. . . 7th Sailing . . .
By Peter Yovu
What Is Your Response to Gendai Haiku?
This “Sailing” will take many of us (I include myself) out of our comfort zone and into exotic waters. The word gendai itself may be enough to send ripples through our haiku foundations, but it simply means “modern.” Just as 20th century Western poetry went through numerous trials and transformations, so did 20th century Japanese haiku. These changes, in each case, were both a response to the old (not necessarily a rejection of it) and a willingness to meet the provocations of a challenging new era, which many felt demanded a new poetry, a revitalized haiku.
In his review of The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century ["Reboot"] (MH 40.3), Scott Metz quotes Masaoka Shiki: “Haiku advances . . . only when it departs from the traditional style.” I am not scholar enough to surmise how far Shiki would have been willing to take this departure, but I will guess that he would have been surprised, at the least, to discover the directions that his disciples and those who followed would take. Certainly a departure from realism, as various movements embraced subjectivity, politics, surrealism, feminism, disjunction and other literary techniques rarely encountered before. Some schools promoted the writing of haiku without kigo, a movement many writers in the West have also explored.
Here are some examples. The first will be familiar to readers of Troutswirl:
like squids
bank clerks are fluorescent
from the morning
—Kaneko Tōta (trans. Makoto Ueda)
autumn nightfall
the skeleton of a huge fish
is drawn out to sea
—Saito Sanki (trans. by Gendai Haiku Kyokai)
in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off
—Yagi Mikajo
(trans. by Richard Gilbert)
from the sight
of the man who was killed
we also vanished
—Murio Suzuki (trans. by Gendai Haiku Kyokai)
Illness in one eye:
I’m walking
like a goldfish
—Ban’ya Natsuishi
(trans. by Ban’ya Natsuishi & Jack Galmitz)
The Gendai Haiku Kyokai (Modern Haiku Association) was founded in 1947. By 1961, I learn from Scott’s review, it was open to “all kinds of haiku styles, including the traditional style . . . nonseasonal haiku and free form.” This, to a greater or lesser extent, is a policy followed by several of our better known publications, not excluding Modern Haiku and Frogpond, but especially Roadrunner and, now, with its haiku section edited by Richard Gilbert, Simply Haiku. Both champion the exploration of new directions in haiku, not necessarily centered on gendai, but certainly encouraged by it.
So, what is your response to this new presence in our lives?
You may recall that Christopher White posted a question (the question, in fact, that prompted me to launch this Sailing) which I will alter slightly to suit our purposes here: “A question I have is whether people feel that gendai haiku contain the standard Japanese aesthetic values or not. I ask this not in order to lay judgment on it—quite the opposite in fact: I’m interested in seeing what it has to say about haiku.”
As always, a number of questions arise from within these central questions. How useful is a study of, or at least exposure to, gendai haiku for you? In what ways? Do you seek new directions for your writing and reading? Is it important to continue looking to Japan for inspiration and education? (I hope to broaden this question of influence in a future Sailing).
It is a concern that some readers, believing they have not had enough exposure to modern Japanese haiku, will feel left out of this discussion. For those to whom it is new, (I include myself), I hope this Sailing will serve as an entry point, and offer directions for further exploration. For this reason, I am especially hopeful that readers who have more familiarity will present examples of work which they feel is significant, educational, or intriguing.
Three excellent sources of information, with many examples of gendai, can be found here:
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Sails is a section of troutswirl that is devoted to presenting questions for discussion and debate on the nature and possibilities of haiku. Sails is overseen by Peter Yovu. For an introduction to this section, see Sails.
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Sorry – I “fat-fingered” the keys on my keyboard and mis-posted twice before I was ready.
To the readers on this thread, are there any non-haiku english language poetry journals that they think embody the spirit of gendai haiku and which they would recommend?
I can’t say it better than Merrill did: the posts here have been wonderful!
Thanks,
Bill C
Thanks,
Bill C
To the readers on this thread, are there any non-haiku english language poetry journals that they think embody the spirit of gendai haiku and which they would recommend?
Thanks,
Bill C
in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off
—Yagi Mikajo
(trans. by Richard Gilbert)
benitake no
mae ni waga kushi
suberi otsu
This seems quite a “traditional” haiku to me, it has a kigo (benitake) and keeps 5 7 5.
If you see the “red mushroom” as a male symbol, it is easily to understand . . . grin . . .
Thanks for bringing the mushrooms into play !
Gbi
Turns out to be an important discussion. These haiku prove to me that the human being is a many layered creature. I, like Paul, find haiku that relates to something I either know, feel or intuit to be more rewarding… I also have a little difficulty breathing and have more than my share of “out of body experiences” so my inclination is to really enjoy those bits of poetry that can bring me back to a natural state, but with a heightened sense of the possible, not a crash landing. I have often wondered what anyone could ever see in mind-altering drugs since to me the most sublime state is to be well and whole. Yet I also recognize that there are many people who do relate on many levels to poetry that is on many levels of consciousness…we are composed of many senses…
I really appreciate all the wonderful posts to this discussion.
Patrick,
The Haiku Universe for the 21st Century can be ordered through
Kinokniya Books–don’t know if you have one locally, so try:
http://www.kinokuniya.com
whoops…thinking and typing away before you posted, Richard, so I didn’t know about your post until after I clicked ‘submit’.
lorin
The more I read, the more interested I become, though it is indeed a challenge to my received notions of ‘what is haiku?’.
