this hokku we feel the sense of transience that is so essential a part of both life and of hokku.

Here is another variation on the same verse:

The heavy doors
Of the temple gate close;
Spring is ending.

In spite of the setting still being spring, the effect now is predominantly a harmony of similarity: the closing of the great doors (at the end of the day), and the ending of spring. Now the weight of the great doors reflects our feelings of reluctance, our sense of time’s inexorable passing, at the departing of spring.

All of that in three short lines, eleven words, fourteen syllables.

We could rephrase the second variation, like this:

Spring ending;
The heavy doors
Of the temple gate close.

That way it flows a bit more smoothly.

David

YIN AMID YANG: BUSON’S MISTY GRASSES

Here is a spring hokku by Buson. Whenever I read it, it reminds me of 19th-century American paintings of the rural countryside as it was in those quieter, greener days:

The grasses are misty,
The water silent;
Evening …

It gives a very good impression of the stillness of evening.

Though this is a spring hokku, it uses the hokku technique of “harmony of contrast,” because while spring is a time of increasing Yang energy (active, growing, warm), evening by contrast is an increasing Yin time of day (passive, receding, cool). Such a hokku expresses that even in the time of year when Yang is growing, Yin is nonetheless present, giving us a subtle feeling of aging, of transience amid the freshness, warmth, and new growth of spring. The mist, the water, and the silence are all Yin, as is the fading of the light of day. That predominance of Yin elements amid the growing Yang of spring is what makes this hokku effective in its very quiet way.

I always like to remind everyone that no knowledge of Japanese is needed to write hokku in English. I only add the Japanese version here because I have one particular faithful reader who always writes me a note if I do not include it.

The word translated here as “grasses” is kusa, which is somewhat more inclusive and general than the Engish, comprising not only grass but also other short plants below the level of shrubs. Higure is the time of sunset, of twilight.

Here is the transliterated Japanese with a literal translation:

Kusa kasumi mizu ni koe naki higure kana
Grasses mist water at voice is-not evening kana

David

WINTER ISOLATION: THE HOKKU OF MONOTONY

Fuyugomori.

It is a Japanese word, one of the fixed expressions used in old hokku to indicate the season. As most of you know (I hope), old Japanese hokku used “season words” to indicate the season in which a hokku was written and to be read. Of course now we just head each hokku with the appropriate season to do this, but old hokku was more complicated in that respect.

Fuyugomori is derived from two elements. The first is the borrowed Chinese character read here as fuyu (冬) –“winter.” The second comes from the verb komoru (籠る), combining a Chinese character with the Japanese phonetic element -ru (る); in its noun form it becomes komori (籠り), which in the combination changes its initial “k” sound to “g.” Together they mean to “shut one’s self up,” to “seclude one’s self,” in winter. It is the isolation that comes when outside there is too much cold rain or freezing weather or snow, and all one can do is to wait it out patiently — hour after hour, day after day — indoors. That is the way life used to be. As Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins wrote in his winter poem,

when pools are black and trees are bare,
’tis evil in the Wild to fare.

A term used in America for this kind of seclusion is “holing up.” One “holes up” on freezing winter days, trying one’s best to keep warm, as an animal hibernates in its burrow.

Being stuck indoors meant that the subject matter for hokku was very limited, only what was inside the dwelling or what outside was visible from it, so most “winter seclusion” verses reflect the monotony of the circumstances. That is why many “winter seclusion” hokku turn, of necessity, from outer things to the silent “innerscape” of the mind. We should note that in doing this, hokku keep the same kind of objectivity as in outward-turning hokku, the same kind of selflessness.

Buson, for example, wrote:

Winter seclusion;
In the innermost mind,
The hills of Yoshino.

Fuyugomori kokoro no oku no yoshinoyama

Even in hokku dealing with close-by outward things there is the same objective stillness, as in this hokku by Yaha;

The lamp flame,
Unmoving and round;
Winter seclusion.

Tomoshibi mo ugokade marushi fuyugomori

It is all too easy, as one can imagine, for “winter seclusion” hokku to turn trite and dull, but the best of them express the nature of both the long isolation indoors and through it of the season.

Here is a slight variation on a hokku by Issa, changed to make it more immediate:

Winter seclusion;
Listening all night long
To mountain rain.

David

COMMENTS:

TranslationCraft writes:

One of my favorite books is Howard Rheingold’s “They Have a Word for It,” a lexicon of pithy foreign terms that express notions English speakers may experience but for which they lack precise words. I nominate “fuyugomori” for the revised version of his book, if and when it is ever updated.
Fuyugomori — what a precious word! Your explanation and hokku examples have brought home to me, perhaps more forcefully than ever before, how season-bound our experience of reading each hokku is. I could never sense the full weight of the fuyugomori hokku you offer if I were to read them in summer, just like I find it impossible to shop for winter clothing during pre-season discount sales. But reading them now, with your gentle guidance, in front of my double-paned window looking out over a snow-covered brook, resonates so deeply within that I can feel something physical shift inside, some kind of release or “ah-ha!” that lets me breathe a bit deeper.
I think I’m finally getting it….
As always, thank you for your generosity in sharing your insights with us.

AUTUMN: RETURNING TO THE ROOT

The autumn equinox has passed. That means the days are growing shorter, the nights longer.

In my recent discussion of the hokku Wheel of the Year, I emphasized how very important the seasons are to hokku. It is a new concept for many people — writing in keeping with the seasons — but it is nonetheless a very old practice.

Hokku, you will recall, are about Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, set in the changing seasons. In autumn, autumn hokku are written. To do that, one has to understand the character of autumn — what it is like, and how it manifests in Nature.

As are all seasons, autumn is a stage in the interplay of the two forces, Yin and Yang. In autumn Yang is decreasing and Yin increasing, and that is particularly obvious after the autumn equinox has passed. Withering and dying are Yin, and in autumn we see plants and leaves begin to wither and die. Cold is Yin, and in autumn we feel the air growing ever cooler as the sun declines lower and lower in its arc across the sky. Darkness is Yin, and in autumn darkness (night) grows while light (the day) wanes. Things that retreat or fall are Yin, and in autumn the sap retreats from twigs and branches in trees and leaves begin to fall; in annual plants the energy has gone into the seeds, and in many perennial plants the life energy leaves the withering, visible part of the plant and retreats to the root.

So in autumn, the general feeling is of withdrawal, of “returning to the root.” It is a preparation for the quiet and chilly days of winter, the beginning of a natural turning inward.

It may interest you, in this regard, to know the basics of the traditional Five Elements associated with seasonal change. Summer was a “fire” season, as you might guess from its very Yang character. As Yang began to weaken in late summer, the element changed to earth. Now that autumn is here, the predominant element is metal. And when winter comes, the element will be water, to be followed in spring by the wood element. These are significant because all relate to processes in the human body and its cycles of energy. For example, now is a good time to begin adding lots of “black” foods to your diet. Why? Because foods black in color relate to and strengthen the “water” element in your body, and after the “metal” season of autumn comes the “water” season of winter, so eating black foods now helps you to prepare your system for winter; that is good for your kidneys and your basic energy, which are also “water” element-related. There is much more to say about this and the relationship between the seasons and health, but this aspect is not so important to writing hokku, except in so far as it helps to keep you even more attuned to the seasons and their changes. So I will not talk more about it now, but encourage those interested to learn at least the simple basics of the traditional Five Elements Theory. You will find many web sites that give charts showing the interrelationships of the seasons, the five elements, appropriate helpful seasonal foods, and the cycle of the body.

Of course hokku written in autumn should be in keeping with and expressing the character of the season. Buson wrote this autumn hokku:

Going out the gate,
I too become a traveller;
The autumn evening.

Autumn is often thought of as a time of travel, of migration. That is because it is the time when migratory birds take the long journey to where they will spend the winter, and animals move from their summer haunts to places where they will winter. So that feeling of “changing homes,” of being a rootless traveller, is very in keeping with the atmosphere of autumn. So Buson says that just by walking out his gate in autumn, he too becomes a part of this feeling of “migration,” and now you understand better why this is a hokku appropriate to the season.

It is appropriate too that the hokku is set in the evening, when the light is waning and darkness coming on, because of course increasing darkness is increasing Yin, and autumn itself is a time of increasing Yin. So this verse uses two things associated with autumn — travel and the waning of the day. You will recall that in hokku correspondences, Autumn relates to the time from late afternoon to early evening, and in human life to the time past middle age through the onset of old age. So we can see that Buson’s verse uses “harmony of similarity,” the putting together in a hokku of things that reflect one another by having a similar character. In this verse both travel and the coming of evening relate to autumn.

To get a better grasp of this relationship between hokku and the seasons, you might wish to again visit the recent posting on the Hokku Wheel of the Year, which you will find here:

https://hokku.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/a-review-of-hokku-basics-the-wheel-of-the-year-and-its-significance/

David

BUSON’S BARE MOUNTAIN: A SUMMER HOKKU

Buson wrote an effective hokku that, like many good summer hokku, deals with the heat of the season:

higaeri no hageyama koyuru atsusa kana
Day-trip ‘s bald-mountain crossing heat kana

A day’s journey
Across a bare mountain;
The heat!

The elements of the verse go together well.

We could be a bit looser with the translation, like this:

A day’s journey
Over a treeless mountain —
The heat!

We feel the weariness of the traveller and his discomfort in that high place with no shelter from the hot summer sun.

David

SEASON WORDS? BE THANKFUL FOR MODERN HOKKU!

To the large numbers of  Westerners who began to read old hokku (usually misnamed “haiku”) in one or another English translation in the middle of the 20th century, it all looked so simple and quick.  All one had to do was to write a fast little poem in three lines, most likely in 17 syllables.  Of course that was a complete misunderstanding of the hokku that led to the creation of modern haiku, which tended to jettison completely any seasonal connection.

Modern hokku, however, saw the essential connection between hokku and the seasons in the old tradition, and kept it by simplifying it to remove the needless complexity and frequent artificiality of the overgrown “season word” system.

Ryôta (1718-1787) wrote this early autumn hokku:

Ie-ie ni   asagao sakeru   hazuki kana
house-house at morning-glory blooms leaf-month kana

At every house
A morning glory blooms;
The month of leaves.

The “month of leaves” was August.

There is a very similar verse by Buson (1716-1783)

Mura hyak-ko　kiku naki kado mo　mienu kana
Village hundred-houses chrysanthemum is-not gate also not-seen kana

A hundred-house village;
Not a gate to be seen
Without chrysanthemums.

The point of each verse is the popularity, in village life, of flowers that express and manifest the season.

In old hokku, both asagao (morning glory) and kiku (chrysanthemum) were words that indicated the season of autumn when used within a verse.  Today, of course, we follow the simplified hokku method of just categorizing each verse by season.  Otherwise we would be stuck, as modern Japanese “haiku” writers are (at least those who maintain a seasonal connection — most American haiku writers do not), with a list of some five thousand or more season words to deal with, not to mention seasonal attributions often far more artificial than the more natural connection of morning glories and chrysanthemums with autumn.

The result is that Ryôta’s hokku, if written today as a modern hokku, would appear like this:

(Autumn)

At every house
A morning glory blooms;
The month of leaves.

That way, no one writing hokku now needs to memorize long lists of season words or to go through the needless complexities that such a system creates for both reader and writer.

Of course, being Westerners, we would no longer say “month of leaves.”  Instead, we might come up with something like this:

(Autumn)

At every house
A morning glory blooms;
Autumn begins.

 

David

 

 

DISGUISED AT TWILIGHT: BUSON AND THE TANUKI

TANUKI IMAGES
(Photo credit Wikipedia)

Ordinarily, I do not dwell much on specifically Japanese cultural aspects of the hokku, because my primary purpose in talking about hokku here is to teach how to write good new hokku in English, and in a non-Japanese environment.  But it might be interesting for readers to see some of the problems inherent in translating old Japanese hokku, particular those with cultural elements that may be unfamiliar to people in other countries.

Buson, in addition to a few good hokku and a number of mediocre hokku, also wrote some rather peculiar fanciful hokku based on Japanese folklore.  If one does not know anything about that subject, it is very easy to misunderstand or misinterpret these verses.

There is, for example, this one:

Aki no kure hotoke ni bakeru tanuki kana
Autumn ‘s nightfall Buddha into changed tanuki kana

We could translate it as:

The autumn evening;
It has turned into a Buddha —
The tanuki.

Most translators usually render tanuki as “badger,” but the tanuki is not really a badger.  It is actually an odd member of the dog family (Canidae).  An English term sometimes used for it is  “raccoon dog,” but that is a bit long, though the tanuki really does look somewhat like a cross between a raccoon and a dog.  My personal opinion is that when one is translating hokku about tanuki, it is likely best to just use the Japanese term, because chances are one is going to have to explain the hokku anyway, as I am about to do here.

Now if you looked at the translation I gave above, you are likely still wondering what the hokku means.  Is Buson saying the tanuki has become a Buddha, like in some old Zen story?  Or does it mean something else?

