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The point is far more obvious than that. I think one of the easiest approaches to an appreciation of haiku is through the realization that a poetry of this kind lies buried in our own poetic literature, [11] for there are quite a number of poems that are remembered only for a single line: Blyth has made a considerable selection of haiku from English literature, conveniently saving me the trouble of searching around for examples: The tinkle of the thirsty rill.
Unheard all day, ascends again. The weak-eyed bat, with short shrill shriek. Flits by on leathern wings. To a green thought, in a green shade. Some bird from out the brake.
Starts into voice a moment. In shades the orange bright. Like golden lamps in a green night. The wonder of these few lines is that in each instance they represent a moment of intense perception. Every one of us can recall a number of such moments in our lives, moments when we were aware of being alive in an unusually vivid way. I can recollect a glimpse of sunlit pigeons against a dark thundercloud.
The sound of cowbells in a mountain silence on a hot afternoon. The noise of a distant waterfall in the dusk. The smell of burning leaves in the haze of an autumn day. A filigree of black branches against the cold blue of a winter sky. The moon hanging like a luminous fruit from a pine bough. And I describe such moments I begin almost to speak in haiku.
Now this is part of the secret of Zen; that life reveals itself most plainly when you do not clutch at it either with your feelings or with your questing intellect. That is the whole art. Everything kept goes stale. The reason is that whatever is momentous, living and moving is momentary. Minute by minute our experience moves along without return and we are in accord with it to the degree that we move with it as the mind follows music or as a leaf goes with the stream. When the lightning flashes,. How admirable he who thinks not—.
Though this is perhaps a poor haiku for the very reason that it begins to philosophize even though it philosophizes against philosophizing. But it only just beings—and this is the point. Being too much against philosophizing is just as much an arid intellectualism as being too much for it. A frog jumps in. This state of mind is technically called mushin , literally the state of no-mind. This is when we are simply aware of what is without distorting it by the complexities of self-consciousness as when, in efforts to get the very most out of life, we not only feel that we feel, but feel that we feel that we feel.
The state of mushin is thus an extremely clear kind of unselfconsciousness where the poet is not divided from his subject, the knower from the known. The scarecrow in the distance. It walked with me. In a world of one color. The sound of the wind. Thinking of past things. How far off they are. The literary form of the haiku is even more rigid that that of the sonnet, which is perhaps the most formal style of English poetry.
Not only must it be expressed in seventeen syllables [20] but there are a number of traditional restrictions of the subject matter. Haiku must always be written in harmony with the current seasons of the year, [21] and there is a strong tendency to adhere to certain customary themes; certain flowers, trees, insects, animals, festivals and landscape being the usual occasions of the poems. But strict limitations of form seem to be a condition of great artistry, an essential part of the very art being to see how much can be done with so little.
And two or three cows. Waiting for the boat. Or this, if I remember it rightly, [25] by Kobori-Enshiu: A cluster of summer trees. A glimpse of the sea. A pale evening moon. Contrariwise there are times when the poet seems to outdo himself with ingenuity: Returning to the branch? Or this by Issa: And for a lock. But the best haiku are those which arise from the tension between the rigidity of the form and the depth of the poetic feeling.
Not a single stone. To throw at the dog. Lie one on another. The rain beats on the rain. What is restrained is the temptation of every artist to show off, to leave his listener nothing to do but admire. It is a poetry where the reader is almost as important as the poet, where deep calls unto deep and the poem is successful to the degree that the reader shares the same poetic experience which, however, is never explicitly stated. What the listener has to be in the know about is not literature but life, places, seasons, moods and, above all, the utterly indescribably insight of Zen Buddhism.
Not their goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness, usefulness or uselessness, nor even their abstract Isness or Being, but rather their very concrete Thingness.
Sticking on the mushroom. Of some unknown tree. Riding the banana leaf. Walking in the winter rain. Speaks of it first.
