For centuries now, Japanese haiku poets have been seeking out teachers to help them with their haiku composition. Since before Bashō’s time, groups have been founded around one poet/personality and their particular style of writing. Disciples and followers were created, and those poets followed their leader’s/master’s style and aesthetic beliefs concerning haiku, oftentimes passing those teachings and belief systems on to future poets and generations. In effect, lineages were, and have been, created. A web’s been formed. The tradition is still present in 21st century Japan. In addition, haiku in Japan, up until the beginning of the 20th century, was primarily a communal activity. For the most part, it still is.
This tradition is not the same in the west, or with English-language haiku. Beginner poets have certainly sought out advice from more experienced poets, especially editors and individuals whose work they’ve admired. But no tradition has been created wherein individuals become publicly acknowledged as “masters” who help students, or who judge and award points for their work. No disciples have been established in the English-haiku world, at least not to the point where they espouse the poetic beliefs of a single person. There are many reasons for this, and it would certainly be an interesting topic to research and explicate.
And so what does one do in the west if they are new to haiku? What did you do? How did you begin your journey? Most people, it seems fair to say, work things out individually, in solitude—through knowledge and ideas acquired from books and examples in collections, anthologies, and journals. For most enthusiasts and poets in the west, it is the Japanese “masters” of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries themselves, who have served as their own teachers and guides concerning aesthetics and stylings.
What does one do though when they want advice on their work—on what they have created—in order to improve? The answer to this question has multiple choices and has expanded over the years, especially to the cyber world.
Readers of troutswirl (The Haiku Foundation’s blog) now have the unique, exciting, and tricky opportunity to help a newcomer to the English haiku cosmos. Her name is Laura Sherman.
How can we, as a community, as opposed to an individual, help Laura on her journey? What advice can we provide? How can we guide her? Thankfully, troutswirl has a huge variety of voices in its midst, voices from many different points of view concerning haiku. While the focus is on Laura, and her evolution as a poet concentrating on haiku, it will, at the same time, in many ways, be focused on us as a community. And so, what can we learn about our own preferences and expectations concerning haiku? How do we present our views to Laura? How do we couch them? Hopefully, this process will not only be a learning experience for Laura but for troutswirl’s readership as well, if not a large population of the English-language haiku community.
Quicksilver, or mercury, has been used for centuries as a precipitant to create gold. The process is called amalgamation, and it isn’t easy or necessarily always safe. Hopefully, our collective experiences, knowledge, and wisdom (culled from successes as well as failures and mistakes) will act as a bridge and allow Laura’s work, over time, to go from quicksilver to gold.
With all experiments comes a bit of danger, angst, frustration, and confusion, but also, and almost always, bits and pieces of clarity, and ways through to knowledge and understanding. Learning is not always immediate.
How many of us would have been brave or bold enough to allow a community of readers they’ve never met before to “have at” our first attempts? It takes a tremendous amount of trust and openness to do so.
So, kudos to Laura for opening up her haiku evolution, experiences, thought processes, and influences to us and to the world. Let’s make it a worthwhile, if not golden, experience for her. One we can all learn from.
Scott Metz
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Quicksilver
Hg1
New to Haiku
By Laura Sherman
I am new to the art of haiku and wish to explore this ancient art form. I am a freelance writer and chess coach, so the blend of syllable count and creativity really appeal to me. I am bold enough to give it a try, but I know that I have a lot to learn.
I went to the library and picked up a book and researched on the net, in an attempt to learn the basics. I quickly found that there are lots of different ideas about what makes a poem a haiku.
I began, as I imagine many do, with the common form of seventeen syllables, structured 5-7-5. I noticed that many poets later break from that, but was intrigued with the idea of working within that framework.
There’s only so much one can learn from a book. What I’d like to do here is to offer my experiences as a new writer of haiku, and hope to get some feedback from those more experienced than me. That’s why I’m reaching out to the members of The Haiku Foundation. I hope some of you will consider helping me on my journey.
From my brief study I know haiku traditionally should speak of seasons and that many involve nature. There seems to be a debate as to whether people should be included. Some feel people are a part of nature, but others feel they are an intrusion.
I also understand that there should be a break in the lines, so that there are two images. I see that this is done without punctuation, typically. That makes sense to me, as punctuation takes away from the simplicity of the art form. It adds complication where it isn’t needed.
I wanted to share a few of the first haiku I wrote and ask for your feedback:
slivers of lightning
shoot across the pitch black sky
lovers spotlighted
leaves of many hues
pressed between worn white pages
pared from parent’s limb
stems hang by a thread
dangling precariously
october puppets
I would love to know what works with these and what doesn’t. Both kinds of comment will help me improve.
Do these haiku communicate to you? Are there unnecessary words? Am I breaking any haiku rules? What am I missing?
Thank you in advance for your help!
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Quicksilver is a column on troutswirl, the blog for The Haiku Foundation, devoted to showcasing the questions, ideas, and evolution of a beginner to the art of haiku, Laura Sherman. Each installment will feature some of Laura’s new work as well as her ideas and thought-processes concerning them. It is hoped that readers will respond with reactions, ideas, and advice on her work and provide feedback on how she might develop and improve her craft.