It might help a bit to tell you that in Japanese folklore, there are two animals noted for being able to change their form, to “shapeshift,” to take on the appearance of something completely different.  The first shapeshifting animal is the fox, but even better at shapeshifting than the fox is the tanuki.  So when Buson says the tanuki has “turned into a Buddha,” does he really mean that it has transformed itself — shapeshifted — into the appearance of an image of the Buddha?  Hotoke in Japanese means “Buddha,” but its secondary meaning is “Buddha image.”

Before we decide, I would like to give a slightly different translation, now that you know what a tanuki is and does in folklore:

The autumn evening;
It has transformed into a Buddha! —
The tanuki.

By “Buddha,” in this case, Buson would have meant a Buddha image.

In the Japanese version given at the beginning of this posting, I loosely translated  bakeru as “changed,” but it really means to transform one’s appearance, to change one’s form, even to disguise one’s self.

Knowing that, we could try a third translation:

The autumn evening;
Disguised as a Buddha —
A tanuki!

I think I like that one best of all, so far.

Now what inspired this odd hokku?  We might keep in mind that stone or pottery images of tanuki standing on their hind legs, from about one to three feet in height, were (and are) quite popular in Japan, and were often to be found outdoors, including in gardens and near temple sites.

We might then think that Buson was in such a place as the evening darkness was coming on, and that as he walked in the growing shadows, he saw a dark image that he thought at first to be an image of a Buddha, but on getting closer, he was amused to see that it was actually just a tanuki image.

Conversely, we could suppose that Buson perhaps saw the dark shape of a standing Buddha image outdoors near dusk, and fancifully imagined that a tanuki was trying to fool him by taking on that form.

Either interpretation is possible.  Of course it is also very possible that Buson just created the whole scene in his mind for the fun of it, for the effect.  He rather liked to create what he thought were “artistic” verses out of his imagination.

Fact is, however, that Buson left a story connected with this particular hokku.  He tells how he was spending a night on his own at a large, shrub-surrounded house in town, and had just pulled the quilt over himself and gone to sleep when there was a frightful banging and pounding that went on repeatedly.  Buson got up and toddled to the door, but no one and nothing was there.

He had barely gotten back to his bed when the pounding began again.  So once more he got up and checked the door, and once more no one was there.

At this point Buson was so unnerved that he found the caretaker of the place, who told him it was a tanuki, and that if the noise began again, Buson should quickly open the door and chase the tanuki, while the caretaker would be waiting in the shrubs.  But when the noise began again and Buson hurriedly opened the door and the caretaker ran out  from the shrubs, not even a shadow was to be seen.

Now the bothersome thing is that this pounding went on for five nights.  Buson, with bloodshot and bleary-eyes from lack of sleep, had just decided that enough was enough and he and was going to leave the place when a servant of the owner of the house appeared and reported that an old tanuki had been killed in Yabushita village — and that it was probably the one who had been making all the night noise.

And indeed there was no more pounding and banging that night.  But Buson began to think of the unfortunate tanuki that had come to him for five nights, and began to feel compassion for him.  So he called a priest named Zenkubo and paid him to perform a ritual so that the spirit of the tanuki might have peace.

Then, after giving this little story of his experience, Buson presents the hokku we have been discussing.

Knowing this additional information, should we decide that our very first thought that the tanuki might have become a Buddha in some religious or Zen sense was correct? In that case, we could just translate it as:

The autumn evening;
It has become a Buddha —
The tanuki.

Of course the notion that just a ritual could make a tanuki into a Buddha is unrealistic, so perhaps what Buson really intended was a kind of hyperbolic euphemism in which “become a Buddha” really meant “has died.”

Now do you see how tricky translating unclear hokku can be?  A hokku should never require a “backstory” to be understood.  And we should never have to sit and ponder to figure out the meaning of a hokku.  We should be able to grasp it immediately.  That is why, as hokku, Buson’s verse is lacking.  Even knowing all that we know at this point about the tanuki in folklore and about Buson’s experience of pounding in the night, we still are not quite certain what he intended with this verse.

In any case, now you know several possibilities for what the hokku means, and also what a tanuki is.  But the most important things you should take away from this discussion are:

1.  Never write a hokku that requires additional information to be understood.
2.  Never write a hokku that cannot be quickly grasped by the reader.

Given that we cannot determine for certain what Buson meant by this verse, we can safely move on to a more important question:  Which of the possible translations we have seen makes the best hokku?

That is easy.  It would be one based on the notion that Buson either saw a tanuki statue and mistook it for a Buddha image in the twilight, or he saw a Buddha image and imagined that a shapeshifting tanuki had taken on that form to trick him.

So my favorite, with one small change, is still:

The autumn evening;
Disguised as a Buddha image —
A tanuki!

It is a playful verse, nothing serious, but to understand it, a reader would still have to know that in Japanese folklore a tanuki is a notorious shapeshifter.

If for some reason you have been intrigued by the tanuki and want to know more, here is a link to a very useful page explaining the evolution of its folklore and representation in Japan over time:

http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/tanuki.shtml

David

OLD POND, OLD WELL

As most of you know, Bashō wrote this spring hokku, which R. H. Blyth translated as:

The old pond;
A frog jumps in, —
The sound of the water.

Buson wrote a summer hokku, which Blyth rendered thus:

In the old well,
A fish leaps up at a gnat:
The sound of the water is dark.

What is not obvious from these translations is that both Bashō and Buson used a similar beginning in the original:

Furu ike ya = The old pond;

Furu ido ya = The old well;

Also, both used a verb meaning “leap/jump” — tobu — though Bashō used it in the form tobi.

In addition, both used the sound of something:

Mizu no oto = the sound of water (literally “water’s sound”)
Uo no oto – the sound of a fish (literally “fish’s sound”)

We can better see these similarities in English if we translate more literally than Blyth.  Here is Bashō:

The old pond;
A frog jumps in — 
The sound of water.

And here is Buson:

The old well;
The sound of a fish leaping at a gnat
Is dark.

It is not hard to see that the middle line of Buson is awkwardly long in English.  But interestingly, if we take away his added “dark,” we are left with a hokku remarkably like that of Bashō, even though we are forced to move the “leap/jump” to the last line to avoid  syntactical problems in English:

The old well;
The sound of a fish
Leaping at a gnat.

That in itself, without Buson’s added comment that the sound is “dark,” works quite well as a hokku.  And it also shows beginning students how interesting variations on the same form are easily possible, and can have quite a different effect depending on the elements one uses.

Buson’s hokku was possible in Japanese, because “hokku” Japanese (not the same as modern Japanese) was very telegraphic, and much could be crammed into seventeen phonetic units:

Furu ido ya  ka ni tobu   uo no oto kurashi
Old pond ;    gnat at leap fish ‘s sound dark

Bashō’s hokku was:

Furu ike ya   kawazu tobi-komu   mizu no oto
Old pond ;   frog       jump-in         water ‘s sound

If Buson had followed Bashō’s form more strictly, he would have had:

Furu ido ya   ka ni tobu   uo no oto
Old well ;    gnat at leap  fish’s sound

That makes only fourteen phonetic units in Japanese, whereas the standard for old Japanese hokku was seventeen; so Buson filled up the missing units by adding the word kurashi — “dark” — which really is superfluous.  A reader educated in hokku will intuit the darkness of the well (and consequently of the sound) without the addition.

What this demonstrates is one reason why, in modern hokku, we do not have a rigidly fixed number of syllables that must be included in a verse.  We just keep the verse brief and simple, and that matter takes care of itself.

If anyone wonders what happened to the word ya in the last two literal English translations, it is represented by the semicolon, which gives us the same effect of a meaningful pause, and thus serves the same function of separating the longer and shorter parts of these hokku.

If I were to render Buson’s full verse into English, it would be like this:

An old well;
The dark sound of a fish
Leaping at a gnat.

The Japanese word translated “gnat” here — ka — is actually the word for “mosquito.”  But not only would those three syllables really complicate keeping a translation of this verse short, but also, in common usage, “gnat” and “mosquito” in England and America are virtual synonyms.  That is why both Blyth and I have chosen to use “gnat” here.

Of course no one needs to know old Japanese in order to write hokku in English.  One only needs to know the principles and techniques of hokku.  I just include the Japanese here to show how structure and language affect composition.

I should also add that using the preposition “in” as Blyth did in his Buson translation beginning “In the old well” is not really necessary in modern English language hokku.  Because of the principle of unity in hokku, an educated reader will automatically know that the fish leaping at a gnat is IN the old well.  That enables us to use the original beginning quite literally, with “The old well” or “An old well” as both the first line and the setting of the verse.

David

THE IMPORTANCE OF HERON LEGS: GRASPING THE ESSENCE OF AN EVENT

Buson wrote a pleasant summer hokku:

An evening breeze;
The water laps against
The heron’s legs.

R. H. Blyth made a very pertinent comment on this verse, a remark precisely in keeping the principles of modern hokku:

“Buson’s intuitions are strong and clear and quick enough to avoid the colouring of his mind by emotion, or its distortion by intellection.”

Blyth is, of course, talking about just what we practice in modern hokku. We write our verses without any “coloring of the mind” — without using them as symbols or metaphors or allegories — presenting them in all their simplicity and purity. And we present them without “thinking” added, which Blyth here terms intellection. That means we do not use hokku to preach, or to advocate political or social change, nor do we use them to make some abstract point.

Of course there will be people who will say, “This is not poetry! It is just an event with nothing added!”

Precisely. That event with nothing added is the point. If you take pleasure in it without all the obvious frills of poetry, without the clever additions of a “poet,” then it is likely you have the kind of mind that appreciates hokku for what it is.

I always say we should not think of hokku as poetry, because if we do, we automatically haul in all the baggage one has grown up associating with poetry in the West. But hokku is nothing like the bulk of Western poetry. In hokku the poetry lies in the event itself, not in anything a poet may say about it.  That is why the writer of hokku must be quick in grasping only that essential event, before the mind begins to add all kinds of thoughts about it, before it begins to decorate it with mental ornaments.

It is always helpful to ask why a particular hokku is effective.  In this one, not only do we have the absence of the coloring of the imagination and the absence of “thinking,” we also have a very straightforward harmony of similarity.  It lies in the movement of the evening breeze combined with the movement of the water lapping against the heron’s legs.  That is all we need when these two elements are united by the heron, who stands in them both.

David

THE LONG DAYS OF SPRING: BUSON AND SHIKI

 There are some hokku that do not seem quite right but nonetheless have value for what they are.

There is, for example, this spring verse by Buson:

Osoki hi no   tsumorite tōki   mukashi kana
Long day ‘s accumulating far   past         kana

The long days
Accumulate;
The distant past.

The point of the verse is this:

In spring one notices the lengthening of days, which seem all the longer now that the short days of winter are past.  As these spring days follow one another, each longer than the preceding, one begins to feel the length of the passing of time.  It makes the past, the “old days,” seem ever more distant.

The primary feeling of this hokku is a recognition of the relentless passage of time, which continually carries us away from the past and onward into the unknown future.  Did you notice that the second line — just one word in English — is visually shorter than the three words of the first line?  Yet if we say it in our minds it sounds very long, and adds to the sense of time passing slowly.

Blyth, rightly, I think, thought the poem in its literal form a bit too much for Westerners unfamiliar with hokku to grasp, so he elaborated it in his version, to bring out the sense of time slowly passing, yet the past constantly receding from us:

Slow days passing, accumulating, —
How distant they are,
The things of the past!

His use of “passing, accumulating” emphasizes the feeling of the slowness of the day that one gets with the lengthening of days in spring, and it increases the sense of time accumulating like dust in an attic, burying the past ever deeper.  He also lengthens in words the mention of the past (“How distant they are, / The things of the past!), where Buson has merely “The distant past.”  That lengthening also gives us the feeling inherent in the verse that the past — even the recent past — is gradually moving farther and farther away.

This is not hokku at its best, and if it were not for the sense of the length of the spring days, this hokku would be too “thoughty” for a verse form that excels in sensation and tends to avoid too much “thinking.”

Shiki, paradoxically, has a more concrete, if obvious, verse:

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sunahama ni   ashiato nagaki   haruhi kana
Sandy-beach on  footsteps long   spring-day kana

On the sandy beach,
A long line of footsteps;
The spring day.

The length of the spring day is reflected in the length of the line of footsteps that parallel the surf and extend beyond the range of sight.  I have chosen to use “long” to modify the footsteps, which is a more subtle way of expressing the length of the spring day for those familiar with hokku.

Blyth, however, chose to use “long” to modify the spring day in his version, making the point of the verse more obvious to Westerners, but less subtle:

On the sandy beach,
Footprints:
Long is the spring day.

In both, however, the emphasis is on the feeling of the feeling of the slowness of time one gets as the days of spring lengthen.

If you wonder why Blyth sometimes tends to make his hokku translations more detailed than they are in the originals, it is because his purpose in writing was to introduce Westerners not only to hokku (which, unfortunately, he called “haiku” in his day), but also to the very different (from Western verse) aesthetic sense behind hokku.

