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I agree with Gabi. Last night, before I went to sleep, I opened Stephen D. Carter's book, Haiku Before Haiku: From the Renga Masters to Basho at random, and came across this hokku by Soogi:

On "Falling Blossoms," from a 100-verse sequence composed at the home of Lord Sasaki, governor of Oomi

itsuwari no aru yo ni chiranu hana mogana

In a world
of lies--why not blossoms
that don't fall?

--Soogi, Tr. Carter

An excerpt from Carter's comment:

Buddhism teaches that the world is an illusion and all statements are in that sense lies. The poet asks, "If so, why can't we have any choice on how lies work? Why not blossoms that don't fall?"

Soogi (1421-1502) was, according to Blyth, a monk of the Risshuu Sect (Ritsu) of Buddhism. I think this hokku qualifies as a Buddhist hokku, and it comes out of Buddhist teaching (if Carter is correct) that isn't specific to Zen.

Issa also, being a Pure Land Buddhist (Joodo Shinshuu), wrote a number of haiku that incorporate Buddhist concepts that aren't specific to Zen.

Larry

In the preface to vol. 1 of Blyth's Haiku, "Eastern Culture," he describes two different ways he uses the word "Zen." I think this can be expanded to apply to Buddhism in relation to haiku as well:

"Usually, throughout these volumes, it means that state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed identical with them, and yet retain our own individuality and personal pecularities. Occasionally ... it [also] means a body of experience and practice ..."

In the history of haiku, there are many haiku which refer to the experiences and practice, as well as the beliefs, of various Buddhist sects. One might say, in that sense, that those are Buddhist haiku.

It is the first meaning that Blyth assigns to his use of the word "Zen" that, in my opinion, creates a problem, and has misled the understanding of the relationship of Zen and haiku in the English-language haiku world.

One doesn't have to be in a Zen state of mind to feel not separated from things, to feel an identification with things outside ourselves. I think poets from pre-literate times to the present have desired to do this and have done it to greater or lesser degrees. I think it is inherent in the very nature of poetry.

The idea of a poet merging with objects outside him/herself became a described state of mind to be consciously pursued during the artistic movement know as Romanticism that emerged in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For instance, the English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge could write, "...to make the object one with us, we must become one with the object..."

Blyth would likely call this an instance of Zen mind in one who had no overt knowledge of Zen (so far as I know, but then again, Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream," so who knows?). But that would be misleading in both directions; toward Zen and toward Romanticism. The way Blyth misused the word "Zen" in this sense has led to a significant misunderstanding of the relationship between haiku and Zen in terms of the history and writing of haiku in Japan, for those who have accepted Blyth's position on the subject.

Susumu Takiguchi, for one, thought that Shirane's book, Traces of Dreams, would become a corrective to this misunderstanding. But the "Zen" of haiku seems to be so embedded in the popular conception of haiku in the English-language haiku world, that I don't think ANY print book can correct the misunderstanding. And now that many people use the internet as their primary source of information, I'm afraid this misunderstanding will persist indefinitely.

Larry

P.S. I think that even as Blyth indulged in this misuse of the word "Zen," he was aware of the potential of problems in using the word the way he was. So we have what I consider to be a caveat on Blyth's part, when he writes:

QuoteI understand Zen and poetry to be practically synonyms, but as I said before, if there is ever imagined to be any conflict between Zen and the poetry of haiku, the Zen goes overboard; poetry is the ultimate standard.

The direct influence of Taoism on haikai came from reading Zhuangzi, as has been noted above by Scott Metz, referring to Peipei Qiu's book.

As Qiu writes in the introduction, Basho "repeatedly instructed his followers to study the Zhuangzi. According to his disciples, Basho's teaching on haikai 'encapsulated the quintessence of Zhuangzi's thought'." In the course of her book, she cites 67 haikai verses (if I have counted correctly), by both Basho and other poets as well.

Blyth discusses the influence of Taoism on haiku in vol. 1 of Haiku, Section 1, "The Spiritual Origins of Haiku," part 3. Taoism. He starts by quoting from various texts of Laotze (Roushi) and Chuangtse (Soushi) (aka Zhuangzi). He then cites eight haiku that make reference to various of Zhuangzi's writings.

