Well, David,

Years ago, in other fora, we have had some of this discussion, you and I. I still do not except your premise that some or most of what I write is qualitatively different from the poems you term “hokku.” I choose to use the word “haiku” despite its apparent coinage by Shiki about 11 decades ago.

Two weeks ago, four friends started an on-line renku with a hokku (don’t know your feeling about this word, renku, but it represents the haikai that was rising in the Century of Basho, the 17th, long before Shiki, as you know). The previous renga form of much more stylized Imperial Court poems also began with a hokku. Hokku being the term for the first verse of renku (or the older renga). Poets in Japan, today’s Masters of renku use the word “renku.” So I do, too. Each of the four of us wrote a summer haiku, one of which we democratically chose by consensus as the hokku. In a few weeks I’ll be in a live group to write renku, an annual event for me — this will be the 11th year. And, that hokku will also be a haiku: cut and seasonal (autumn as it will be September by then). You may know that about half of a renku is seasonal, the other stanzas deliberately not. Generally the only cut verse is the hokku . . . the following, internal verses are not haiku (or your “hokku.”). So yes, I and my partners do write and call verses “hokku” that begin the linked forms just as for the last… oh, thousand years?

My own haiku, that nearly everyone but you know as “haiku” — in Japan and around the rest of the world, I consider as mostly traditional, many heavily of nature and with either kidai or a narrower kigo. Some may not be in the saijiki of Kyoto, being instead North American in character and origin. Still, go to the April 19 Montage at this THF site and find haiku by the late Paul Williams, Marian Olson, and me, selected not by me but by Allan Burns. _The Good Earth_. He chose seven from each of us to celebrate a country/local kigo: Earth Day. I posit to you that all seven of mine, or most, look just like what you teach, _except_ they are not English-punctuated in the manner of Blyth. Two might be pivots or imperfect pivots (requiring the assumption of short verb) to be read in two directions. The rest are completely cut, broken without needing any punctuation. The force of the language shows the reader the break. Japanese language, especially from the past has no punctuation. Why do you? Why did Blyth? Blyth made wonderful translations to poems but showed them to the world in the guise of traditional Western poetical form used since at least Elizabethan times. Commas sprinkled, Capital letter, period, occasional semi-colon or colon. Why? Paul Williams used a few em dashes as does Marian. I will not parse their haiku, not my role, but they have kigo and are often cut (caesura, whatever term is current). Mine mention farm, fence, car, road traffic and have a person, hiker. Yet, as I read them now, they are nature oriented and seasonal as mentioned. If I sprinkled Blyth’s punctuation (seems superfluous) would they look like your ideal from the past?

Purpose? I write to share. I try to express, to show two or three things and their interrelations, to a reader or listener who might find seven or eight other things. This expression so as to allow that reader/listener to enter into the experience, perhaps to share my insight again with me. I can even read the Old Haiku Masters and sit by the rice fields and hear the work chants, or see the heron’s legs and the waves lapping, or even at least comprehend the cherry experience on the mountain slopes seen from Yoshino, despite my never having been there. Could Old Basho see my egrets and Venus? Would he get the possible reference to Shakespeare as time for love fades into the dawn? Certainly wouldn’t know Shakespeare, but might hear the fleeting love as the egrets fly off for a day’s work? [see the Montage cited.]

I’m not foolish enough to equate what I write, and what my various haiku teachers and editors have shown, with Classic haiku in Japanese, or even Japanese haiku in more traditional modes today. The language is different as is my ability; the cultures are miles apart as is some of the geography, fauna, and flora. Yet, a cormorant is a cormorant, fish are fish, and streams have their own cooling wind.

***

I also know that if my consciousness is not linked to nature it becomes self centered and inward, cut off and isolated. Nature is an “other” that we can relate to in some manner. So I hope it’s understood that when I say human experience that experience is not truly complete without the “other”….

We’ve veered somewhat, though not entirely, from the question which heads this Sailing, but this matter seems to have some momentum, so I’d like to encourage others to join in, perhaps on the point made by David and underscored by Gabi. At the risk of entering into a hokku:haiku skirmish, I would be interested to know if those who write haiku, which is probably most people reading *troutswirl*, agree that “modern haiku — particularly post-traditional haiku — is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding and misperception of the nature and aesthetics of the old hokku”.
David, you’ve offered a strong challenge here, calling much into question. And something I often say, if only to the pines outside my house, is– if we as writers are to grow, we need challenge.

Peter,

I would agree that a sense of impermanence is found throughout all of hokku, but it was not individualistic; it was a part of the culture.