My first response to this one was ‘so what?’ What’s so significant about yr (Aust.adjective deleted) comb falling out?
in front of the scarlet mushroom
my comb slips off
—Yagi Mikajo
(trans. by Richard Gilbert)
But on coming back to it, I find it suggests or implies an extended scenario, mood and state of mind much in the manner that good haiku that I’m more familiar with do.
It’s not only Japanese women who use combs in their hair (I say that as an ex-hairdresser who notes these things) so while Japanese hair combs may have special significance to the Japanese, to me it’s just the sort of comb that has the function of keeping the hair-do in place, whether the style of comb is Japanese, Spanish, or whatever, whether the comb is decorative as well as functional, ‘invisible’ or not. Think of the photos of Edwardian women with those slightly disheveled up-dos…those styles were held in place with combs as well as hairpins as are French rolls, more casual buns and the like today. Think of, if you want American examples, of Grace Kelly’s up-do, and some of Hitchcock’s cool, blonde heroines.
One thing we know is that this woman has long hair. So the comb slips off and the hair that it’s been holding in place comes down. Less formal a look, maybe embarrassing in some circumstances, threatening a loss of personal control (such as when one’s in the middle of a dissertation or coming on strictly to a year 10 high school class) maybe erotic in others.
Given that, how can one take the scarlet mushroom literally? If it was just a scarlet mushroom in the woods and she was alone, no woman would be discomforted or find the occasion anything to remark on. She’d simply twist her hair up again and pop the comb back in.
So do we have euphemism here? For an engorged penis tip? That’s a possibility I can’t rule out. Another is that it really is just a scarlet mushroom, maybe the sort that grow under pine trees and are hallucinogenic if you can stomach them, but the woman is obsessed with penises for some reason so just the shape of the mushroom brings a penis to mind. That the comb slips off, all by itself, suggests in either case that one’s conscious intentions are being undone by other motivations that one can’t entirely disown, so part of the hidden self is revealed.
Or maybe it’s much less Freudian, and she’s looking the illustration of the mushroom with the hookah-smoking caterpillar on it in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and her hair comes down to be more like Alice’s. But I doubt it.
Well, that was fun.
btw, I wrote a ‘non-gendai’ haiku, similar to this one of Yagi Mikajo’s in that it suggests (at least I think it does) a change in a woman via an image of hairdo changing of itself:
evening primrose -
hairpins working loose
from her bun
(Simply Haiku, last year, when Lenard D. Moore was haiku editor there)
lorin
Good responses, and an important debate.
In terms of the Mikajo and Hoshinaga examples above (and referring especially to Paul Miller’s comment), one of the differences between the English-lang. versus Japanese haiku context is that readers in Japan generally expect to learn something of a poet’s era and biography in order to understand or even adequately grasp their oeuvre. That said, “scarlet mushroom” in Japanese is a more overtly sexual symbol — this is revealed in the provided commentaries to the poem, accompanying the English translation.
Hoshinaga’s “twenty billion light-years…” is obscure also in Japanese, until one studies his work and notes that one of his main themes is war, and further the triumvirate gestalt of “war, innocence, youth” — a theme often presented autobiographically. The poem mentioned is one of his signature works. I empathize with Paul, when he writes, “How could a reader ever be expected to know [certain details of that haiku]?” Which is why Hoshinaga’s own commentary to the haiku is provided. It’s my feeling that we face major translation problems in reading Japanese gendai haiku (and haiku generally) in English, when they are unaccompanied by historical, cultural and often biographical notes and commentary. As well, the poems do not necessarily “stand alone” in Japanese (in the western sense of a purely autonomous artwork), there often exists vectors of reference for which the (intercultural) reader requires information, in order to enter the richer landscapes of authorial intention.
I think Mikajo and Hoshinaga, like many notable gendai poets, have pushed the form, and in doing so, both refresh the genre and challenge the reader. Having grasped the two haiku mentioned, via study and discussion, I find them to be brilliant. A further thought on this issue — in Japan what separates haiku from senryû most strongly is kigo (not wit or the old trope “nature versus society”). Any given kigo often requires the study of a saijiki (glossary), prior to grasping the haiku — representing a significant difference in reader-process between the Japanese haiku and haiku born elsewhere. The commenter reveals just how significant this difference is, in articulating a sense of frustration or bewilderment concerning the lack of accessibility of the haiku mentioned. Yet this is more a typical reader experience in the Japanese context. Sometimes several different saijiki are consulted, and it’s not unusual for a haiku to require an awareness of biographical information on the reader’s part, before that haiku begins to unfold in multiple dimensions. This topic can be extended to Japanese literature in general, as some linguists have done, in discussing how Japanese writing (including the essay) is “author oriented” (it’s up to the reader to discern what the author intends) versus the European tradition, which is “reader focused” (it’s up to the author to determine that comprehensibility is fairly guaranteed for the reader). This has been discussed by Professor Yoshihiko Ikegami as ” The Japanese Speaker’s Preferential Choice of Subjective Rather Than Objective Construal.”
Will we write this way in English? I think it’s doubtful. Though there is certainly an edge that is being explored, in terms of ways that haiku resist reader interpretation — this aspect of resistance seems as significant in excellent haiku as any other quality to be found.
Is gendai haiku a style? As a movement, it appears to be defined mostly by what it is not. The possibilities outside the parameters of haiku realism and tradition number more than I can count. Seriously, no sarcasm, can anyone tell me what is gendai haiku outside of a damn good haiku (short poem, ku?) that breaks the rules?
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