Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

To reiterate a personal view: the West does not have a ‘Haiku Tradition’. What it has is a rather short history of literary appropriation from a completely different language-culture.

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition says Eliot (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’). This statement is taken somewhat out of context (Eliot is in no way denying the importance of the historical foundations of English Poetry); but it’s true - for example, no-one speaks of ‘our sonnet tradition’, Will Shakspaw notwithstanding. Even did we, Eliot would surely have agreed that, while good English versions quickly followed the sonnet’s appropriation, it took rather longer than fifty years for the form to become comfortably bedded down in our own literary heritage. As to any perceived contradiction in terms regarding ‘tradition’ and ‘appropriation’, Eliot would have seen no problem: I have …suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry …ever …written. But even if it were ever appropriate to speak of an English haiku tradition, wouldn’t it first seem necessary to have developed an authentic English haiku equivalent - not some misconstrued look-alike of the original? And now that Professor Haruo Shirane has corrected our vision (‘Beyond the Haiku Moment’), is it unreasonable to suggest that such an equivalent should possess at least some of the literary qualities present in the writings of Bashō and Buson but seemingly absent from so much of current English haiku?

*

The problems of writing haiku in English stem, obviously enough, from the fact that Haiku has its tradition within a language-culture very different from our own. But what I want to suggest here, is that the responsibility of facing up to these problems rests as much with the reader as with the writer. It will not help matters much if a writer does something ‘right’ if readers think it ‘wrong’. Consider the following:

The acceptance of allusion as a reader responsibility. I assume agreement that, for those haiku written in immediate response to direct experience, it would be desirable for the writing to retain at least some of the freshness of that response? So consider the modest effort below (it’s unfortunate that one should need to refer to one’s own work, but at least I can vouch for its spontaneity - ‘sincerity’, whatever).

over the gravel sea,
a river in the trees - the sound
of children’s voices

No great knowledge (maybe a willingness to read) is needed to take this as being a simple response to walking around a Japanese garden where the wind in the pines (what else?) is mingling with the distant sound of children’s play. A sense of nostalgia is conveyed perhaps? Now, a feature of remembered poetry scraps is that they can be released out of the subconscious by the selfsame experiences that caused them to be written in the first place. And when they rise to the surface, they may drag with them more cognitive, yet no less spontaneous, associations that over-write with symbolic meaning, (for the writer at least - hopefully for any perceptive and receptive reader as well). Thus, the above ‘haiku’ references Seamus Heaney’s

The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.

where Heaney’s imagery may well be conveying a sense of need to find a new poetic voice from an old source. My own mind, likewise, may have been reflecting on western haiku writing. But with ‘haiku’ such as this, the problems are revealed when one opens one’s hand to display self knowledge of the inner-writing: Oh, but that’s too difficult to understand - haiku should be more ‘immediately’ readable. Really? Well OK, but if we sincerely want our picturesque haiku to achieve some sort of literary status - how serious should we get? And what is the point of having haiku with ‘depth’ or ‘layers of meaning’ if we are not prepared to close-read them?

It seems reasonable to suggest that the use of allusion in haiku should not deny a ‘simpler’ reading for those who do not share the writer’s ‘erudition’. On the other hand, Shiki, that austere advocate of objectivity, admired Buson’s writing - and Buson felt able to write haiku like this:

  the silk-tearing
biwa’s current -
  autumn ‘s voice

Buson’s first two lines are referencing the T’ang Dynasty poet, Po Chü-I; and the whole haiku builds up into a deeply complex metaphor that fuses together the sights and sounds of a river torrent, lute music, nostalgia, and season, (Haiku Handbook, pp 212-215). Admittedly, the haiku forms part of a haibun, the referenced lines are given, and perhaps a select (rather than broad) readership was envisaged. Also, Buson’s haiku elicits powerful sensory feelings rather than any ‘intellectual’ meaning (though this in no way alters the reader’s problems). But what does all this say about the quality of our own haiku writing?

Style as a writer responsibility. Brevity in Japanese haiku presumably reflects both linguistic aspects of Japanese prosody, and aesthetic pleasure in utterance that matches the brevity of some motivating instant. Here in the West, we seem largely influenced by the 12-14 syllable model proposed in Haiku Handbook; but I still wonder whether or not Mr. Higginson’s suggestions are based less on considerations of ‘communication of meaning’ than on mere ‘temporo-mechanical’ aspects of translation. It seems to me that Haiku’s reality might depend on a certain cultural bond between writer and reader that was forged in Japan over centuries; the developments of the written language (closer to its pictorial roots than ours), haiku, and haiku-readership being, to some extent, contemporary processes - close-linked strands of cultural evolution. It may well be that such a writer-reader bond will always elude the West - is not likely to be replicated now by the mimicry of some mechanical translation. ‘Meanings’ in haiku writing, East and West, must consist of ‘the written’ and ‘the understood’, and any authentic western equivalent of the pre-20th century Japanese haiku (prior to western influence) will need to attend to both - because it is ‘the whole’ that matters. Period of utterance can not be held more important than semantic content, and it seems worth considering whether or not a sense of brevity in western haiku writing might better reside in the artistry of the language used than in the mere absence of words.