And haiku is very frequently used as a type of accompanying verse to this sort of painting. I believe that haiku had their origin in anthologies of short quotations from Chinese poems which the Zen Buddhists compiled for purposes of meditation.
One of these poems puts the quality of Thusness a little more philosophically and therefore for us, perhaps a little more intelligibly when it says: If you do not believe,. The yellow leaves falling, falling,. To fill both mountain and river. But again, and for the last time, let me say that you must not look here for any symbolism, and idea either of God revealed in the beauty of the autumn leaves or just autumn leaves with no God, or of the transiency of life, or of anything else. The mysterious and yet obvious Thusness of things is clear when you see it directly without asking questions.
Gensha, another old Zen master, was asked how to enter the path of Buddhism. Says what I think. Now a skilled photographer can point his camera at almost any scene or object and create a marvellous composition by the way in which he frames and lights it. An unskilled photographer attempting the same thing creates only messes, for he does not know how to place the frame, the border of the picture, where it will be in relation to the contents.
How eloquently this demonstrates that as soon as we introduce a frame anything does not go. But every work of art involves a frame. A frame is precisely what distinguishes a painting, a poem, a musical composition, a play, a dance, or a piece of sculpture from the rest of the world. In haiku, it is not a frame of syllables, but a frame of brevity, seasonal reference, juxtaposition, implication, and sensory imagery that matters. It is not the subject matter of haiku that makes it marvellous, for the subject matter is available to everyone.
Rather, it is the framing of the subject that makes haiku marvellous.
Alan Watts had a profound and widespread influence on a dynamic emerging generation of Western poets and others interested in Eastern thought and culture, especially in California. I am grateful, above all, for his emphasis on how marvellous haiku can be. Awareness of Daily Life. For those who already write haiku, the effect is both an affirmation of information already known plus a fresh push into possibly unknown territory. For those completely new to haiku, both poems offer strong images and are immediately engaging to sensitive readers. Personally, I think these translations by R.
Blyth are problematic, starting with excesses of capitalization and punctuation. How easy it would have been to pick poems that showed more diversity. Several members corresponded with the committee, and their information was included in committee deliberations. The committee further revised the draft, giving particular attention to separating definitions from additional information in notes and refining both. This final report concludes the work of the new definitions committee. All of these words originate in the Japanese language, where they refer to types of Japanese literature.
These definitions, however, are intended for people reading and writing in English.
Like the members of the earlier definitions committee, we hope the results of our efforts are faithful to the spirit of these words' Japanese origins and provide insight into contemporary English-language usage and practice. As in Japanese, the defined word is its own plural. In the Haiku Society of America was the only substantial non-Japanese haiku organization, and virtually all public statements about haiku in English were made in the pages of a few books and low-circulation magazines.
Now many local, national, and international haiku organizations, as well as individuals, have taken up such definitional matters, often posting the results of their deliberations on the Internet or in more widely circulated magazines, providing poets with a new, globally collaborative enterprise. We have taken much of this recent international discussion into account in our own deliberations, and we salute all who struggle with us in similar efforts.
Accordingly, we see the Society now in the position of joining a chorus of efforts to understand and define "haiku" and related terms for a much wider audience than existed for such efforts 30 years ago. The committee also notes that a definition is neither a lesson nor instruction for writing. Rather, it seeks to clarify the differences between the meaning of one word and the meanings of others.
Those who wish to learn more of haiku must read the best haiku they can find, not merely definitions of haiku. The same for the other types of poems defined here. We have attempted to provide a succinct, yet accurate definition for the core meaning of each of these terms, followed by notes that contribute to a more rounded understanding of each.
To complete the record, an appendix with the earlier definitions of follows the body of our report. A haiku is a short poem that uses imagistic language to convey the essence of an experience of nature or the season intuitively linked to the human condition. Most haiku in English consist of three unrhymed lines of seventeen or fewer syllables, with the middle line longest, though today's poets use a variety of line lengths and arrangements.
In Japanese a typical haiku has seventeen "sounds" on arranged five, seven, and five.