Sadly, Westerners usually just read the verses in Blyth’s books and seem to have ignored or glossed over his important explanations of the aesthetics behind them.   That failure contributed to the confusion that arose in the so-called “haiku movement,” which began in the West in the 1960s — a confusion and disarray that continues to this day, because the Western haiku movement never learned the aesthetic principles necessary for continuing the practice of hokku in the modern world.  That is why “haiku” today is generally something quite unlike hokku, even though often superficially similar in outward appearance.

 

David

SPRING AND SUPERFICIALITY: DETERMINING DEPTH IN HOKKU

One of the most difficult things for the beginning student of hokku to grasp is the difference in what we might call “levels” of hokku.  It is common for someone unfamiliar with the principles of hokku to read hundreds of old verses from the time of Bashō and Onitsura in the 17th century up to the time of Shiki and his “haiku” revolt near the turn of the last century, without ever having noticed the differences in “level.”

What do I mean by “level” in hokku?  Put very simply, some verses, however pleasant they may be, are little more than illustrations, “pictures” in words.  In others, however, one has the feeling that there is more going on in the verse than is stated in words.  There is a feeling of hidden “depth.”

Hokku with “depth” were appreciated through most of the history of hokku.  But near the end of the 19th century, with the “reforms” of Shiki, verses became more and more like “pictures,” without depth.  Everything was on the surface, so we speak of such verses as “superficial,” even though they may still be pleasing.

Shiki was a great admirer of the earlier writer Buson, who was a painter as well as a composer of hokku.  But even Buson came up with verses with “depth,” while those of Shiki himself tend to be superficial, to be little more than pleasant illustrations.  I often compare hokku of this kind to those attractive Japanese woodblock prints one finds by Hasui and Yoshida.  It does not mean they are bad, it just means that they lack depth.

Here, for example, is a “spring” verse by Shiki:

Spring rain;
Holding an umbrella,
Looking at picture books in a shop.

You have to picture a man standing just inside one of those old-fashioned, Japanese open-fronted book shops, looking at the books laid out flat on tables as he holds the kind of paper-and-bamboo umbrella that used to be typical of that time and place.  This verse is a “picture,” with not much more in it than that.

If we look at another spring verse of approximately the same late period, we find that even though it is written by someone else, in this case Otsuji, we still get a kind of illustration:

(Photo credit: slworking2)

Spring rain;
Seen between the trees —
A path to the sea.

It is pleasant and quiet and undemanding, and though we may think at first that it too is only an illustration, notice that we at least feel behind it the vastness and power of the (hidden) sea.  So while it is still largely a “picture,” it is less superficial than the verse by Shiki.

Now we can turn to the person Shiki so admired — Buson — who lived in the 18th instead of the 19th-20th century:

Bags of seeds
Becoming soaked;
The spring rain.

To the novice, that might seem to be little different from the other two verses, but really it is worlds apart.  Like them, it is an event in spring, but in this case we sense the power inherent in the bags of seeds, and we know that the spring rain is going to affect them if they are left in it for long; they are going to begin to swell and sprout with abundant new life.  So even without it being said, we feel a kind of hidden power in this verse, something “big” going on that is not even mentioned in the words of the verse.  That unspoken part of a hokku, which is really all the better for being left unspoken, is what gives depth.  In Buson’s verse we really feel the nature and character of spring, which we do not in the other two.

Of course not all hokku are quite that obvious.  In general we can say, however, that older hokku tend to have more depth than verses written after Shiki’s propaganda urged writers to make “sketches from life.”  And of course Shiki liked to call those “new” verses by a different name — “haiku,” even though they were still essentially hokku in form and often in content.

It is useful, then for the student of hokku to look through lots of old hokku, comparing them to see which have a sense of depth, and which are just “pictures” in words, with little beyond that.  The key to determining depth is to look for something unspoken in the hokku, for something beyond what is actually written.  If it is not there, the hokku — like the first example by Shiki, is superficial, no matter how pleasant it may be otherwise.

 

David

ONE BLOSSOM’S WORTH: TWO “PLUM” HOKKU

The connection of plum blossoms and spring, historically, is well known.  As I have written before, however, the ume no hana spoken of in old Japanese hokku — conventionally translated as “plum blossoms,” were not really plum blossoms as we generally think of them, but rather the flowers of the Japanese apricot (Prunus mume).  In spite of that, when an English speaker reads Japanese spring hokku about plum blossoms, it is perfectly natural to envision the blossoms of Prunus domestica, which gives us our edible plums and prunes, or perhaps those of Prunus salicina, the “Satsuma” plum, which is native to China, but is grown both in Japan and in the West now.

As regular readers here know, I often “westernize” hokku in translation, though I note the fact to avoid confusion.  So of course it does not bother me in the least that we think of these other plums, rather than of the Japanese apricot, when we read old spring hokku.  Further, what applies to that tree applies also to the plums grown in the West, so for practical and aesthetic purposes it is really advantageous for us to think of “our” kinds of plums instead of what the original hokku technically signified.

Having gotten through all that dull introduction, we are ready to take a look at some spring plum hokku.  The significant thing about the plum in that context is that it is an early bloomer, flowering often when the weather still can be cold and unsettled, in that time of the yearly transition from winter weather to that of early spring.

We see that period of change in a hokku by Buson:

In every nook and corner
The cold lingers;
Plum blossoms.

In the original, “every nook and corner” is really a repetition of the same word — sumi, meaning “corner.”  When used twice (zumi the second time for euphony) as sumizumi, it literally is “corner-corner,” but the “every nook and corner” understanding of the term is what it signifies.

Regular readers here know that spring is a time of increasing Yang energy.  The cold Yin energy of winter is waning, but as Buson tells us here, when the plum begins to bloom, the cold still lingers in all the little shady spots and corners and hollows.  The word I translate here as “lingers” is nokoru in the original, which means “to remain, to be left over or left behind.”

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The blooming of the plum tree of course has a direct relationship to the amount of warmth and light present.  The warmer the air, the more blossoms will pop open.  That is why Ransetsu wrote what I call his “thermometer” hokku:

A plum blossom —
One blossom’s worth
Of warmth.

What I translate as “blossom’s worth” — the word hodo — means “an extent or degree or measure” of something.  So we could be playful, and translate it as

A plum blossom —
One blossom degree
Of warmth.

The concept behind this hokku is the notion that the more plum blossoms open, the higher the temperature of the air and the farther along the advancement of spring.  It shows a unity between the blossoms and the growing warmth, in contrast to our “rational” way of thinking in terms of action (the warming of the air) and consequence (a plum blossom opens), cause and effect.

David

THE NARROW PATH: A HOKKU BY BUSON

As a writer of hokku, Buson had his flaws.  He was sometimes too consciously literary, at others too obviously painterly (he was, after all, an artist).  That is why numbers of his verses fail to quite make it as good hokku.  Nonetheless, there are some that are very good and in keeping with the poverty and selflessness and simplicity and impermanence characteristic of hokku at its best.  Here is one:

The narrow path
Not quite buried;
Fallen leaves.

Where I am it would be very much up to date, because the leaves are falling heavily now in the cooling air.  In old Japan it would have been a winter verse, but according to the hokku calendar it is the beginning of winter now.  Autumn ended with Halloween.

Old hokku had a sometimes not very accurate distinction between verses about colored leaves, which were autumn verses, and those about fallen leaves, which were winter verses.  Here in the West we go by what is happening where we are.  So for us, both verses about colored leaves and fallen leaves may come under the autumn heading or the winter heading.  We are not so rigid as old hokku sometimes tended to become, and we pay close attention to what is actually happening in Nature in a given season.  That helps to keep us from falling into the artificiality that began to afflict old hokku over time.  It helps to keep our verse fresh and new.

This hokku, like many, requires a leap of intuition from the reader.  In good hokku such leaps are easy if one keeps in mind that there is always some relationship between the shorter and longer parts of a hokku (short and long are separated by the “cutting” punctuation).  In this verse we know that what is meant by the first part is that the narrow path is nearly but not yet entirely buried in fallen leaves; that is clear from the second part.  Some hokku require greater leaps of intuition, but if that leap becomes too great, a hokku fails.  Hokku should always be clear and quickly intuited.  For one schooled in the principles of hokku aesthetics, that is one mark distinguishing good hokku from bad.

David

THE FOX BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

There is a kind of old hokku that I almost never discuss here.  It belongs to the category of verses based on folk belief or myth.  Even these verses have their seasonal connections.

Here is one by Buson:

Withered grasses;
A fox messenger
hurries by.

That makes no sense in a Western context.  To us — at least traditionally — a fox is a rather sly and clever animal.  In traditional Japan, however, a fox (kitsune) is a creature that lives between two worlds — ours and the “spirit” world.  In Japan, foxes were believed to be able to take on human form, and woe to the young man who happened to become infatuated with a fox spirit!  He would just fade and waste away like a shoot of grass withering, and would eventually die.

Buson has reflected this notion in the withered grasses of the autumn fields in his hokku.  He sees the fox hurrying past not as just an ordinary animal, but rather as a courier passing swiftly with a message to deliver, involved in his task and giving no attention to the  human.  Buson regards the foxes as living their own lives in their own eerie society, separate from that of humans, but occasionally coming in contact with them.

The Hiroshige print shown depicts a gathering of fox spirits with “spirit lights.”

This verse has a feeling that we in the West would associate with Halloween.  It is far from the best kind of hokku, but it did exist, and it does have its effect.

David

ENTERING AUTUMN

(Photo credit: Joel Abroad)

Here is a timely repeat of an earlier posting:

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 when one sees the morning glories in bloom in late summer, and suddenly the delicate flowers are troubled by a cool wind, one senses the change to autumn.  Morning glories are also associated with impermanence because the flowers bloom and die so quickly.

So here too on this site we begin the change to autumn.

Buson wrote:

Sadness;
The fishing line trembles
In the autumn wind.

This does not mean he is sad, and then sees the line trembling in the wind; it means that seeing the line trembling in the wind of autumn is in itself sadness — the seeing is the feeling. That is because of all the layers of association it evokes — the withering of things, the ending of things, the certainty of mortality, and yet none of these things are mentioned in the verse, and mentioning them goes too far in explaining it. That is the suggestiveness of hokku.

Bashō wrote:

In the cowshed,
The sound of mosquitos
Is weak.

Because this is Bashō, we know that there is some significance to this, not just a random event. The insects that formerly buzzed with such vigor in the height of summer now sound only faint and feeble, their numbers diminishing. That is in keeping with the weakening of vital energies in autumn.

Autumn, again, is the weakening of the Yang energy, the decline of the energy of warmth and life and active movement. It corresponds to the period after middle age in human life, and to the late afternoon and twilight in the day. All these things are automatically associated in hokku; we do not need to even think about them. That is why the faint sound of the mosquitoes is so significant; it expresses the nature of autumn. We hear all of autumn in that weak sound.

It is important to keep in mind that hokku are not metaphorical or symbolic. The faint buzz of the mosquitoes is only the faint buzz of mosquitoes. Everything else is merely suggested by them, below the level of the intellect. All of my explanations are only to teach you with what mind a hokku should be read, with what attitude. To put such things, that are automatically associated, into words, is really going too far, but for beginners it must be done.

We see the effect of these “hidden” layers of association in Issa’s evocative verse:

The autumn wind;
In Issa’s mind
There are thoughts.

What is the nature of those thoughts? We know already, because the autumn wind tells us. They do not have to be spelled out or made clear, and should not be.

Issa’s Autumn verse is an expression in that season of the same thing Bashō expressed in a Spring verse:

Many things
They bring to mind —
Cherry blossoms.

In both we see the sense of transience so common to hokku, and in both we also see the suggestiveness of hokku, which again are to be evocative, not in any way explanatory. For either Issa or Bashō to tell us exactly what these thoughts are, exactly what is brought to mind, would remove every trace of poetry. We do not have to ask.

We know.

 

David

THE VALIDITY OF HOKKU

Yesterday I discussed a kind of “fundamentalism” one finds among those who talk about hokku and haiku, and I wrote, essentially, that it does not matter to me (except historically) what any of the old hokku writers had to say about the hokku and its nature; what matters is the validity of the verse itself, on its own merits.

Now that can easily be misunderstood. Some people may think it means, “I don’t care what the original writers considered to be hokku, I am going to write it however I please.”

That, in fact, is the attitude and practice of a great many people in the modern haiku community, but it is not mine.

On the other hand, there are those who examine every detail of old hokku and say that the way we write it today cannot vary in any particular from how the hokku writers of the 17th or 18th century — or a certain one among them — wrote it. Some even say it is impossible to write “genuine” hokku in English — that it can be written only in Japanese. That, again, is not my position either.

My position is simply this. In my teaching of hokku, I have taken its essence — what I consider to be the best and most practical aspects of both form and content — and I have adapted those to the English language. The English-language hokku form reflects the essence of the old Japanese form, though of course it is now “reborn” in an English-language format. And the aesthetics I teach are very much the aesthetics of the old hokku.

Because of that, I continue to call what I teach hokku. And I can look at what is written by other people, and I can tell them whether it is hokku, or close to hokku, or only superficially hokku, or not hokku at all in anything but brevity.

