i’m assuming the question of whether this poem of mine is a haiku or not has to do with its imaginative elements (blue apple, mirror-birth) and not the form of the poem (in this case: 3 lines, short-long-short, a kire/cut after the first line, creating two parts, and, as Paul Miller pointed out, a possibly strong, mysterious, ambiguous juxtaposition because of the word "it"—all standard-bearer elements and western traditions, in some way or another, since haiku pretty much began in the english language). if it is not the imaginative elements, then i am afraid pretty much nothing written in english that calls itself haiku will apply to whatever definition "lulu", and others, are holding so dear, whatever puritanical lamentations they have such sorrow and woe for.
this ku and the “blue apple” series (about 90** ku in total) was inspired, in some way or anther, i guess, by:
Jorge Luis Borges; magical realism; David Lynch; Ban’ya Natsuishi’s Flying Pope series; Michael Pollan; frankenfood; genetics/modern science; Lewis Carroll; Adam & Eve/Genesis/knowledge/Satan; Haruo Shirane’s “vertical axis, the movement across time”; Stanley Kubrick's films (wherein there is a mirror scene in each one, oftentimes during the most critical scenes); Johnny Appleseed; Snow White & the Seven Dwarves; surrealism; cubism; the mythological and the fantastic; Ban’ya Natsuishi’s concept of “the totality of reality” (which includes the imagination, not just, or only, “direct experience”/objective reality); evolution; mystery and depth (
yū gen); playfulness (with tradition, with the concepts of Nature/the Wild and with season); Bashō’s imaginative, radical and non-traditional “old pond” ku and compositional philosophies; automatic writing, particularly that done by and promoted by Shiki and explained by Tsubouchi Nenten (“And for each topic, he composed 10 haiku as part of his formal compositional style. . . . Then, whenever he and his friends would gather, he lit a stick of incense, and they would write as many haiku as possible before the incense went out. This may seem merely playful—but the process requires intense concentration. As a result, something of the unconscious is revealed: this is similar to a kind of automatic writing, the automatic writing of the surrealist poets, I believe” [
Poems of Consciousness, Richard Gilbert, 155] [interestingly enough, Kyoshi found this method “too playful”].
in addition, these quotes about the long history of imagination in haiku and how vital it is from Haruo Shirane’s “Beyond the Haiku Moment” (
http://www.haikupoet.com/definitions/beyond_the_haiku_moment.html) have made their inroads on me:
“The joy and pleasure of haikai was that it was imaginary literature . . . . [T]o create a new and unexpected world. . . . One could compose about one's daily life, about being an official in China, about being a warrior in the medieval period, or an aristocrat in the ancient period. The other participants in the haikai sequence joined you in that imaginary world or took you to places that you could reach on with your imagination.
In short, linked verse, both orthodox linked verse (renga) and its comic or casual version (haikai), was fundamentally imaginary.”
“For Basho, it was necessary to experience everyday life, to travel, to expose oneself to the world as much as possible, so that the poet could reveal the world as it was. But it could also be fictional, something born of the imagination. In fact, you had to use your imagination to compose haikai, since it was very much about the ability to move from one world to another. Basho himself often rewrote his poetry: he would change the gender, the place, the time, the situation. The only thing that mattered was the effectiveness of the poetry, not whether it was faithful to the original experience.”
Also the following from Janine Beichman’s
Masaoka Shiki, His Life and Works:
“Shiki found Bashō’s work deficient in one area, however: he had not used imagination. In
Some Remarks on Bashō, he wrote: “Basho’s haiku
speak only of what was around him [emphasis in original]. That is, his subject was either an emotion he felt subjectively or else natural scenes and human affairs that he observed objectively. This is of course admirable, but the fact that he discarded scenes which arise from imagination and are outside observation, as well as human affairs he had not experienced, shows that Basho’s realm was rather small” (p77).
of course this has been proven to be historically a little off. Bashō did, at times, make up scenes (wrote of and about places he had not been to) and scenery, yet combined them with objective reality and simplicity. and so he did use imagination at times, though not to the extent, perhaps, Shiki would have liked, or that someone like Buson utilized at a much higher percent. this quote also shows that Shiki was not only or all about shasei and objective writing, but that using one’s imagination was very important to him (and recently we have been reminded of this by Nenten [as mentioned above] and also by Kaneko Tohta in the new book
Ikimonofūei (Poetic Composition on Living Things).
there's also this from Beichman’s book:
“Four years later, in
The Haiku Poet Buson, [Shiki] wrote of Bashō: He simply took himself as his basic poetic material and went no further than expressing the truth of objects related to him. In modern terms, such poverty of observation is really laughable.
