2nd POSITION

I find the difference between Gary Snyder’s 50s (Blyth influenced) view on haiku and his 2007 view to be really interesting.

His 50s view is, of course, steeped in the zen thang + Shiki shasei sketching; his ’07 comment though seems to me, if i’m reading it correctly, to be much different, and much more aware of the intricacy and depth that Japanese haiku inherently have regarding language, culture, poetic techniques, and literature.

The difference, to me, seems like quite a radical change.

I just recently finished rereading Haruo Shirane’s *Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho*.

This was a much more thorough and careful reading i think, with news eyes, and it’s left me with many feelings that directly connect to what Richard has presented.

Two things jumped out at me about the book and about the poetry:

1. the use of cultural, and especially literary, allusions and symbolism, as well as an overwhelming plethora of literary/poetic techniques

2. the way poets were constantly trying to play with Japanese kigo (especially Basho), by using and utilizing them, by inverting their meaning, manipulating them, and radically twisting their traditional associations and expectations in order to constantly strive to create something new and fresh.

All in all, i suppose, what Shirane calls “haikai imagination”; and that Japanese haiku are indeed, very much so, a word-based poetry, not the enlightenment-“moment”/zen-image-sketching-experience-based mantra so many continue to espouse and cling to. That is simply only an element of it. And so it proves Richard’s point (or one of his points) i think: that elh are merely kissing cousins at best; and, for the most part, still, “slavish imitations” of translations of what westerners *think* Japanese haiku are. Creative oversimplifications, most of which lack internal energy/dynamics. creative misreadings are cool. but i think they’ve lost their virginal glow in this case.

As Richard points out though, even more prominently in his essay Kigo and Seasonal Reference, Japanese kigo are simply nothing like a seasonal reference in English (which is more often than not a diary entry/weather report, “naturey”, or, perhaps at their best, “environmental” and seasonal in an emotional and more imaginatively subconscious level). Yes, they might be able to create a sense or world of season for english readers, but have nothing like the cultural or linguistic depth a kigo does in Japanese.

One direction i find interesting for elh is that of symbolism and literary allusions/references being used within them, either in a mythological way, or in a more canonically literary way. knowingly or unknowingly.

(but then what about something like [forgive me] Basho’s frog? is an allusion to it able to become part of not just western literature but world literature? for example, on a recent episode of the Poem Talk podcast, one of Robert Grenier’s poems from his *Sentences* was brought up as being “very literary”, and compared to a Japanese poem’s “poetic condensation” and a literary allusion to Basho’s frog:

AUTUMN

frogs for the first time since autumn

as Shirane points out in his book, Basho’s frog poem has so little to do with season and nature, and *so much* to do with language, culture, literature, and the radical playfulness of screwing with traditional associations.

what else then from the Japanese literary tradition concerning kigo could in fact become part of western literary practice, or world lit? and then again, even if it does—even though the frog has—there is still a world or depth (a vertical axis of literary and cultural history) that readers and writers will still not, and never will be, aware of).

And so when many in elh criticize certain english haiku for being “language-based/centered”, that this somehow might be a negative thing, this seems like a joke of a critique to me; it seems fine if it’s a preference, but it’s a complete historical misinterpretation if it’s seen as what haiku is, always has been, and should be. or that it is is, of all things, a purely western thing. It seems like either an “ignorance is bliss” attitude or just a copout and pure laziness—a staggering oversimplification of what Japanese hokku/haikai/haiku are and have always been: word-based art that utilizes images and objects.

What is additionally dumfounding (in 2010) is when folks then zero in on the work and primary technique of Shiki (shasei/sketching), attracted to its image-centeredness, and, ironically, not realize that it is western art aesthetics being given back to us, then claim it as eastern otherness/exoticism, while at the same time (if not all the while) claiming an allergy to western poetry and poetic techniques (the West).
Japanese haiku, at their root, are not simply, or only, about images at all, or moments, or “real/true” experiences—as Shirane’s *Traces of Dreams* abundantly shows—but about language and culture and literature: an intricately woven rug of all these elements.

i think this explicitly and unequivocally shows what Richard is trying to say in his Position.

What also strikes me after rereading Shirane’s *Traces of Dreams* is how strangely satisfied those writing elh are with their nature imagery. Considering how radical Basho and his followers were about always trying to do something new and fresh with kigo, it seems a shame, and kind of mortifying, that so many writing elh don’t try to experiment more with nature/environmental imagery. To try to turn them on their heads. To twist them. Play with them. that so few try to do something with imagery instead of repeating them like bad pop songs on some corporate radio station.

I think folks writing elh need to play more: with images, words and techniques. and that not just western poetry/poetics should be considered and sampled, but anything and everything we can get our hands on. which is why it’s exciting to see things like “kire” and “ma” and vampires and sufism and gendai popping up. what can we do with these things?

if Japanese haiku teaches me anything, i think it’s that haiku are not simplistically or puritanically “image-based” or “word-based”, “real” or “imaginary” but both and all. (that, esp after reading Shirane’s book, western poetry is in no way against or opposed to haiku because they actually share many elements. haiku is *condensed*).

and that i should artistically play. that i have a world, and a world of words, available to me, and that i should play with them to create condensations. under a microscope, droplets of pond water are complicated things. raindrops too.

I think the statements which conflate “enlightenment” with haiku may be suitable for dinner or religious conversation, but do not belong in an academic context. It’s simply a variety of creationism and wishful proof. It’s like saying poetry reveals love or truth. These terms are not found in academic poetics discourse as statements of veracity because they are abstract, global and entirely too mushy. “Enlightenment” viz haiku has in particular been a real problem in so-called haiku literary criticism, as the entire approach is woolly-brained. The main problem is one of definition and agreement on definitions. If a writer wishes to define the term “enlightenment” and sally forth, good luck to them. just for a start, is enlightenment a state, a condition, a moment, a path, a process, an “a” (thing), does it become, who has it, knows it, can demonstrate it, etc. etc.

