The Haiku Foundation Forums

I was reading a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese Nature Poetry in Medieval Japan, ca. 1050-1150 and came across an interesting discussion of the waka-related term "soku," which refers to a "distant" or "fragmented" link. I started playing around with the notion that maybe a new kind of haiku could be written that was really soku. In other words, you take the idea of juxtaposition to the extreme limit, just as Richard Gilbert did with "disjunction," and write poems where the link is distant and dissonant rather than close and consonant. Of course the trick would be to have something that held the poem together even so. In linked verse this is not as much an issue, but with a short poem on its own, there would have to be some effort spent making the poem work without becoming a puzzle for the reader.

There are examples of recent haiku that seem to use disjunction, but people have not connected it to soku as far as I know. For instance, Peter Yovu has a poem in Roadrunner that goes

the cold of a question
stars of eight legs
dangle

I'm not sure if it's the best example to start with, but it does serve the purpose of showing that the juxtaposition truly is just that, two separate things placed in relation. The poem doesn't break apart under the pressure of such a distant link; it is made all the more eerie. The poem uses metaphor liberally to help the overall effect, with the words "cold" and "stars" as sort of mini-disjunctions.

I wonder when people decide about juxtapositions, what the general thought process is and if the idea of a distant link ever comes to mind.

I appreciate a great set of examples, which I'll take some time with to comment on.  For now I just wanted to say two things.  First we were generally speaking of Western haiku, what the norms are, what the definition is, since it is a borrowed form.  I tend to view Japanese early modern haiku in a different light since things like post-modernism and other developments don't apply.  But I have studied Basho and Japanese so I'm interested.  That leads to the second thing which is that there's a dense literary factor going on that isn't like modern Western haiku in many cases.  Haiku poetics developed in a very distinctive culture.  Basho would have been so involved in that he wouldn't have made absolute boundaries between the personal and the poetic, between nature and culture.  Those binaries happened with modernism; it's anachronistic to attribute them to the 17th century.  So one example I gave was Basho's use of "loneliness" as a topos not a personal feeling.  Similarly "mono aware" is part of the genre; ascribing lots of personal attributes to it is not exactly correct. 

I think there has been some sort of misunderstanding about my position here, just because I used the terms "too explicit."  I was reflecting on how some contemporary poets tend to think of haiku as confessional poetry, which it could never be for one thing because it's just too short.  Also generically it is too dense a form to have unmediated, raw emotion or statement take up that much space.  If that happens you lose the literary nature of the form. 

You found that yourself when you commented on the difference between nature in Western versus Japanese poetics.  That there is an idea out there that seems to say that nature can be an unmediated experience.  I really doubt that early modern haiku artists thought of nature as so reified and divorced from cultural experience.  Or even tried to divide the world up that way.  It's a very specific ideology that separates "man" from "nature," one fairly recent and on its way out, though I'm overstating to make the point.

Perhaps a way into both topics, Larry, is to emphasize the literary qualities of haiku, which are foreclosed if haiku ends up being categorized as referential.  Since there have at times been tendencies to privilege the referential in haiku, whether it's to experience or to nature, it's sometimes important to resist the pull to do that.

It's interesting that the Basho poem uses literary allusion of a rather dense type to register reactions to the scene.  Even without knowing that, the relation between the two parts is far from explicit.  There's a textual density there that draws us in and asks us to fill in the gaps.  Even in poems that state the mood outright--like Basho's loneliness/cricket poem--it's the connection and the way the topic is picked up and inflected by the poet that makes all the difference since loneliness is part of the literary topoi of the genre so it can't be taken up as merely a private, subjective experience.

Nature too in haiku is literary in the form of kigo.  These are built up poetic and cultural associations that one learns as part of the genre.  But nature is such a difficult topic to cover because it is hotly contested, and lots of writing shows how ideological it is to separate out a category called "nature."

