The Haiku Foundation Forums

My Dear THF Poets:

Early this morning, I posted this decades-old question -- what is a haiku? -- on To the Lighthouse, NeverEnding Story: Is "War and Peace" a Haiku?

...Defining American haiku is a slippery slope that ranges from the traditional Yuki Teikei (5-7-5, kigo, kireji) to "anything I call a haiku is a haiku"—the last being especially problematic in that it would require us to recognize War and Peace as a haiku if Tolstoy had so insisted.

-- Haiku's American Frontier by Paul Miller, Frogpond, 35.1, 2012

Hmm... what is a haiku? Before answering this important question, in my humble opinion, we as haiku practitioners should  honestly answer the following two questions regarding the most-read haiku by Basho:

The old pond;                                 
A frog jumps in --                         
The sound of the water.           

Q1: How can there be significant meaning in this 3-LINE POEM which merely describes a frog jumping into an old pond?

Q2: If I replace "frog" with any other amphibian creature or any creature that can dive into a pond, is it still considered to be great? "

Welcome to join the discussion.

Chen-ou Liu

Alan and Don:

Thanks for your encouragement and good wishes.

Today, Issa's Untidy Hut features NeverEnding Story.  ;D

Chen-ou

Nu:

Thanks for your hearty congratulations.

Chen-ou

My Dear THF Poets:

tenth New Year
Chinese fried dough
... and black coffee

I launched a new poetry blog on the first day of the New Year, 2013.

NeverEnding Story, the first English-Chinese bilingual haiku and tanka blog, was established to fulfill my butterfly dream portrayed in the haibun, entitled "To Liv(e)," which was published in Frogpond, 34:3, Fall 2011. I hope it can bring the beauty of English language Japanese short form poetry to Chinese readers around the world (note: I'm seeking my friends' help to put NeverEnding Story on the literary map of "Cultural China," one that has been promoted by Tu Weiming, Research Professor and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University, who authored "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center," Daedalus, Vol. 134, No. 4, Fall, 2005, pp. 145-167. And just imagine this potential size of your fan/reader base")

This blog is divided into five sections as follows:

I Butterfly Dream: Selected Haiku (English Originals with Chinese Translations)

Now, a call for submissions for a new anthology, entitled Butterfly Dream 2013: Selected English-Chinese Bilingual Haiku (for more information, please see the "Anthology Submissions" webpage)

A haiku is an imaginative lotus pond with the real frog in it.

II One Man's Maple Moon: Selected Tanka (English Originals with Chinese Translations)

Now, a call for submissions for a new anthology, entitled One Man's Maple Moon 2013: Selected English-Chinese Bilingual Tanka (for more information, please see the "Anthology Submissions" webpage)

A tanka is snowflakes drifting through the ink dark moon.

III A Room of My Own: Selected Poetry by Chen-ou Liu

IV Poetic Musings: Commentary on Haiku/Tanka

V To the Lighthouse: Essays/Discussions on Haiku/Tanka Aesthetics

I and II seek submissions from the poets, experienced and emerging, around the world while III, IV, and V belong to my "private Idaho" on the island, Lost, and any suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated.


Butterfly Dream: Call for Haiku Submissions

Send your best, preferably published haiku (please provide publication credits) or new work and a bio sketch (75 words max.) with the subject heading "Published or Unpublished Haiku, Your Name, Submitted Date" to Chen-ou Liu, Blog Editor and Translator via email at neverendingstory_haiku@yahoo.ca

No more than 20 haiku per submission window and no simultaneous submissions. And Please wait for at least four months for another new submission.

Please note that only those whose haiku are selected for publication will be notified within two months, and that no other notification will be sent out, so your works are automatically freed up after two months to submit elsewhere.

The accepted haiku will be translated into Chinese and posted on NeverEnding Story and Twitter (You are welcome to follow me on NeverEnding Story, or on Twitter at @storyhaikutanka). Of them, the best 66 haiku will be included in the anthology, which is scheduled to be published in April of 2014, and the best of the best haiku of 2013 will be rewarded $CAD 50 and the poet will be given a 3-page space to feature the best haiku of his/her choice. For those whose haiku are included in the anthology, each will receive a copy of its e-book edition.


One Man's Maple Moon: Call for Tanka Submissions

Send your best, preferably published tanka (please provide publication credits) or new work and a bio sketch (75 words max.) with the subject heading "Published or Unpublished Tanka, Your Name, Submitted Date" to Chen-ou Liu, Blog Editor and Translator via email at neverendingstory_tanka@yahoo.ca

No more than 20 tanka per submission window and no simultaneous submissions. And Please wait for at least four months for another new submission.

Please note that only those whose tanka are selected for publication will be notified within two months, and that no other notification will be sent out, so your works are automatically freed up after two months to submit elsewhere.

