Associate Professor Kozlovska
Anna
Ukrainian Academy of Banking of National Bank of Ukraine,
Sumy
THE ART OF HAIKU POETRY
Haiku is one of the most important forms of
traditional Japanese poetry. Haiku is, today, a 17-syllable verse form
consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Since early days,
there has been confusion between the three related terms 'haiku', 'hokku' and
'haikai'. The term 'hokku' literally means 'starting
verse', and was the first starting link of a much longer chain of verses known
as 'haika'. Because the hokku set the tone for the rest of
the poetic chain, it enjoyed a privileged position in haikai poetry, and it was
not uncommon for a poet to compose a hokku by itself without following up with
the rest of the chain. Largely through the efforts of Masaoka Shiki,
this independence was formally established in the 1890s through the creation of
the term ' haiku'. This new form of poetry was to be written, read
and understood as an independent poem, complete in itself, rather than part of
a longer chain [1].
Strictly speaking, then, the history of haiku begins
only in the last years of the 19th century. The famous verses of such
Edo-period (1600-1868) masters as Basho, Buson, and Issa
are properly referred to as hokku and must be placed in the perspective of the
history of haikai even though they are now generally read as independent haiku.
Using the terms 'classical haiku' and 'modern haiku' can handle the distinction
between hokku and haiku. The exact origin of hokku is still subject to debate,
but it is generally agreed that it originated as an abbreviated version of
short classical waka poetry (or tanka), which has a 5-7-5-7-7 structure.
Tanka is a 5-line Japanese poem,
much older than haiku. It flourished a big way in Heian time (794-1192).
Usually we can see two parts in tanka - the first 3 (2) lines gave a natural
image, while the second part talks about human feelings. For example:
your wet hair touching my face
Alexey Andreyev
There existed a game popular among people who liked
tanka: one person would give a first (second) part of the tanka, and another
would write the rest. Such kind of poem is called renga,
e.g.:
somber and tall the forest of oaks
in and out
through the little gate to the cherry blossoms
Basho
It also shows that the images
are not always from the human life. What is more important: 'the shift of the
scene' is provided on each step, and at the same time there is some connection
between every two parts (as if it were seen by one person who just turned his
head).
The haiku originated in Japan about six to seven
hundred years ago and thus is one of the world's oldest surviving poetic forms.
However, the English-speaking world did not learn of its existence until after
1868 when Japan opened its shores to the West and envoys from England started
to translate the form. A short while later, French visitors to Japan took up
writing haiku and in 1905 published an anthology of their work in France. Then,
in 1910, two anthologies of Japanese literature in translation were published,
one in France and one in England and both included haiku.
While these anthologies
created little general interest, they did catch the attention of a
much-heralded group of English and American poets headquartered in London and
in Chicago between 1910 and 1917 who called themselves the Imagists
and who took a special interest in the haiku. Its members, among whom were such
luminaries as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra
Pound, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, used the haiku as a model
(along with the classical Greek lyric and French symbolism of the vers libre
type) for what they considered to be the ideal poem, one "in which the
image was not a means but an end: the image was not a part of the poem; it was
the poem" [Pratt, 29].
While the Imagists thought of
the haiku as an ideal, none of them quite managed to ever write a true one.
Persons with only a tenuous knowledge of the form often describe Pound's famous In A
Station Of The Metro as a haiku:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet black bough.
[Pratt, 50]
Successful as a short poem, it
fails as a haiku because only the first line deals with an immediate experience
while the second line involves the memory of an image that the poet uses
overtly as a metaphor. A haiku is a haiku because all the images it conveys
occur simultaneously in a person's present perceptions of the world. To become
a haiku, Pound's poem would have to indicate that he saw the faces at the same
time as he saw the actual petals, in the flesh, not in memory.
In Ts 'ai Chi 'h,
Pound comes much closer to the spirit of a true haiku:
The petals fall in
the fountain, The orange-colored rose leaves, Their ochre clings to the stone.
[Pratt, 58]
Here he manages to deal only
with things perceived in a particular moment, but fails to achieve the needed
brevity which can be defined as a comfortable breath-length.
