The Truth in Haiku - How necessary is it?

[Billie Wilson]

I am not even close to being a haiku scholar, so won't attempt to address whether truth is necessary in haiku. I can only report that I seem to write better haiku (and to feel better about it within) when responding to an actual event rather than an imagined one. This may be because the mentors who "raised me from a haiku pup" emphasized the believability that seems to be enhanced around such haiku.  I seem to have a deeper sense of inner integrity when the haiku comes from a real moment. Alternatively, when I know I've made up a haiku out of whole (or even nearly-whole) cloth, there is an inner sense that I have somehow "cheated".  I'm sure that none of these inner responses have much meaning beyond my own views.  Yet, they are enough to persuade me to continue along this pathway that feels like one I'm supposed to walk.  

[Gael Bage]

And do you believe a fictional haiku can lead the reader to a truth ... a sort of cosmic truth, if there is such a thing?

Sometimes I have written things almost automatically, not fully appreciating it at the time, only later learning the truth and a full appreciation of what I wrote earlier.

Is the truth the same for everyone? Wondering how much truth is coloured by our own experience ?

Maybe an honest don't know is truth sometimes?

We all have an imagination, and a subconscious, within our imagination can it be our truth?

How boring if there were no mystery, no creativity bringing us something new?

manta ray -
dancing
in my dreams  ..... not real, but my truth?  

Don, I think you have it there, creating art while maintaining the event...and the insight perhaps, sometimes it would be so much easier to change something instead of persevere till the art is there in the ku. Funny how some just trip off the tongue and others take ages to birth.

[cat]

Hello, all,

A very interesting thread.  Perhaps of greater interest to me because I came to haiku after many years of writing short stories -- "God's liars", my fellow Mainer Stephen King calls those of us who toil in the fiction vineyard.  I like that term because it reminds me that making things up can be for as high a purpose as being factual, and I think it touches on an important idea -- what is truth?  Is it faithfulness to the facts?  Or is it faithfulness to the inner weather one was experiencing whilst outside events were happening?  Or is it somewhere in between, at the crossroads of an experienced moment and "an emotion that has found its thought," as Robert Frost once put it?

Gael asks, "Is the truth the same for everyone? Wondering how much truth is coloured by our own experience ?"  I would ask, Isn't our own experience actually what our individual truth is? 

Are there any absolutes in the creative arts?  If art is, as someone once said, "nature filtered through a personality," isn't emotional truth just as important as literal events?

On the front of my story notebooks I used to put this quote by Nadine Gordimer, just to remind me of the writer's ultimate responsibility:  "Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction."

Just one writer's opinion.

cat

[Lorin]

1. But of course Shakespeare wasn't above spinning facts for the Tudors hence we get a skewed, and highly influential skewed viewpoint of a great king in Richard III.

2.But Shakespeare's work, often adapting earlier works, has messages that are still highly relevant for today's society.  It never dates, while history versions do (pun half intended).

...
3.I wish haiku had been known to the public during WWII.

Alan

1. ...and a skewed historical Macbeth, too  :) But these characters have truth beyond the historical facts, are not history, but enact perennial themes about human nature.

2. My favourite play, 'The Tempest', Shakespeare's last play, is clearly fiction. Yet it embodies, imo, perennial truths : the truths of poetry. Much of Shakespeare does this. It's more than 'messages'.

3. It was, in Japan.  ;D

ok, that's a smart-arsed sort of comment & I'm glad I'm not withing striking distance of you. Alan. But the very real 'haiku war' in Japan during WW2 does bear consideration.

- Lorin

[cat]

Hello again,

I was going to give an example of "truth" or "untruth" (take your pick) in haiku, but then I got a phone call that the draggers were in and there was a quart of still-quivering scallops waiting to be picked up, so I had to go.  Dinner, yum!

This is a situation going on now.

I have just started doing haiga, and last week my husband, who is very ill, noticed the sunset and asked me to take some photos.  There was one I really liked, and I wrote a haiku to go with it.  Then I realized that the photo I had chosen had some problems, and I chose a different one from the same shoot.

I posted the haiga draft at a haiga forum, where it was felt the first line of the haiku "midwinter . . . " wasn't pulling its weight.  I floundered around and couldn't come up with that elusive "killer fragment".  One of my friends suggested "missing you . . . " would work well, and others agreed.

I started thinking about that and if it fit my vision for my haiga.  And memory took me back to my 15th summer, when my first high school boyfriend broke up with me.  Living in a village without much in the way of entertainments, my parents liked to go for drives in the country, and this one evening when I was down in the dumps, Daddy decided to take a drive around one of the lakes.  Along the way down this camp road we came upon an incredible view of the sun setting over an alder swamp.  An alder swamp -- it sounds so prosaic, but it was so lit with beauty it almost hurt.  And in my teenage angst, I wondered: How could there be such beauty in the world when I was feeling such pain?  I guess you could call it my Skeeter Davis moment:  "Why does the sun go on shining? / Why does the sea rush to shore? / Don't they know it's the end of the world / 'cause you don't love me anymore?"