The accepted tanka will be translated into Chinese and posted on NeverEnding Story and Twitter (You are welcome to follow me on NeverEnding Story or on Twitter at @storyhaikutanka). Of them, the best 66 tanka will be included in the anthology, which is scheduled to be published in April of 2014, and the best of the best tanka of 2013 will be rewarded $CAD 50 and the poet will be given a 3-page space to feature the best tanka of his/her choice. For those whose tanka are included in the anthology, each will receive a copy of its e-book edition.

And I wish you all a most happy, successful, and healthy year of the snake, 2013


Chen-ou Liu

Editor and Translator, NeverEnding Story

Lorin,

I principally agree with your critique of  Bly's view on Imagism and Pound.

His articles and essays were written in a polemical manner. In my view, the main purpose of these writings is to introduce American readers to European and Latin American poets who possess different literary voices and visions. In doing so, he has helped enrich and broaden the American poetic sensibilities. And later he used these poets -- mainly Spanish surrealists -- to call for writing a new kind of American poetry, a poetry that is directly against Ezra Pound's imagist poetry and that is more rooted in the surrealist tradition.

Thanks for the info. regarding Capital of Heaven by Marc Riboud.

David,

Thanks for the read and for your helpful comment.

The question regarding the relationship of leaps to kigo is thought-evoking, and it also makes me think about the relationship of leaps to cutting. I think a skillful use of cutting and kigo might facilitate "the fast association of images operated through psychic energy."

Just a thought.

Chen-ou


Chen-ou

David,

Glad you enjoyed the excerpt.

Ban'ya Natsuishi's haiku in general, the one above in particular, have been seasoned with a strong touch of surrealism, one that has been favored by Bly.

I enjoyed reading your essay on leaping haiku and liked Berry's haiku very much. Thanks for sharing.

Lorin,

The leap you talked about in your reply to "leaping haiku" seems to me that  it's more focused on the reader's reading of the "relationship between two juxtaposed images."  It's a readerly view of "leaping."

I think it's different from Bly's conception of a poetics of leaping between the consciousness and the unconsciousness. It's more about a writerly view of "leaping." For Bly, the image itself maybe is realistic (taken from the conscious world) or surreal/imaginary (from the imagination/the subconscious mind).

For example, the following  comes from one stanza of his famous anti-Vietnam War poem entitled Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings,

Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!

The leap suggested here is a huge and politically-charged one from the domestic image of drinking coffee in America to the combating image of Black Starfighters dropping bombs in Asia, from the kitchens of individual Americans to the battlefields of the American fighting troops, and from the homely image of safety to the war-torn image of atrocity. The fighting image of Black Starfighters reflected in the coffee cup (leaping image) directly and psychologically connects the war fought outside the American soil with the mind and heart of the individual reader, hinting at an unavoidable relationship between the gaiety of Americans and their capacity for destructing their own lives and those of other people. This interwoven relationship between the American people and the Vietnamese people is initially implied in the title of the poem.

The next example is Bly's most anthologized poem entitled In Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River:

I

I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.
The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.
The soybeans are breathing on all sides.
Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats
In the small towns. I am happy,
The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

II

The small world of the car
Plunges through the deep fields of the night,
On the road from Willmar to Milan.
This solitude covered in iron
Moves through the fields of night
Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

III

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,
And water kneeling in the moonlight.
In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;
The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.
When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.
A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

The description of landscape has a significant role in understanding the poem. However, the images employed to portray the landscape are not intended to be objectively accurate. On the contrary, the images employed here are "The stubble field catches the last growth of sun / The soybeans are breathing on all sides," "The small world of the car / Plunges through the deep fields of the night/ ... / This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets," and "water kneeling in the moonlight/ ... / The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass," revealing the emotional state of mood of the speaker. This description of landscape is, one way or another, like a mirror of emotion upon which the speaker projects his feelings. It has gradually become laden with emotional weight as the poem proceeds to arrive at the end of the second stanza, from the objective recounting of fact, "I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota," to the emotion-laden imagery of the mind of speaker, "This solitude covered in iron / Moves through the fields of night / Penetrated by the noise of crickets."

In the concluding stanza, the attentive reader would sense a shift in the mood of the speaker through the images, in which considerable effort is made to blur the boundary between the objective and the subjective. A slow, psychic leap is made to descend into an inner landscape of the mind of the speaker, a landscape where the ordinary-turned-defamiliarized things populate and are perceived from a meditative eye: "water kneeling in the moonlight," "The lamplight fall[ing] on all fours on the grass," the full moon cover[ing] [the river], and "A few people talking, low, in a boat."

Here is the link to my essay entitled Three Readings of Ezra Pound's "Metro Haiku" http://chenouliu.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-readings-of-ezra-pounds-metro.html

By the way, I read my friend your Huang Shan haiku. He was impressed by your allusion. Me Two!

