Lecture 7: Haiku, Tanka, Haibun
Please note: this week's readings include the essay "Images" in Twentieth Century Pleasures (Hass), this lecture, and the poems which are appended to the end of the essay.
Haiku comes from the traditional Japanese poetry called haikai. Haikai, in turn, is a species of the traditional Japanese poetic form, the renga, which rose to prominence in the 13 th and 14 th centuries; and renga, in turn, originates with tanka. In this brief history, you can see a little of the way that new poetic forms emerge from the flourishing and the subsequent exhaustion of poetic forms—and then their revivals, often in slightly different versions.
Tanka originated in seventh century Japan. It had a fixed pattern of syllables-per-line—five-seven-five-seven-seven—and was associated, according to Richard MacDonald, with the Japanese Imperial Court, which means that in classical tanka, the tone was elevated and refined. Often, classical tanka combined the strong imagery that we associate with haiku with some sort of emotional or philosophical statement. Even when tanka were part of a sequence, each tanka was usually complete in itself.
Renga derived from the tanka. Historians of Japanese poetry note that the tanka form had come to seem stale and worn out, and renga—essentially linked tanka, but collaboratively composed, less formal, more conversational and lively—took their place. Renga means "linked elegance," according to Jane Reichhold ("Another Attempt to Define Haiku"). The renga was a sequential form, which alternated stanzas in the five-seven-five syllable form (familiar to us as the form of haiku) with couplets of seven syllables in each line—like tanka. However, generally one poet would compose the upper stanza—the five-seven-five stanza—and another poet would compose the two line, seven-seven, lower stanza. These poems could go on to quite a length—as long as 1000 or even more links.
One variety of renga was known as haikai—"humorous"—which meant a rejection of the courtly and stylized diction of court poetry; as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes, haikai poets (notably Basho) "found 'humor' in describing the mundane" (493). Of course, in the lively atmosphere wherein renga were composed, a spirit of competition emerged, and poets would come with haiku already written, hoping that they'd be able to use them. Eventually, these extra haiku became a form in their own right.
If renga can be understood as a kind of poetic conversation or dialogue, then, as John Drury says, haiku can be understood as "the proverbial 'one hand clapping' of the Zen koan, the first half of a tanka isolated and answered by silence, an exercise of the solitary self in the midst of the universe" (The Poetry Dictionary, 224). The rules for syllable count are well understood—indeed, because the form is so brief, many people write simple haiku as children—but the form is more than just a regulated number of syllables. The haiku as practiced by its Japanese masters always contained a word called the kigo, which indicated the season. Classical haiku also contain a break—a "cutting word"—which, in English translation, is often rendered with some sort of punctuation. That break occurs, generally, at the end of the first or second line. We might also see this break as a kind of leap: the poem requires the reader to leap into another image or context, a leap which gives the poem its blaze of insight.
Haiku seek to embody a moment of perception, sharpened into image. Hass's essay, "Images," makes, I think, one of the most thorough and beautiful investigations into the nature of image and its work. It's telling that the majority of Hass's examples come from the great masters of haiku—Basho, Buson, and Issa. These small poems—their exquisite movement and their precision—can help us to see the power of image to do great emotional and even spiritual work.
One interesting question—to me, at least—is why haiku (and, to a lesser extent, tanka) have such an appeal to writers in other languages. There is something about these forms that seems powerfully rooted in Japanese culture; yet we borrow its specific formal rules, even though in some important ways, they don't fit our language. (For instance, the English syllable is not the same as the Japanese morae, which move much more quickly than a syllable—an already brief form, which is, apparently, even briefer in Japanese!) Wendy Bishop, in her Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem, quotes some of Basho's rules:
She then goes on to observe, "These rules match the contemporary poet's interest in the local, the personal, and the carefully observed details of the world" (155). American poetry, at least, has had a long fascination with the idea of the image, which spawned an aesthetic movement called "imagism" (note Hass's hilarious observation that imagism "seems to have been an idea that Ezra Pound had for a few days in around 1910"). But Hass gives, I think, the more complete answer, by implication. Though he does not explicitly address the question of why we are fascinated by these Japanese forms, he does help us to see how what Buson referred to as "the way" of haiku answers "the unappeasable habit of the image"—that is, our hunger for the power of images to arrest, for a moment, what is always fleeting, which is our lives. Hass sees the "habit of the image" as an expression of our longing for those moments when we understand the very being-ness of our being, and also an expression of how fleeting such moments are.