And then I thought about the day I took the photo and how worried I was about my husband's ill health, and how I wanted to take some great photos for him.  And how I would feel if after all he's been through, this health problem was one he couldn't beat.

So even though it had no part in the actual moment, I changed the haiku fragment to "missing you . . . "  And I had already changed the photo.

So I ask you: My haiga -- truth? Or a lie?  And does it matter?

cat

[AlanSummers]

Hi Lorin, ;-)

3.I wish haiku had been known to the public during WWII.
Alan

3. It was, in Japan.  Grin

ok, that's a smart-arsed sort of comment & I'm glad I'm not withing striking distance of you. Alan. But the very real 'haiku war' in Japan during WW2 does bear consideration.

- Lorin

Yes, some harrowing times for many Japanese haiku poets during WWII inside Japan.  Secret Police and State Police raids, beatings, torture, imprisonment, murder perhaps?

What would have happened to non-Japanese haiku writers in America and Britain if such a culture existed?  I imagine many would have been imprisoned in prisons or detention camps.  There are still many shocking facts locked up tight in America and Britain about WWII despite the right to information acts and laws, the the fact that WWII ended over 60 years ago.

Sombre food for thought.  I haven't even mentioned the recent reportings to secret police of haiku poets in a certain European country.

Alan

[Don Baird]

Hey Cat,

That's an amazing story/journey with your haiga!  Thanks so much for sharing it. 

I'm not one to judge, but rather discuss.  My thoughts are that you put a lot of energy into the poem.  The poem, though not created (any longer) in "the/one moment", has come together with truth.  You didn't just make it up.  It's real;  the activites surrounding your creating the haiga are real.  We're not dealing with fantasy here.  It became a "longer moment" but stayed true to the poem's needs and the event(s) that inspired it. 

Back to pondering out loud:

I don't have an answer.  I simply have the question.  Should we write haiku of actual events and word them in such a way that they resonate deeper aspects to ponder;  or, do we just make them up from imagination? 

How much should we construct haiku if at all? Should we simply report what we see and stay out of the way? How far can we go in the creativity behind the haiku poem and still legitimately call it a haiku rather than, lets say, a short prose or etc.?

You have a wonderful story and the haiga you have created will be everlasting as a result.  What else could any of us ever want beyond that as poets?

Again, thanks so much for sharing your story.  And you and your husband have my bestest of all best wishes and prayers.

all my best,

Don

[AlanSummers]

Hey Cat! ;-)

To me, you have given an excellent example of how a haiku can be true to an event, except it isn't the original event i.e. the sunset and your husband's illness.

It's a true haiku on many levels, and stronger for that.  It goes beyond mere reportage which all haiku should be.

Alan

[chibi575]

Truth, just by writing we are already outside the realm of truth.

If I can feel an affinity for the emotion in the writer's poem, that is my litmus.  Then, most of those poems that meet that requirement are usually of an actual event.  The degree of truth is usully high in such poems.  Yet, I wonder what is the quantitative threshold... 10%, 33.3_%, etc.,...?  Though, I think the scale may be logrithmic and asymptotic, never getting to 100%.  The threshold may be dependent on many factors between the reader(s) and the writer.  I feel, though, "Truth in haiku (Japanese as well as other languages) is possibly a literary koan.

Now... my brain is starting to hurt :))

[Don Baird]

Chibi,

Please do not hurt your brain over this.  Keep tylenol close by for these discusions!  :)

"if I feel an affinity for the emotion in the writer's poem" ... "most of those poems that meet that requirement are usually of an actual event"... chibi. 

It seems, then, that you are automatically in sync, from years of experience, with poems that are written based on an actual event.  Through your gut and intuition, you just know it's real and of a real moment.  So, do you encourage beginner's to write what they see, write what they remember or write what they want to make up?  If you were coaching a beginner, which of the three prior possibilties would you use as their starting point?

all my best,

Don

[Mark Harris]

For me, the concrete, nature as experienced (which immediately becomes a memory, and memory is fallible) is the key through which I express in words what I call haiku.

a digression: can we describe any aspect of the natural world we haven't experienced?

As several of you have stated or almost stated, if a haiku isn't an expression of who we are, our experience, what compels us to write, why are we at it? Now someone tell me what is truth.

[Don Baird]

A Quote from Billie stirs my mind:

"This may be because the mentors who "raised me from a haiku pup" emphasized the believability that seems to be enhanced around such haiku.  I seem to have a deeper sense of inner integrity when the haiku comes from a real moment."  Billie

That's one of the reasons I posted this topic.  Many of us have been mentored to keep our haiku credible.  A real moment, well expressed, that rings in our pondering minds for years to come is, as I see it, what we have been taught - truth.  The haijin is true to a moment.  The reader walks away with something bigger than merely the poet and the poet's bias.  That the poet surrendered to nature and wrote about that surrender, that moment, as accurately as possible is the achievement.  And, that the art of writing haiku is to do it in such a way, as I've mentioned, that it rings credible in an everlasting way.