Anxiety is not at all a characteristic of hokku, nor a negative sense of incompleteness, though it may be found in later haiku. In hokku one finds a recognition of the transience of all things combined with acceptance, and incompleteness was something to be valued, not feared.

But again, this aesthetic of impermanence was not individualistic; it pervades older Japanese literature, whether hokku or waka or even Nō. It is one of the fundamental aesthetic principles on which all are based, and transience remains an essential characteristic of hokku today, as it was of old hokku.

You quoted,

“American haiku poets don’t grasp the idea that the shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku.”

No writer of old hokku would have even considered such a statement as valid — if they had even understood it — and I would venture to say that there would probably be a great many in modern haiku who would suspect it better defines the preoccupations of the speaker than what they write. But modern haiku is so various that practically anything one may say about it is true of someone somewhere.

You also quoted,

“The least important thing about it is its seventeen syllables or its nature scene.”

I think this reflects the fundamental misunderstandings that led away from the old hokku and into modern post-traditional haiku. The subject matter of old hokku was Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature. It was not merely a “nature scene.” There was no dichotomy such as one finds today in modern haiku between those “about nature” and those dealing with other matters. In old hokku everything was about Nature, even verses in which a writer spoke of himself, because humans were considered part of and another aspect of Nature, and of course this was further enhanced by hokku being presented in a seasonal context.

The hokku aesthetic thus represented a view fundamentally different from that expressed by Bly. His view leads toward the sense of “self,” whereas the aesthetic of hokku led away from it.

Again, the transience so apparent in the hokku of Bashō is not anything peculiar to him because of any personal trials; it is found throughout older Japanese writing. Bashō is honored not because he created an aesthetic of transience, which existed centuries before his birth, but because to some extent he lived the existing aesthetic.

The whole history of old hokku is reflective of the words of Kamo no Chōmei, who was born in the middle of the 12th century:

“Though the flow of the river never ceases, the water passing moment to moment is never the same. Where it eddies, bubbles rise to the surface, bursting and vanishing as others replace them, none lasting. Thus are people and their dwellings in this world — always changing.”

And like all of hokku, that is simply a recognition of the impermanence inherent in all things, and not in the least peculiar to Kamo no Chōmei any more than the same when expressed in the hokku of Bashō or Onitsura is peculiar to either of them.

I often say that modern haiku — particularly post-traditional haiku — is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding and misperception of the nature and aesthetics of the old hokku — a seeing of it not for what it was, but rather a projection onto it — to use your term and Jung’s — of what was already familiar from Western poetry and culture. I think that is what we see in the quotes you gave.

What I am saying is, and I may be misled by what others like Bly have said and by my own preferences and projections onto the early masters, is that they allowed their “anxiety”, their sense of impermanence and “incompleteness” to come into their work, though not necessarily as subject matter. I’d guess you would agree, David, that anxiety, a “sense of incompleteness” etc., were integral to how they lived and what they wrote. Otherwise, it would be formulaic. It is one thing to study a doctrine of impermanence; it is another to deeply feel and experience it, as apparently Basho did, and perhaps Santoka and others. I would say that the clear and steady observation of nature may open up more than what the senses reveal: I don’t think one can be truly open to nature without being open to oneself, in ways that are not always pleasing. The poem does not have to be “about” war, or sex or violence, but will be all the clearer, the sweeter, the more poignant and mysterious for its author having allowed the psychic pressure they exert into his or her awareness. It is, after all, what the Buddha did.

I’m sure there are others reading this who are more qualified than I am to talk about this. I have not made the early masters and hokku my primary focus, and I don’t want to impose something I feel strongly about onto something where it may not belong. And yet…

The matter was brought out some time ago. Bly made the statement I quoted above in the 80′s. Here it is again: “American haiku poets don’t grasp the idea that the shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku. The least important thing about it is its seventeen syllables or its nature scene.” It was brought out again when M D Welch published the correspondence between Cor van den Heuval and Bly in Issue 2 of Tundra, which came out in Sept. 2001. Reviewing the correspondence, Lee Gurga said: “Even allowing for some overstatement [in Bly's statement] I think the observation is something that needs to be considered in North American haiku…”. Michael McClintock made a similar statement. I explored it more recently in a review of the Red Moon Anthology Big Sky.

I do think it relates directly to both the questions raised in Envoy 4 and the one raised in this Sailing, first asked by Paul Miller, “what is the purpose of our poetry?”

And here I have entered a bit of a shadowy neighborhood– I know, because I feel exposed. I am not a scholar, folks, but I do regard this as important.
What I don’t do is insist you agree.