David and Lorin:

I wonder what both of you think of the following poem?

deceased friend
Paul taps me on the shoulder
plum blossoms falling

A leaping haiku? Thanks.

Chen-ou

Lorin,

A string of little gems infused with evocative imagery and deep thoughts.

I love your Huang Shan haiku.

There is a Chinese saying: "Since ancient times, there has been a sea of mist and clouds over Mt. Huang Shan."

The opening line could be read literally and symbolically.

David:

Glad you mentioned Robert Bly's discussion about the intuitive approach to poetry.

I wrote an introductory essay (the first draft) on Robert Bly's  leaping poetry, entitled Leaping Poetry: More Than a Leap from One Image to Another.

Share with you an excerpt relevant to our discussion:

In his most anthologized essay entitled A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, by making the comparative reading of the poems by European and South American poets and also some medieval Arabic poets against those of contemporary and recent American counterparts, Bly criticizes his fellow American poets that "these men have more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world," and quotes Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as a forceful suggestion: "You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. There is only one single way. Go into yourself." He proceeds to enhance his argument by continuingly juxtaposing passages from both camps of poetry for comparison, showing a stark distinction between American-centred conventional narrative verse and a European- and Latin American-dominated daring imagistic style.

Like Pound, Bly is highly interested in turning poetry away from a narrative style to one infused with evocative images, which would elicit a strikingly profound effect in the mind and heart of the reader. He firmly asserts that "the poetry we have now is a poetry without the image" by which he means deep image. He attacks Pound's imagist approach to the "image", which is, in his view, merely a "picture:"

"The only movement in American poetry which concentrated on the image was Imagism, in 1911-13. But 'Imagism' was largely 'Picturism.' An image and a picture differ in that the image, being the natural speech of the imagination, can not be drawn from or inserted back into the real world. It is an animal native to the imagination. Like Bonnefoy's 'interior sea lighted by turning eagles,' it cannot be seen in real life. A picture, on the other hand, is drawn from the objective 'real' world. 'Petals on a wet black bough' can actually be seen."

("Petals on a wet black bough" is taken from Pound's iconic imagistic poem entitled In a Station of the Metro, he demonstrates his imagistic characteristics in two lines: precision of imagery, clear, sharp language, and experimenting with non-traditional poetic forms. I wrote a review essay on how to read his poem in a contextualized setting. You can read its full text on my poetry blog)

Bly writes against the imagist tendency to abstraction and objectivity, seeing it as "merely another form of the flight from inwardness." The poetic image he has learned from the masters of European and Latin American poets and advocated for involves psychic energy and movement, and he clearly states that:

"Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement."

In his ground-breaking 1975 book entitled Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations, Bly offers a different version/vision of a poetics of the image, a poetics of leaping between the consciousness and the unconsciousness, and he makes his assertion about psychic energy, a concept that is deeply rooted in the psychoanalytically influenced surrealist poetic tradition and that deepens and broadens the range of association in the poem.

"Freud pointed out that the dream still retained the fantastic freedom of association known to us before only from ancient art. By the end of the nineteenth century both the poem and the dream had been set free... The poets then began to devote their lives to deepening the range of association in the poem... It is this movement that has given such fantastic energy to 'modern poetry'... In ancient times, in the 'time of inspiration', the poet flew from one world to another, 'riding on dragons'.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke.... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known."


Chen-ou

Quote from: hairy on January 20, 2011, 10:26:17 AM

The named issuing forth out of the nameless, both from the same source.
Al

Al, this observation is dao-esque.

Thanks for sharing.

Chen-ou

Al, I like your Chinese box metaphor.

Read in the context of Japanese haiku, one of its poetic characteristics related to our discussions here is "yugen."

The compound "yūgen" 幽玄 (lit., depth and mystery) is made of two Chinese characters: "Yū" means "faint, dim," and also "deep;" "gen" indicates the black color, the color of heaven, something far away, something quiet, and an occult principle. We find the character "gen" used in the Tao te ching (Classic of the Way and Integrity) to describe the "Way:

These two—the nameless and what is named—emerge from the same source yet are referred to differently. Together they are called obscure (Ch. xuan; Jpn. gen), the obscurest of the obscure, they are the swinging gateway of the manifold mysteries.1

Thus, "yūgen" is something well beyond the reach of man's immediate perception and understanding, since it is too deep and too far for humans to reach, even conceptually. In ancient China, yūgen came to indicate the other world, as well as the Taoist Way and Buddhist enlightenment.2

-- Yūgen by Michael F. Marra

The first book on this topic is Peipei Qiu's Bashō and the Dao: the Zhuangzi and the transformation of Haikai.

And the contrasts/comparisons in your haiku are impressive.

Here is my response haiku:

the distance between
my attic and the moon --
April rain

(alluding to T. S. Eliot's The Burial of the Dead)


Chen-ou

Cat, thanks for these helpful links.

Chen-ou