Aug
Viral 5.3
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It seems appropriate that this Viral, selected and commented on by Yu Chang, follow Viral 4.3 and Periplum #3, both of which accumulated such great discussions and so many interesting thoughts and readings. One of the key questions it seems that was being alluded to but not being addressed head-on was this: what is Nature? How do we define it?
It seems that because our definition of Nature is expanding to include us (humans) and our inventions—that human nature is indeed part of Nature and vice versa and not separate or divided from it—our definitions of haiku and senryu, and what they can be (and what they are capable of doing), must expand as well. The lines become blurred, as they should. Isn’t this a good thing, and a natural trajectory for haiku and senryu as they become more global? Kigo (season words) become less vital and exclusive, and more work that employs season-less, universal words (muki-kigo) become prevalent—the human nature of Nature becoming more central, more accented. Is this subjectivity, or a new objectivity?
This Viral (5.3) seems to be yet another example of this kind of artistic progression: a seasonless poem where human nature-consciousness-emotions and something physically perceived outside it are spiraling around one another, pushing and pulling, with deep connections that go all the way back to the origins of humankind (“Where there are rocks, watch out!” -Alan Watts). In many ways, the seasonless poem goes deeper than seasons, and, with the openness they create, require the reader to go deeper as well. You the reader, bringing your life experiences and imagination in tow, are allowed to come in contact with a world the seasonless poem creates more openly, with more freedom, and are given the chance to create your own season for it, or however the poem works through you. It’s a collaborative workout. What season does it leave you in and with, and why? Take a look. And watch out.
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Virals is a section in which one person choses a haiku by another person and comments on that haiku. Then the author of that haiku is invited to select a haiku by someone else and comment on that poem, and so on. For an introduction to this section, see Virals.
• Viral 5.1 (Metz ➾ Lyles)
• Viral 5.2 (Lyles ➾ Chang)
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Some by Yu Chang
a deep gorge . . .
some of the silence
is me
— John Stevenson
Franz Kline
“Ah, the color gray . . . a lonely man, in a deep gorge under a misty sky, not even a crow in sight.” That’s the picture I painted right after the first read. I find it curiously satisfying. Much later, after a closer read, I was delighted to find another portrait for the poet – centered, humble, and at peace with his surroundings.
The sense of elation has stayed with me since I first read this lyrical, and evocative poem. The gentle pull of the understated first line “a deep gorge . . .” sets the scene, and the invitation for the reader to join in is put forth in the second and third lines. The poem succeeds effortlessly, without raising a single decibel.
On a bridge in Ithaca, I caught a glimpse of the gorge after our (Route 9 Haiku Group) poetry reading at Cornell’s Mann Library to celebrate the 2006 Poetry Month. It’s like any other gorge just deep enough to rattle me out of my complacency.
A man on a bridge looking down into a gorge is a common scene, but a poet with an open mind has found a poem. Like my composer friend, Hilary Tann, says, “Composing music is making the commonplace incandescent.”
What was in the poet’s mind when he wrote the poem? Could it be that he just wrote it down with nothing particular in his mind? It really doesn’t matter. Each time I read the poem, I am thankful for the space and the freedom to let my imagination play a part.
The poem’s telescoping construct provides enough room between the first line “a deep gorge . . . ” and the third line “is me” to accommodate layers of unspoken emotions effectively juxtaposed in three short lines. Two concrete images, a man and a gorge, are brought together by silence, a word which could conjure up all sorts of sounds, from thunderous waterfalls to the faintest whisper of a wounded heart. A bridge is made, and the reader is invited to come in.
But what is the poet trying to tell me? A voiceless confession of some action/inaction in the past that gave rise to the formation of the gorge? The last two lines when read as a single sentence seem tinged with regret. Could this be a change of heart in the darkest hour of his life? Does he feel centered again and the poem is wide open? Could it be true that if we all open our hearts and talk to one another, the world would be a better place? We’ll never know. Maybe that’s why a poem like this is so tantalizing.
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“deep gorge” was first published in Geppo (July/August 1996)
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As featured poet, John Stevenson will select the next poem and provide commentary for Viral 5.4.
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Scott writes:
“It seems that because our definition of Nature is expanding to include us (humans) and our inventions—that human nature is indeed part of Nature and vice versa and not separate or divided from it—our definitions of haiku and senryu, and what they can be (and what they are capable of doing), must expand as well. The lines become blurred, as they should. Isn’t this a good thing, and a natural trajectory for haiku and senryu as they become more global?”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This redefinition of Nature and separation of haiku from the seasons was a very sore point between Harold Henderson and William J. Higginson in the founding of the Haiku Society of America in the late 1960s. Henderson — a traditionalist — said with some irritation that contrary to to Higginson’s notions, if one is going to remove what is characteristic of haiku (and to Henderson, “haiku” meant really hokku and the traditional haiku of Shiki, etc.), then one should no longer call the result haiku.
