HAIGA/PHOTO-HAIKU (NHK HAIKU MASTERS: January gallery, 2018)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/haiku_masters/gallery201801.html?week=1

re:Virals 118: Haiku commentary

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly poem commentary feature on some of the finest haiku ever written in English. This week’s poem was

 
     and now . . . 
     passing through me
     into eaves

          — Robert D. Wilson, A Soldier’s Bones: Hokku and Haiku (2013)

Danny Blackwell is spaced out:

This week we had no comments submitted, so it falls upon me to say something about this haiku.
I have to confess that it wasn’t a poem that really spoke to me and, upon trying to say something about it, I’m not even sure what it is about. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as many haiku defy easy assimilation on the first reading and truly benefit from further philosophizing, so the question is whether the problem is the haiku or the reader—in this case, me. Maybe I’m not up to the challenge?
The first line “and now . . .” doesn’t really give much information, and I find myself asking whether it is redundant to state “now” in a haiku. What gives me pause for further consideration, however, is the use of the word “and.” One cannot help wonder what came before it. Beginning in medias res can be an incredibly effective technique. I’m reminded of the opening to Lorca’s La casada infiel, for example, which intentionally starts on the second line, leaving us with a sense of something unsaid, which could either be a reference to what the narrator is omitting, or it could be taken as a reference to the oral romance tradition that often left us with fragmentary texts. (The epic Song of My Cid, for example, is missing the opening.) In this case, I’m not sure I can unravel the reason behind this “and now,” other than to create an enigmatic ambiguity for its own sake. Again, I reiterate, I may not be living up to my expectation as a critical reader. The first line doesn’t give me anything to work with in order to (re)construct the poem, or the poet’s experience. But maybe that is the intention.
As regards “passing through me/into eaves”, we don’t know what is passing through the narrator. The word eaves might suggest rain but, if that were the case, how does the rain pass through the poet and then into the eaves?
One reader asked me to clarify if I had published the poem with a typo. (The email simply read: “leaves?!”) So maybe I am not alone in feeling at a loss.
I could conjecture a variety of readings but I feel like I would be potentially clutching at straws.
The poet has good credentials and the collection this haiku is taken from features introductory comments by David G. Lanoue and David Landis Barnhill.
“Open your mind and expect the unexpected,” says Lanoue of these “wonderful, jarring, delightful, and provocative discoveries.”
Maybe this week’s selected poem is intentionally jarring or provocative, I don’t know, but I’m left feeling like I didn’t quite get it.
“They are full of the pause of ma,” says Barnhill, and talking about the way in which Wilson “cleaves” his haiku to create juxtapositions (“three periods acting as his kireji or cutting word”) Barnhill says that the poet “creates a space for the reader, not to “fill in” that space but to be filled by it.”
For me personally this poem has too much space—and while I would be able to construct a poem from the materials I have been given, I doubt it would bear much resemblance to the experience that provoked the poet to write it. One has to be honest: one either feels something or they don’t, and this poem left me without any real emotional or literary reaction, although I will say that the words are beautiful enough . . . and maybe they are in the right order. Maybe the problem is also one of genre and I am not reading this, as I should, as an experimental haiku. My failure to be moved is no value judgment on the author’s work, only on one person’s (possibly faulty) reading of one poem.
There is no doubt that the poem is able to provoke something in others because it was selected by a reader last week for commentary, so I will leave the comments section open this week and hopefully others out there can give their belated reactions to Wilson’s haiku. (Those of you that wish to comment on the haiku I have selected this week please use the contact form as mentioned in the submission instructions below.)

Last minute addition:

I was fortunate enough to be able to contact Robert D. Wilson, the author of this week’s poem, and he was kind enough to elucidate with the following:
“The now, the moment, is passing through me into the eaves that represent the past. All is static, all is in a state of becoming, the now is a passersby.”
These comments included a caveat: “How I interpret my hokku (. . .) is unimportant. Each reader subjects it to his or her own interpretation. No two interpretations are alike.”
Wilson also clarified that this poem, taken from his collection of “hokku and haiku,” is not a haiku, as I had referred to it, but a hokku, and went on to define his hokku as “action biased,” as opposed to “object biased.” Wilson has some articles online for those that wish to read more on the subject—just click here.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/12/15/revirals-118/

re:Virals 114: Haiku commentary

Haiku poem under discussion:

     quietly
     we become
     audience
  
          — Hilary Tann Frogpond 27.1

Danny Blackwell ponders sound and silence:

While preparing this week’s re:Virals I learnt, as did some others who have contributed comments, that the author of the haiku under discussion is a musician, and I just noticed that each line has 3 syllables, and the haiku has the effect of sounding, to my ear at least, as a run of triplets. Even taking into account the possible pauses between lines, the lines still tend to have a feel of triplets because of the natural rhythms and stresses of the English language. This is not, however, something I noticed during the many readings I made of this poem, and only occurred to me when I decided to take on the potentially odious and pedantic task of analyzing it, and it may be that the meter is of negligible import in comparison to the content, and that the rhythm arises accidentally, as it were, from the message the poet wanted to convey. (Passing from musical to poetic terminology, the meter of this poem would be mainly considered as consisting of dactyls, although one might consider line 2 as a molossus or an anapest—meaning, in layman’s terms, that the stress is placed equally on each syllable of “we become,” or with a stress falling on the final syllable.)
But syllable-counting aside, I wonder if the poem speaks to the phenomenon of the musicians, before or after performing a piece, as they listen to the applause of the audience, and therefore become the “audience” of the audience, paying witness to the sound of the public, turned performers with their sonic applause. (The resulting paradox being that the poem could explicitly revolve around the word “quietly,” while implicitly being about the noise of a grateful audience.) Or maybe the musicians become one with the audience in the reverent silence between songs, which unites the musicians and audience as one collective “audience,” all performing a truncated version of John Cage’s 4’33’’.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/11/17/revirals-114/

re:Virals 109: Haiku commentary

Haiku for discussion:

 pig and i spring rain


          — Marlene Mountain, Frogpond 2:3-4 (1979)

Danny Blackwell wonders if the personal is political:

What a great haiku. It is hard not to feel compassion for the players in the scene. Sadly, it is also hard for me not to think about the pig’s destiny, which is likely one of suffering for the benefit of humans. For the most part pigs are not companions, like dogs or cats. Pigs are, more often than not, destined to be food. In fact, unless we work on a farm or in the countryside, we rarely see a living pig. Like many great haiku it is what isn’t said — what is implicit — that really resonates with us. The pig in this haiku will probably end up on someone’s plate, and one has to reflect on what that means. Upon reading this poem by Marlene Mountain I cannot help but recall an interview that I read not long ago, and which colours my reactions. While not a vegan myself, I recently stumbled across a pamphlet of resistance against speciesism, and I was particularly captivated by the opening interview with an individual named Rob, who served in the military during Desert Storm:
“I was out of the military for some time already, and I was struggling with PTSD (…) you see, when I was in the military I saw the most horrible and ugliest things, I saw innocent people die, and I saw these videos of animals, and noticed there was no difference in how humans and animals die, there was no difference in the bloodshed, the fight for life, and their subsequent death.
My eyes were wide open, and saw that we were the actual terrorists, we were the ones creating chaos and murdering innocent people for their resources, we had no right — as we have no right to take the lives of innocent animals — to invade or enter into those countries. Meanwhile, here at home, we people of color were being terrorized for years by the police. The lies we’ve been told about people in other countries, the environmental destruction humanity takes part in, the unnecessary killing of animals for food, imprisonment in zoos and aquariums, torture and murder in test labs. Why do these things resonate so much with me? Because as a black man, we also suffered these injustices and were marginalized in much the same way animals are . . .”
After reading this interview, I wonder how relevant the following comments by Marlene Mountain are:
“We have been ‘taught’ alienation and it seems imperative now that we seek that which affirms the common ground of all organisms.”
I was hesitant at first to include parts of the interview from the vegan pamphlet, as I don’t wish to misuse this space for political commentary, however, after reading up on Marlene Mountain, I feel that it touches on some issues which the poet has dealt with in her work, and that it gave me a springboard from which to see the poem in a winder context.
(It may also be worth bearing in mind that a great many of the haiku poets who defined the genre were Buddhists, and went to great lengths to not harm other living beings, and this, in turn, greatly influenced haiku culture. Though Marlene Mountain may have issues with such a Nippon-centric take on haiku, as in the essay they don’t shoot horses do they? she states: “those who champion the Japanese Spirit and its complex paraphernalia for North Americans are under considerable delusion.”)
As regards the topic of war, Marlene Mountain also has various haiku that tackle the topic explicitly. Take, for example, the following one-line haiku:

 
a live update the men's war brushes off more 'collateral damage'

Is not the death of a pig for human consumption another example of ‘collateral damage’? In the aforementioned essay the poet is critical of anthropocentrism and authoritarianism, and at one point asks: “Must we continue to be subjected to hierarchical concepts which separate us from all other organisms?”
The comments I selected from the pamphlet, which touch on a variety of political topics, may shed little light on the poem in a strictly textual sense. And, if I’m honest, when I read the haiku I see little more than the image of a person and a pig, sharing in the spring rain. And it moves me. It has a restrained pathos that is representative of the best of haiku. But when I stop and think about the haiku — that is to say, not simply participate in the haiku moment — I cannot help but wonder about my own conduct and how political my personal decisions are.
One thing I know for sure: the spring rain falls on pig and person alike.

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/10/13/revirals-109/

re:Virals commentary 105

This poem under discussion was:

     This autumn
     I’ll be looking at the moon
     With no child on my knee. 

          — Onitsura

(Translation by Donald Keene. Included in Faubion Bowers' 
The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, 

with the following footnote: 
"Written on the death of his eldest son at age six, in 1700.")

Here are my comments:

Onitsura was a contemporary of Bashō, and is credited as being one of the great creators of haiku. Blyth, for example, said of him: “Onitsura composed the first real haiku.”
Kenneth Yasuda’s book The Japanese Haiku includes various quotes from various sources, which will prove valuable in getting to know about the poet at hand. Onitsura himself expressed his thoughts on haiku with the following words:

“When I think occasionally about an excellent verse, I find no artistic touch in its phrasing, or display of colorfulness in its air; only the verse flows out effortlessly; yet profound is the heart that expressed it.”