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Amos, thank you for your breakdown. There is a lot of helpful advice here for me in your posting. You have helped me put a lot of pieces together. I decided to break free from the 5-7-5 and work on sharing the simple experience.
I also appreciate your analysis of Sandra’s edit. It helped me to understand the editing process a bit better. She definitely succeeded to present my message beautifully, without all the cumbersome, descriptive words.
Paul, Originally, when I started on this path, I thought that a seasonal word was open to interpretation. Then after studying about kigo, I saw that it wasn’t, but now it appears that my initial analysis would be accepted by some, but not others.
I promise not to write a haiku about autumn rain.
I appreciate your sharing with me your revision. I love “windless heat”.
Laura, some definitions of kigo can be found at Gabi’s excellent website, and in the URLs I posted here, early on. A kigo, well-employed in a haiku, elicits in a word or a few words a complex of things. A sort of shorthand that a given culture of readers/listeners will understand even with just the stimulus alone. July 4th is a man-made kigo in the US. Fourth of July. What does just its mention bring to your mind? Perhaps 8 to 10 things?
What I was getting at, obliquely, was discussion elsewhere in THF’s blog about even the possibility of haiku being written in other cultures than Japan. Adopting the word “kigo” and even “haiku” shows a certain intent to follow at least some of the Japanese philosophy. The differences are cultural, and they are substantial. Yet the seasons are evident in the US and Europe, and New Zealand and Australia. Admittedly the North American history, written by Europeans, dates to only the beginning of the 17th C. Yet the Pilgrims landed near Cape Cod in 1620 to find agriculture well established. They learned to plant a fish head or lobster with each kernel of seed corn. The Native Peoples understood the season in what is now Massachusetts much the same as Thoreau later did, and recorded in his books. The seasons were of great import in Europe, back to times before written language, the same as in Japan. Japan was “primitive” once too; just older than we in N. America. Stonehenge was, after all, a great big calendar. If the seasonal rhythms of rice and other crops dominated the culture in early Japan, so too for a farmer in Alabama growing tobacco, cotton, and corn (not to mention rice in Louisiana and Texas).
Urban and suburban peoples in the USA are pretty removed from “The Land.” There are kids in New York City that have never seen the Atlantic Ocean; some in Los Angeles that have never been to a Pacific beach. Yet, they have seen snow and the leaves fall in NY, and felt the Santa Anna winds in California.
I firmly believe that writers of haiku, some at least, understand and feel nature’s rhythms. Yesterday by car on a dirt road, I saw a wild hen turkey followed by a line of very small chicks. They melted into the roadside foliage. Kigo? You bet. Not in a Japanese classic saijiki as turkeys are a new world bird. Here in northern New England I consider it a spring image, regardless of the calendar. In Georgia, the wild turkeys probably hatched weeks or a month ago. This week I saw a female merganser (diving, fish-eating duck) with half a dozen babies paddling madly after her to keep up. Since I know the brood is usually much larger, probably mink, snapping turtles, or hawks have been hunting the ducklings. Of course, the mink and hawks will have young to feed… more kigo. As Gabi points out, there are kigo of people and many of “nature” absent people. Or a mixture. The corn, planted by a _farmer_ near here, in large fields with endless rows is now about 3 to 4 inches high. The brown of the dirt still dominates the view. Haiku and kigo subjects all. Tall corn, tasseling corn, and ultimately me eating corn on the cob! Ahh, the coolness of the ear picked in early morning still wet with autumn dew? (or late summer). I cannot write “Japanese kigo” but I surely can evince a complex of reactions with but a few words: first mosquito; opening day (baseball); twin fawns; queen ants flying; Labor Day; Election Day; trout stream; mushroom ring; first dogwood; first snow, etc. Not all of these are in Japanese collections of kigo (saijiki) … some are, certainly. Kigo can be local, and kigo can be utilized as more than a “weather report.” The latter phrase is used as a pejorative about ELH that is nature-centered. It is a fun game to play, after a few adult beverages, to write/speak two lines and append “autumn rain.” # the machine gun/ ran out of ammunition/ autumn rain # a blue walrus/ laughs at the KGB/ autumn rain # and so forth. Sure, English speaking writers can write some awful haiku, and can ignorantly abuse kigo. A glance at THF’s Montage The Book (largest single volume of anthologized haiku in English) or the 6,000 or so haiku in the Heron’s Nest Archives, on line, will reveal quite a lot of subtlety if one reads English well.
[some excerpts from an essay of mine published in several
places (3 or so)...you can include kigo where I wrote”haiku”]
SOME PHILOSOPHY AND PERSONAL NOTES ON HAIKU
http://www.worldhaikureview.org; VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2 AUGUST 2001
“What is haiku? What is it not? One approach by some
Japanese and some Westerners is that haiku exists only in the Japanese language. Haiku is indeed a product of Japanese literature, descending from the much older literary form renga. Reductio ad absurdum, well yes, haiku may be only in and of the Japanese language. But then it would follow that Ibsen, Moliere, Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams are not dramatists; surely this form of art can only be achieved in old
Greek as perfected by Sophocles, Euripides, et al.” . . .
