Category: Haiku and Beyond

Sam Hamill’s Translator’s Introduction and Afterword alone would be worth the price of Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior: and Other Writings. On one level, it provides an excellent introduction to Basho’s journal Narrow Road to the Interior:

Narrow Road to the Interior is much, much more than a poetic travel journal. Its form, haibun, combines short prose passages with haiku. But the heart and mind of this little book, its kokoro, cannot be found simply by defining form. Basho completely redefined haiku and transformed haibun. These accomplishments grew out of arduous studies in poetry, Buddhism, history, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and some very important Zen training.

and

His journey is a pilgrimage; it is a journey into the interior of the self as much as a travelogue, a vision quest that concludes in insight. But there is no conclusion. The journey itself is home. The means is the end, just as it is the beginning. Each step is the first step, each step the last.

These insights not only make the travel journals easier to understand but provide a greater appreciation of their literary importance.

On another level, it provides an excellent introduction, at least for a relative newcomer like myself, to Basho’s entire works and to Japanese literary traditions in general. It shows how Basho was influenced by earlier traditions:

From Saigyo, the poet learned the importance of “being at one with nature,” and the relative unimportance of mere personality. Such an attitude creates the Zen broth in which his poetry is steeped. Dreaming of the full moon as it rises over boats at Shiogama Beach, Basho is not looking outside himself-rather he is seeking that which is most clearly meaningful within, and locating the “meaning” within the context of juxtaposed images that are interpenetrating and interdependent.

Hamill’s extended discussion of mono-no-aware helped to flesh out an earlier discussion I had with Jonathon Delacour and Shelley Powers about mono-no-aware:

Insight permits him to perceive a natural poignancy in the beauty of temporal things” mono-no-aware ” and cultivate its expression into great art. Aware originally meant simply emotion initiated by engagement of the senses. In its own way, this phrase is Japan’s equivalent of William Carlos Williams’s dictum, “No ideas but in things.”
“
As a more purely critical term in later centuries, aware identified a particular quality of elegant sadness, a poignant awareness of temporality, a quality found in abundance, for instance, in the poetry of Issa and in this century in the novels of Kawabata Yasunari. Middle-aged and in declining health, Basho found plenty of resonance in temporal life, much of it clarified through his deep study of the classics.

But Hamill also introduced me to concepts I had never encountered before, concepts that should also help me to better understand other haiku poets I will be reading shortly:

Basho believed literature provided an alternative set of values, which he called fuga-no-michi, the “Way of Elegance.” He claimed that his life was stitched together “by the single thread of art” which permitted him to follow ‘no religious law” and no popular customs.

At the same time, this made me wonder how fuga-no-michi compares to Western theories of art like those of Pound or Stevens.

Hamill’s discussion of Basho’s sabishi perhaps explains why haiku poets often seem so “modern” when compared to English or American poets of the same time period:

Despite his ability to attract students, he seems to have spent much of his time in a state of perpetual despondency, loneliness everywhere crowding in on him. No doubt this state of mind was compounded by chronically poor health, but Basho was also engaging true sabishi a spiritual loneliness that served haikai culture in much the same way mu or “nothingness” served Zen.

Personally, though, I think I’m much more drawn to Basho’s idea of “elegant simplicity:”

After flirting with dense Chinese diction, Basho was turning toward wabi, an elegant simplicity tinged with sabi, an undertone of “aloneness.” Sabi comes from the purer “loneliness” of sabishisa. It was an idea that fit perfectly with his notion of fuga-no-michi, the Way of Elegance, together with his rejection of bourgeois values. Elegant simplicity. His idea of sabi has about it elements of yugen and plenty of kokoro.

which, in turn, leads to a simple, direct writing style that becomes nearly invisible:

It was during this stay in Ueno that he first began to advocate the poetic principle of karumi “lightness,” urging his followers to “seek beauty in plain, simple, artless language” by observing ordinary things very closely. Karumi together with existential Zen loneliness (sabi) and elegantly understated, unpretentious natural beauty (shibumi) characterizes his final work.

This “simplicity,” which is anything but simple to attain, almost brings my latest poetic excursion, which began with Emily Dickinson, full circle. I think it is this “simplicity” that I most admired in her poetry, a simplicity, combined with a spiritual longing, that sets her poetry apart from the transcendentalists she resembled in so many other ways.

I just finished preparing our Federal and Oregon taxes, so I haven’t had much time for indulging my taste for poetry, or for much of anything else for that matter. But the whole week hasn’t been wasted.

