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Rare moments of enthusiasm find me reworking the sum total of my 5-7-5 writing so far.  (A small collection one day?  God knows).  As you might guess, I try to follow my own particular ideas - to put my ‘haiku’ where my mouth is; but it’s not easy, and good or bad, ‘haiku’ I care more about than others get preferential attention. 

wintry evening -
briefly, the horses’ breath ...
whiter than the moon 

was written 6 years ago, and appeared in the Iron Book of British Haiku; even Red Moon Press asked to use it!  (Did they use it?  Dunno).  I can guess its appeal to some others (especially, perhaps, some of the Americans?); it trips nicely enough off the tongue, and it paints a pretty picture.  For me, in the above form, it has little merit; only its personal significance makes me care enough to want to be bothered with it.  So what do I find wrong? 

The writing is not true to the moment - and there is no way for the reader to know this.  In two ways, important information has been withheld.  Firstly, the haiku experience was vicarious - a TV image.  However, it only reproduced, more or less exactly, a real life experience from the past: watching racehorses training on a moor-top; and I know perfectly well that, had I been writing ‘haiku’ then, I would have produced the same result - because the emotional jarring of both experiences was identical enough.  Perhaps, in age, there were subtle changes - I don’t know; but on the second occasion, it was as if a pattern had reiterated itself inside my head.  Secondly, I ‘invariably’ write ‘haiku’ of the ‘here and now’ variety; and I believe that ‘haiku moments’ should find me spontaneously … should not be desperately sought to claim my quarterly spot in BS.  In the words of Mr. Susumu Takiguchi (1): ‘write what actually happens to you’ … and ‘only when you have been deeply moved … poetically inspired’ … and ‘do not fake poetic feelings’.  Now, whenever we approach a ‘haiku situation’, we do so with our emotional and cognitive minds pre-set by earlier events and who we are: we see the ‘haiku moment’ through pre-tinted spectacles as it were.  And at the ‘haiku moment’, a subtle change occurs in which whatever thoughts and emotions we brought with us are re-tempered by the event.  This in itself is influenced by other ambient circumstances - such as season; and a particular emotion experienced in Spring is, perhaps, experienced differently in Winter.  Coming back to the ‘haiku’ under discussion, there is no way for any reader to guess with what mind-set I was looking at the horses - unless, perhaps, one reads ‘wintry evening’ as a symbol for age and takes a long shot.   But why should one?   This, for me, is where Western haiku technology is at some disadvantage.  In reviewing Masajo Suzuki’s book, Love Haiku (2), I was constantly impressed at how kigo and kireji could be used to fine-tune a haiku’s emotional content.  This facility we don’t have, yet emotional information seems just as important as any other; and while much is spoken about the need for open-endedness in haiku, leaving out any important information leaves doors irritatingly shut.  The be-jewelled finger might distract, but the finger pointing vaguely is useless.  Clearly, in the above piece of writing I might have been seeing things from several very different angles; and I can’t believe that such extreme open-endedness makes for satisfying haiku.  The above ‘haiku’ is hardly a shared event.   

The ‘haiku’ is technically incompetent: much of the kigo imagery is redundant.  Like Bo Peep’s sheep ‘wagging their tails behind them … pray, where else would they wag them?’(3); it’s cold - it only needs saying one way. 

The ‘haiku’ is anonymous - little, if anything, in it is subjective - the writer’s hand remains closed (a fault closely related to the first).  More than once, I have read about the early demise of haiku-meaning in Japan, eg. ‘Countless haiku have sunk into oblivion without being understood as their authors intended’ (Yagi (4)) -  a somewhat alien idea to Western poets?  And I conjecture that a haiku’s style/success might depend on who or what it is/was written for, eg. a knowledgeable readership or closed circle of friends (Basho, Buson etc?); a prefaced collection (Masajo Suzuki’s Love Haiku); as isolated contribution to some Quarterly.  Universals, of course, will ‘always’ lead long, solitary, yet meaningful lives, eg. Penny Harter’s, broken bowl/ the pieces/ still rocking.  Everyone recognises that particular suspended moment of disaster, irrespective of personal reasons.  However, regarding other (‘non-universal’) haiku, R. H. Blyth (5), writing about Shiki, has this to say: ‘at their best, Basho and Issa have an objective-subjectivity in which the thing [described] is suffused with the … life of the poet, and suffers no distortion [in consequence]’ …The objectivity of Buson and Shiki has about it ‘something cool and delightful … restful … that makes no demands … [but] … When Basho and Issa fail, we fall into sentimentality or something worse.  When Buson and Shiki fail, the landscape is made of cardboard … without life or depth’.  And Blyth underlines the latter comment with, near the boat landing,/ a small licensed enclosure;/ cotton-plant flowers …‘Shiki’s verse … is a picture of life, but has it any life in it, any depth?’  One might add, has it any significant meaning?  And where is the middle ground - between self-indulgence and cold objective realism - that might confer more immediate significant meaning, and a longer haiku shelf-life?  Two of Shiki’s late [?] haiku seem, to me, to point the way: Again and again/ from my sickbed I ask/ ‘How deep is the snow?’ and I want to sleep./ Go gently, won’t you,/ when you swat the flies.  What impresses me here is that, although in each case I am conditioned  by  Shiki’s  presence, my  attention is drawn not to him, but to the window where the snow is falling; or to the ever present flies (for whom there may even be divided/opposing feeling between Shiki and his attendants).

*

How then do I set about rearranging my ‘haiku’? 

Some insight is now given into a ‘correct reading’; yet the ‘haiku’ remains open-ended.  Are the horses racehorses or Larkin horses (7)?  Am I envying the exhilaration of the riders or the ‘freedom’ of the horses?  Note also that one can easily mould this style of writing to other, no less honest ends.  In criticism of those haiku that always leave me out in the cold, I might have written (in mimicry of Basho’s  Autumn crow haiku - and just as objectively),

whiter than moonshine,
the horses’ breath - the bleak air
freezes my ears off