Shirane's book sounds interesting.  I like his approach in general.  He is very densely literary as a reader and scholar.  And in an essay I recently read, he makes that a real point, that haikai is an imaginative set of genres, something we may overlook if we are too referential about approaching it.  He cites a Buson poem:  piercingly cold/stepping on my dead wife's comb/in the bedroom to discuss the poet's feelings, only to point out that at the time of the poem his wife was alive and in fact outlived him by 31 years!

I've read many things about "ma," some a bit too dense to summarize.  I first encountered "ma" through a film maker who filmed the famous rock garden in Kyoto.  He used Heidegger, whose later work was influenced by Asian thought.  Although Heidegger doesn't mention "ma," he does theorize the space/silence needed in poetry and the arts. 

In a book called Electric Language, Michael Heim picks up the Heideggerian argument.  It's based on Heidegger's assessment in part of the "technological world picture," in which everything becomes "ready-to-hand," that is, lacks being and instead is treated for its "use value."  So for instance, friendship comes to be replaced by networking. 

In language, we get "verbal noise," the endless chatter of information, for ready-to-handedness, calculation, and manipulation.  But language depends upon silence to make things appear.  He writes, "things can only stand out in full presence when the background is silences or open formlessness."  He questions whether Western culture has been able to learn "silent hesitation," a "pause" in which language does not become verbal noise, which he further characterizes as "an ocean of infinite symbols drowning the hints of taut meaning in the loose wash of noisy chaos where meaning is swallowed up."

Jack, you raise not only the current condition of Western poetics but also the condition of man!  That's going to take a whole lot of thought and consideration before even making an attempt. 

I have friends who have go the way of flarf and agree with you that it really is a dead end.  So is an naive stance.

You seem to have some answers in your essay, which I need to read again before I give you comments, but just a few things about it.  You cite Rich, who among others talks about poetry as a social practice and that poets have forgotten that poets used to be public figures articulating common concerns, not sollipsistly existing and focussed on private experience.  The doctor you center on is doing something extraordinary with haiku.  Not only is the political there, but it's cultural memory. And because it's so pressing and artful, there's not really a gap between himself as a subject and his self as a subject of ideological influences.  His poetry is a cultural struggle as he says in one of his haiku as well as an account of it.  It's true that Satre called for freedom, but existentialism requires that a responsibility to be taken on along with that freedom.  There are different ways to place yourself, cultural, psychological, political, etc.  Things aren't determined as is the case of the self prepared to go to market.  Things are overdetermined.  And there are many approaches to that.

Thanks, Alan, for the correction about onji.  It leads to adjustment I should make.  I overstated the differences for the sake of argument. It would have been better to say that Japanese syllables don't neatly correspond to those in English.  Japanese has two syllabaries, which consist of either just vowels or consonants followed by vowels with the exception of the nasal "n."  These units are very short and more regular than in English.  For instance, even the word "haiku" which would count as two syllables in English is actually three units in Japanese--"ha-i-ku"--even though over time dipthongs have emerged to combine the "a" and "i" sounds so in pronunciation it sounds more like two syllables in Japanese though the first syllable is somewhat longer.  In English we have much more variation.  We have established meters and stress patterns.  The word "ha" is shorter than the word "long," even though they would both count as single syllables in meter.  This leads to often funny renditions of foreign words in Japanese because they add a vowel after every consonant, and thus stretch out words sometimes beyond recognition.

There are several interrelated questions to which I don't have preformulated answers so I'm going to wing it.

First I don't necessarily see a distinction between nature and objects.  I'm not sure what "nature" is really, except some left over idea from the American Transcendentalists?  But after all, the hut at Walden was within a short walk to town and he accepted many visitors so he hardly was a hermit in Chinese mountains.

I don't see the need to have so-called nature in haiku at all.  Sometimes it's nice to have a seasonal reference if appropriate, but that's because of temporality and larger scope, not because it's natural.  Kigo after all were many steps removed from nature in any idealized sense because there were saijikis that are all about literary convention and allusion.  And some of these connections to modern readers seem quite arcane so saijikis are actually necessary or footnotes to explain what was taken to be a naturalized phenomenon.

What strikes me as strange is when a kigo like first line is then followed by something that is all about the subjectivity of the writer and then called haiku.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  It seems a fundamental misunderstanding of how haiku conventions have developed in modern English or Western haiku.

