the blogspot for The Haiku Foundation’s academic journal
Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Poetics & Culture (JUXTA)
1st POSITION
The Problem
by Philip Rowland
The problem: “haiku writing is a practice that’s easy to take up, but very difficult to get anywhere in.”
The problem, and a solution of sorts:
“Haiku-like haiku aren’t particularly bad. But haiku that don’t seem haiku-like at all—nowadays that’s the kind I’m after.”
—Santoka (trans. Burton Watson)
Or: perhaps haiku poets would do well to stop being “haiku poets” for a while; to conceive of their work more broadly in the field of contemporary poetry and the canon to which they aspire. The relatively narrow (and necessarily hybrid) basis of the tradition of haiku in English, with its emphasis on the here and now, can only take us so far; thus many published haiku seem “thin.” Perhaps what’s needed is less striving to perfect the “same,” more writing against the grain.
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POSITIONS is a section of the blog for The Haiku Foundation’s haiku academic journal Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Poetics & Culture (JUXTA), edited by Tom D’Evelyn. The space will be used for updates and topics related to the journal. Oftentimes, the posts will be excerpts from papers scheduled to appear in the journal. It is hoped that the posts/excerpts will inspire feedback that will help the author with revision of the piece for final publication in JUXTA.
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Having argued at some length recently with a self-appointed western “authority” on haiku, I can sum my position on these issues in this way: I appreciate the freedom to discover what “haiku” may be or may not be, but I will not be TOLD what is “haiku”.
Ever.
I share my work. I do not seek approval for my work. My work is not about others. My work is about my own experiences and my own need to express them in whatever form seems appropriate for my own satisfaction and keeping. Enjoy if you wish. Do not enjoy if you do not wish. I go in peace. I ask you do the same.
Gabi,
The author of the above-mentioned book might be pleased at your willingness to provide him free publicity. However, you have missed my point. I do not appreciate his poems. I’m mistrustful of your desire to demote some haiku to mongrel status or to enforce an ideal of purity.
Not to make too much of Lorin’s position (since history in the West does not confer on haiku much power), I would like to point out by a citation that in the 1940s just such an insistence on “haiku purity” had serious propaganda and life and death consequences to those who veered from the traditions of haiku (in Japan).
http://www.Haiku-heute.de
Alle Rechte bei den Autoren
This is the text:
The Japanese Author Itô Yûki presents in his monograph, “New Rising Haiku: The Evolution of Modern Japanese Haiku and the Haiku Persecution Incident“1, published in November 2007, about a chapter in Japanese Haiku history mostly unknown in the Haiku world, outside of Japan (and within Japan these facts are no longer well recalled). In the forties of the last century haiku poets were persecuted, arrested, tortured and their journals annihilated by the ultranationalist Tennô regime; some poets died in prison or were sent to the frontlines of the war. All victims were advocates of free-verse haiku poetry, which had turned away from the “traditional“ stylism of haiku composition. After the war, it was Takahama Kyoshi (1874-1959), who was considered to be mainly in charge. Kyoshi was chief editor of the haiku journal Hototogisu, the journal with the greatest public success in Japan, and the inventor of the “traditional“ haiku (dentô haiku). He was one of the two main disciples of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). With his aesthetics of kachôfûei („singing about flowers and birds“) Kyoshi propagated a return to “tradition“, against the innovative reform efforts of other haiku poets and groups. At end of the thirties and beginning of the forties of the last century, Kyoshi came into influential governemental positions. He became president of the Haiku branch of the “The Japanese Literary Patriotic Organization“ (Nihon bungaku hôkoku kai), a culture-control/propaganda organisation of the Tennô system, under control of the Intelligence Bureau of Japan. The persecutions of haiku poets took place during Kyoshi’s presidency. After the war, unlike many other poets and writers, Kyoshi did not distance himself from his attitudes or apologize for his wartime activities. From 1946, a movement began, whose aim was to bring charges of haiku war crimes to Kyoshi and others. In Itô’s Addendum: “Historical Revisionism (Negationism) and the Image of Takahama Kyoshi,“ which is nearly the half of the monograph, Itô debates efforts to minimize or negate Kyoshi’s responsibility and role in the promotion of fascism and persecutions. The author, Itô Yûki, was born in 1983 in Kumamoto, composes and publishes haiku himself, and is a member of the Gendai Haiku Kyôkai (Modern Haiku Association). Currently he is a Ph.D. (cand.) at Kumamoto University, Graduate School of Cultural and Social Sciences, and is a co-member and co-translator of a cross-cultural research project lead by Prof. Richard Gilbert to present contemporary Japanese haiku (Gendai Haiku) in international contexts.