“Just as a French band can play the jazz developed in the US, and an orchestra in China can play Austria’s Mozart or a Viennese waltz, so too may I understand and at least attempt to write haiku.” . . .
I add (not in original essay):
After Phidias in Ancient Greece how could marble be sculpted in Italy by Michaelangelo? Henry Moore, England, worked in marble but also bronze. Could anything be said that was fresh in bronze after Rodin of France?
Laura, kigo (and kire and ma being discussed elsewhere in Troutswirl) is something to be studied as essential craft and philosophy as we write haiku in English. Not all successful haiku use a kigo. Many are not in the Japanese lexicon. In the conservative schools of Japanese haiku: no kigo? not haiku. Is senryu — but that is another subject. Subtle and specific kigo may be more successful that naming a season or a month — unless it is essential. Try for something other than _autumn_ rain.
In closing to this ramble, one such I felt I had to use was published as:
August heat
an alligator nose
in the coot’s wake
I later revised for a contest:
windless heat
an alligator nose
in the coot’s wake
– Paul (MacNeil)
Dear Paul,
I love your poems. They are very good examples of how to include people. I love the one about your daughter. Can you tell me more about the seasonal word/topic debate? With your second poem, there is an implied season, but is there a word too?
I love the poem by Peggy Willis Lyles. It is so vivid! Wow!
Sandra, My face is red. I apologize for my confusion.
Sorry for the confusion – I was referring to the title of the Jack Stamm contest anthology, called “the dipped oar”, nothing to do with the poem Laura has linked to.
In my humble opinion, the poet/observer is present in all haiku. When I need to make a self-reference as a necessary part of the haiku — I do. As Gabi and Sandra say (others of course), humans may be the subject of haiku and may share poem space with “naturey” topics. Human animals are part of the world, too. Those having Japanese will be better able to comment, but the Classic Japanese poets did not often use the first person, because it is rare in Japanese in many circumstances. Some translators infer it (1st person) –Ueda in one Basho book had about 16% with personal pronoun or possessive in his English.
From my entry in THF’s Registry:
paddle at rest
beads of water slide
from the loon’s bill
another stair
the weight of my daughter’s
college bags
It is MY paddle, and it is I who is that close to the loon. I did not need to say so.
That it is MY daughter is very important. Incidentally, each of these has kigo (or season word/topic as the debate rages on …).
And this from her THF Registry page with kigo, human and “nature” subjects, and first person, by Peggy Willis Lyles:
Mother’s scarf
slides from my shoulder
wild violets
[PM notes: a classic ELH haiku, this, worthy of much study. Read it aloud for its music. I find nothing of "gendai" or "senryu" about it. I nominate my friend Mrs. Lyles as an ELH Master. I do not think I am alone, although she will surely shush me.]
Sioux, The poem that Sandra mentioned, is here:
http://www.haijinx.org/columns/shooting-my-poetry-mouth-off/shooting-my-poetry-mouth-off-april-2010/
This article has been mentioned by a few people and is an amazing example of how to edit and how to include people on a subtle level.
Sioux was responding to the original point I wondered about in the above article (whether it is acceptable to write about people).
Sandra, I loved the poem about the oar and realized through that one could be subtle about how you include people.
However, isn’t it true that whether to include people or not still an active debate amongst haiku experts?
Gabi, as always you have excellent articles to help me sort through this!
Also, while I am at it, I might as well ask about another question I have: As I learn what a traditional seasonal word is, I have noticed that some English Language Haiku do not include one. Why is that?
There are many Japanese kigo of the category HUMANITY and then OBSERVANCES, which cover the changes of the season in the daily life of people.
They include food and drink, the home, festivals and rituals and many activities like farming, fishing and hunting during all seasons and much more.
And Japanese haiku can be funny too, and humorous, and about human nature …
You can check it out from here
http://wkdkigodatabase03.blogspot.com/2009/05/humanity.html
.
“To limit a haiku to nature and not include people sounds like someone introduced an arbitrary [rule?]“.
Don’t know what you’ve been reading Sioux but there is no ban on writing about people in haiku. In fact, in the anthology from the Jack Stamm Haiku Contest (just out and named “the dipped oar”), the introduction reads in part:
“The human element [in haiku], Janice [M Bostok] says, seems to be developing into the English language [poems] very naturally and becoming part of our gift to the form in English. In the past many haiku were so centered on ‘nature’ that they were becoming sterile without the human element which is part of the overall plan of our environment – remembering that in haiku ‘human nature’ is supposed to be aligned to the larger picture of ‘nature’. It is the person who is enlightened by the sudden perception that lets the human be part of the natural environment.”
In short, people in haiku okay.
Perhaps you’re wading through the haiku-senryu thing. In haiku humour is supposed to elicit something like a smile, in senryu a belly laugh. Haiku are about nature (of which people are a part), senryu about human nature.
Many writers no longer bother making a distinction between the two.
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