The Japanese scholar Asō is cited in Yasuda’s book with the following comment:
“Once an abbot asked Onitsura what the essence of haiku art was, and he replied: ‘In front of a garden a camellia tree blooms with white flowers.’ Since the truth of the universe lies even in a single flower, insight into the universe and into God can be grasped by understanding this truth . . . Onitsura thinks that the true way of haiku art is to discover poetic refinement in the truth of natural phenomena, whether in the snow, the moon, or flowers, with a selfless attitude.”

We find this mission statement evident in the poem under discussion: In front of the moon a father’s heart blooms with the loss represented by a childless knee. It is a simple description. Unadorned. Unpoetic even. And yet it resonates because of its sincerity, something Onitsura spoke of at great length, using the Japanese word makoto, which we will touch on in a moment. But first I’d like to present two very similar flower poems by Onitsura that speak to the “truth of natural phenomena,” and which I will try my best to translate:

桜咲くころ鳥足二本馬四本

when blossoms bloom
bird feet: two
horse: four

The following haiku is similar, in the way it reveals the almost shocking isness of nature, offering an epiphany in which things-as-they-are become somehow absurdly real, usually by virtue of some natural phenomena which awakes in us a new way of looking at the world, which is little more than looking at the world in its essential nature.

目は横に鼻は竪なり春の花

eyes horizontal, nose vertical: spring blossoms

In the case of these two poems the epiphanies (that birds have 2 feet and horses have 4, or that eyes are of a horizontal nature, while the nose is vertical) are caused by blooming flowers, while in the poem about the loss of his child it would seem the moon has played a part in awakening him to a simple realization. The realization here, however, (that the moon-viewing this autumn is without his son on his knee) inspires far more pathos in the reader, and seems to go beyond the “whimsical humour” that critic Henderson spoke of when discussing Onitsura. Henderson criticized Onitsura’s haiku as being too philosophical, saying that they were more like epigrams than haiku (something we often hear said of many modern English-language haiku), and while that opinion may seem valid to a degree in reference to these two flower poems, I don’t think that criticism would hold with the poem we have been looking at this week.

I’d like to offer one final quote from Asō, also included in Yasuda’s book, which we can reflect on as we try to unravel this enigmatic genre known as haiku: a genre that evolved radically through the influence of Onitsura and Bashō and continues to challenge us to this day:

“At the center of Onitsura’s haiku theory is his statement about truth. Everywhere in his writing he uses the word makoto. This term is used in various ways and its meaning is not fixed. However, he uses this term in the sense of sincerity. In his writing a Soliloquy, he said, ‘When one composes a verse and exerts his attention only to rhetoric or phraseology, the sincerity is diminished.’
The fact that no artistic effort in the form or no decorative expression in the context [should be present] is Onitsura’s ideal, which is the way of sincerity.”

Our commentators this week have all remarked on the everyday nature of the elements in this poem that make it so easy to relate to, and of its ability to awake great compassion in us, while at the same time being composed with a lack of poetic decoration.

In Onitsura’s own words:

まことの外に俳諧なし

“Without makoto, there would be no haikai.”

 https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/09/15/revirals-105/

Contributor for Re:virals #88

Analysis of a haiku poem as part of the Haiku Foundation's Re:Virals section:

Poem:

whale song
I become
an empty boat

          — Michelle Tennison, Michelle Tennison 32 (2015)

The power of haiku, like much poetry, often lies in its power to strike us with the sensation that there is meaning that lies beyond the words, and that the poem warrants work on the readers behalf — the reader, then, becoming an “accomplice” (to use Cortázar’s term). When the reader is active and becomes an accomplice to the poem, that is to say “activates” the poem, we are entering the terrain of the spiritual, philosophical, or existential — we are “entering” the poem, so to speak, and entering the position of the poet-creator. At their best, the haiku that occupy this Zen-like territory allow us to become the poet who has lost herself, or himself, and thus we become this absence, or interpenetration of subject and object—of poem and life. I happily confess that I don’t know exactly what this poem is saying. I hear the whale song and I am on the boat, and upon hearing the whale song I become the whale, and on becoming the whale I leave the boat, and I leave the boat empty.
But what if the whale is the empty boat? And, if so, why is it “empty”?
Upon considering these alternatives, the Pavlovian response kicks in: But what about those unwritten (yet endlessly discussed) “rules” about avoiding metaphor in haiku? And while I generally agree that clichéd metaphors are a waste of time and, more often than not, metaphors of any kind have a tendency to jar in haiku, that is because we are, understandingly, on the guard for something inauthentic. But when experience is metaphorical there is nothing more inauthentic than not giving into metaphorical thought and expression. And so, while I will continue to become the poem, and become the whale, and become the empty boat (or, better yet, to become “an-empty-boat-of-whale-song-me”), the meaning of the poem — if we can truly speak of “meaning” — will nevertheless continue to be the following:

whale song
I become
an empty boat

https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/2017/05/19/revirals-88/