Of all haiku poets, Shiki wrote in the same work, only Buson has used imagination successfully. In this lay his uniqueness.... Using imagination to write haiku, said Shiki, meant writing about what human beings cannot experience, what does not exist in reality, ancient things, places one has never visited, or societies one has never seen."
“. . . Shiki’s analysis treats the history of the haiku as a kind of evolution . . .”
and so i think this is where the “haiku vs haiku” (the unfortunate title of this thread) comes in. thinking of the haiku art form in such a way is exclusionary, closed, puritanical, not to mention antagonistic. it’s a fundamentalist perception of, and approach to, haiku instead of an evolutionary one. i strongly disagree with this approach. if someone wants to call what they write haiku, so be it. there’s nothing “sad” about it ("chibi575"'s word), nor should work that doesn't jive with some conservative definition "be encouraged to become its own genre (as the Japanese have named modern haiku, gendai haiku)”. it's all part of one expanding web, one genre, one family, "expanding with each poem that's written" (Martin Lucas); nor is Japanese post-war haiku (gendai) considered a separate genre in Japan. that's perhaps wishful thinking (for some reason), but simply malarky. it's all one. a progression. an evolution.***
what the real and vital questions should be are: is it good poetry? is it quality? is it art?
i don’t think i’m going out on a limb here to say that if one is only going to write haiku (and want everyone else to write haiku) based on a very specific and closed definition, and strike a pose of fundamental puritanicalism, or write haiku based on poll results of common characteristics, or the uninformed teachings of elementary school teachers (bless them), or some hyper-specific "way" or technique of some poet from centuries ago, or whatever else, then the poetry will more than likely be empty, trite, boring, disingenuous, cliche, pretentious, phony, lifeless, forgettable, and disposable.
those who are longing for haiku to be one thing, one kind of poetry, one kind of box—this mindset—seems contradictory to the entire haiku art form itself.
yes, experimental, avant-garde, nu haiku, or nu ku (new/naked ku), can be just as pretentious, and that's a sincere danger and something poets need to be mindful of, but it is a movement based on openness, excitement, playfulness, elasticity. . . . It's an evolutionary (not fundamentalist) view of haiku's extensive and amazing, and ever-expanding history, and is directly in tune with its fundamental nature of freshness, and experimentation—the idea of haiku being both a folk art and a radical/revolutionary art form, and one which challenges traditions—not one that's over-protective and putting on a coat of phony purity airs that has never existed in the first place.
as i mentioned at the beginning, the "blue apple" ku were a series, and my first at an attempt to take one topic and experiment with it. i have done others ("the queen of violets" and "the king of sharks"; and of course there is Ban'ya Natsuishi's "Flying Pope" series; John Sandbach's "invisible castle" series in his collection
a dragonfly and facts; Chris Gordon has done likewise with his "Invisible Circus" and "Chinese Astronauts"; there are Tanya McDonald's "seven moons"; Michael Dylan Welch has played with "seven suns" and the "neon buddha"; Johannes S. Berg's "fun house" ku; the Gordon, McDonald, Welch and Berg can be found in
Roadrunner and
MASKS). i think it would be fun and exciting to see others play with this concept of personal mythology/topic and automatic/series writing. perhaps great things will come of it, or, perhaps more importantly, inspire new work by others.
i'd like the share the five ku* from that series that were selected by Ban'ya Natsuishi for issue #42 (April, 2009) of his
Ginyu journal:
blue apple
it gives birth
to a mirror
cloudless
a day balanced
on the blue apple
in a pool
surrounding the blue apple
the tears of a crow
deep underground―
the blue apple reflecting
billions of suns
on the blue apple
the spider dreams dreams
in shades of blue
and two others from the series that i think are decent:
what if
the blue apple were
a blue rose
the blue apple
sending out waves
to a red apple
*edited: it was 5, not 7, and so two were removed
**not 20 like i originally posted but actually 90 (i was going off an edited document)
***some deletion, revision and additions here