I did receive four haiku books book from Powell’s on Tuesday, though two of the four were sale-priced books I bought in order to reach the minimum $50 to qualify for free shipping.

While taking breaks from doing taxes, I’ve actually grown quite fond of one of these sale books, Inch by Inch: 45 Haiku by Issa, translated by Nanao Sakaki. Perhaps it’s merely that I needed Issa’s humor to add perspective to the thought of paying an additional $1,100 in Federal taxes, though I’m beginning to suspect it is more than that. I think I may really be falling in love with his light poetic style, despite the fact that I generally disdain what is commonly known as “light poetry.”

However, even in his more serious poems, Issa retains a unique perspective, though I’m not sure I realized this until I read:

The Amanita muscaria
can kill you”

Sure, what a beauty!

It’s hard to deny the beauty of this dramatic mushroom, but a little research reveals it’s a powerful hallucinogenic which sometimes proves fatal, a heavy price to pay even for such beauty. If Issa had begun the poem “Sure, what a beauty!” rather than ending with it, I doubt I would have even noticed it. But, as written, it reveals a real mastery of words.

A rather different definition of “beauty” can be found in Issa’s:

Such a beauty “
from the milkweed

a butterfly
is born.

We might think such a beautiful insect could only thrive on roses or an equally elegant flower, not on the humble milkweed plant. Thankfully, such beauty is as much a part of our everyday life as we allow it to be, but it sometimes takes a genius from humble beginnings to remind us of that truth.

I imagine to readers accustomed to the serious, if not somber, tone of most haiku, Issa’s irreverent sense of humor must come as a delightful surprise. Several of the haiku that Hass offers have such a comic effect. Two of my favorite are:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes

and

No doubt about it,
the mountain cuckoo

is a crybaby.

There are others that seem to have a more serious intent, but accomplish that effect through humor:

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

Although all three sections include excerpts from prose passages, the section on Issa has more than the other sections do. As I’ve said before, I’m not too fond of prose poems, but for some reason, I find the idea of ending a long prose passage with a haiku rather satisfying:

It is a commonplace of life that the greatest pleasure issues ultimately in the greatest grief. Yet why”why is it that this child of mine, who has not tasted half the pleasures that the world has to offer, who ought, by rights, to be as fresh and green as the vigorous young needles of the everlasting pine ” why must she lie here on her deathbed, swollen with blisters, caught in the loathsome clutches of the vile god of smallpox. Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away”a little more each day” like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain.

After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away ” like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow. In our joy we made what we call a “priest in a straw robe.” We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together. Yet our hopes proved in vain. She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever. Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly. For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

The World of dew
is the world of dew
And yet, and yet

I doubt that I would have found this particular haiku moving if I had read it in the context of page after page of haiku, but in this context it is heart-breaking.

As a long admirer of Japanese haiku, I appreciate the way Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa introduces these three artists, particularly the way it tries to show how they relate to each other, both how they are similar, and, more importantly, how they are different. His introductions have certainly helped me to better understand different approaches to haiku.

For instance, Hass contends that “The religious sense in Buson’s art, if that is what it is, comes from his love of Basho’s poetry and of the Ch’an Buddhist poets and painters whome he studied and admired; it’s in his clear-mindedness and in his sense of alive of things and of their presence.”

As he also points out, Buson’s poems “are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper.”

These two observations probably help to explain why I prefer Basho to Buson, because, as I’m discovering more and more, my favorite poems generally have a spiritual element to them, especially it relates that spirituality to nature as in:

Butterfly
sleeping

on the temple bell.

On one level this is certainly a very painterly poem, it’s hard to imagine anything more “painterly” than a butterfly, especially contrasted against a monotone bell, but much of the power of the poem stems from the sense that we, like the butterfly, wait to be awakened by the bell’s knell to our true beauty.

The appeal of the next poem may well be accounted for by love of caligraphy, a form of art I practiced for years until I realized that no matter how much I loved letters and alphabets, I simply lacked the self-discipline and the determination, particularly once I was able to produce a passable work, to continue with calligraphy, especially once I discovered the Mac and Adobe Illustrator.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky
the moon seals it.

Of course, I’m also fond of the zen-like simplicity of certain Japanese and Chinese paintings, and to the extent that Buson’s captures that simplicity I admire in that art, it’s hard not to love:

Sudden shower–
a flock of sparrows

cling to the grasses.

Of course, as a long-time bird lover, Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” was, after all the first poem I ever memorized, and my favorite Dickinson poems featured robins, it’s easy to see why I would be biased towards this poem. But in one swift bushstroke Buson seemed to capture the essence of sparrows.