Many people find the practice of these two forms to be clarifying, and write them as a kind of formal discipline, a means of paying attention. Sometimes their practice of the forms is "in the spirit of" haiku or tanka, rather than strictly obeying the rules. Other poets have played with various aspects of the formal requirements. For instance, in Japanese, a single haiku would be written as a single vertical line; its pauses would have been heard, rather than represented typographically. So some translators have written their renditions of Japanese haiku as single horizontal lines. Plenty of poets don't follow the five-seven-five rule strictly. The American poet John Ashbery wrote a poem, which I'll include below, called "37 Haiku," which is a series of 37 lines, presumably each approximating a haiku in length and spirit.
The sense I get from these two forms as practiced by American writers is that the borrowing amounts to an homage—a way of paying tribute to aesthetic forms that refresh and clarify our own aesthetic practices. By writing small, we can learn to pay more careful attention. By working primarily with the image, we cleanse our sometimes overblown rhetoric. By embodying a leap or break into the logic of this spare form, we refine our sense of how to connect, compare, contrast, create movement.
Some people have noted that the great masters of traditional haiku achieved this mastery late in life. To me, this suggests that contemporary poets might usefully regard their work in these forms as a practice more than as a destination—that is, you might think of returning to the chastened spareness of these poems as a recurrent discipline. The poet Anne Carson, for instance, has the speaker of her book-length poem The Beauty of the Husband (2001) refer to the practice of writing almost daily about a branch she could see from her kitchen window. Here's a passage from the poem to illustrate:
There was a branch I used to watch from my back kitchen window
and gradually began to keep a record of it
almost every day
in elegiac couplets,
for example:
Foaming against its own green Cheek it cools in brief
or seems to cool each Underleaf
(this was in spring, or
here's one from early October)
Dull whitish and deadly as that Chalkline marked on the Door
by Homer who likened Carpentry to a Stalement in War
(or an overcast morning:)
Whose Shadow in abstract Rain appears to be
lashing the Wall at some secret Velocity
(just before a thunderstorm:)
All but bare: dangling like Bits of Bone
in an All Souls Wind just five
you see those Souls seeping up the numb
Shafts, see Souls come oaring out of the Dark alive
Now, these aren't haiku at all. Carson, a classicist who translates Greek and Latin in addition to writing her own poetry, is writing freely in the elegiac meter (from classical Greek), which here includes rhyme. However, I think you can see here the idea, that she's practicing a kind of clarifying exercise, one that refreshes her abilities to make images out of something so common that most of us would fail to see it at all. This is the kind of practice for which haiku or tanka writing might serve.
Chase Twichell talks about using the two-part nature of the tanka as a kind of prolonged invention. She likes the idea of extending the initial period of writing a poem, wherein you're still trying to discover what the poem has to say—she believes that often, we shut down this invention period too quickly, and thus don't let the poem have its way with us, help us to find its unexpected aspects, its surprises. She takes her practice from the idea of the collaboratively composed renga, writing three or four lines of the poem, then putting it away for a week, a month. When she takes out the poem again, she is, in effect, a different person from the one who wrote those lines. She adds new lines, then puts the poem away again. She thus builds into the poem the kinds of small leaps and surprises that are typical of tanka and haiku. You might try this strategy with a poem to see what happens.
I've saved the form of haibun till last, as it is a hybrid form. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes that "Tanka and prose narrative contexts have proved extraordinarily congenial" (1265), and haibun is just such a merging of contexts. The prototype of haibun is Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which recorded his journeys on foot throughout Japan toward the end of his life. He kept what amounted to a travel diary, writing in densely imaged prose punctuated with haiku. I've included a piece of this masterwork below in the readings for this week. Other classical Japanese texts feature this intertwining of prose and poetry, including The Tale of Genji, the famous eleventh century narrative, written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu (considered by some to be the earliest instance of a novel).
There are really no rules about haibun—some people spar over whether a haibun may include one haiku or many, but this seems to be a rather minor concern. What matters is that the quality of the prose is as "poetic" as the haiku—that is, it is purged of anything explanatory or "talky," and it is rich in image. Both the examples I include below, including one contemporary one by James Merrill, feature the prose first and the haiku as a kind of conclusion, but you needn't feel that is a requirement, either. You can intersperse more haiku if you like. What counts in this form is the surprising relation of the prose to the poem, and the density of imagery.
Here are a few readings. I'm relying on you having read Hass's essay carefully enough to find the extensive collection of haiku within that text. I have just a couple of tanka, and two haibun. I've also added a couple of poems that I think have a strong connection to this tradition of American written, Japanese inspired poems.
Tanka
Ueda Miyoji (English translation by S. Noritoshi):
To live is to break
One's heart for the sake of love;
A couple of doves,
Beaks touching on their way,
Are stepping out in the sun.
Sami Mansei (early 8 th c.; trans. Steven D. Carter)
Our life in this world—
To what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
Rowing out at break of day,
Leaving not a trace behind.