Blyth points out the influence in particular of Zhuangzi's butterfly passage, in which he wonders if he is a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Blyth points out that "This was the origin of many haiku concerning butterflies..." But of the eight haiku Blyth cites, four are based on other passages of Zhuangzi.

Basho's most direct reference to Zhuangzi's butterfly is probably in this haiku:

kimi ya choo ware ya sooji ga yumegokoro

you're the butterfly
I'm Zhuangzi's
dreaming heart

--Basho, Tr. Barnhill

An excerpt from Barnhill' comment:

"Basho sent this hokku to his disciple Dosui in a letter, where Basho refers to the famous story in Zhuangzi..."

Larry

P.S. In this legend about Jesus, it's his brother who is mistakenly crucified in Jesus' place.

Larry

Not related to haiku, but there is a legend that Jesus traveled to both India and Japan during his 'lost' years, and after his crucifixion he returned to the island of Honshu in Japan, where he lived to the age of 106, married, and had three daughters.

The American author John Updike has written a beautiful short story based on this legend, titled "Jesus on Honshu," which first appeared in the magazine The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 1971.

Actual vestiges of this legend can be found today in the farming town of Shingo on the island of Honshu.

Larry

For what it's worth, here is another translation of the Issa haiku, with explication, by Lewis Mackenzie in his book, The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa:

onozukara atama ga sagaru Kamijiyama

Of itself
The head bows in reverence
At Kamijiyama.

Mackenzie's comment:

QuoteThe Ise shrines...are the most important in the Shinto faith, and in Issa's time as in ours were the subject of thousands of pilgrimages. Although many of them were no more solemn than that of the Wyf of Bath [a pilgrim in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales], visitors without any reverance for Shinto have often remarked on the atmosphere of peaceful sanctity that seems to surround the place, in part created by tradition, in part by the plain wooden buildings set in sourroundings of unusual loveliness. Kamijiyama is a hill within the precincts, the name of which signifies literally 'The Way of the Gods' as does the word Shinto itself.

Larry

P.S. "The Gods' Absence" is in Winter, not Autumn. Sorry for my neo-Confusionism.

Larry

Within my small library of haiku-related material, there are two discussions of Shinto and haiku that I know of: Blyth, in vol. 1 of Haiku, in Section I, "The Spiritual Origins of Haiku," part 10. Shinto; and Joan Giroux discusses Shinto in a few places in her book, The Haiku Form.

This is how Blyth starts out his discussion about the relation of Shinto to haiku:

QuoteThe relation of Shinto to haiku is a vital one, but owing to the obscurity of the nature of Shinto it is difficult to write clearly on the subject. With Shinto and its boring and repulsive mythology, haiku has little to do, directly or indirectly, but primitive, or crude Shinto, which still persists throughout Japan, both expresses the national character and affects it. As far as it concerns haiku, there are two aspects of this Shinto which we must describe, animism and simplicity.

Blyth does not give any examples in this short essay of Shinto-influenced haiku, as he does for example when discussing the influence of Confucianism on haiku.

Joan Giroux, after a very brief introduction to Shinto beliefs and practices, points out that:

QuoteThe communal aspects of Shinto did dovetail nicely with the utopian theories of Confucianism. But the Shinto word 'kami' (translated into English by 'gods') really indicates the animism which is the essence of Shinto. Animism is a primitive belief which endows even inanimate things with both life and spirit to explain two phenomena: first, the difference between a living man and a corpse (described as caused by the disappearance of life from the body), and secondly, the existence of dreams (explained as the ability of the spirit to move about.) Shinto, with its belief in the many 'kami' or minor deities of mountains, streams and trees, is a religion of nature worship. This fact is reflected in the large part played by nature in Japanese haiku.

Giroux's remark about dreams makes me think about Basho's death-verse in a new light:

tabi ni yande yume wa kareno o kakemeguru

ill on a journey:
my dreams roam round
over withered fields

--Basho, Tr. Barnhill

Although there is clearly a Buddhist element here, is there also a Shinto element as well?

As others have pointed out, there are haiku about various Shinto places, practices, and festivals. Basho wrote haiku about visiting sacred mountains. He wrote a haibun, Visiting the Ise Shrine," which contains the haiku (also in "Knapsack Notebook"):

nami no ki no hana to wa shirazu nioi kana

from what tree's
blossoms I know not:
such fragrance

--Basho, Tr. Barnhill

Barnhill points out that this haiku is a 'take-off' from a waka by Saigyo, which includes these lines translated by Barnhill: "What divine being / graces this place / I know not...."