I do not know what the experience of listening to ‘their own’ haiku is/was like for the Japanese, but the quality of much current English haiku writing seems, to me, so unsympathetic to the English language. There is so much same-sounding pidgin diction - so much uniformity of passive, participle-infested tone irrespective of semantic content (which itself seems so uniform in ‘depth’). So much seems to have depended on translations such as

in the fire-depths / saw the way /a peony crumbles (Shūson - à la Charles Chan; Haiku Handbook)

[hardly superior to/semantically different from the Etonian elegance of

in the fire’s depth / I saw the way / a paeony crumbles (Shūson - à la Pu Manchu)]

or on the apparent conditioning that haiku writing requires only the juxtapositioning of heavily cropped Instamatic images.

Adapt to survive. Haiku is a rightly respected literary genre; and in attempting to forge a ‘true’ western equivalent, a little re-vision and experimental variety would not seem amiss. Why do we only dip our toes into the minimal? How many syllables? Whatever it takes to create a western version of literary quality - the sole aesthetic proviso being that more must never be excess.

Golden peacocks
Under blossoming cherry-trees,
But on all the wide sea
There is no boat

Amy Lowell

I would point out here that, syllable and line-count apart, Amy Lowell’s poem might be considered to have identical semantic structure to my own ‘over the gravel sea where I could easily have made ‘the sound’ into a third line - a line of suspended action. However, a three-line form gives my poem more ambiguity to its surface reading - all still ‘sincere’ to instant experience.

*

I want now to turn closer to home, where

again and again
we ask the same old question -
What is a haiku?

(after Shiki)

Essence or Form? What’s in a name? One solution might be to call all English haiku-related genre Haikai, (using its generic sense). This would result in some immediate cosmetic changes (e.g. The British Journal of Haikai and Tanka); but considerable freedoms would be opened up. No purist need ever be denied the opportunity of writing ‘haiku’- whilst editors (of aesthetic integrity, naturally) would have the dubious opportunity of playing ‘Haiku Evolution’. On the other hand, if we in the West are reluctant to relinquish the name ‘haiku’ and persist in seeking definition of something that may not even exist - what then? Courage comrades, do you not hear the clatter of digital hooves (geddit? geddit?) as Latest Technology plunges to the rescue? Or does it? Useful idea or academic exercise? Help or hindrance? (as it says in the small writing). I refer, of course, to Mr. Platt’s recent proposal (BS 10.2, p19) to loosely adapt some of the principles of genetic fingerprinting to the analysis and classification of haiku. To recap the method: a bank of supposed haiku criteria is selected for use as quantifiable data. Individual members of a panel of ‘judges’ score haiku (from a selected experimental group) for each criterion. For each member, each haiku achieves a sum total score; and scores are then averaged for each haiku. Any one haiku scores between a maximum and a minimum (where it might be thought of as ‘not haiku at all’); and haiku with similar scores might be thought to share overall characteristics (taxonomic relationship). Mr. Platt informs us of some of the problems faced in feeding highly subjective material to a method designed for processing only highly objective data; yet his summary still suggests that ‘this approach can provide valuable information with a wide range of applications and the potential to enhance our understanding of the genre’. Let’s review this:

• the criterion selection panel may be pre-conditioned by possibly misconstrued ideas as to what haiku should be.

• if the criterion selection panel is also involved in the scoring, this may produce misleading consistency of results.

• the criteria themselves impose a highly subjective loading. Several resemble wine-bibbers’ jargon, and are wide open to interpretation. (I would not want to use them!).

• several criteria are redundant - show equivalence to, or overlap with, others.

• scorers may be affected in their ‘objectivity’ by their overall feeling for the haiku.

• scorers are people - have you ever heard of high/low markers in education?

Overall, my comment would be that one only sees what one wants to observe. And even given its validity, how would such an analysis as the above be used - what valuable information would it provide? Sussing out editorial preferences seems pretty small beer to me compared to answering the question ‘What is Haiku?’, which one has to have some preconceptions about before one can devise such a procedure. More specifically, I reckon that I could have grouped H22,34,38 together without constructing any dendrogram; likewise, hands up all those who didn’t think that H24,29 were valid haiku (interesting companions they had though - H17,20?). I can’t help wondering what Shiki would have made of all this (apparently, Shiki often adjudicated competitive haiku writing).

  three thousand haiku
to mark on two persimmons - Aice!
                   not more paperwork?