Princess Nukada (7 th c.; trans. Steven D. Carter)
Waiting for you,
I languish, full of longing—
And then the blinds
Of my house flutter slightly,
Blown by the autumn wind.
Haibun
Genjuan no ki
( The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling )
By Matsuo Basho
Beyond Ishiyama, with its back to Mount Iwama, is a hill called Kokub-yama—the name I think derives from a kokubunji or government temple of long ago. If you cross the narrow stream that runs at the foot and climb the slope for three turnings of the road, some two hundred paces each, you come to a shrine of the god Hachiman. The object of worship is a statue of the Buddha Amida. This is the sort of thing that is greatly abhorred by the Yuiitsu school, though I regard it as admirable that, as the Ryobu assert, the Buddhas should dim their light and mingle with the dust in order to benefit the world. Ordinarily, few worshippers visit the shrine and it's very solemn and still. Beside it is an abandoned hut with a rush door. Brambles and bamboo grass overgrow the eaves, the roof leaks, the plaster has fallen from the walls, and foxes and badgers make their den there. It is called the Genjuan or Hut of the Phantom Dwelling. The owner was a monk, an uncle of the warrior Suganuma Kyokusui. It has been eight years since he lived there—nothing remains of him now but his name, Elder of the Phantom Dwelling.
I too gave up city life some ten years ago, and now I'm approaching fifty. I'm like a bagworm that's lost its bag, a snail without its shell. I've tanned my face in the hot sun of Kisakata in Ou, and bruised my heels on the rough beaches of the northern sea, where tall dunes make walking so hard. And now this year here I am drifting by the waves of Lake Biwa. The grebe attaches its floating nest to a single strand of reed, counting on the reed to keep it from washing away in the current. With a similar thought, I mended the thatch on the eaves of the hut, patched up the gaps in the fence, and at the beginning of the fourth month, the first month of summer, moved in for what I thought would be no more than a brief stay. Now, though, I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever want to leave.
Spring is over, but I can tell it hasn't been gone for long. Azaleas continue in bloom, wild wisteria hangs from the pine trees, and a cuckoo now and then passes by. I even have greetings from the jays, and woodpeckers that peck at things, though I don't really mind—in fact, I rather enjoy them. I feel as though my spirit had raced off to China to view the scenery in Wu or Chu, or as though I were standing beside the lovely Xiao and Xiang rivers or Lake Dongting. The mountain rises behind me to the southwest and the nearest houses are a good distance away. Fragrant southern breezes blow down from the mountain tops, and north winds, dampened by the lake, are cool. I have Mount Hie and the tall peak of Hira, and this side of them the pines of Karasaki veiled in mist, as well as a castle, a bridge, and boats fishing on the lake. I hear the voice of the woodsman making his way to Mount Kasatori, and the songs of the seedling planters in the little rice paddies at the foot of the hill. Fireflies weave through the air in the dusk of evening, clapper rails tap out their notes—there's surely no lack of beautiful scenes. Among them is Mikamiyama, which is shaped rather like Mount Fuji and reminds me of my old house in Musashino, while Mount Tanakami sets me to counting all the poets of ancient times who are associated with it. Other mountains include Bamboo Grass Crest, Thousand Yard Summit, and Skirt Waist. There's Black Ford village, where the foliage is so dense and dark, and the men who tend their fish weirs, looking exactly as they're described in the Man'yoshu. In order to get a better view all around, I've climbed up on the height behind my hut, rigged a platform among the pines, and furnished it with a round straw mat. I call it the Monkey's Perch. I'm not in a class with those Chinese eccentrics Xu Quan, who made himself a nest up in a cherry-apple tree where he could do his drinking, or Old Man Wang, who built his retreat on Secretary Peak. I'm just a mountain dweller, sleepy by nature, who has turned his footsteps to the steep slopes and sits here in the empty hills catching lice and smashing them.
Sometimes, when I'm in an energetic mood, I draw clear water from the valley and cook myself a meal. I have only the drip drip of the spring to relieve my loneliness, but with my one little stove, things are anything but cluttered. The man who lived here before was truly lofty in mind and did not bother with any elaborate construction. Outside of the one room where the Buddha image is kept, there is only a little place designed to store bedding.