W.J. Higginson considers
Autumn Haze by Amy Lowell to be "one of the best hokku
[haiku] by a self-styled Imagist" [Higginson, 52]:
Is it a dragonfly
or a maple leaf
That settles softly
down upon the water?
However, this haiku has the
same problem as Pound's Ts 'ai Chi'h - it is too wordy. In
sum, while the Imagists saw the haiku as a model for their aspirations, they
wrote pieces that were either too metaphorical or too wordy and usually both.
After the Imagist movement
broke up around 1917, North American interest in the haiku verse languished for
several decades until after World War II. Scholars such as Higginson and Thomas
Lynch have tried to trace the path of the form during this period of more than
thirty years and suggest that a continuing interest in the haiku way of seeing
was kept alive by the work of a few major poets who made their mark during this
time, such as William Carlos Williams (beyond his Imagist days), Wallace
Stevens and Charles Reznikoff.
Williams' 1923 poem The
Red Wheelbarrow is most often quoted as evidence:
So much depends
upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Williams
As Lynch states, "All
that keeps this poem from being an excellent haiku is the opening two lines,
which by haiku standards are quite unnecessary". [Lynch, 141]
Both Higginson and Lynch also
single out Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
as proof of the haiku's influence on eminent North American poets: the first
stanza of the thirteen composing the poem is the most frequently quoted:
Among twenty snowy
mountains, The only moving thing
Was the eye of the
blackbird.
As with Williams' The
Red Wheelbarrow, only a small change is necessary to make this a
true haiku. As it stands, it lacks the immediacy required in a haiku, but this
can easily be remedied by dropping the verb "was". Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird was first published in 1917, during the
last year of the Imagist movement. Thus the poem might simply have been the
young Stevens' lone experiment with haiku-like poetry. But we can find similar
writing in later work such as this stanza from the 1936 A Postcard from
the Volcano:
At what we saw. The
spring clouds blow Above the shuttered mansion-house, Beyond our gate and the
windy sky
Stevens W.
Nevertheless, such direct
images are rare in the more mature work of Stevens which is richly metaphorical
in the best tradition of Western poetry.
On the other hand, Charles
Reznikoff did show a steady kinship with the haiku way of seeing throughout his
long career as Geoffrey O'Brien points out: Reznikoff wrote in a variety of
forms ... but most typically he employed brief lyrical forms, often grouping
short units into such comfortably loose sequences as Autobiography: New York
and Autobiography: Hollywood, sequences which do not rise toward a climax or
seek an overall symbolic meaning but rather collect a series of powerful
moments related only by their position in the author's experience.
Here is one of his poems that
needs no editing to become a true haiku:
About an excavation
a flock of bright red lanterns has settled.
However, most works by
Reznikoff are composed of haiku-like lines imbedded in longer stanzas. The
reader has to pluck them out like brilliantly colored feathers from a peacock.
Here, for instance, are the last two lines from a five-line stanza:
From the bare twigs
rows of drops like shining
buds are hanging.
Reznikoff
Nevertheless, compared to
Williams and Stevens, Reznikoff is probably the strongest strand spanning the
years between the Imagists and the 1950s, a decade which E.S. Lamb describes as
the real beginning of what may be called the haiku movement in the western
world.
The chief reason for the
renewed interest was American fascination with Japanese culture following World
War II. In particular, artistic and intellectual Americans became enthralled
with Zen whose history as well as charm Bullock and Stallybrass succinctly
describe: Zen [is] the Japanese version of the Ch'an sect of Buddhism in China,
noted for its simple austerity, its mysticism leading to personal tranquility,
and its encouragement of education and art. Some of its scriptures and
paintings have become widely known and admired in the West; and Aldous Huxley
and others in California led something of a cult of Zen, which in the 1960s
began appealing to students as a way of having religious experience without
dogmas or religious institutions. For many this interest grew to encompass
Japanese art and literature. As a result, the haiku translations of scholars as
H.G. Henderson and R.H. Blyth began to be widely read.