On another visit to a shrine, Basho wrote (in "Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field"):

misoka tsuki nashi chitose no sugi o daku arashi

month's end, no moon:
a thousand year cedar
embraced by a windstorm

--Basho, Tr. Barnhill

Ueda notes that Basho wrote this "when he visited one of the Grand Shinto Shrines in Yamada..." The commentator Tosai points out that "...the Outer Shrine [is worshipped] as a moon deity.  With no moon, the invisible deity seemed even more august, and the poet looked up to the cedar tree as her holy manifestation."

Blyth has two kigo/topics related to Shinto in his 4 volume "Haiku": in Spring, under "Gods and Buddhas," there is "The Shrine of Ise," and in Autumn, under "Gods and Buddhas," there is "The Gods' Absence." Perhaps "The Feast of All Souls" in Autumn is also related to Shinto?

I will close with a haiku by Issa which seems to me to reveal how pervasive Shinto is in Japanese people. Issa was a Pure Land Buddhist (if I'm remembering correctly) and yet, when he visited the Inner Precincts of Ise Shrine, he wrote:

onozukara koube ga sagaru nari kamiji yama

Kamiji Yama;
My head bent
Of itself.

--Issa, Tr. Blyth

Larry

P.S. I disagree with Seisensui about the first line of furuike ya being superfluous. Seisensui is being iconoclastic, just as Shiki is in his essay about Furu-ike ya that Blyth translates as Chapter XXVI in A History of Haiku, Vol. Two.

One example of this is Seisensui not applying the same criticism to one of his own 'haiku' that Ueda gives in the same essay mentioned by someone already about Seisensui in chapter 7 of Modern Japanese Poets.

Tanpopo tanpopo sunahama ni haru ga me o hiraku

dandelions
dandelions
on the sandy beach
spring
opens its eyes

--Seisensui, trans. Ueda

(in Modern Japanese Haiku: An Anthology, Ueda gives the third line as: "on the sandy shore---")

Applying Seisensui's critique of furuike ya to his own poem, one could say that the scene-setting phrase "on the sandy beach/shore" (sunahama ni) is equally superfluous. I, on the other hand, have nothing against scene-setting, unless it is totally gratuitous. And I think furuike ya functions as much more than mere scene-setting, although it serves that purpose as well.

For what it's worth, I found something about the meaning of 'kawazu' online on a blog called "No-sword", posted by Matt Treyvaud  (http://no-sword.jp/blog/2007/10/types_of_frogs.html):

Types of frogs
Responding to my Monday post about tadpoles and snails, Thomas asks: "So what's the difference between the two words for frog: kaeru and kawazu?" The common answer is that kawazu is the "old word" that got replaced by the "new word" kaeru, but this is a misconception. It's really just another case of semantic overlap combined with poetic versus everyday register.

It's true that there are no kaeru as such in the Manyōshū -- all the frogs that appear as frogs are kawazu (/kahadu/, at the time). But this is not because the word kaeru had yet to be invented. How do we know this? Because it appears inside other words -- specifically, kaerude (literally "frog hand"), which became the modern word kaerude, maple. Check out this poem by Lady TAMURA (田村大嬢) to her younger sister:

wa ga yado ni/ momitu kaherude/ miru goto ni/ imo wo kaketutu/ kohinu hi ha nasi

吾屋戸尓/ 黄變蝦手/ 毎見/ 妹乎懸管/ 不戀日者無

Every time I see the maple leaves turn in my garden, that day does not exist, O sister, which does not find me longing for your company
Some versions have momituru kahede or some minor variation, but the use of the kanji 蝦, which means "toad" or "big frog", to get the kae(ru) sound is constant. So, the word was there. Why didn't they use it?

One reason was that kaeru was a general word, while the original meaning of kawazu seems to have specifically been "kajika frog". The kajika frog is so called because it lives in rivers (ka(wa)) and has a haunting call like a deer (shika), making it ideal for use in poetry. Virtually all of the Manyōshū poems that include a kawazu specifically refer to its call.