The question of subjectivity or consciousness in haiku is very bit and tangled.  I have learned from another discussion that there is a tendency toward more explicit displays of particularly the emotions because of a tanka-esque influence on recent haiku.  I haven't digested the implications of that.  It seems to me that making subjectivity into an object for the reader's consumption might be problematic.  But this refers to the above discussion about the difference between subjectivity as projected versus subject-object blending or blurring.

As to senryu, I do have a distinction that I carry around in my head, but that's baggage from being a reader of Japanese early modern haikai, not anything I apply very often.  If you look at Issa's corpus, I think there's an argument to be made that a large number of his haiku have more in common with senryu. 

Perhaps if there's a poem, kigo or not, that seems to have as its sole purpose a satirical aim, I would call it senryu, but it's just using a fancy and borrowed Japanese expression that isn't really binding or necessary.

There is a larger problem here that's just endemic to many aspects of Western language haiku.  It's a borrowed form from a highly developed and often insular culture.  So even the word "form" doesn't really apply.  In Japanese we don't even have what is translated as syllables.  They are onji, sound units, very brief, not replicable in English certainly where syllables have varying lengths and also have stress or not.  We have just adopted for the most part 3 lines, though lots of people are breaking even that convention.  There's no intrinsic relationship between 3 lines and 17 onji.  And though that may not be a big deal to note, the important word is "intrinsic."  Just like "naturalized" it implies that there are cultural, hence ideological components at work to appropriate, transform, and yet present as if normative and natural.  Lots of people take up art forms without exploring how these things came into being or what the implications are. 

What's to be done is to actually examine what appears to be normative and natural.  And then, in echo of your guy Lenin, to take a step farther and see what the ideological implications are.  Only then can you understand how your writing participates in a larger context.

The best example I have at the moment for this comes from contemporary poetry, not specifically haikai.  If you take the first person lyric poem and treat it as a kind of genre, there are many implications that writers of the genre tend to overlook.  For instance, it participates in and reinforces certain notions of individuality that seem naturalized but are really ideological products.  A whole set of beliefs emerge without too much scratching of the surface:  a centered subject, complete with self-willed identity and agency, valuable in its own right and similarly self-determining.  There are so many critiques of that kind of subjectivity that it is almost embarrassing to hear hear a first person lyric poem that naively presents itself as just what poets do.

The space of ambiguity, aporia, indeterminacy might be said to be inherent in any language game, but it is brought the foreground in what I call after post-structuralists "textuality" or in the above posts "textual density."  Derrida following Nietzsche called this the aphoristic energy of language.  But Wittgenstein who by no coincidence wrote aphoristically saw it more ordinary kinds of language games.  My favorite saying by him, that has something of a haiku energy to it, is that it does not bother us that we cannot describe the smell of coffee.

Lacan too wrote in a highly textually dense style so it is difficult to appropriate parts of his theorizing, which changed over time.  The same can be said about Winnicott though they make strange and interesting bed fellows.

As far as both psychologies go, the developmental stages do appear in each theorist's writing as temporal, but they are also meant to be taken as simultaneously existing in the adult.  Unlike Freud who has a more mechanical notion of stages that are either passed through or fixated upon, Lacan had a fluid and complex view.  One way he phrases it is that you are always a subject given to be seen.  In that sense you are always the object of the gaze.  Not necessarily literally the mother or any other subject but an internalized notion of what he describes as the mirror stage.  In some accounts, this other is the Big Other of the Real or even God, as in his account of female sexuality via a reading of the ecstatic statue of St. Teresa.

In Winnicott too, to get to your question, though it seems a developmental model and is to some extent.  After all Winnicott was a baby doctor as well as an analyst and theorist.  But he is clear that what he means by transitional phenonmena is not just what happens in early childhood object formation but is constitutive of what he elsewhere calls play, the highest form of human activity in his psychology and the roots of all creative endeavors.

Jack, yes, I'll have a look at your essay before I comment, but it does sound interesting.