The first significant work in
relation to modern haiku was The Bamboo Broom (1934), by Harold
Gould Henderson (1889-1974). Though Henderson wrote a later revised volume, An
Introduction to Haiku (1958), his work did not make an impact
approaching that of his contemporary and acquaintance Blyth, perhaps because
Henderson chose to translate hokku and haiku into an English rhyme foreign to
the Japanese originals, which never used rhyme.
It was thus not until 1949,
with the publication of the first volume of Haiku,
the four- volume work by Reginald Horace Blyth, that the verse form was
properly introduced to the West. R. H. Blyth (1898-1964) was an Englishman and
teacher of English who took up residence first in Japanese-occupied Korea, then
in Japan. He produced a series of works on Zen, on hokku and haiku, and on
other forms of Japanese and Asian literature. Those most relevant here are his Zen
in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942); his
four-volume Haiku series (1949-1952); and his two-volume A
History of Haiku (1964). [Blyth, 10] Today he is best known as
the major interpreter of hokku and haiku to the West.
Blyth's four volume Haiku
became especially popular at this time because his translations were based on
the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not
surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat
school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack
Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen. All three wrote haiku as well
as about haiku. Kerouac especially played a huge role in popularizing the form.
These two pieces, probably from the late fifties or early sixties ,successfully
evoke fleeting moments of heightened awareness full of metaphorical
resonances. For Ginsberg, and
especially Kerouac, the haiku was a brief diversion from the other writing on
which their reputations as well as incomes were based. Time spent on haiku
meant time away from their bread and butter, e.g.:
The summer chair
rocking by itself In the blizzard
Kerouac
J.
I didn't know the
names of the flowers — now
my garden is gone.
Higginson
Around the same time that the
Beats were exploring the haiku, so was an American novelist and poet from an
earlier generation, Richard Wright. His best haiku reach a high standard:
Coming from the
woods A bull has a lilac sprig Dangling from a horn
Higginson
In the falling snow
A laughing boy
holds out his palms Until they are white
Higginson
Both are vivid and joyful and
resonate with meaning. Because Wright is Afro- American, the second is of
particular interest because it can be interpreted beyond a child's play with
snow. Is the boy experiencing the fulfillment of a desire to be white or is he
feeling the sense of equality that comes when everyone, no matter his or her
skin color, is covered with snow?
By the early 1960s, other
haiku translators, such as Geoffrey Bownas and Peter Beilenson, joined the
ranks of Blyth and Henderson. The effect was that even more people grew aware
of the haiku and eventually grass roots organizations, in the form of haiku
study groups, began to flourish, especially in California. Haiku interest grew
phenomenally during this decade which saw the birth of the "Hippie"
culture with its interest in Eastern art, literature, music, religion and
philosophy that far surpassed anything generated by the Beats. A major
influence during this time was the philosopher Alan Watts whose writings and
recordings used haiku (what he called "the wordless poem" ) as a way
of illustrating Zen principles. Thus, Watts reinforced the impression left by
the Beats that haiku had something to do with Zen.
In 1963, American Haiku, the
first magazine devoted entirely to English-language haiku, was published in
Platteville, Wisconsin. By the end of the 1960s, the interest in haiku could no
longer be considered a fad. Haiku magazines and collections were being
published on both coasts of the United States as well as in the Canadian and
American Midwest.
During the 1970s and 1980s,
the English-language haiku became even more entrenched in North American
culture with over a dozen periodicals at any one time devoted to publishing the
form as well as its close relative, the senryu. Three of them, Brussels
Sprout, Frogpond and Inkstone (Canadian), have
lasted over 12 years and one, Modern Haiku, has survived
over 27 years.
Concomitant with the success
of the periodicals has been the establishment of various haiku societies. Three
of them, Haiku Society of America (established 1968),
Haiku Canada (co-founded by Eric Amann, Betty Drevniok and George
Swede in 1977) and Haiku Poets of Northern California
(established in the late 1980s), have emerged as dominant, holding their own
regular meetings and conferences as well as cooperating every two years to hold
one major event, Haiku North America, that has
attracted individuals from around the world. Each of the Societies also
publishes a regular newsletter, and, one of them, Haiku Society of
America, also publishes its own journal, Frogpond.