Maybe for this reason, kawazu also seems to have been the preferred word in poetry for frogs in general. There is a word for this in Japanese aesthetics: kago (歌語, "poetry word"). Another good example is references to cranes: the word tsuru is plenty old (some say it came over direct from the continent), but most early poems used the word tazu (たづ) instead. That was the kago.

So maybe kawazu originally meant "kajika frog" in particular, but it didn't take long before it just meant "frog [+poetic]" in general. Meanwhile, kaeru was a perfectly healthy synonym meaning "frog [-poetic]".

Eventually, poetry would be modernized in such a way that people felt quite comfortable using the word kaeru, which left kawazu stranded, gradually shifting towards meaning simply "frog [+archaic]". Kaeru, on the other hand, became simply "frog" (unmarked).

Kawazu would probably have been forgotten by all but the specialists by now (much like tazu) if it weren't for one thing: the Dark Side of the Moon of traditional Japanese poetry, that one haikai by Bashō that everyone knows...

古池や かはづ飛び込む 水の音

Furuike ya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto

Old pond/ Frog jumps in/ Sound of water
Bonus fact: Bashō was actually consciously playing with the kawazu tradition here by attributing the sound to the water rather than the frog. The frog's implied silence, after centuries of naku kawazu, is a crucial part of the stillness that allows the sound of water to make its impact.

Thanks for all the comments so far!

I tried to make the lists fundamental and manageable. I won't be able to read a thousand books about haiku, in this lifetime anyway!

I didn't include Higginson's World Haiku, because it is an attempt to establish a worldwide, contemporary saijiki, which goes beyond a basic understanding of the Japanese haiku tradition in my opinion. I think Higginson's The Haiku Seasons is more fundamental reading for an understanding of saijiki and seasonality in the Japanese haiku tradition.

I think it's possible to spend too much time reading, especially if it cuts into time spent writing. This is a delicate balance that writers in all genres have to deal with.

Many of the books I've listed I haven't read in years, but I do go back to them from time to time for reference purposes. I do think it's possible to get too caught up in the Japanese haiku tradition, in a way that can be inhibiting in the writing of ELH.

By post-Shiki, in terms of straying from the Japanese haiku tradition, I mean Japanese haijin such as Hekigodoo, Seisensui, and Soojoo (and not forgetting eccentrics such as Hoosai and Santooka), who started writing outside the tradition of Japanese haiku in terms of accepted form, the use of kigo, and traditional subject matter. This  new 'tradition' of experimentation, as has been pointed out, continues to this day.  Although it's been reported that Mayuzumi Madoka has recently asserted that the writing of haiku in Japan is beginning to move away from experimentation and back toward a more traditional approach.

I enjoy Donegan's work on haiku, but I wouldn't call it essential in a fundamental way. I think I took a workshop from her in Chicago back in the 70s, when she had recently returned from being a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea (or some kind of volunteer), although I may be misremembering, and confusing her with someone else.

Blyth is somewhat essential for the sheer number of haiku he translated. But for me, the most essential Blyth is found in his History of Haiku, particularly in the two chapters on Shiki as a critic. In my opinion, there has not been nearly enough translated into English of haiku criticism by Japanese authors. For instance, where is the complete Kyorai's Conversations with Basho in English? Or maybe it exists, and I've missed it?

I also should have probably included Sato's One Hundred Frogs in my list of informative books.

Larry Bole

Dear Lorin,

Perhaps we should take this conversation off this thread, but I greatly enjoyed reading your very fine haiku:

lily pond:
  another poet
  clears his throat             

- 3Lights gallery, senryu, April 2009


I think this haiku and David Wagoner's poem complement each other.  One doesn't supercede the other. Although Wagoner's poem is relatively short, the brevity of your haiku gives it a delightful light-heartedness that is not as evident in Wagoner's poem, and yet your haiku is equally profound in its own way.

Playing Kikaku to your Basho for a moment, did you toy with the idea of using an alternate first line, such as 'the old pond', or 'frog pond'?

And I wouldn't call your haiku a 'senryu' either. Water lily ('suiren') is a kigo for late summer. And the fact that there is humor in your poem doesn't preclude its being a haiku. Haiku can be humorous.