So what I teach is hokku, a continuation of the old tradition, but in the English language.
However, as I have said, the kind of hokku I teach stands on its own merits now. Consequently there is no need to refer to Japan at all. If hokku is “good” verse — if it does what it is supposed to do as hokku according to the principles and aesthetics I teach, then if for some reason we had to call it something else and never mention Japan again, it would still be a verse practice with its own value and virtue. It does not have to rely on any 17th or 18th or 19th century historical validation of it merits.

That too, is why I like my students to think of hokku as I teach it as something without a history, so that they may see it as something new, and may learn it on its own terms. Of course it does have a history, and we can trace it back centuries — but for writing it today, all of that is really unimportant except for academic reasons. In the actual practice of writing hokku, it does not matter at all.

The result is that I do not encourage students to take up the study of old literary Japanese, or the sociology of Japan in the Edô period, or any of those things. None are necessary for learning and writing hokku. One may study them if one likes, but to do so is not in the least necessary for the successful learning and writing of hokku. In fact for many people, such things simply become just another distraction and obsession.

Those who learn hokku from me are learning modern English-language hokku. They are not learning Japanese hokku, they are not learning a hokku that requires validation by  Bashô or Buson or Shiki.  They are just learning hokku as I teach it. That is the best way to approach it.

David

AVOIDING HOKKU AND HAIKU AS “RELIGIOUS” FUNDAMENTALISM

Every now and then, I like to clarify my approach to the hokku — that is, to teaching the writing of new hokku — for readers who may be novices here.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

As many of you know, I have been teaching hokku on the Internet for many long years; in fact to the best of my knowledge, I was the very first person to ever actually teach either hokku or haiku on the Internet. Of course now the number of such people is legion, but I am still — again to the best of my knowledge — the only person actively teaching the hokku as distinct from modern haiku.

Except as a matter of historical interest, it does not matter in the least to me what Bashō or Taigi or Gyōdai or Buson or Issa or any of the other writers of old hokku had to say about the nature or composition of the hokku. Further, it similarly does not matter to me (again except for historical reasons) what is said by any modern scholar, Japanese or Western, about the history or practice or aesthetics of the old hokku or of its numerous offshoots, ancient or modern.

Why? Because what I teach as hokku does not depend for its validity or value on any of that. Instead, the hokku I teach stands on its own merits. And though one can say that hokku as I teach it reflects and continues this or that aspect of the old hokku, it would not matter to me in the slightest if it did not.

Do not misunderstand. There is an obvious and very clear continuity between old hokku and what I teach, because I teach largely from old examples written from the 1600s to near the beginning of the 20th century. In that, one could say that what I teach is as close to old hokku as one is likely to get. The only difference is that I translate the models I use for teaching into English form and punctuation. So hokku as I teach it is a continuation of the old hokku, but in a different language, and with emphasis on some aspects of the originals that fit what I consider to be hokku at its best, and a de-emphasis on aspects of old hokku that I regard as superficial or unnecessary.

There are endless quibbles in print and on the Internet over what is “real” in the history of the hokku, which many people today anachronistically and inaccurately term “haiku,” confusingly mixing it with modern haiku: What was the role in old Japan of “season words”? What is the historic use of “cutting words?” Did Bashō use metaphor or not? Did Shiki “free” the hokku when he re-named it “haiku”? How can we write “real” hokku or “real” haiku (for those who use that word) today, if we do not know precisely how it was written in old Japan? To me one need not worry about such questions.  It all just leads to pointless bickering.  Such discussions  are merely of academic — not practical — interest.

Some may wonder why, then, I teach hokku by frequently using translated or modified old Japanese examples.  It is not because such examples validate what I teach as a quotation from “scripture” presumably validifies this or that religious doctrine.  It is, instead, because the examples I choose exemplify quite well aspects of the hokku aesthetics I teach, and it is easy for the student to use them as models for the structure and aesthetics of writing hokku today. A good model makes for good learning. So the old hokku I use in teaching validate what I teach not because they are old, but because they are good.

I like to teach the hokku as though it had no history at all, because then people do not get caught up in those kinds of fundamentalistic arguments over whether this particular brand of hokku or haiku is what Bashō “really” taught, or whether this or that word in a Japanese original actually meant something other than it appears to mean.

I consider all such questions to be literary archeology, or idle speculation irrelevant to the actual writing of hokku today. It is an unnecessary distraction, and worse than that, it is the cause of seemingly endless bitter quarrels and animosity among different factions over whose form of verse is the most genuine, the most in keeping with the spirit of the original — the most “scriptural,” one is tempted to say, because again, it all seems to me like arguing over points of religious doctrine — and equally as profitless.

So I repeat, for emphasis, that hokku as I teach it has nothing to do with all that. People may think of it, if they wish, as something completely separate from the history of hokku or that of haiku — something entirely new. That way they will not approach it with all the baggage of this or that faction of the modern haiku community, or this or that faction of Japanese or Western scholarship on the history of hokku. My students should never feel that they have to justify the form or aesthetics of what they write from any old Japanese writings or any statement by past or modern scholars.

That approach to hokku automatically removes the cause of a great deal of bother and dissension. It frees students from caring whether R. H. Blyth accurately represented the Japanese hokku or did not, whether Shiki was justified in his revisionism of hokku into “haiku,” whether the “right” path is set forth today by this or that pundit or advocate or critic of hokku or of modern haiku. It saves a tremendous amount of needless historical research and semi-religious, fundamentalistic “proof-texting.”

Above all, that approach gives one a sense of extraordinary freedom in one’s practice of hokku, because then one can just concentrate on learning its principles and in writing it and developing one’s understanding of it. All the rest matters not one whit.

Of course, to repeat, doing so is dependent upon one’s desire to do so, and whether to write hokku as I teach or not is entirely up to the individual and his or her inclinations. Those who prefer some other verse form or no form at all will not find themselves cast into outer darkness or anathematized. To each his or her own. But of course I will continue to teach “my” approach to hokku on this site, for those who may be interested.

And I will continue to hope, as I always have, that there are some out there who will find that hokku as I teach it — which I sometimes call Contemplative Hokku — “speaks to their condition,” as the Quakers say — that they will see the virtues and value that I find in it.

So, to conclude , if you want to learn hokku from my postings here, please do so without any sense of dogmatism in comparing it to the past or present of either hokku or of haiku. It is helpful to completely separate from any such history or dogma. Learn it for itself, because it is only by doing so that you will discover what it has to offer.

Keep in mind, as you do so, Henry David Thoreau’s principle that what is required is not “new clothes” (in change of form or subject matter in this case) but rather “a new wearer of clothes.” I teach that we should not drastically change hokku to fit us and our whims, but rather that we should change to accord with the profundity underlying hokku. That is, seen deeply, just what it was for Thoreau — a spiritual teaching.

You will find it, I think, a liberating experience.

David

THE SOUND OF BRANCHES; the Simplicity of Hokku

There is a hokku by Buson, translated thus by R. H. Blyth:

Snow-break also
Can be heard,
This dark night.

I think many reading the verse without his explanation would fail to understand it, and that is always a problem.  A hokku should be able to stand on its own — to be effective — without a commentary.  If we modify it slightly, I think it will be more accessible:

The sound
Of branches breaking with snow;
The dark night.

Now everyone should be able to get it — to experience it — without any added explanation.

But look how the revised version does what a hokku should do:  It is a manifestation of the season, winter.  It expresses Nature and the place of humans within Nature.  And it does it all very simply, presenting the experience only in sound (the branches breaking under the weight of the snow) and sight (the dark night), and of course the third element that we all feel without it even being mentioned, which is the deep cold of winter.

This is how hokku — the best hokku — differ from what we ordinarily think of as poetry.  Hokku is primarily an experience of the senses, not an intellectual experience.

Notice that the verse — as hokku should be — is divided into two parts, one long, one short.  And the two parts are separated by appropriate punctuation.  I often mention one type of hokku called the standard hokku, which consists of a setting, a subject and an action.  But keep in mind that these are not always strictly separated in a verse.

Let’s look at it again:

The sound
Of branches breaking with snow;
The dark night.

The setting in a hokku is the wider environment in which something occurs.  Here the setting is “the dark night.”  The subject is “the sound of branches,” and the action is “breaking with snow.”  But note that the sound is not really separable from the action — “the sound of branches breaking with snow.”

Some people accustomed to Western poetry might find it difficult to understand how these three lines can be poetry too.  The answer is that the poetry of hokku is in the experience, not in the words, and if the reader experiences being in a dark night in which the sound of branches breaking under the weight of snow is heard, then that reader is experiencing the poetry of hokku, which is something quite different than the English-language poetry to which we are accustomed.

Hokku says only what is necessary, and stops before saying too much.  That is why it is so brief, and why two of its chief characteristics are poverty and simplicity.  By poverty we mean that it is reduced to its bare minimum of elements, just as a life of poverty reduces one to the basics of food, clothing, and shelter.  When the elements are few, we have a greater appreciation for each one; its meaning, its significance, is magnified for us.

Simplicity means that a hokku uses few words and ordinary words, and does not try to impress the reader with verbal pyrotechnics.  Hokku should be as simple as a drink of warm tea from a stoneware mug.

Notice also the contrasts we feel in reading these few words.  We have the darkness of night and the mention of snow, which we know to be white; so there is an inherent contrast.  And we have the background of silence against which the breaking of branches is heard.  There is a sudden and loud crack out in the night, the sound of a branch falling with its load of snow, and then all returns to silence and darkness.

That is why this hokku is very effective, why it “works” as I always say.

David

 

 

WRIGHT OR WRONG?

The automatic statistics of this site tell me that frequently people come here hoping to see something illuminating about the “haiku” of Richard Wright — just why, I am not certain, given that this site favors hokku and generally considers “haiku” only a mutant degeneration of it.

Nonetheless, I suppose those visitors, given their frequency, should go away with something, so here are a few words about Richard Wright and his “haiku.”

The primary book for Wright’s verses is Haiku: This Other World (Arcade Publishing, 1998).  It oddly combines an anthology of his “haiku” with a considerable amount of historical information about what is really Japanese hokku, much of which does almost nothing to illuminate Wright’s verses.

The reason is, of course, that anyone reading the book from an historical perspective discovers very quickly that Wright had the same difficulties, and followed essentially the same course, as almost all those whose verses were written under the influence of R. H. Blyth’s works titled Haiku — works which were really largely about hokku.

In short, Wright followed the standard mid-20th century pattern of reading Blyth and then writing his own verses based upon a distorted Western view of Blyth’s translations — the result of unconsciously mixing one’s own Western preconceptions about poetry with the brevity of the hokku.

Wright’s “haiku” can largely be divided into these categories:

1.  Verses that are essentially brief “Western” poems;
2.  Poems written as variations or studies on Japanese hokku translated by Blyth;
3.  Poems written in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern, which Wright somehow concluded was “standard” for his haiku in English;
4.  Verses written in a 5-5-5 syllabic pattern; and
5.  Verses written in an uneven syllabic pattern.

By examining a few of them, we get a very good picture of the whole of his work:

There are verses that are simply images:

Heaps of black cherries
Glittering with drops of rain
In the evening sun.

(One wonders if that was influenced by William Carlos Williams’ “red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens”).

The very first verse in the book is this:

I am nobody.
A red sinking sun
Took my name away.

It is not a hokku, so we shall have to put it in that vast and vague category of poems that look superficially like hokku but are not — ‘haiku.’  It is too personal, too “me” oriented for hokku.  Essentially it is a brief modern Western poem that would not even qualify as a “Shiki” haiku.  Structurally it consists of three lines, each of which has precisely five syllables.

We will find a great many of Wright’s verses are like this.  And that tells us a great deal about Wright’s approach to verse.  First and foremost, to repeat, it was the result of the unconscious mixture of Western notions of poetry with the brevity of the hokku, a problem endemic in the “haiku movement” of the second half of the 20th century.

As with most beginners in hokku, we find among Wright’s verses the usual, obviously Issa-inspired examples using the technique I call “talk to the animals”:

Make up your mind, snail!
You are half inside your house
And halfway out!

There is no real value in such verses, but one may suppose that through them Wright was experimenting, trying to find his way.  He obviously read a lot of Blyth, but of course as I often lament, Blyth left no clear and specific instructions for writing the hokku in English.  So all too often, his readers were unable to extract the principles of writing hokku in English from the matrix in which Blyth left them embedded in his writings, valuable as those writings are.  So it is no surprise that Wright was left looking about for a path.

Sometimes he detours into what looks like Issa-flavored senryu rather than hokku:

“Shut up you crickets!
How can I hear what my wife
Is saying to me?”

None of the verses given up to this point are hokku, nor are they worthwhile as “Western” verses in general.  But that does not mean Wright’s attempts at haiku are without value.  It just means that we have to sift the better examples out of all the inferior verses.

We find, for example, this:

A summer barnyard;
Swishing tails of twenty cows
Twitching at the flies.