Perhaps if terms like realization and awareness are posed, we can at least ask what is realized and what are the qualities of awareness, without floating off into faux-elitist aspirations, as regards a poetics. “Mu ku is really more enlightened than yours; haiku is really more enlightened than other forms of poetry”, etc. A term like “enlightenment” is gaseous and we all just float away into the aether.

On the topic of “ma”, which Lorin mentioned — I think suitable for another setting, a different thread, because there will be no precise delimitation or answer; more, explorations. I think Hasegawa Kai states as much, and he is a critical sourcepoint. If one wonders where or how “ma” and “kire” first appears in an academic-critical context and whats to check it all out, the two subtitled videos here are worth checking out:

gendaihaiku.com/hasegawa/
“Haiku Cosmos 1″ & “Haiku Cosmos 2″ — especially #2, though #1 provides some ground.

In the main though, “ma” is not a haiku thing, but arrives in haiku with unique qualities. As “ma” is instigated by “kire” (radical disjunctive cutting), the two become phenomenal experiences for the reader. We can talk about types of “kire,” and also qualities of “ma”, why not — let’s do it!

Anyway, Stevens, who I truly love and who has enlightened my awareness, seems a master of “ma” — he can teach us a thing or two about kire as well. Which goes back to my main point, concerning haiku as existing withing an atmosphere of western-poetic influence.

But if possible, I would like to solicit comments regarding the main point of the “Position 2″ essay, which is given by Gary Snyder. I would like to know

1) whether you agree or disagree with him

2) why

3) and how you personally react to the possibility that haiku can be defined as Japan-influenced yet predominantly western poetic form.

4) corollary to this is that most of what we think Japanese haiku is all about, involves a lot of cultural projection. (Which to my mind is what is prompting Snyder’s pointed comments — and they are quite sharp.)

Here is the relevant part of the quote:

“I do not think we should even ‘think’ haiku in other [than Japanese] languages and cultures. We should think brief, or short poems. They can be in the moment, be observant, be condensed and meaningful, detached or not, or have many other possible qualities. . . . As I am trying to say, the haiku is a Japanese poetic form. It has elements that can indeed be developed in the poetries of other languages and cultures, but not by slavish imitation (Gary snyder, 2007; please note this is quite a recent statement.)

Any takers? [place 'wink' emoticon here]

Sorry for “cross-posting” earlier in this thread. I did so because I was responding only to Merrill’s comment, not to the main points of subsequent posts. But it does seem to make things a bit messy, so I’ll go with the temporal flow in any future posts!

“If you build it, he will come.”

Just want to acknowledge Phil, who cross-posted — his reply temporally later yet positionally former than my first. But what is time, really, inside the biting (virtual) wind?

Peter, in brief I feel in simpatico with your ethic and acknowledge the sense of temenos — a word I first encountered in a Jungian context — in succinct meaning, that psychological sense of sanctuary, from which it is possible for soul to grow. Lacking temenos, there cannot occur therapeia, an attendance upon psyche (a logos of psyche). In approaching the animate life of soul in haiku creation, a sense of temenos is created. I feel this psychic space as related to ‘ma’ — which after all is most materially, the empty space at teh center of a shinto shrine. the space between, which possess or instigates the sacred. this same architectural scene was brilliantly described by Mircea Eliade in his “Myth of Eternal Return” — there is a chapter on ‘the construction of sacred space.’ Seen as a universal act of indigenous cultures. I’ts been said in many ways and places that poetry is archaic, and the thing about poetic form is that it’s an architecture. There is a reader journey, and, in consciousness shifts, stages of initiation inherently occur (or there could be no shift).

I mused on this as the importance of forgetting, in the second section of “Plausible Deniability,” because the exquisite puissance of haiku involves loss of pattern circuiting a crystalline architecture (sodium chloride, DNA, the structure of a star).

At the moment I’m recalling part of Henri Corbin’s discussion in “The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism” (Corbin was one of James Hillman’s intellectual mentors, along with Gaston Bachelard, Jung, etc.), to wit,

Concenring the Sufi roots of the images of “Black Light” or the “Midnight Sun,” this numinous darkness constitutes something akin to the “Abyss” one must cross — one must submit to annihilation, then the annihilation of annihilation…

If in seeking the pine, then for Corbin, this involves not only poetic paradox in extremis, but language in extremis (“Black Light”, “Midnight Sun”). I think extreme, extensive paradox (“kire” in flavors and charms, by other names), requires a strong sense of temenos. This may be one reason why, when you cross a certain indefinable horizon line of form, when the form opens up too much, that outrageous yet ordinary ‘diamondlike’ cutting of architecture dissipates (the strong force becomes weak, the impossible binding of the center yields to gravity, to play with a sub-atomic metaphor — and metaphor is about all we have).

“that unexpected animal in the clearing”

sometimes very rude. crude. Thinking of Anakiev’s “troop carrier crushes a lizard” ku for example.

I would say, in response, that it’s likely we all here are drawn to depth, to metaphorically a well, deep into which a mystery arises, the pure truth drunk by Tron energy bodies (sorry). It’s perhaps for this reason that this haiku by Uda Kiyoko seems, paradoxically, both obtuse and deeply knowing:

nemuri tsutsu fukai e otosu chô no hane

slumbering
drops, a butterfly wing
into a deep well

that is psyche, and temenos …