Regarding 'hon'i' ('poetic essence'), of course one can find a lot of stuff about this online. Not knowing what you are familiar with already, here are some books with interesting discussion about this:

Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku, Ch. V, "Historical View", section 2, "Seasonal Element" (pp. 161, 162 in First Tut Book ed., 1973.).

Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry, Part One, "Linked Poetry...", section 6, "Some Canons of Renga" (pp. 81-85 in First Princeton paperback, 1980.).

Shirane, Traces of Dreams, see under "Poetic essence" in the General Index, various pp. (Stanford U. Press, 1998.).

Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse, ch. 2, "The Poetics of the Haiku", in the section, "The Expressive Capacity of Seventeen Syllables", pp. 60, 61 (English translation, U. of Tokyo Press, 2000)

Here is some of what Kawamoto has to say on the subject of 'hon'i':

'Hon'i' is usually explained as the essential qualities inherent in an object and the emotional response deemed appropriate. However, as seen in Chapter 1 ["Autumn Dusk"], the actual qualities of the phenomenon itself were second to the conceptual qualities acquired through literary precedent. ... there may have been autumn dusks for centuries in Japan, but no one saw them until the age of the 'Shinkokinshuu' (ca. 1210), when the theme of autumn evenings began to attract a markedly strong interest. After the composition of several masterpieces using such set phrases as 'aki no yuube' [autumn evening] and 'aki no yuugare' [autumn dusk], the association between the phenomenon and the 'hon'i' of sadness first became fixed. When a 'waka' word achieves recognition as a suitable topic, its 'hon'i' is established and its not the thing itself but the precise word or phrase that determines its implications. Judgments at the 'uta-awase' poetry matches, for example, frequently centered on the 'hon'i' or legitimate meaning of the topic and not the object itself.

[end of excerpt]


In Ch. 1, alluded to in the above excerpt, Kawamoto discusses the apparently well-known example of Kyorai's criticism [in 'Kyorai-shoo', Kyorai's Notes, 1702-4] of a haiku by Fuukoku, about which Fuukoku is quoted as saying, "Recently, when I heard the sound of a temple bell in the mountain at dusk, I didn't feel at all forlorn."  So Fuukoku wrote a haiku saying as much. Kyorai's criticism is that one can't ignore the 'hon'i' of a mountain temple, autumn dusk, and a bell at dusk [all apparently mentioned in the original haiku, now apparently lost] which is of forlornness. So the haiku was re-written as:

yuugure wa kane o chikara ya tera no aki

At dusk,
how uplifting the bell!
Autumn at a temple.

--trans. Collington, Collins, Heldt

Kawamoto goes on to say:

Indeed, this poem manages to incorporate the "essential implications" of autumn dusk as the epitome of forlornness by preserving a hint of melancholy, while suggesting that the powerful reverberations of the bell raise the speaker's spirit. ...

While Kyorai's critique may seem extreme, it has been a given in Japan for centuries that the only appropriate sentiment in connection with "autumn dusk" is that of forlornness.

[end of excerpt]


Shirane also discusses this haiku of Fuukoku's, and Kyorai's criticism, in Traces of Dreams, in ch. 7, "Seasonal Associations and Cultural Landscape," pp. 204-5.

Here is Shirane's translation of the haiku:

yuugure / wa / kane / o / chikara / ya / tera / no / aki
dusk / as-for / temple-bell / (acc.) / strength / : / temple / 's / autumn

the sound of the bell at dusk
gives me strength--
a temple in autumn

--trans. Shirane

According to Shirane, it was Kyorai who re-wrote the haiku.  In a footnote  to Ch. 7 (footnote 24.), Shirane says:

Kyorai's corrected version suggests that with the approach of evening, the noisy crowds have left the temple and the poet is left with a feeling of loneliness, which is diminished or obscured by the sound of the evening temple bells, which give him emotional strength.

[end of excerpt]


Larry Bole

P.S. The next time I have a chance to go to the New York Public Library, I will check for other discussions of 'hon'i' in books that might be there, and let you know by email, if that is ok.

Don,

Sorry I can't quote from your most recent post, but I'm ignorant when it comes to using what all those icons represent at the top of the page. I will have to work that out sometime when I have more time.

But you mention limits and expansion possibilities when writing poems consisting of 9 to 11 words.