And in fact, that seems to be the direction in which modern haiku — specifically post-traditional haiku — is moving, toward a formalization in terms of the blurring of the lines and boundaries that in reality has characterized American haiku from its beginnings. So a change of terms would be just terminology catching up with accomplished fact.
Now from my perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing, because if one stops calling this kind of season-free, non-Nature-focused verse haiku, then it actually may increase the effectiveness of terminology by leaving “haiku” as defining traditional post-hokku haiku, while post-traditional haiku will have moved on to being what it has always been — a brief verse form that, whatever it may finally be called, is neither haiku as Shiki knew it nor the hokku the preceded Shiki.
One of my major points in teaching has always been that one should not anachronistically and stylistically confuse hokku with haiku, which did not really exist until the revisionism of Shiki near the end of the 19th century, nor should one confuse traditional haiku with post-traditional haiku. So a formal shift to a terminology that more clearly reflects and defines a genre of verse is all for the better, whatever one’s personal aesthetics.
Perhaps then, with a terminology more accuratetly reflecting genres, we will at last be free of the utter confusion caused by the careless and indiscriminate use of the term “haiku” to describe everything from the hokku that preceded Shiki to the kind of verse advocated by Shiki (still Nature and season-based, but with increasing presence of modern technology and other aesthetic modifications), to the kinds of verse that writers under the vague umbrella of “haiku” have been presenting for decades, which is in many cases neither hokku nor haiku, but something quite new and distinctively different, as Harold Henderson astutely recognized very early on.
And perhaps then the “thousand and one warring sects” and disputes that have so characterized American haiku from its inception to the present will gradually fade away, and people can just concentrate on writing hokku, or traditional haiku, or whatever their preferred verse happens to be.
Scott writes: “what is Nature? How do we define it?”
Here’s the first def. from my Oxford American Dictionary: “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations”.
Just throwing that out there for now.
Scott also writes: “our definition of Nature is expanding to include us (humans) and our inventions…”.
It might be helpful if you said a little more, Scott, about who this “our” refers to exactly.
My feeling is that this is a very complicated, tricky subject for a few of the following reasons:
1) Humans originated within nature and are products of it.
2) But our behavior and ideologies have often cut us off in certain ways from the rest of nature, thereby creating the schism reflected in the definition above.
3) We also need to consider the transforming impact of our civilization on (the rest of) nature, in terms of extirpation or extinction of species, introduction of invasive species, fragmentation of habitats, destruction of ecosystems, industrial pollution, constant transformation of “natural resources” into human artifacts or waste, and potentialities such as destabilizing climate change and a nuclear arsenal that can wipe out multicellular life globally. These changes are occurring at a pace of centuries or even decades, whereas the forces that shaped most natural phenomena (species, ecosystems, landscapes, etc.) span millions or even billions of years.
Isaac Asimov imagined a world called Trantor in his Foundation series, with a human population of 45 billion (sustained by human dwellings that extend deep underground). All other species had been wiped out, including trees and other plants (agriculture was an import from other worlds), and the entire surface of the planet had been essentially paved over. Obviously, Trantor is an extreme allegorical extrapolation from the pace of our own urbanization. An interesting thought experiment is to ask in what sense something like Trantor is “nature”. And is there a sense in which we can arrive at Trantor in terms of consciousness before doing so physically?
Just throwing out a few ideas. I’d love to believe in a large-scale reconnection or reintegration of humanity with the rest of nature (exemplified by John Stevenson’s wonderful haiku), but I don’t see that concept reflected for the most part in our current global civilization.
Any nature poem, in my opinion, includes the writer. John Stevenson has chosen his observations out of what must have been many possibilities, and in so doing entered the poem. In this case, he has gone a step farther and made an observation about observation. I also feel included. The last lines could be overlaid with the words: some of the silence is us (readers).
The point I wanted to make (I see now I didn’t state it clearly) is this: For me, the question is not whether we are part of nature (surely we are) but how we see the writer’s relationship to the poem.
Speaking for traditional Japanese haiku,
we should not forget the two KIGO categories of
seikatsu 生活 Humanity, daily life, livelihood
gyooji 行事 Observances, seasonal events
http://wkdkigodatabase03.blogspot.com/2009/05/humanity.html
These categories are not “nature pure”, but about the human life as it changes thruogh the seasons. The resulting poems with these kigo can be quite funny and humouous, but are usually NOT considerd senryu, but haiku.
http://worldkigodatabase.blogspot.com/2006/12/seasons-and-categories.html
Gabi
Dear Scott – Thanks a million for the “rocks!” Nothing like a little humor to
Merrill
bring things to simple solutions.
the only way to define nature is to become one with nature. It’s pretty simple; keep an open mind and
take a walk outside.
a deep gorge . . .
some of the silence
is me
— John Stevenson
read John’s poem and if you are not in awe, I don’ know
what to tell you.