That is hokku.  It is set in a season.  It has Nature as its focus.  And it is in two parts, a longer and a shorter.  Wright seems to have fixated on the predilection of that time for sequences of 5-7-5 syllables as the “right” standard for his verses, which led to a bit of padding, but nonetheless this verse qualifies as a real hokku, and even more importantly, it works as a hokku.   We could improve its form a bit, like this:

A summer barnyard;
The tails of twenty cows
Swishing flies.

But even left as it is, this verse by Wright qualifies as hokku.

One frequently wants to re-write his verses, to free them from the cage of 5-7-5, as in this example:

On winter mornings
The candle shows faint markings
Of the teeth of rats.

The hokku perception is obviously there, but again Wright’s reading of Blyth failed to provide him with the necessary technique that would have enabled him to reduce this  5-7-5 wordiness to its essentials, which we might do thus:

A winter morning;
Marks of rat teeth
On the candle.

Here and there we find verses that essentially repeat an old Japanese hokku, for example Wright’s

The webs of spiders
Sticking to my face
In the dusty woods.

That is just a run-on rephrasing of Buson’s

Spider webs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

And we note of course that Wright has returned here to his 5-5-5 syllable phrasing.

We find other Wright verses all too obviously based upon old hokku, but in doing so we may recall that such variations on old verses are a good way for beginners to learn.  Wright wrote:

Just enough of light
In this lofty autumn sky
To turn the lake black.

That is a variation upon Bashō’s

Cold rain –
Enough to blacken the stubble
In the fields.

Another Wright verse is obviously influenced by Shiki:

That abandoned house,
With its yard of fallen leaves
In the setting sun.

A Shiki predecessor was:

A dog asleep
At the door of the empty house;
Falling willow leaves.

So we can see that Wright was heavily influenced by the material Blyth provided, even at times too obviously influenced by it.

One sees this influence repeatedly, sometimes for the worse, sometimes — as in this example, for the better:

Wright’s verse:

Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.

One cannot but think that was inspired by Seibi’s  Japanese original:

Swatting flies,
I begin to think
Of Killing them all.

In Blyth’s version it is:

Killing flies,
I begin to wish
To annihilate them all.

Exactly the same feeling of starting small and feeling the urge to carry a matter to extremes.

The more one reads Wright’s “haiku,” the more one has the feeling that here was a man with the poetic sensibility to write excellent hokku, but because of the lack of suitable instruction he got lost in the early student phase, becoming mired there.  He never grasped sufficiently the importance of separating the two parts of a verse, nor of learning the underlying aesthetics.  So we can repeat a quick analysis:  Some of his verses are mere images; some are variations on old Japanese verses translated by Blyth; some are “modern” free verse poems with the brevity but not the substance of hokku or of Shiki’s “haiku.”

Sometimes Wright tries to be too “clever,” which is a failing of modern haiku in general, with its heavy emphasis on Western poetic notions:

In an old woodshed
The long points of icicles
Are sharpening the wind.

At times he strives too obviously and artificially for effect:

To see the spring sky,
A doll in a store window
Leans far to one side.

One could spend a great deal of time commenting on each verse in the book, looking for obvious antecedents in Blyth, noting where Wright, like almost the entire Western “haiku” movement, went wrong in unconsciously substituting his own preconceptions for the inherent aesthetics and techniques of the hokku and of the Shiki “haiku.”  Such an effort would be very enlightening in showing just how and how thoroughly Western haiku went astray in the middle of the 20th century, but it would also be rather disappointing and futile in that it is too late to correct Wright’s misperceptions and missteps, too late to give him the guidance he needed to rise to the level of old Japanese hokku instead of falling into common misunderstandings.

That is, fortunately, not the case with those still writing today.  But the problem in this case is finding those with the potential poetic intuition of a Richard Wright who are also humble enough to be willing to start over and do hokku the right way.

A great deal more could be said about the “haiku” of Richard Wright, and perhaps I shall have more to say when time permits.  But for now I shall only repeat that reading Wright’s “haiku” leaves one with the disappointing feeling of a potential unfulfilled due to lack of informed guidance, the same feeling one gets on reading the better examples of present day writers of “haiku,” who never quite understand what they are doing or why, and who consequently are always walking but never getting anywhere.

David

THE CLEAR WATER

The stonemason
Cools his chisel in it —
The clear water.

Buson

While working stone, the metal chisel of the stonemason becomes too hot to hold — from the heat of the day and from the friction of repeated blows — so he holds it in the clear, cool water to take away the heat.

This is a hokku of harmony of opposites — the heat of the summer day (this is a summer hokku) and the heat of the chisel from working the stone are placed against the coolness of the water — Yang (heat) against Yin (coolness and water) — and in this case, Yin overcomes Yang, which makes for a very refreshing verse.

David

HOKKU — AN OLD-FASHIONED WAY OF BEING NEW

I am always surprised and amazed by those who speak of hokku as though it were something outdated and to be discarded.  The emphasis today is on “new,” “new,” “new” and “different,” “different, “different.”

What people with such childish thinking do not realize is that everything one sees is continually new, continually different.  It is their way of seeing that is the same.  That is why Thoreau told us that what we need is not new clothes, but rather a new wearer of clothes.  We must change how we see things if we want to follow hokku well.

I like very much — and apply to hokku — what Robert Frost once said of his own kind of poetry:  “It is an old-fashioned way of being new.”

Buson wrote this summer hokku:

June rain
In the downspout;
The ears of old age.

David

THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

Today was beautiful where I am.  After days and days of pouring rain and cool temperatures, the sky cleared, the sun shone, and the temperature rose into the low 80s.

It made me think of the old lines from the Song of Solomon:

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

How much more poetic that is in “King James” English than in modern versions.  And I like the humor of people today having forgotten that “turtle” at the time of translation meant a turtle dove — and consequently wondering what the voice of a turtle might sound like.

There are the words attributed to Jesus in the King James Version:

“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

How far more beautiful that is than the modern

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

But I digress.

The sudden warmth reminds me of what is in store for us, the kind of heat of which Buson wrote:

Spiderwebs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

That, of course, is a “statement” hokku, which I just discussed in a recent posting.  You will recall that a “statement” hokku makes a statement that is simply true.  But in making it the writer tells us something that we did not realize we knew — until we read the hokku.

The “something seen in a new way” in this verse is the combination of the spiderwebs and the heat in the silent, heavy air of the grove of trees.  Ordinarily we think of a web as light and airy, but walking through a hot grove of trees on a hot day, with spiderwebs sticking to one’s face and hands, one has a “little enlightenment”:

Spiderwebs
Are hot things;
The summer grove.

This verse shows the Yang nature of summer with its heat.  Even things we ordinarily think of in cool or airy Yin terms — a grove of trees — spiderwebs — have here become Yang.

David

NO MODERN HAIKU, THANK YOU!

R. H. Blyth recognized even in his day that the hokku had fallen on hard times.  He speaks with favor of Bashō, of Buson, of Issa, and even speaks of the “objective dryness yet pregnancy of Shiki” (who began haiku as distinct from hokku), but he speaks also of  “the decadence of all later writers” (of haiku).

So much for the experimentation and change that came after Shiki in haiku — the experimentation and change that is also characteristic of modern haiku in English, which has continued, though in another language, the decadence of verse after Shiki.

Blyth tells us that Bashō’s “Way” can “hardly be said to exist now, for almost nobody walks on it.”  Certainly I have found no one in the modern haiku movement on that path.

In speaking of what came after hokku and the conservative haiku of Shiki that was often indistinguishable from hokku, Blyth says quite honestly and bluntly,

“…I feel that very little would be lost if all the haiku of modern times were tacitly forgotten.”

I feel precisely the same about modern haiku in English and other European languages.  One would like to erase all the mistakes and misperceptions and misunderstandings and foolishness foisted on the English-speaking public by the modern haiku community in the entire second half of the 20th century, a period which unfortunately set the stage for the abysmal kinds of verse written today as “haiku,” a period in which the genuine hokku and its aesthetics were seemingly deliberately obscured by the Western founders of modern haiku, who, not understanding the real hokku, simply chose to re-make it  as they wished it to be, then foisted the result on the naïve general public. 

Blyth tells us precisely what he thinks of this abandonment of the Way of Bashō:

“Its disuetude is a monument to the stupidity, vulgarity, sentimentality, and unpoeticality of human beings.”

Blyth summarized his two-volume History of Haiku by saying,

“Haiku since Shiki [that is, since about the turn of the 20th century] has been, like the world itself, in a state of confusion.”

That confusion is abundantly evident on modern haiku sites.  One need only read the advice given by the “poets” there to novice writers, and one quickly sees that they really have not the slightest idea what they are doing or why, but in any case the best one can say of the deplorable results is that they are mercifully brief excuses for verse.  The “learning” and “teaching” of “haiku” on such sites is simply a classic illustration of the blind leading the blind.

Everyone in modern haiku makes up his or her own mind as to what constitutes a haiku and how to write it.  Blyth foresaw that decades ago, because the attitude already existed in his time:

“The confusion of our modern times seems greater than ever before because people speak by themselves only, not by humanity.”

It is the “Me” Period in which we live, not just the “Me Generation.”  And nothing so exemplifies modern haiku as this confused and rootless emphasis on “me,” on the individual as “poet,” on the necessity for constant change in verse, the same kind of constant change demanded by the short attention span of a two-year-old child.

I have watched the low rise of the modern haiku and its near-immediate devolution over many decades, and I see no trace of hope for the arising of anything worthwhile within it at present.  Almost without exception, those who practice it are devoid of an inherent sense of poetry (paradoxically, because those who write “haiku” today seem more than ever obsessively concerned about being perceived as “poets.” and as writing “poetry”).

I can say with Blyth that very little would be lost if all the haiku and haiku Internet sites and fora and journals of modern times were tacitly forgotten.  Given how little they are noticed by the general public in any case, their absence would likely pass without comment, and modern haiku could go into the dustbin of history, forgotten and unmourned.

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

If any one has any doubts about my attitude toward modern haiku, I think this brief posting should dispel them.  

I want to remind everyone that I do not teach or practice or advocate modern haiku; I do not belong to any “haiku” group of any kind; and I have nothing whatsoever to do with modern haiku, aside from deploring its accompanying nonsense and mediocrity and triviality, and how its self-made pundits have actively contributed to the obscurity and near disappearance of the real hokku as practiced from its beginnings to the time of Shiki near the beginning of the 20th century.

David

A WILLOWY WALDEN

Not long ago I introduced two short-verse “alternative” forms.  Both were intended for those times when a hokku is too small in space for what needs to be said.

We find such an example in English translations of one of Buson’s spring verses about the willow.  Blyth gives it as:

Unwilling to throw it away,
I stuck the willow branch in the ground;
The sound of water.

This is really too long for hokku in English, though Blyth conveys the meaning of the Japanese rather well.  Let’s suppose for a moment that we are the writers of this verse, that we are writing it in English and we can see its content is too extensive for a hokku.  The next step would be to go to a longer “short verse” form, in this case the walden, which is the English-language aesthetic equivalent of “hokku-ized” waka:

Not wanting
To throw the willow away,
I stuck it
Deep in the earth;
The sound of rain.

As you can see, that has a short/long/short/long/long form.  It is  kind of extended hokku, and it is really remarkably handy.  Just because something fits into a hokku in Japanese does not mean it will do so in English.  Similarly, many experiences take just too many English words to fit the hokku form, and in those cases we may also use the walden (or the slightly briefer loren).

Let’s look again at Buson’s verse in walden form:

Not wanting
To throw the willow away,
I stuck it
Deep in the earth;
The sound of rain.

The writer has been walking along, holding a long branch of a willow that has newly leafed out in the fresh green of spring.  Suddenly he realizes that it is not something to keep, but what is he to do with it?  He feels it not right to just discard it, but instead pushes it deep into the spring earth.  Some time later he hears the sound of rain falling.

With this verse Buson too is part of the spring, the greening willow, the rooting and growing of things.  The willow and its watery nature and ease of sprouting in moist soil are in harmony with the sound of falling rain.

David

THE GREEN WILLOW ROAD

Buson the artist-writer was also a classicist heavily influenced by Chinese poetry.  Put very simply, Chinese poetry in general has a feeling of great distances, while Japanese poetry more often concentrates on the small and near.  Nonetheless, one sometimes finds the “vast space” of Chinese poetry in the very small envelope of a hokku.  One example with a very obvious Chinese influence is this verse by Buson:

Kimi yuku ya   yanagi midori ni   michi nagashi
You go ya willow  green at      road long

Rather literally it is:

You are going;
In the green of the willows,
The long road.

It is a “departure” verse, for which we find many prototypes in Chinese poetry.  Essentially it is an expression of one’s feelings when a dear one is going away.  It is quite obvious, though, that those feelings are expressed in ways other than we would usually do it in the West.  Here they are expressed through Nature rather than through “bare emotion.”

We could also translate Buson’s verse more freely:

Your leaving;
The green willow road
Is long.

Two old friends are saying goodbye in spring.  The willows that line the road are bright green with new leaves, and the road itself stretches on and on into unimaginable distance.