Some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about twelve syllables in English approximates the duration of seventeen Japanese on. Traditional Japanese haiku include a "season word" kigo , a word or phrase that helps identify the season of the experience recorded in the poem, and a "cutting word" kireji , a sort of spoken punctuation that marks a pause or gives emphasis to one part of the poem. In English, season words are sometimes omitted, but the original focus on experience captured in clear images continues.
Punctuation, space, a line-break, or a grammatical break may substitute for a cutting word. Most haiku have no titles, and metaphors and similes are commonly avoided. Haiku do sometimes have brief prefatory notes, usually specifying the setting or similar facts; metaphors and similes in the simple sense of these terms do sometimes occur, but not frequently. A discussion of what might be called "deep metaphor" or symbolism in haiku is beyond the range of a definition.
Various kinds of "pseudohaiku" have also arisen in recent years; see the Notes to "senryu" , below, for a brief discussion. A hokku is the first stanza of a linked-verse poem. Formerly, "hokku" in both Japanese and English referred to what we now call "haiku", but this usage is now generally obsolete in both languages. A senryu is a poem, structurally similar to haiku, that highlights the foibles of human nature, usually in a humorous or satiric way. A senryu may or may not contain a season word or a grammatical break. Some Japanese senryu seem more like aphorisms, and some modern senryu in both Japanese and English avoid humor, becoming more like serious short poems in haiku form.
Many so-called "haiku" in English are really senryu. Others, such as "Spam-ku" and "headline haiku", seem like recent additions to an old Japanese category, zappai , miscellaneous amusements in doggerel verse usually written in with little or no literary value. Some call the products of these recent fads "pseudohaiku" to make clear that they are not haiku at all. In Japanese, the word "senryu" sounds like the English phrase "send you" with a Spanish flipped-r in place of the d. For those unfamiliar with this sound, a three-syllable word, "sen-ri-you" may be substituted in English, with the medial "i" sound as diminished as possible.
In both Japanese and English, the word haikai can also refer to all haiku-related literature haiku, renku, senryu, haibun, the diaries and travel writings of haiku poets. In the first half of the twentieth century the word "haikai" was used in French and Spanish for what is now usually called "haiku" worldwide. But note the use of the similarly pronounced jaicai in Portuguese to refer to both haiku and all the elements of the definition of "haikai" above. In Japanese, "renku" is a modern equivalent for haikai no renga.
Usually written by two or more people, a renku's most important features are linking and shifting. A major point of renku writing is to move forward, from stanza to stanza, through a great variety of time, weather, environment, activity, fauna, and flora. Stanzas focused on human activities and concerns should be balanced throughout with stanzas concentrating on landscapes, animal and plant life, and other subject matter. A haibun is a terse, relatively short prose poem in the haikai style, usually including both lightly humorous and more serious elements.
A haibun usually ends with a haiku. Most haibun range from well under words to or Some longer haibun may contain a few haiku interspersed between sections of prose. In haibun the connections between the prose and any included haiku may not be immediately obvious, or the haiku may deepen the tone, or take the work in a new direction, recasting the meaning of the foregoing prose, much as a stanza in a linked-verse poem revises the meaning of the previous verse. Japanese haibun apparently developed from brief prefatory notes occasionally written to introduce individual haiku, but soon grew into a distinct genre.
By submitting this report, we request that the foregoing definitions be adopted by the Haiku Society of American, Inc. The foregoing report was submitted to the membership of the Haiku Society of America at its Annual Meeting of 18 September in New York City and accepted on a show of hands of the members attending. In those unabridged English dictionaries where the words haiku, haikai, and hokku have been listed, not one of the definitions given has been wholly accurate or even passably satisfactory.
The definition of haiku has been made more difficult by the fact that many uninformed persons have considered it to be a "form" like a sonnet or triolet 17 syllables divided 5, 7, and 5. Actually, there is no rigid "form" for Japanese haiku. To the Japanese and to American haiku poets, it is the content and not the form alone that makes a haiku.