An eminent monk of Mount Kora in Tsukushi, the son of a certain Kai of the Kamo Shrine, recently journeyed to Kyoto, and I got someone to ask him if he would write a plaque for me. He readily agreed, dipped his brush, and wrote the three characters Gen-ju-an. He sent me the plaque, and I keep it as a memorial of my grass hut. Mountain home, traveler's rest—call it what you will, it's hardly the kind of place where you need any great store of belongings. A cypress bark hat from Kiso, a sedge rain cape from Koshi—that's all that hang on the post above my pillow. In the daytime, I'm once in a while diverted by people who stop to visit. The old man who takes care of the shrine or the men from the village come and tell me about the wild boar who's been eating the rice plants, the rabbits that are getting at the bean patches, tales of farm matters that are all quite new to me. And when the sun has begun to sink behind the rim of the hills, I sit quietly in the evening waiting for the moon so I may have my shadow for company, or light a lamp and discuss right and wrong with my silhouette.
But when all has been said, I'm not really the kind who is so completely enamored of solitude that he must hide every trace of himself away in the mountains and wilds. It's just that, troubled by frequent illness and weary of dealing with people, I've come to dislike society. Again and again I think of the mistakes I've made in my clumsiness over the course of the years. There was a time when I envied those who had government offices or impressive domains, and on another occasion I considered entering the precincts of the Buddha and the teaching rooms of the patriarchs. Instead, I've worn out my body in journeys that are as aimless as the winds and clouds, and expended my feelings on flowers and birds. But somehow I've been able to make a living this way, and so in the end, unskilled and talentless as I am, I give myself wholly to this one concern, poetry. Bo Juyi worked so hard at it that he almost ruined his five vital organs, and Du Fu grew lean and emaciated because of it. As far as intelligence or the quality of our writings go, I can never compare to such men. And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a
phantom dwelling? But enough of that—I'm off to bed.
Among these summer trees,
a pasania—
something to count on
(Source: From the Country of Eight Islands. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.)
Arrival in Tokyo
James Merrill (from The Inner Room)
Our section of town is Roppongi, where thirty years ago I dined in W's gloomy wooden farmhouse. The lanes and gardens of his neighborhood have given way to glitzy skyscrapers like this hotel—all crystal and brass and life-size ceramic Saint Bernard in the carpeted lobby. It is late when the revolving door whisks us forth, later yet when our two lengthening shadows leave the noodle shop to wander before bed through the Aoyama cemetery. Mishima is buried down one of its paths bordered by cherry trees in full, amazing bloom. Underneath, sitting on the ground—no, on outspread plastic or paper, shoes left in pairs alongside these instant "rooms"—a few ghostly parties are still eating and drinking, lit by small flames. One group has a transistor, another makes its own music, clapping hands and singing. Their lantern faces glow in the half-dark's black-beamed, blossom tented
dusk within the night.
The high street lamp through snowy
branches burns moon-bright.
Miscellaneous Poems, which appear to me to be inspired by these traditional Japanese forms
37 Haiku
John Asbery (from A Wave)
Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon
Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year
Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic
Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel
And I think there's going to be even more but waist high
Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer
You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit
You nearly undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing
That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now
And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove
Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance
Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you're a monster
Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car
The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it
What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there
You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now
Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country
A pencil on glass—shattered! The water runs down the drain
In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer
A child must go down it must stand and last
Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms
Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking
There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book
The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?
In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity
The boy must have known the particles feel through the house after him
All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors
Pine Tree Tops
Gary Snyder (from Turtle Island )
in the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
the creak of boots.
rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.
from Hitch Haiku
Gary Snyder (from The Back Country)
They didn't hire him
so he ate his lunch alone:
the noon whistle
• • •
Cats shut down
deer thread through
men all eating lunch
• • •
Frying hotcakes in a dripping shelter
Fu Manchu
Queets Indian Reservation in the rain
• • •
A truck went by
three hours ago:
Smoke Creek desert
• • •
Jackrabbit eyes all night
breakfast in Elko.
• • •
Old kanji hid by dirt
on skidroad Jap town walls
down the hill
to the Wobbly hall
Seattle
• • •
Small Song
A.R. Ammons (from The Selected Poems 1951-1977)
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away
The Inevitable Lightness
W.S. Merwin (from The Rain in the Trees)
The roads and everything on them fly up and dissolve
a net rises from the world
the cobweb in which it was dying
and the earth breathes naked with its new scars
and sky everywhere
Poem
Gregory Orr (from Burning the Empty Nests)
This life like no other.
The bread rising in the ditches
The bellies of women swelling
with air.
Walking alone under the dark pines,
a blue leather bridle in my hand.
And lastly, here's a poem of my own, with a haiku embedded in it.
Autumn Sutra
I wanted a leaner, a sparer style.
I wanted birds to be able
to fly through the branches
after the pruning.
In a chastened season,
why my longing,
appearing everywhere?
on the walk, fallen
crabapples: smear of ochre,
crushed under heel
Conundrum
to be solved by techné,
I thought, though perhaps
I loomed larger:
I wanted to be the altar, not
to kneel there.
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