A small experiment seemed in order. Six personal ‘haiku’ were anonymously submitted to be assessed by Mr. Platt’s scoring panel (four of six obliged). The ‘haiku’, fresh from the notepad (two still in unpolished state), were a mix of styles (from tongue in cheek flippancy to more ‘serious’ observation). They shared one common feature: ‘spontaneity’, i.e. immediate response to direct experience leading to genuine expression of experienced reality. I feel that ‘spontaneity’ covers both ‘sincerity’ (free from pretence), and ‘makoto’ (‘truthfulness’); and see it as essential to haiku of the ‘here and now’ variety. In a recent article (‘A Haiku Moment of Truth’; Look Japan, July 2000), Mr. Susumu Takiguchi has suggested that the so-called ‘haiku moment’ is to be received when and if it happens - not desperately sought; and I agree. But if the perception comes as strange, or the immediate response comes in the guise of referential language, then I suggest that this is to be accepted by the writer. To polish rough syntactic edges is one thing; to alter the ‘truth’ of perception is another. Anyway, what were the results?

• for three of the panel, at least half of the haiku scored middling to high; but the scorecard of one member resembled an exercise in binary code for all samples (a parsimonious marker?).

• in conceding possible spontaneity, half the panel were mean - half generous. But there was the impression that if a haiku’s imagery was not understood - despite its directness or suggestiveness -then the haiku was ‘contrived’. Thus ‘over the gravel sea’ (slightly different from the above version) scored near-uniform zero for spontaneity, i.e. ‘it was contrived’. This ‘result’ at least raises the question: ‘How can we know?’

• regarding ‘depth’ or ‘layers of meaning’, the panel could be forgiven for not picking up a reference to S. Heaney; but none saw a line, ‘beneath the banana tree’ as perhaps alluding to Bashō.

• the real gem came from a respected member who believes in ‘gestalt assessment’ anyway. After marking one haiku highly for everything except ‘season’, he remarked, ‘I seem to like this one quite a lot’. Nuff said. One day, all our pleasures may be scored this way.

*

One cannot think of the Limerick as being other than it is - wit, form, rhythm and language are one; and seemingly immutable. The Sonnet, on the other hand, resembles more a Platonic Form in thought than arbitrary poetic structure. It truly has a sense or spirit that does not reside in exacting rhyme schemes or line count. It has been said that if the Italians hadn’t invented the sonnet, someone else
would have had to - so closely linked is it to the way the human mind works, (the western mind, at least). Doubtless, all this explains the sonnet’s longevity despite its superficial diachronic variations. The sonnet bends, but does not break. Its centre holds. Its stability is fluid. It resembles, in Chaos Theory parlance, a ‘strange attractor’ situation-existing and breathing within the determined, yet indeterminate variety of its form. (Evolutionists amongst us might know that one modern theory of speciation suggests species themselves to ‘be strange attractors’. All of us know that species can be driven to extinction). And the haiku? I suggest that the haiku ‘falls somewhere between Limerick and Sonnet’: at one extreme, Japanese purists observe strict traditions of form and content; at the other, the West cannot avoid problems of language and culture, however ‘pure’ its intentions.

Commonality of human experience exists; but what is Haiku? Don’t even think about it. There are no hard and fast answers - only a moving towards, away, and around. It sounds a bit Wittgenstein-ish to say that one must take Haiku ‘for what it is’; but throwing more words at the problem will not elucidate it any further. All it will do is help you to accept things the way you want them to be-even ‘putting words into a computer’ can only ever reinforce the preconceptions of some prevailing paradigm. It’s a human frailty to stick names on things and then wonder what the hell the names mean. Mr. Takiguchi tells us that most Japanese do not understand ‘haiku moment’. This does not necessarily mean that a ‘haiku moment sense’ is absent from their haiku - simply, they haven’t put a name to it. More importantly, advice that the term can cause problems for western ‘haijin’, should give us cause to think: so much for words. So many words to try and pin down the un-pinnable! I humbly suggest that, outside its traditional home, Haiku can only ever be a gestalt experience looking for a language.

*

At a corner table in The Happy Rice-Landing Wine Bar, two old - yet strangely rejuvenated - poets (H17 and 20 on the dendrogram) are trying to raise their spirits, while

a fly on the wall
eyes the saké cups. It’s a game
Busie - Just a silly game