Inevitably one is reminded of Hans Bethge’s loose rendering of Wang Wei in Die Chinesische Flöte — The Chinese Flute, as used in Gustav Mahler’s “Song of the Earth”:

Er stieg vom Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk
Des Abschieds dar. Er fragte ihn, wohin
Er führe und auch warum es müßte sein.
Er sprach, seine Stimme war umflort: Du, mein Freund,
Mir war auf dieser Welt das Glück nicht hold!
Wohin ich geh? Ich geh, ich wandre in die Berge.
Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz.
Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte.
Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen.
Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!
Die liebe Erde allüberall
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt
Aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig
Blauen licht die Fernen!
Ewig… ewig…

(http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=235)

He dismounted and handed him the drink of parting;

He asked him where he was going and why it must be.
He replied, his voice was veiled;
“You, my friend — Fortune was not kind to me
In this world.
Where do I go?  I go — I wander in the mountains,
I seek peace for my lonely heart.
I wander to my homeland, my place.
No more shall I travel in far regions.
My heart is still and awaits its hour!
The dear earth all and everywhere
Blooms forth, and grows green anew.
All and everywhere the blue light
In the distance —
Eternal… Eternal….

David

HOKKU AS ILLUSION AND AS REALITY

Buson wrote:

A Korean ship
Passes without stopping;
The haze.

It is virtually impossible to recognize in English translation, but this verse is an example of the romantic tendency in Buson’s hokku — romantic in the sense of “evoking an idealized past or exotic adventurousness.”  When Buson wrote of a Korean ship, what he meant was a particular kind of ship that long before his day brought exotic goods from the mainland to Japan.  It is as though we were to translate the first line as  “a caravel” or “a galleon,” which in English would immediately set the verse in the past rather than the present day:

A Spanish galleon
Passes without stopping;
The haze.

So Buson was doing something romantic artists like to do, which is to create an exotic mood, and to do that, he has us see an ancient Korean vessel approaching the shore, yet continuing on into the haze of spring instead of stopping.  Essentially he is bringing the ship out of the haze of the imagination to evoke an artistic atmosphere of the “past,” then sending it back into the haze to let us know it is not a part of the “real” world.

This hokku reminds me very much of a painting I once saw of a boy reading at night in his room, and all around him — out of the haze of his imagination — appear pirates and a parrot, palm trees and all the images called forth by the reading of Stevenson’s Treasure Island in the young mind.

From my point of view this is all very well in novels and in some kinds of verse, but I do not think it should be the purpose of hokku.  Hokku should not be the artificial creations of the imagination, the world remolded nearer to the heart’s desire, but rather it should be the world seen clearly and without the coloring of the imagination — a reflection in a mirror wiped clean.

That is a fundamental difference between hokku as a contemplative path and hokku as a creative exercise of the imagination.  In the history of the form there has always been a certain kind of contradiction and conflict between these two approaches.  We find it even in the verses of Bashō, who after all was a businessman of sorts, making his living from teaching a rather complicated system of verse to the merchants and tradesmen of his day.  So not all he wrote is gold by any means, in fact the majority of Bashō’s verses could be obliterated without doing the slightest damage to hokku.  Those we see printed in anthologies tend to be among the few that showed him at his best.

In fact we could say that a certain amount of artificiality was built into the practice of haikai, because as a kind of group-oriented poetic game, the composition of a linked sequence of verses (of which the hokku was the first) meant coming up with new links on the spot, and that opens it to the possibility of a large element of artificiality.

It is also one of the reasons why I do not lament the passing of this approach.  I have always preferred a hokku that takes us closer to the real world of Nature rather than to the world remade through our imaginations.  Our task as humans is not to immerse ourselves in illusions, but rather to see the world more and more clearly.  And hokku, in my view, should be practiced in the same way.  Otherwise it only contributes to our delusions instead of helping to free us from them.

David

YOURS TRULY INTRODUCES THE WALDEN

Buson wrote a spring verse that is very tricky to put into English:

Hana ni kurete   waga ie tōki   no-michi kana
Blossoms at darkened   my home far   field-road kana

Blyth, who often preferred to convey the overall meaning of a verse rather than its absolutely literal meaning, gave this as:

Among the blossoms, it grows late,
And I am far from home —
This path over the moor.

That does well what Blyth wanted it to do, but it is not at all what we would do when composing a hokku in English.  It is too unbalanced, too long.  The problem is that literally, what Buson is saying is something like

It grows dark on the blossoms;
My home is far;
The field road.

But that too is unusably awkward in English.

We could try

The blossoms dim,
My home is far;
The road through the fields.

But essentially, Buson has presented us with two parallel lines and a third, and that makes translation into English hokku form problematic.  We need not feel troubled by it, however, because Buson has really packed too much into the small space for a hokku.  The information contained in the verse requires a wider format, either the waka or four lines of “Chinese” verse.

I would translate it into my own version of the waka.  But first I must explain a bit:

A waka (literally “Japanese song” or “Japanese verse”)  put into English form comes out as three lines of the same length as a hokku.  But it ends with two additional lines that are the length of the longest (the middle) line of the “hokku-like” part.  Where hokku avoids overt “poetry,” the waka does not.  And the waka, which does not shy away from romance, tears, longing for the loved one, etc. etc. etc., also tends to use a very elevated and elegant language, using only what we might call “high” subjects though presented in the context of Nature.  It is all moonlight and singing birds and cherry blossoms.  No toads, no pumpkins.

We may say that while our tradition of hokku took a middle path in old Japan, neither falling into mere puns and wordplay and witticism nor using only elevated subjects, the waka always remained on a very elevated level.  Subjects often found in hokku would be considered too “common” or “low” for it.

Quite honestly, that has always been why I have never had much interest in writing the waka.  I have no interest in its deliberate romanticism and its “ivory tower” attitude toward the ordinary things of life.  In waka everything must be conventionally beautiful and elegant and aristocratic.  Waka fails to see that there is also beauty in the ordinary and plain, and for me that is a fatal flaw.

What I have always wanted to do, then, is to make up for the flaw by writing a kind of “hokku-fied” waka, verse combining the high and low, which of course I could not continue to call waka because its aesthetics would be different — like those of the hokku.  My kind of waka, then, would be the waka form minus its complexities, and having the “contemplative” aesthetics of the hokku.

So here I give Buson’s overly-packed (for a hokku) verse rewritten in my longer, hokku-fied waka form, which I hereby name the “walden” in honor of Henry David Thoreau:

With evening,
The cherry blossoms
Grow dark;
Through empty fields,
The long road home.

Buson has lingered too long admiring the blossoms, and as they darken, he turns his eyes to the long road through the fields and begins his homeward journey.

If any of you would like to try the “walden” as well, just keep in mind that it has the same aesthetics as the hokku, and the same avoidances.  Its subject matter is Nature and the place of humans in Nature, and it omits romance, sex, violence — things that disturb the mind in general, as well as “technology.”

It is simply an extended hokku in its aesthetics.  And every now and then, one may need an extended hokku.  Outwardly it looks like a waka but it is not a waka; nor is it what is today called a tanka.  It is a walden.

Enjoy.

David

FREEDOM FROM POETRY

One who learns hokku learns to be free from poetry.

Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?  Isn’t a hokku a poem? The answer is that a hokku is not a poem, and hokku is not poetry, and those who write hokku are not poets.

This of course applies to hokku as I teach it.

If you stand on a rocky shore and look out at the sea, what you see is not poetry; what you see is a thing-event.  An event is something happening, and of course without a “thing” nothing happens.  So a bird flying is a thing-event; a bud on a branch is a thing-event.  The sun rising is a thing-event.  An old man sneezing is a thing-event.  A child burping is a thing-event.  Similarly, a hokku is not a poem as we usually think of a poem; instead it is a thing-event.

Buson wrote:

Haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana
Spring ‘s sea  all-day     undulating undulating kana

The spring sea,
Rising and falling
All day long.

Where is the poetry in that?  It is just a statement of what is happening.

You may say it is a “poem” because it is divided into three lines, but by that definition the address on an envelope is poetry.  And of course if we present it like this,

The spring sea, rising and falling all day long.

— nothing has really changed.  So it is not simply the division into lines that makes poetry, in spite of the fact that the “beat” writer Gary Snyder made a name for himself by simply dividing prose into lines to make it appear superficially like poetry.  That is a common trick from the mid-20th century onward, deceiving many.

Nonetheless, when we look at the spring sea there is poetry in it, and R. H. Blyth tells us clearly and correctly why:

“There is a poetry independent of rhyme and rhythm, of onomatopoeia and poetic brevity, of cadence and parallelism, of all form whatsoever.  It is wordless and thoughtless even when expressed in words and notions, and lives a life separate from that of so-called poetry.  It is the seeing we do when a white butterfly flutters by us down the valley, never to return.” (Eastern Culture)

To summarize all of this quite simply, hokku is not what we ordinarily think of as poetry (so-called), but hokku lives a life separate from that of so-called poetry.  There we have it in a nutshell.

When we say, then, that hokku are not poems, not poetry, we are saying it so that we may distinguish it from all poetry so-called, by which we mean all that normally passes as poetry in English-language cultures.

What then, do we mean by poetry in hokku?  We mean simply a thing-event in which we perceive an unspoken, deep significance.

Blyth tells us that “This poetry of things is not something superimposed on them, but brought out of them as the sun and rain bring the tender leaf out of the hard buds.”

That means poetry (as we are speaking of it in relation to hokku) is not something we add to a thing-event as one adds condiments to spice up a soup.  It is not a dash of metaphor, a thick slice of iambic pentameter, a pinch of alliteration.  Instead, poetry is something awakened by certain thing-events, and when we experience such a thing-event, we “automatically” perceive the poetry in it.  That is the poetical experience of hokku, and that is the entire point of hokku.  Without this poetry in a thing-event, hokku would not, could not exist.

We can say then of hokku what the German mystic Meister Eckhardt said of the Nativity:

Was nützt es mir, wenn Gott früher einmal in Bethlehem Mensch geworden ist, wenn er nicht in mir geboren wird?

“What good is it to me that God once become man in Bethlehem, if he is not born in me?”

That means, when applied to hokku, that the poetry in a thing-event does not really exist until it is perceived as such by the experiencer.

That is why when Buson saw the sea of spring — when we read Buson’s verse that gives us only the sea of spring with nothing added — we experience that thing-event and poetry is born in us.  Yes, the poetry is in the event, but only when it is perceived by the person able to recognize the poetry, in which case the spring sea is born in that person, the thing-event takes place, and the poetry is felt.

We can say, then, that in hokku the poetry is not in the verse but rather in the reader.  Without the reader the verse is just words on page.  But when read, the words and page disappear, and the thing-event “is wordless and thoughtless even when expressed in words and notions.”

If you find that confusing, just remember this and you will grasp the essence of the matter:

Hokku is an experience of the senses, a thing-event put into words, but when read, the words disappear and the thing-event takes place in the reader.

It is simply that when you read Buson’s verse, words and page disappear and you see and experience only

The spring sea,
Rising and falling
All day long.

And that, in Blyth’s terms, is your “little enlightenment.”

David

UNHURRIED BUTTERFLIES

Wafū wrote:

Chō kiete    tamashii ware ni    kaeri keri
Butterfly having-gone    spirit me to  returned

The butterfly gone,
My spirit
Came back to me.

What does he mean?  He means that he was so absorbed in watching the butterfly that he and the butterfly became one, and Wafū lost consciousness of himself and was only — for a short while — the flitting, fluttering butterfly.  Then the butterfly was gone, and Wafū suddenly “came to himself” as we say in English.

This happens all the time.  Watch a child reading a good book.  The child forgets himself or herself, becoming the action in the book.  Then a shout from the mother brings the child back “to the body,” back to our customary separation of subject and object.

This subject-object unity is the very essence of hokku.  In hokku the writer — we do not even want to be so grand as to say “poet” — disappears in the presence of what is happening in Nature.  When he looks at a tree, he becomes a tree; when he looks at a rock in the stream, he becomes the rock and the water swirling about it.  He forgets himself for the moment, and that is not only how hokku takes place, but it is also one of the most important ways in which hokku differs from conventional Western poetry, particularly modern English-language poetry, in which writers seem so desperately self-obsessed.

Wafū’s verse, then, has something important to teach us about hokku.  Technically, however, it is just a simple “standard” hokku in form, consisting of a setting, a subject, and an action:

Setting: The butterfly gone,
Subject:  My spirit
Action:  Came back to me

Remember that a setting is the wider atmosphere, environment, or circumstance in which something takes place.  The subject is what we “focus” on in that atmosphere, environment, or circumstance, and the action is something moving or changing, however quickly or slowly.  One can write countless hokku using this “pattern” and the old hokku writers did.  Remember that setting, subject, and action need not be in that order.

One has to be really careful in writing hokku about a “delicate” subject such as a butterfly.  It is easy to fall into sentimentality or “prettiness,” both of which are death to hokku.

Shiki, for example, wrote a really awful “haiku” on the butterfly:

Butterfly sleeping on a stone,
You will dream
Of my unhappy life.

Well, no it won’t.  The butterfly could not possibly be less concerned with Shiki, and Shiki should have concerned himself more with the butterfly.