Merrill, I hope you won’t mind my asking some questions about what you wrote (on June 7th): “I’d rather just experience the pines. … That’s what haiku gives to me that western poetry does not … I have to lose poetry to find haiku since only haiku seems to be able to take me to that depth of perception. I don’t know if we can explain this to others who just can’t quite figure out what we’re saying…”
I find the distinction between “haiku” and “western poetry” rather confusing, since most haiku in English is western, and both “categories” contain such a range of poetics and practices, some closely, some distantly related… Or are you suggesting that good haiku in English is so different from other western poetry that it should (almost) hardly be classified as “poetry” at all (perhaps because, in Peter’s memorable phrase, it “surrenders to silence” so readily)? I realize that you’re speaking of your own, not necessarily others’, need “to lose poetry to find haiku”, but are you also making a claim for the status of haiku in general – that an isolationist stance is, in some sense, necessary?
(My own view – perhaps to state, by now, the obvious – is that to clarify the relationship between E-L haiku and “western poetry” we need to be more specific, not ignoring other western poetries or sweeping them aside as just too different.)
I also don’t understand why you should say, “I don’t know if we can explain this to others who just can’t quite figure out what we’re saying”; and couldn’t help thinking that your comment makes a “true” appreciation of haiku sound suspiciously like a religion! I imagine that most people who are reading or participating in this discussion, particularly those of us who write in ways strongly influenced by our reading of haiku (whether in the original or in translation), have had the exhilarating sense that haiku can “give” something that no other poetry can in the same way. Surely an appreciation of haiku read alongside or in conversation with other poetry – an interest, that is, in haiku as literature – doesn’t preclude appreciation of its particular power and appeal? Besides, doubtless there are those who would claim that the work of some other poet or genre of poetry has taken them to a “depth of perception” more profound than any other; I don’t see how one can reasonably generalize such a claim for haiku. But we can speak specifically of how particular varieties of poetry, including varieties of haiku, work – how they heighten language-/life-awareness.
Thank you, Eve, for noting that I have not been arguing for the likes of the “vampire” writing-exercise that was quoted! But I suppose, to be politically correct, we should not be dismissive of vampirism as a subject for literary haiku. (Does anyone know any good vampire-ku? Perhaps some of Ban’ya’s flying popes could qualify?) Thanks also for sharing the Armantrout poem – which is quite funny, and fitting, with “the subject” – in all the senses – and the “moment” raising questions relevant to haiku. Particularly memorable phrase: “as if matter stuttered”.
Incidentally, speaking of “mongrel” American-ness, has any modern or contemporary poet mentioned in this thread, with the exception of Lorin, been other-than-American? And – I’m a bit out of touch with BHS and HSA – has the bridge across the pond fallen into disrepair?
Sorry, just a momentary diversion …
With Sea Fever still bouncing around in my head, imagine my delight when in a book by Melvyn Bragg that I’m reading I came across an aside that “whale’s way” in Old English meant the sea:
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
Isn’t language lovely?
A Japanese man I met at the weekend referred to his country’s economy as being no longer “shiny”.
Back to the scheduled programme …
“VAMPIRE HAIKU, by Ryan Mecum.
He sticks with the 5/7/5 form throughout.
These are from his book:
My tongue has trouble
licking the blood off my lips
due to my sharp teeth.
Mostly pools of blood
are actually just puddles.
A pool would be great!”
This morning in the Japan times, we get a treat of
Farewell haiku for Hatoyama
Morality down
Your money’s toilet paper
Pecunia non olet
Servants gulp my tax
Perverted indifference
This cancer eats all
Yellow ever bright
Their lacking colorless guts
Our true mimosa
and so on and on …
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100608hn.html
They might have labeled them senryu, but no …
.
…mongrels, cruel experiments on cats in the name of ‘haiku science’. I think a bit of caution in our use of metaphor is advisable, or we will be too close for comfort to theories of a ‘pure race’ of haiku.
thinking about dogs and mongrels, here is an old one take of mine.
If you call a tail a leg,
how many legs has a dog?
Five? No, four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg!
Abraham Lincoln
Before reading the parable of Lincoln, I had phrased my question in this way (and that was way before the birth of my kitten Haiku-Kun).
If you take a cat (or dog to keep in the parable),
cut off his head (kigo),
cut off his four legs (5-7-5),
cut off his tail (kire-ji) and
present this creature to the world,
what would it be called?
Which takes us back to the definition of haiku …
http://wkdhaikutopics.blogspot.com/2007/02/haiku-definitions.html
Gabi
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