Well, one could start with determining how many permutations (in a mathematical sense) are available with 9 to 11 words. Then one can take into account that English has a vocabulary of approximately 100,000 words, which I have read is the largest vocabulary of any known language in the world. Although the total number of possible 9 to 11 word poems is still finite, it is possibly a huge number.

About the only restrictions I can think of are: 1) The limitations that are imposed by what one believes makes an ELH poem an ELH poem, if one wants to limit the composition of 9 to 11 word poems to that genre. 2) Poems being too similar in content and/or expresson (I believe this is your point). And although a one-word difference can make a difference, often it wouldn't. 3) Poems that would be nonsensical. Although, there is a genre of mainstream poetry, called "conceptual poetry," that includes some types of nonsensical poetry as legitimate poetry, as well as non-lexical vocalizations, and appropriation, which often consists of just re-producing someone else's text, but doing it by hand in some way, whether writing it out or typing it out.

Basho was a great appropriator. He occasionally spent some of his seventeen syllables quoting from Noh plays, for instance.

From what I remember of Basho's appropriations, the most extreme example would probably be this:

yo ni furu mo sarani Sogi no yadori kana

life in this world
just like a temporary shelter
of Sogi's

Basho, trans. Ueda


This is based on Sogi's haiku:

yo ni furu mo sarani shigure no yadori kana

life in this world
just like a temporary shelter
from a winter shower

Sogi, trans. Ueda


Basho has changed just one word in his haiku from Sogi's haiku. (note: Sogi should have a diacritical mark over the "o"; one can Romanize this as "Soogi," which has the same number of sound-syllables as "shigure".)


Larry Bole

Dear Don,

Some random observations:

Sturgeon's Revelation (Sturgeon's Law) states that "90% of everything is crud." This probably applies to haiku as much as anything else. I suspect that most every writer of ELH has written their fair share of bland haiku, and that in any given era of haiku writing, Japanese or English, the number of bland haiku far outweighs the number of interesting haiku. And I recognize the difference between a haiku that may personally appeal to me, but objectively is not that interesting in relation to other haiku on the same topic.

Can one avoid repetition in haiku?  If one looks at the 10,000 or so haiku of Issa that David Lanoue has now translated online (I hope I have the number correct), one finds that often Issa would write a haiku, and then write one, two or more haiku that are pretty much the same as the first one, with only minor and often insignificant differences.

It happens now and then that someone writes a haiku that is almost the same as a previously published haiku, without any knowledge of the previous one. I vaguely remember reading once that there is even a term for this in Japanese, although I can't remember what it is, and could be mistaken about that.

I recently wrote a haiku (kind of mediocre):

day after day
after day cherry blossoms
about to drop


This was written observing a stand-alone cherry tree in my city neighborhood, one on which the blossoms seemed to last forever or, at any rate, longer than one would expect.  And then I happened to be looking in Robin Gill's "Cherry Blossom Epiphany," and found these:

ippon no hikazu o tamesu sakura kana

counting the days
one tree stays in bloom:
it's cherry time!

Ginkou, 1778; trans. Gill

chiru made wa sono hi sono hi no sakura kana

until they drop
they are cherry blossoms
day after day

Shihan, 17c; trans. Gill


Oh well....

Maybe I can improve my haiku:

day after day
after day cherry blossoms
that should have fallen!

But as others have pointed out, one can notice a particular aspect of something that other people have seen but paid no attention to. Or find an interesting arrangement of words that are not quite the same as anyone else has used to describe a familiar scene or event.

Here is an example of two different haiku about cherry petals falling on food:

ki no moto ni shiru mo namasu mo sakura kana

Blossom Viewing

beneath a tree,
     both soup and fish salad:
          cherry blossoms!

Basho, trans. Barnhill


amenbo ni bettari tsukishi sakura kana

plastered
to the lollipop
cherry petals

Issa, 1824; trans. Gill


If I'm sitting with Basho picnicing under a cherry tree, I'm not sure I would want to eat the food so elegantly decorated by falling cherry petals. But l'm licking Issa's lollipop!  Yum! 

About Issa's haiku, Gill says:

I am no relativist. I prefer this to petals in dog bowls, on dog shit, bean paste, (itself identified with shit), garbage or avaricious faces. The 'ku', perhaps old Issa's last word on the subject, adds something the others lack. Cherry petals, to my mind at least, resemble little lips. Need more be said?