There are unfortunately more bad verses written by old Japanese authors on the dreams of butterflies, but we have no reason to add to the smelly pile.  Instead, we should write more objectively, as did Buson:

Tsurigane ni   tomarite nemuru   kochō kana
Temple-bell on  having-perched sleeping  butterfly kana

On the temple bell,
A butterfly has settled,
Sleeping.

Now on the surface there is not much to this.  But the whole point of the verse is in knowing that the temple bell is a very heavy, cast metal object that is struck at certain hours of the day by a long, horizontal swinging pole; when struck, it emits a great, deep BBbbboooooooooooooonnnnnngngngngngng that vibrates not only the whole bell but all the air around it, sending out a sound that can be heard for a great distance.  From that the perceptive reader will gather, correctly, that this is a hokku of “harmony of contrast.”

Remember that there are hokku made by combining similar harmonious elements, but there are also hokku made by combining contrasting elements that when put together still make a kind of overall harmony.  That is the case in this verse.  The contrasting elements are the great, dark, heavy bell and the very small, very fragile, butterfly.  The butterfly is always silent; the bell is silent only for the present.  When struck, it will vibrate with great energy, and the butterfly will flutter away.  We are to sense all of this when we read the verse, but to say it really spoils it.  Nonetheless in teaching hokku, one has to explain such things until a student develops a “hokku” spirit and begins to understand them for himself or herself.

Garaku composed a hokku that shows us the nature of the butterfly:

Even chased,
The butterfly is not
In a hurry.

Try to catch a butterfly, and it will just casually, apparently thoughtlessly, slowly flutter away, pause, and flutter off again at its usual, leisurely speed.

Sora too wrote a “butterfly” verse:

Back and forth,
Stitching the rows of barley —
A butterfly.

R. H. Blyth, however, improves on it by removing the “stitching” simile, which I shall also do here:

Back and forth
Between the rows of barley —
A butterfly.

Why does that improve it?  Because the butterfly is not really “stitching,” just making a back and forth, to and fro repetitive motion.  Butterflies do not “stitch,” and when we use such a word, it takes us just that much farther away from reality.

David

 

 

FLICKERING SHADOWS

Buson, who wrote some rather artifical and contrived hokku, also managed to write one of the simplest and most effective of spring hokku:

Shoku no hi wo   shoku ni utsusu ya   haru no yū
light   ‘s  flame wo light at  transfer ya spring ‘s evening

The flame of one light
Transferred to another light
The Spring evening.

Translated woodenly — literally — like that, it does not look like much.  That is why when we translate a hokku into English, we must not just say exactly what the verse means in Japanese, because the Japanese language does not say things as we would say them in English.  We only get the full effect of the verse when we make it fully English, like this:

Using one candle
To light another;
The spring evening.

I always stress to my students the importance of Yang and Yin in hokku, of understanding how they are applied in countless verses.  We see here a very effective use of the Yin-Yang principle.

Yin, you will recall, is the dark and passive principle in the universe; Yang is the bright and active principle.  Everything is a combination of Yin and Yang.  The summer is Yang, the winter Yin.  Yin grows until it reaches its maximum, then it becomes Yang; Yang grows until it reaches its maximum, then it transforms to Yin.  Spring is a period when Yin and Yang are mixed, but it is growing Yang, because Yang increases until the height of summer; then Yang begins to decline into fall (autumn), which is another mixed season, but of growing Yin and declining Yang.

This hokku, then, is set in spring, when Yin and Yang are mixed, and Yang is growing.  It is also set in the evening, which is growing Yin — the light of day declines into the darkness of night.

Knowing all this, we can appreciate the interplay of elements in Buson’s hokku.

It is twilight — evening begins, and the light of day is fading and the shadows growing.  Someone has lit a candle that shines in the gathering darkness.  And someone is using the flame of that candle to light another candle, increasing the Yang element in the midst of the Yin of evening.

One can easily see that this lighting of a “Yang” candle, this “doubling” of the Yang of the lit candle by using it to light another is in keeping with the growing Yang of spring.  It shines in the darkness and dispels — but only partially — the Yin of the evening, just as the growing Yang dispels — but only gradually — the Yin element of spring, as Yang begins to move to dominance.

To say all of that, however, is to overthink the verse.  We are not supposed to work it out in ratios of Yin and Yang, like a mathematical formula.  Instead we are just supposed to feel the Yang of the candle flame dispelling — but only partially — the Yin interior darkness of evening.  Buson did not sit down and work this verse out in measures of Yin and Yang; it was already a part of his understanding of the universe, so when he wrote it, it came naturally and without intellection.  Yin and Yang are often new concepts to Westerners, however, so we must make it a part of our understanding of things, and then we will understand countless hokku without having to think it all out.  It will just come naturally to us as well.

With our electric lights in the modern world, we miss the rituals our ancestors used to know so well — the lighting of a candle or a lamp at evening.  It is an act filled with significance, and we see the effect in many old paintings where the light is only that of a candle.

Twilight used to be a time of calm and closeness for families, who would gather around the light of a candle or a lamp as the shadows of evening grew.

There is a very old-fashioned song, popular generations ago, that in spite of its romanticism, captures the quiet of this time of evening:

Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low;
And the flick’ring shadows softly come and go.
Tho’ the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes love’s old song,
Comes love’s old sweet song.

If we were to make a hokku of that, we would use only the “non-romantic” parts:

Flickering shadows
Softly come and go;
The twilight.

That would make a fitting verse to go with Buson’s hokku.

David

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 is a verse of early to mid autumn, and now we are entering deep autumn, a more severe and chilly time that leads us directly on to winter.

There is a hokku by Shōhaku that can be understood as early or as late autumn, depending on whether we translate it by the old lunar calendar or by the newer calendar.  Under the new calendar it is:

October;
I go nowhere —
No one comes.

Read thus, it expresses the beginning of the pulling away from the activities of life that we find in autumn as the days shorten and the nights grow longer, as Nature begins to wither.  One thinks of a hermit life amid the coloring and falling leaves.

The first line is literally “tenth month.”  It is like the old Quaker calendar, in which the months were numbered rather than named, but even more literally it is the “tenth moon.”

But what does “tenth month” mean?  Actually, two different things, depending on whether we read Shōhaku’s verse according to the modern calendar adopted in Japan during the Meiji period, or by the old lunar calendar of Shōhaku’s day.

We have seen that by the new calendar the “tenth month” is October.  But by the old calendar it is November.  So that gives us two different feelings expressed in the same verse, depending on which calendar we choose.

By the old calendar it becomes

November;
I go nowhere —
No one comes.

This gives the verse a darker feel.  The leaves have already been swept from the trees by the rains and cold winds.  The gold and crimson colors are gone, giving way to bare branches and dim, grey skies.  Here the verse expresses the inhospitableness of the weather through the actions — or rather the lack of actions — of the writer.  He visits no one, no one visits him.  But it also expresses a kind of late autumn of the soul, an isolation and apartness that those growing older notice as they see they are no longer of interest to young people, and those their own age either have their own affairs to deal with with or have left this world.

All too often, it is the story of the elderly in America.  I remember  a Korean fellow I met in college.  He was staying in a cheap, rundown apartment building in which numbers of old people also lived, because it was all they could afford.  Watching their poor lives from day to day, seeing their isolation and how they were treated, he remarked to me, “America is Hell for old people.”  I have never forgotten that “outside” perspective on how this country treats its elderly.

But getting back to hokku, this growing isolation of individuals in the late autumn makes “things to the contrary” matters of significance.  That is why Buson could write

A person came
To visit a person;
The autumn evening.

It is quite a bland verse until one reads it in the context of the season as explained above.  There is a significance to making a visit in autumn, a significance to receiving a visit, and this significance too is expressive of the season.

By the way, I rather consistently translate the common line aki no kure, found in large numbers of hokku, as “The autumn evening.”  Technically it could also be translated as “Autumn’s end,” and that should be kept in mind not for linguistic reasons, but because it gives us a very good line for many hokku of the deepest part of autumn that is just about to become winter.

So for those of you interested in technicalities, the line can be understood either as:

Aki no kure
Autumn   ‘s   evening

or as:

Aki no kure
Autumn   ‘s   end

Shiki wrote this simple verse, which is a bit too interpretive for good hokku.  It is both true and not true:

I am leaving,
You are staying;
Two autumns.

Yuku ware ni    todomaru nare ni    aki futatsu
Go     I  at           remain      you   at    autumns two

One could loosely paraphrase it as:

With me going
And you staying,
There will be two autumns.

Shiki  is seeing the situation from a dualistic point of view:  When I am gone, we shall each experience our separate autumns.  But there is also the unitary point of view, in which you and I are both autumn, along with each reddening and falling leaf.  That is the wider perspective.

One must always keep in mind that when we are talking about weather and what is happening in Nature, a lot depends on where one is.  A month that is golden autumn for some is already icy winter for others.

David

 

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 think   autumn ‘s evening

Thinking only
About my mom and dad;
The autumn evening.

At first this seems a rather bland hokku, but a great deal depends upon the reader knowing how hokku work.

We know that a hokku is an expression of a season, in this case the season of autumn.  Autumn is the time of aging and withering and eventually dying.  That is the key to understanding this verse.

When Buson says that he is thinking only of his parents, he means it in the sense that they keep coming into his thoughts for some reason — that even when he tries to think of other things, the faces of his parents keep returning.

Why is that?  It is because in the autumn, one realizes both what one is losing and what one has lost.  Autumn is the time of growing yin, the time of things — of life — returning to the root.  It is the time of withering plants and falling leaves and the diminishing of warmth and light and the increasing of cold.  All of these things combine to bring Buson’s mother and father constantly to mind.

He does not tell us if they are aged — in which case one has the sorrow and concern of seeing their lives fading — or if they have passed away, in which case one has the grief that never really goes away, the bittersweet memories easily evoked by the season of autumn.

One can see that the last line,

The autumn evening

is very important.

So there is a world of feeling in this verse.  It is at the same time very personal and very universal.  Buson thinks of his parents, but when we read it, it becomes a hokku about our own parents, whether we are near to losing them or have lost them.

Dante says in the Divine Comedy that there is

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria….

That there is

“No greater sorrow than to recall a happy time in misery.”

Time is the thief that steals all things — our childhood, our youth,  and leaves us

Thinking only
About my mom and dad;
The autumn evening.

David

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 paintings of mountains emerging from fog.  Just as in hokku, what is seen — or mentioned — is made even more significant by what is not seen or mentioned.

Keep in mind that when three people read the same hokku, they will have three different experiences.  Yes, each will be focused on a river and the fog, but each will be different.  That is because on reading a hokku, each person draws from his or her own memory and experience to create the new experience.  So a thousand people reading the same hokku will have a thousand different experiences.

One must be careful not to make hokku too “poetic.”  Look at these two verses, the first exactly what a hokku should be, the second in hokku form but really too poetic for hokku:

Dense fog;
What is being shouted
From hill and boat?

It is a scene where on a clear day, one would easily see a river passing at the base of a steep hill.  But now there is a thick fog, and in it someone in the river boat and someone on the hill are trying to communicate by shouting through the fog that muffles all sounds.  The writer hears the shouting, but cannot clearly see either person, nor can he distinguish what it is that is being shouted.

In forming the hokku thus, Kitō conveys to us the “hiding and revealing” power of the fog.  We hear shouting, but do not understand the words in an autumn world where much is hidden by the fog.

Obviously this is a “question” hokku.  A question hokku derives its power from an asked, but always unanswered question.  What is being shouted in the dense fog?  It is that questioning feeling — that “not knowing” that is the whole point of a question hokku.  To answer it — even by saying we do not know what is being shouted — spoils the effect.

Perhaps you are familiar with the American composer Charles Ives.  One of his best-known works is titled The Unanswered Question.  It is an instrumental way of presenting the question of existence — and in Ives’ work, that question — as in hokku — is never answered.

Kitō’s hokku, then, does what hokku should do, but does not go beyond it.  By contrast, here is a verse by Buson.  You will recall that Buson was a painter, and he often strives for painterly effects in his hokku, which makes them a bit artificial.  It is worth remembering that Buson — not Bashō — was the favorite of Masaoka Shiki.   It was the “painter” aspect of Buson that Shiki liked, which contributed to Shiki’s notion that his new “haiku” should be a kind of illustration or sketch from life.  But let’s look now at Buson’s verse:

Morning fog–
A painting of people passing
In a dream.

It is really too intentionally beautiful for hokku, and is somewhat like an impressionist painting.

Literally, what Buson wrote was:

Asagiri ya   e ni kaku  yume no hito dōri
Morning-fog ya   picture in painted dream ‘s people pass

So if we moved things around a bit, we could translate it more literally as

Morning fog:
Painted in a picture —
Dream people passing.

Either way, however, it does what hokku should not do — it pulls our attention in two different directions by comparing one thing with another.  Instead of just telling us that people are passing in the morning fog, he goes beyond and tells us that it is like a picture of people passing in a dream — of dream-people passing.  Any time we have to use the word “like” to explain something in hokku, it is a warning sign.  Hokku should let things just be themselves, not be “like” this or “like” that.