David,
Thanks for your comment.
To quote the astute Harold Henderson: “A definitive definition of haiku is probably impossible [as haiku] must be what poets make them, not verses that follow ‘rules’ set down by some ‘authority’ . . . a strict definition is neither possible nor desirable.”
[Also, interestingly enough, this: "Prof Henderson suggested that experimentation with one-line haiku may be in order. After all, that is the Japanese method" (The Haiku Path, p 28).]
I have a very difficult time thinking of hokku, traditional haiku, post-traditional haiku, (post-post-traditional haiku?, pre-post-modern haiku? how technical are we going to get here?) as islands, but instead as an intricate, ever-expanding web. Or as a vine. Or as nesting dolls, one blossoming and mutating out of the others; flowers in the same garden cross-breeding and influencing one another. It’s a progression, an evolution. Being that this is the 21st century (and not the 17th or the 19th), I think we should be writing in and of this era. This century. To try to write, say, “hokku”, in English in the 21st century seems antiquated, cliché, nostalgic and rather irrelevant. It’s backwards looking instead of an inspection and reflection of now and what is soon to be.
Also, though Henderson and Blyth were writing about haiku (whose books were called “Intro to Haiku” and “Haiku”) well into the 20th century, they completely ignored 20th century work by Japanese poets and their “1000 & 1 warring sects” (which exists in all artforms, if they mean anything) and movements of that time. Plus, they Zen-warped it, and rhyme warped it, among other things. They are fantastic introductions to haiku (or, hokku and pre-modern traditional/post-hokku). It didn’t and doesn’t end with them though. New flowers are always blooming along the vine.
I think Bashō said it well: “As time moves on, the art of haikai will go through its own thousand transitions and ten thousand changes, but all transformations based on makoto (genuineness) will be part of the master’s art. The master said, “Never content yourself with the drivel of the ancients. Just as the four seasons change, all things become new. Everything is that way” (Tohō, disciple of Bashō (translated by David Landis Barnhill).
And to quote Shiki: “haiku advances only when it departs from the traditional style.”
David, is there anything new you can bring to this ku (which is my preferred term) by John Stevenson besides the fact that it might not fit a definition of hokku or traditional haiku?
Scott,
You write,
“To try to write, say, “hokku”, in English in the 21st century seems antiquated, cliché, nostalgic and rather irrelevant. It’s backwards looking instead of an inspection and reflection of now and what is soon to be….”
Essentially you are saying that to write verse in any style used previously, and to use historically accurate terminology, is simply not to be considered, because it automatically classifies such work as “irrelevant” and outdated. I wonder where and when you got the peculiar idea that only what is new — and even that only momentarily until the next revisionist leap forward — is relevant.
I use the term hokku because what was written as hokku between the middle of the 17th century and the revisions of Shiki has virtually nothing in common with modern post-traditional haiku but brevity — and sometimes not even that. “Hokku” is both historically accurate and aesthetically defining — quite unlike “haiku” applied anachronistically to earlier verse, and shotgun-style to the immense variety of verse written under that vague umbrella from the middle of the 20th century to the present.
In any case, I am quite happy to continue practicing and teaching hokku, which to me is ever fresh and new — as is Nature; and I wish you much happiness in your chosen course as well. Each to his own taste and path, and each according to his lights.
A few responses to David Coomler’s thoughts:
First, I share your ideal of harmonious coexistence among poets pursuing disparate goals, whether they be more traditional or more experimental.
But my approach to terminology is different. True–the term “haiku” is applied to free-standing “hokku” of the past anachronistically, as you point out; but that’s just a shift in terminology, reflecting the need for a distinction between an autonomous, free-standing poem and the starting verse of a renku. After this useful distinction was made (by Shiki, of course), the tradition simply continued to evolve from there, evincing–as one should expect, esp. in the tumultuous, ever-changing 20th c.–both continuities and discontinuities.
Today, many haiku are written that conform to the characteristics of classic hokku and also many that do not. But I would argue that using the term “hokku” for anything but a renku’s starting verse at this point is itself anachronistic and effaces a useful distinction.
Dynamic, living, evolving artforms tend to be messy; like Scott, I see that “messiness” as a sign of health. One thing that interests me as a reader of haikai literature is the way an individual poem manifests certain specific characteristics that play off of tradition, sometimes adhering to norms, sometimes deviating from them, sometimes creating interesting ambiguities (such as blurring the line between haiku and senryu). That’s the way creativity works–and creativity within serious artforms has never been constrained by textbook rules and, really, cannot be.