[end of excerpt]

We will never run out of interesting ways of saying things, if we cultivate what I call a haiku-mindset that, aware of what's been said before, strives to see things afresh. As Basho says in 'Oi no kobumi' (variously: Knapsack Notebook, Record of a Travel-worn Satchel, Notes in a Straw Satchel, etc.):

Nothing one sees is not a flower... (trans. Barnhill)

There is nothing you have in mind that cannot be turned into a flower...(trans. Ueda)

Anywhere a poet looks, there are flowers...(trans. Fumiko Yamamoto)


--Larry Bole

P.S. Regarding trying to say something new:

The Poets Agree to Be Quiet by the Swamp

They hold their hands over their mouths
And stare at the stretch of water.
What can be said has been said before:
Strokes of light like herons' legs in the cattails,
Mud underneath, frogs lying even deeper.
Therefore the poets may keep quiet.
But the corners of their mouths grin past their hands.
They stick their elbows out into the evening,
Stoop, and begin the ancient croaking.

--David Wagoner

Lorin, et al:

I stand corrected regarding 'kigo'. I just came across an essay by Richard Gilbert, "Kigo Versus Seasonal Reference in Haiku: Observations, Anecdotes and a Translation," in which he distinguishes between Japanese 'kigo' and Engish-language haiku (ELH) 'seasonal references'.

Gilbert points out that 'kigo' also has a cultural component for the Japanese, as well as a seasonal component, whereas 'seasonal references' don't necessarily have a cultural component for English-language haikuists.

I would, however, like to add that 'kigo' also has a 'literary tradition' component in addition to a cultural component for the Japanese. I base this opinion on a discussion of 'kigo' by Kooji Kawamoto in his book, "The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Images, Structure, Meter."

Here are some of Kawamoto's comments on 'kigo':

The use of old 'waka' words was therefore, not inconsistent with 'haikai's' effort to renovate traditional poetry. The reliance upon classical poetic diction does not mean that 'haiku' was a slave to long-standing conventions. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the 'haiku' as a full-fledged poetic genre was made possible by the existence of a poetic lexicon comprising thoroughly stereotyped expressions evolved over the course of a thousand-year old tradition. Within this tradition, the mere mention of a single word automatically translated into a specific complex of thoughts, emotions, and associations.

The class of words known as 'kigo' or seasonal words, provides the representative example of such poetic diction. .... However, it was not until after the maturing of 'renga' that ARTIFICIAL [emphasis mine] 'kigo' classifications systematically and inseparably yoked particular seasons to particular phenomenon---including those which are not (in reality) exclusive to a single season. In other words, it was through the discretionary rules of 'renga' that things like the moon, deer, and fog became inextricably linked to autumn.

... The justifications for these classifications derived from antecedent texts, particularly the dominant tendencies found in works that were widely regarded as superior poems. Here again, concern was not with reality, per se, but with a literary world---mostly poetic in nature---and the relative position of a word within a network of traditional literary expressions. It is true that large numbers of new 'kigo' were established during the age of 'haikai'. Yet even in these instances poets continued to apply the same fundamental crieteria. As a result, any newly established 'kigo' generally remained subject to strong regulating influences of the initial and therefore paradigmatic verses in which they first appeared---regardless of later changes in reality. [It is interesting to note here that, at least at the beginning of 'haikai', what was considered a 'kigo' was not set in stone---new 'kigo' could be added to the lists.]

[end of excerpt]


In my opinion, it's too bad that English-language poetry, from its beginnings in the British Isles, didn't develop a tradition in which poems, at least those that were about nature or used nature as image/metaphor, weren't classified by season and published in anthologies that way. There is also a bias in the English-language poetic tradition against using stereotyped phrases and expressions. So the best we can do in the English-language poetic tradition (of which ELH is, or should be, a part), in an effort to not totally disengage from the Japanese haiku tradition when writing ELH, is to use seasonal references in a way that hopefully gain resonance by repeated occurance in haiku of distinction, and also have resonance as those seasonal references may remind us of well-known poems in the English-language poetic tradition.

But it's obvious that 'seasonal references' will never have the same impact in ELH as 'kigo' has in Japanese haiku.

Larry Bole