To explain this further, let’s look at another Buson hokku in which he took things to a similar but even greater extreme:

Ichi gyō    no kari hayama ni   tsuki wo insu
One line   ‘s    wild-geese  foothills at  moon wo seal

A line of wild geese;
Above the foothills,
The moon as seal.

It may not be readily obvious to someone not familiar with Chinese and Japanese painting, but what Basho is doing here is comparing — LIKE-ening–a line of wild geese flying in the night sky of autumn to a line of calligraphy — of writing — on a scroll.  And carrying the simile further, he then says that above the foothills, the moon is pressed as the seal.  In such a painting, there is generally a reddish-orange seal that is either the mark of the painter or the mark of an owner.  Such seals were often round (though sometimes square or rectangular or oval), and contained stylized Chinese characters.

So Buson is likening a passing line of wild geese on a moonlit autumn night to a vertical scroll on which there is a line of black writing, and he is likening the bright autumn moon above the foothills to the reddish-orange round seal mark of the painter.  He thus pulls the mind of the reader in two directions — one a real scene, the other the work of a calligrapher-painter.  Hokku, in my view, should not do this.  It leads, as I have said, not only to artificiality, but it also does not allow a thing to simply be what it is, to stand on its own merit and power.

Since I first posted this, someone has used part of what I wrote above on another site (http://haigaonline.com/issue16-2/welcome.html), and has added this comment:

Coomler dislikes the poem for the same reasons that first attracted me to it. I don’t read the image as a “real scene” that is being compared to a painting. Like all good art, the poem is open. It could be describing the painting itself, or could be simply what it purports to be: wild geese at moonrise, realized in the artist/poet’s eye as a synthesis of art and experience. In other words, ekphrasis.

This is approaching hokku from the perspective of Western poetry, which in my view is an error.  It is not that “Coomler dislikes the poem,” but rather that Coomler dislikes it as hokku, for the reasons stated above.  However if one treats it as a Western poem (by approaching it from the perspective and conditioning of Western poetry), then it is perfectly fine.  Seen from that perspective, this verse by Buson is a literary conceit, meaning a literary comparison/likening of two quite different things.  But such cleverness — while perfectly acceptable as “poetry” — is not hokku at its best, which avoids cleverness.

Of course Westerners will often like such verses very much, because Western poetry is filled with simile (one thing likened to another) and metaphor (saying one thing is another).  A conceit is an extended metaphor.  We are accustomed to it this kind of thing, we recognize it, and we might mistakenly think it is just fine because to us it is common in poetry.  But hokku is not poetry as we understand it.  Instead, hokku should be a direct sensory experience — seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing.  Hokku should not be an intellectual experience, and when we use simile or metaphor, we take hokku away from the concrete and into the realm of the abstract — the world of the mind and intellection, what we call “thinking” in hokku.  But hokku are experiencing, not thinking.

That does not mean Buson’s two verses are bad.  In their own way they are interesting for what they are.  It is just that what they are is not really what hokku should be or what hokku should do.  Fortunately, not all of Buson’s verses are like this, but when reading him, we somehow feel we can never really trust him to tell us the truth; he too often strives for an effect, and so Buson’s verses give us the same uncertain, untrustworthy feeling we get when looking at an exhibition of photos in which some have been altered by computer to enhance their effect.

For those curious about Buson’s original, here it is in transliteration, with a very literal translation:

ichi gyō no     kari ya hayama ni     tsuki wo insu
one-line ‘s   wild-geese ya  foothills at moon wo seal

Ichi gyō/ichigyō（一 行） calls to mind the vertically-written, single-line sayings — ichigyō mono –particularly Zen sayings — that were often painted on wall scrolls.

David

WHITE DEW

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 bramble, but notice how they are presented.  A single drop hangs from each of the thorns on a branch of the bramble.  We see its cold transparence in the light of morning — the yin softness of water, the yang hardness of the bramble thorns.  One element is very transitory — soon gone when the sun rises higher — the other more permanent, but still as transient on its own time scale.

It is a good idea to have something that moves or changes in hokku.  Generally we see things that do so obviously — a branch moving in the wind, a fish swimming through the water.  But in this hokku the movement is only implied, and very subtle — the temporary nature of the dew, the knowledge not only that at any moment one of those drops could fall from a thorn, but that the dew itself will likely only last the morning.

Buson sometimes tended to spoil his hokku by making them too artificial, too contrived from literary sources, or too obviously intended to impress.  He was both a painter and a writer, and his writing is often influenced by his painting.  But in this hokku it is the simplicity and faithfulness to Nature that saves him.

David

 

FALLING LEAVES

In old hokku, falling and fallen leaves are generally a winter subject.  But where I live, as well as in many other parts of North America, they are generally more appropriate to deep autumn.

Ryōkan wrote:

The wind
Brings enough for a fire —
Fallen leaves.

Have you noticed that old hokku often put the main subject of a verse last?  That gives us a kind of “wondering” buildup to the answer:  The wind brings enough what for a fire?  Then the answer — fallen leaves.

Buson does the same thing in another hokku:

Blown from the west,
They pile up in the east —
Fallen leaves.

To remember this technique, we might call it the “What is it?” technique.  In the first first, we ask “What is it the wind brings enough of?”  Answer:  Fallen leaves.

In the second we ask, “What is it that blows from the east and piles up in the west?  Answer:  Fallen leaves.

If you remember that, it will help you when an experience fits that technique.

Here is one of my very favorite hokku, by Gyōdai:

Falling leaves
Lie on one another;
Rain beats on rain.

Notice how this verse has a kind of parallelism reminiscent of old Chinese verse, and we can put the parts side by side like this for study:

Falling leaves lie on one another;
Rain beats on rain.

The first line has the subject fallen leaves and the action lie on one another.
The second line  has the subject rain and the action beats on rain.

In hokku we want to avoid perfect parallelism in all things, so in this one the third line — comprising the entire second part of the parallelism — is shorter than the first part.

Ryūshi wrote

Stillness;
The sound of a bird walking
On fallen leaves.

That is the regular setting-subject-action hokku.

The setting is “stillness.”

The subject is “the sound of a bird.”

The action is “walking on fallen leaves.”

Many old hokku are about the sound of one thing or another.  You will recall that the best-known of all hokku — Bashō’s Old Pond verse (a spring hokku), has “the sound of water.”

I will end today with another good hokku by Taigi, very expressive of the autumn season and its changes:

Sweeping them up,
Then not sweeping them up —
Fallen leaves.

At first the falling leaves are few, and easily removed.  But as autumn deepens they fall in ever greater numbers, until finally one just gives up and lets the season follow its course.

From this we learn that hokku is not simply a “moment in time,” but rather an expression of time and change.

And do not overlook that Taigi’s hokku also fits the “what is it?” technique:  What is that that we first sweep up, then do not sweep up?  Fallen leaves.

David

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 experience, whether the hokku is written on the spot or hours or days or weeks later.

This principle goes back to a very old practice common in Chinese painting — that one entered and contemplated Nature, mountains and rivers, rocks and streams, trees and birds — and if one did this with sufficient awareness and perception, one would absorb the characteristics of such things, so that when one returned home to paint, one would paint a scene that, while not a photographic representation of Nature, nonetheless faithfully expressed the spirit of what was seen.

In life we accumulate a great many direct experiences of Nature.  We see spring rains and autumn rains, trees in bud and trees withered, wild geese arriving and leaving.  We see fog and snow, lightning and windstorms, twilights and dawns.  All of these experiences, if noticed with sufficient awareness, are stored away in the memory as a kind of library or vocabulary of sensory experience of Nature.

When writing a hokku, then, we have these options:

1.  One may write a verse faithfully from an immediate experience, a hokku of a single, actual event.  I did this with my verse:

Summer’s end;
The tall tree
Cut up in a heap.

Every part of that hokku is faithful to an event I experienced.

2.  One may write a verse from a mixture of direct experience and creative selection, meaning that while part of the verse reflects an actual “immediate” event, another part may be selected from the mental vocabulary of past sensory experience.

For example, one may have seen:

Dragonfly shadows
Pass to and fro.

But that requires a setting.  Perhaps the “real” setting is that you saw the shadows passing on the grass.  But you think the verse would be more expressive with a different setting, so you might make it:

The paper screen;
Dragonfly shadows
Pass to and fro.

The actual old Japanese hokku from which I have made this example was:

On the white wall,
Dragonfly shadows
Pass to and fro.

So one has the freedom to use creative selection in composing, based on one’s own personal vocabulary of things and events.  The key is to make it “real,” by which is meant keeping it in harmony with Nature.  And to do that, one must have direct experience of Nature.

3.  One may write a hokku entirely from creative selection, meaning the verse is not a reflection of a particular actual event, but rather a combination of elements from different past events, yet united and harmonious.

A good example of this is Bashō’s “Old Pond” verse:

The old pond;
A frog  jumps in —
The sound of water.

Now Bashō did not write this verse from direct experience, according to old accounts.  He had the last two lines, and was looking for a setting, so the story goes.  He tried many possibilities; someone suggested beginning it with the yamabuki, the yellow shrub Kerria japonica, often translated, rather confusingly, as “mountain rose” in the West.

 

But in a sudden inspiration, Bashō spoke “Furu ike ya,” — “The old pond”; and according to the possibly apocryphal story, everyone was thunderstruck.

Whatever the truth of the story, we know that Bashō would have experienced many frogs jumping into water in his life, and would have seen many old ponds.  He just did not happen to see this precise event when he composed the verse.  Instead it was composed from his mental vocabulary of past sensory events.  It was thus written from experience, but not from immediate experience.  This is an important point.

Some old hokku never happened.  Buson, for example, wrote a verse about stepping on his dead wife’s comb; but his wife was not dead!  He did it merely for effect.

One could write like that, but there is a great danger of artificiality.  The more we draw from our own imagination instead of from actual experience — whether immediate or from our mental vocabulary of past experiences — the less likely our hokku are to seem real and in keeping with Nature.  Too many of Buson’s hokku thus seem artificial and contrived for effect.

That is why I discourage students from writing strictly from the imagination.  In today’s world we are more and more separated from Nature, and because of that, our verses — if not directly connected by immediate experience or by creative selection from genuine past experience — tend to be rootless and “phony.”  And so we must keep in mind the old advice that when writing about pines, one goes to learn from the pine — meaning that if you want to express Nature faithfully, you must go and learn from Nature, absorbing it until you can express it naturally and without artificiality.

In our way of hokku we have the principle that the writer must get the ego out of the way, must be a mirror reflecting Nature.  That applies whether the experience is immediate or creative selection.  Our purpose in writing is to restore the unity of humans and Nature, not to escape into the imagination.

Our course is directly the opposite — out of abstract fantasy and back to Nature as the true home of humans, our mother and father, our origin and our ending.

David

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 when one sees the morning glories in bloom in late summer, and suddenly the delicate flowers are troubled by a cool wind, one senses the change to autumn.

So here too on this site we begin the change to autumn.

Buson wrote:

Sadness;
The fishing line trembles
In the autumn wind.

This does not mean he is sad, and then sees the line trembling in the wind;  it means that seeing the line trembling in the wind of autumn is in itself sadness — the seeing is the feeling.  That is because of all the layers of association it evokes — the withering of things, the ending of things, the certainty of mortality, and yet none of these things are mentioned in the verse, and mentioning them goes too far in explaining it.  That is the suggestiveness of hokku.

Bashō wrote:

In the cowshed,
The sound of mosquitos
Is weak.

Because this is Bashō, we know that there is some significance to this, not just a random event.  The insects that formerly buzzed with such vigor in the height of summer now sound only faint and feeble, their numbers diminishing.  That is in keeping with the weakening of vital energies in autumn.

Autumn, again, is the weakening of the Yang energy, the decline of the energy of warmth and life and active movement.  It corresponds to the period after middle age in human life, and to the late afternoon and twilight in the day.  All these things are automatically associated in hokku; we do not need to even think about them.  That is why the faint sound of the mosquitoes is so significant; it expresses the nature of autumn.  We hear all of autumn in that weak sound.

It is important to keep in mind that hokku are not metaphorical or symbolic.  The faint buzz of the mosquitoes is only the faint buzz of mosquitoes.  Everything else is merely suggested by them, below the level of the intellect.  All of my explanations are only to teach you with what mind a hokku should be read, with what attitude.  To put such things, that are automatically associated, into words, is really going too far, but for beginners it must be done.

We see the effect of these “hidden” layers of association in Issa’s evocative verse:

The autumn wind;
In Issa’s mind
There are thoughts.

What is the nature of those thoughts?  We know already, because the autumn wind tells us.  They do not have to be spelled out or made clear, and should not be.

Issa’s Autumn verse is an expression in that season of the same thing Bashō expressed in a Spring verse:

Many things
They bring to mind —
Cherry blossoms.

In both we see the sense of transience so common to hokku, and in both we also see the suggestiveness of hokku, which again are to be evocative, not in any way explanatory.   For either Issa or Bashō to tell us exactly what these thoughts are, exactly what is brought to mind, would remove every trace of poetry.  We do not have to ask.  We know.

David