Once rooted, the vigorous
North American haiku spread its seeds throughout the English-speaking world and
beyond. In 1990, The British Haiku Society was formed
and immediately became a powerful force, holding monthly meetings, annual
conferences as well as publishing its own journal, Blithe Spirit. Shortly
thereafter, a couple of independent haiku periodicals took hold as well.
Similar developments have occurred in Australia and New Zealand and, not
surprisingly, in countries speaking tongues other than English, especially
Holland, Germany, Croatia and Poland.
In 1989, the three major
Japanese haiku societies, the Modern Haiku Association, the Association of
Haiku Poets and the Association of Japanese Classical Haiku,
formed Haiku International Association. The purpose for the
creation of this new umbrella organization was given in an official
announcement mailed around the globe: "To promote friendship and mutual
understanding among poets, scholars and others who share a common interest in
haiku, though they may live in very distant parts of the world".
True to its stated aim,
Haiku International has its own periodical HI that publishes work from numerous countries in the original
language and Japanese. About half of every issue, however, is devoted to haiku
from Japan, which is printed in Japanese and English. This makes sense
considering that Japan still has far more haiku poets than any other nation.
With the beginning of the
twenty-first century, writers, teachers and scholars of haiku can justifiably
argue that the form is the most popular poetry in the world. None of the other
long-lived forms, such as the englyn, ghazal, limerick, rondeau, sapphics,
sestina, sonnet and villanelle, are considered with such universal interest.
This status is in no small way due to encouragement by the Japanese who, in
addition to publishing work from everywhere, also hold international contests
and conferences to which they invite, often with all expenses paid, the winners
as well as the presenters.
One more indicator of how the
North American psyche has welcomed the haiku is the fact that the current Poet
Laureate of the U.S. Robert Hass has championed haiku for many years. An
English professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Hass published The
Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). The
book puts the three Japanese legends of haiku in the luminous company of poets
such as Blake, Keats, Poe, Shakespeare and Whitman. It should not be long
before the haiku gets the same attention in university curriculums that it now
enjoys at lower levels.
World Haiku
Association was founded in 1999. The idea of its creation belongs to the Japanese
haiku poet-modernist Natsuishi Ban 'ya, Jim Kacian, one of
the most well-known American haijins (haiku poets) and Yugoslavian poet
Dmitr Anakiev. Natsuishi Ban'ya is the chairman of the WHA.
On the first international
symposium of the Association there were determined the principles of the
"Global haiku" creation. They are: 1) Kigo, 'season words' are not
obligatory; 2) 'Key words' can be used instead of 'season words', for example:
'war', 'sea', 'love', 'mountain' etc. 3) Author's individuality is the main
feature of haiku;4) The peculiarities
of each language are taken into consideration in order to create the rhythm of
haiku, satisfying the verse content; 5)Kigo, 'cutting words' are important to
express the leap of thought or feeling, to add to the scope of sense; 6) Haiku
should be translated with particular accuracy, in the spirit of original; 7)
Haiku is the quintessence of beauty in every language, the vitally important
poetic form for the 21st century culture.
The aims of the World Haiku
Association were determined on the second WHA
symposium in 2003 as follows: 1) To reveal and support
the principles of haiku, common for each language, taking into account their
local peculiarities; 2) To organize and support the system of haiku teaching
and forums, based on the equality of all members, despite their ethnic, religious,
sex and political belongings; to carry on publishing and enlightening activity;
3) To promote haiku composing in every language, to support haiku translations
and their spreading, to consider English the mediator-language in this process.
Today the members of WHA are
more than 150 haijins from Japan, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany,
Denmark, India, Canada, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, USA, France,
Croatia, Sweden, Estonia and other countries. The poems are published, the
contests on haiku and haiga (laconic and vivid form, based on haiku) are held
on the WHA site: www.worldhaiku.net. The third meeting
of the WHA is to be held in Bulgaria in 2005.
Both haiku and hokku writers
and verses are now found online. A search will lead to many forums where both
new and experienced poets learn, share, discuss, and freely criticize.