If I can pull out some of the features that I highlighted through a simple close reading, that might help continue the discussion.

One thing that I'm loosely calling "openness" perhaps needs to be theorized more and given a better name.  I see it as part of the genre of haiku, but I've been challenged on that so am open to other views.

What I see is something like a structural component in making the poem that deliberately makes space for the reader.  This is done by various techniques like not being too explicit, deflecting attention away from authorial presence, and what I have called textual density.

In other words, the writer in a sense deliberately holds back, trusting the reader to enter the poem.  There may not a singular meaning at all, but the structure of allowing the reader to inhabit the poem allows for deeper involvement because the reader in at least a hypothetical way is asked to become the author of the poem and produce its meanings.

This activity of reading, while available in potentially any form of writing, can be foregrounded in haiku due to its brevity and some of its conventions.  I'd like to call it "intersubjective" because it allows the overlap and perhaps sometimes the merging of subjectivities through the medium of the poem.  Intersubjective participation in a poem allows the reader to re-create or co-create the poem.  It differs from other acts of reading in the sense that the poem is not taken as a thing that is simply what it is and then consumed.  Rather the reader has to do something with and for the poem.  Whether the writer intended it or not, if a reader is able to inhabit the poem in this way, the writer has also participated at least retroactively in intersubjective experience. 

Of course there's an asymmetrical relationship, partly because it is in the medium of written language, so we don't literally have two subjectivities intermingling in shared actual space and time.  The writer has more of a role to play as the creator of the experience that is to be shared.  But in the act of re-creating the experience of the poem, that part of the equation is temporarily effaced.  In other terminology, the subject-object distinctions are loosened to the point of let go of. 

This loosening of the subject-object distinction was in fact an early principle in the haiku teachings of Basho.  He feared that if this did not occur, one would be left with only the subjectivity of the writer merely projected onto things which would have only an artificial effect.  I'll look for the passage of Basho that discusses this and post it.

I enjoyed reading your responses and being offered two haiku to play with.  Though they are very different in scope because one has a minute focus and the other a broad one, they have things in common. 

The first is that something curious is happening; intrigue is set up.  Set up but not resolved.  That leaves it open ended so that the reader has lots of space to move around.

This openness is facilitated by two related features: the absence of a controlling subjectivity and the focus instead on actions of something that is not the poet.  The verbs in both cases do not belong to the subject who is writing; they belong to things in the poem.  This I take to be intentional in both cases.  It is not a question of manipulation really, but rather what selections are made in the process of constructing a poem.  Indirectly the poet's fascination is shared, but it is deflected away and toward the object of attention.  So even the lines that seem to draw attention to the poet--"inside of me"--are subordinated to the activity of the bison and become part of what is fascinating about that.

Both also use language in ways that peak intrigue.  In Alan's poem, the use of the verb "collapses" with ice is a kind of density of writing that I would call textual.  It asks for more attention that a normal statement.  In Jack's poem, both "inside of me" and the fact its caves not fields or something similar implicitly links the two, asking how the inside of someone is like a cave with visual images streaming across.  That kind of linking plus the clear pointing to the cave paintings makes for a density I would also call textual.

Both then support and even ask for more than a cursory look.  They sustain and reward more than one reading.  What I would argue is different is that they do it with such economy of language and such self-restraint that they are not like other forms of textual density in poetry.  The genre convention of having English language haiku in 3 short lines tells the reader that these poems are finished, complete in themselves, nothing more is coming.  But since so much more is implied, the reader is invited to jump right in.

This topic is large, but I did that intentionally so see what people might want to bring up.  One of the things I'm interested in is how there is an interaction between the writer and the reader that could be said to co-create the experience.  That haiku is a kind of open form which places lots of demands and trust in the reader to enter the poem and fill in the blanks, thereby creating the poem upon reading.  The writer has, in this kind of poetry, to resist being too explicit.  Not that there is a puzzle, but rather that there's an effect that is better conveyed by activity on the part of the reader instead of passivity.  I'd be interested in examples of poems that do this, but also I'm also interested in how people approach reading and writing haiku in their own experience.