I remember writing this somewhat non-haiku/haiku that starts out with the phrase:

two shoes
side by side

This is an honest recognition.  The two shoes were there.  I noticed it.  They struck me for many reasons (I'll explain).  But what, then, would ever be the fragment?  I pondered on them briefly.  I pointed them out to my wife and said "what is it about these shoes"?  I went on saying "there's a haiku, there".  She knew it too.  We chatted a bit and then she went on her way.

I looked at the shoes and pondered their significance.  In a few moments something struck me:

two shoes
side by side ...
empty

It hit me.  No one was wearing them.  Why?  "The why is the resonance".  "It must be", I thought. It's profound, I went on.  I called my wife over and read her the poem.  She responded, "it's perfect" ... "it's exactly what it is". And then I discussed how it could be that someone is in bare feet ... the shoes left behind ... or they're wearing another pair ... or someone died ... it began to "ring".  The poem began to carry its weight ... it began to perform its mystery and stir me to thinking - to pondering.  It was done.  I breathed out ... and let it go ... contentedly.

When I buried my father and later went to his home ... I was faced with the poem's resonance ... his two shoes side by side ... empty.  

Don

[chibi575]

Don sensei,

As you know, my first Japanese haiku sensei, Fujita Akegarasu, had given this axiom/lesson, "The best haiku enters an empty heart."  This evoked layers of learning for me.  Empty, is a good start.  

(Sorry, I could not pick from your three proposed options... and you did not give me the option, "None of the above."  :D )

If anyone would like to continue further lessons from Fujita Akegarasu sama, drop me a private message, as I'm affraid the forum does not provide a platform for such.  In fact, I have experimented with using SKYPE as part of the platform, which, gives a somewhat suitable simulation of a haiku circle situation in Japan, in that it may allow the interaction between sensei and deshii at the realtime audio visual level.  

[Don Baird]

Hi Chibi,

Yes, I should have given you "emptiness" ... where else would any humble person start?  It removes ego and bias.  It cleans the slate even of the slate itself.  And when a hajin feels ready, in that feeling, he/she is biased and therefore, not ready.  Empty: fresh.  Without self:  but self.  Self: without ego.  Selfless:  the perfect soil for the seedlings of haiku to grow. "The best haiku enters an empty heart" chibi  Excellently expressed!

Thanks chibi for your post, invitation and thoughts.  You're always appreciated.

all my best,

Don

[colin stewart jones]

hi don

if haiku, are not poetry but some kind of mystical wisdom
then we should all be aiming to write following the shasei style
which at least attempts to record an event at the time of witnessing
(but so do newsmen and weather reporters...which many haiku often resemble)
and allow the reader to engage with it...resonate with it
in what is commonly understood as truth
but is in fact a misappropriation of the word truth
and should be better stated as identifying with experiences of a similar nature
then the answer is yes


i believe that all experiences whether they be in actuality, anecdotal, dreams or whatever are still part of my experience

every haiku i write is drawn from an event that was experienced in some way and at some time and in some location by someone
though they may not necessarily have happened at the same moment

so i feel free to draw on that store at any time - poetic license, if you will
and haiku is poetry,

what is wrong with desk ku anyway?
is not the very term a kind of snobbery
the point of writing is to be good enough so that it does not look like it is contrived

a desk
and a pen...
aha

(not a desk ku..but drawn from a visit to my doctor)

haiku is of course a construct and by conforming to any construct we are operating within a given framework but as there are different schools of thought within haiku it is, therefore, not an absolute,
and truth must be absolute
there can be no half-truths

notions of something being true to me, true to you or true to my experience before i can write haiku
are essentially redundant and ridiculous
a thing can not be true to me and false to another
if something is true, then it is true to everyone
is something not absolutely true then it is untrue

arguing from a philosophical pov haiku is subjective
anything which is subjective is open to interpretation
and so is not absolutely true, so it is untrue
so all haiku are untrue
ergo truth is not necessary

for example, how many different comments do we see on forums for the one haiku
if each haiku were true then we would all write the same comment when responding
(thanks for posting lol) :P

so the short answer to your initial question is NO

ask this; if truth is so important then why do some haiga artists
use computer manipulation in their images
if the written poem is sacred so should the image be
and why does sumi-e use broad brush strokes to suggest something
rather than use lifelike representation

a suggestion is not a statement of truth

philosophers used to say "all swans are white"
this was a truth statement until lorin's ancestors discovered the antipodean black swan

nowadays they use meta-language

the snow is white iff lla neige est blanc 
which is bullshit cos we all know Zappa sang about yellow snow ;D

pontius pilate (a wee man from perthshire) once asked "what is truth?"
you can decide that for yourselves
but you won't find it in poetry

col :)