In early 1998, Salon
magazine published the results of a haiku contest on the topic of computer
error messages. The winning haiku, written by David Dixon, was:
Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost
data. Guess which has occurred.
Like much of contemporary
haiku, this does not follow the guidelines of hokku or early haiku. Instead it
takes the creative and often witty approach characterizing humorous haiku
today. There are online computerized systems for generating random haiku; there
are "Spamku" (verses devoted to the processed, canned meat) as well
as many other clever variations on the brevity of the haiku form. For example:
When good times return, with God as my witness,
I'll not eat SPAM again!!
Milford Pigboy
Witty haiku, often satirizing the form itself,
have appeared in popular TV programs such as Beavis and
Butthead and South Park. In 1995, the
scifaiku (science fiction haiku) form was invented by Tom
Brinck. Scifaiku is a form of poetry inspired by the Japanese
haiku. SciFaiku poems are short, minimal poems about science and science
fiction topics. They are presented with direct, tangible images in clear and
simple language . For example:
Bathing
her reptilian skin
-
small bubbles on
glossy green...
There is no single expert in haiku, and the
masters sometimes broke their own rules with little more comment than a shrug
of the shoulders. It is at once a highly disciplined form, yet one that remains
flexible, and has continued to evolve. In pursuit of knowledge about haiku a
true 'haijin', or 'haiku poet', is nothing more than a lifetime student, and
what Bob Dylan once said is highly relevant advice in pursuing an understanding
of haiku: "Don't follow leaders. Watch your parking meters". Haiku
has long been associated with Zen Buddhism, but the haiku is, first and
foremost, a form of poetry, not a vehicle for philosophical or religious
expression. Study of the haiku's long history in Japan shows quite clearly that
it has always been a form of poetry quite separate from Zen Buddhism. While the
great Basho and a few other outstanding haiku poets were Zen monks, they all
treated haiku as poetry first, and, if at all, as Zen second. It is well known
that Basho made his living by teaching students how to become masterful haiku
poets, not how to be Zen monks. Zen instruction was the job of the monks on
staff of the Zen monasteries. As eminent Japanese haiku scholar Harold G.
Henderson confirms in his classic An Introduction to Haiku
"Only a comparatively few of Basho's poems are obviously
religious". Perhaps the
association with Zen can best be explained by the fact that both place high
value on the 'present moment', and human interactions with nature. In any case
knowledge of, or practice of Zen is unnecessary to understanding or creating
fine haiku.
The following two ideas those are relevant to
the haiku art: 1) Experience. There are many things that can't be learnt from
books or teachers (even from the great ones), but can be only perceived,
"lived" in our own personal interactions with the world. It means
that along with education (studying words, forms, styles, and history) a poet
should get "a full contact" with the world, developing his own point
of view, his own poetical eyesight. "It's better to see once rather than
to hear hundred times", the well-known proverb says: 2) Unity and Harmony.
According to the ancient Chinese tradition, all pieces of our world are
connected among themselves; moreover, they stay in spontaneous universal
Harmony with each other; every part of this great Unity is significant for the
others. Thus, the Nature and human beings are tightly connected and dependent
of each other. It's reflected in poetry. Firstly, "season words" are
used to show these relations. Secondly, the very style of haiku poetry without
similes, metaphors and other elaborate poetic devices demonstrates this.
Considering these ideas, one
can see the art of haiku poetry not as the art of making up fancy and
impressive relations in a poem, but as the art of seeing the relations that
already exist around us, and the art of making other people see them, too.
Literature:
1. http://home1.pacific.net.sg/-loudon/keiko.htm
2. PrattW. The Imagist Poem – NY: Collier Books, 1993.
– 417p.
3. Higgingson W.J. The Haiku Handbook. – NY: McGraw
Hill, 1985. – 442p.
4. Lynch T.P. An Original Relation to the Universe:
Emersonian Poetics of Immanence and Contemparary American Haiku: University of
Oregon, 1989. -141p.
5. Blyth R.H. Haiku: 4 Volumes. – Tokyo: The Hokuseido
Press, 1983. – Vol.1.- 493p.