The Seashell Game - Round 2

[Lorin]

Reading all the comments I'm pleased that Fay's haiku not only compares favourably with Umberto Senegal's poem, but shows us the power, depth, and uniqueness of Japanese kigo, and why it's such a useful tool.

I don't say "useful tool" lightly, as I know it's been called the soul of haiku, but to emphasise that although the haiku may be difficult to read along the vertical axis, it's a rewarding and purposeful process.

As much as I admire Umberto Senegal's haiku, my vote in a head to head such as this, is to Fay's haiku.

Alan

Kigo is certainly the 'group soul' of Japanese haiku (or arguably so, anyway) but am I reading you right, Alan, that you mean that kigo and the associated hon'i (the part of kigo I suspected was there but have only very recently confirmed and begun to understand) is a "useful tool" for EL haiku? If so, could you please explain this view in more detail?

Or do you simply mean that knowing kigo and the associated hon'i is essential for anyone who wants to read Japanese haiku? I'd tend to agree with you there, since this haiku seems to fall into place quite easily as a perfectly traditional Japanese haiku once one understands the hon'i.

Yet, as Peter mentions, it was written in English (one assumes) as an EL haiku for EL haiku audience. Or maybe it wasn't.


- Lorin

[John Carley]

She has presented something rather challenging: a poem written in English for English speaking readers (most of whom, presumably, are not English speaking Japanese, as FA is) and yet which is founded in a cultural environment which I am outside of.  So how am I to respond? - Peter

The whole issue is a caution against cultural insularity - Lorin

Yeah, or cultural misappropriation. The risk of parody here is pressing; I'm not sure how anyone who is not fluent in Bogush can claim intimate familiarity with Bogushetti iconography. Put another way: why is Borat funny?

But treading on eggshells aside, I'm not sure how hon'i squares with fuga no makoto.

Best wishes, John

[AlanSummers]

Reading all the comments I'm pleased that Fay's haiku not only compares favourably with Umberto Senegal's poem, but shows us the power, depth, and uniqueness of Japanese kigo, and why it's such a useful tool.

I don't say "useful tool" lightly, as I know it's been called the soul of haiku, but to emphasise that although the haiku may be difficult to read along the vertical axis, it's a rewarding and purposeful process.

As much as I admire Umberto Senegal's haiku, my vote in a head to head such as this, is to Fay's haiku.

Alan

Kigo is certainly the 'group soul' of Japanese haiku (or arguably so, anyway) but am I reading you right, Alan, that you mean that kigo and the associated hon'i (the part of kigo I suspected was there but have only very recently confirmed and begun to understand) is a "useful tool" for EL haiku? If so, could you please explain this view in more detail?

Or do you simply mean that knowing kigo and the associated hon'i is essential for anyone who wants to read Japanese haiku? I'd tend to agree with you there, since this haiku seems to fall into place quite easily as a perfectly traditional Japanese haiku once one understands the hon'i.

Yet, as Peter mentions, it was written in English (one assumes) as an EL haiku for EL haiku audience. Or maybe it wasn't.


- Lorin

Yes, Fay would have written it in English first, unlike Dhugal who always writes in Japanese first. ;-)

re my statement, I was directing it towards kigo first and foremost in a generic manner. 

We in the West cannot duplicate kigo, but we can come up with respectful alternatives, as we do have a rich cultural history.  It might not go back as many thousands of years as Chinese culture, which the Japanese can utilise, but we have barely scraped the surface of what we can do in the West.

I would imagine that writers born in the Indian sub-continent probably have a better chance of creating near-kigo than we do because their culture goes further back than the West.

Alan

[David Lanoue]

Hi Everyone,

"Love means never having to say you're sorry." - The Love Story.

"Love means having to say you're sorry every fifteen minutes." - John Lennon.

In this case, I agree with the first proclamation. I took no offence at any of the previous posts. This forum is a place for the free exchange of ideas - like I told Eve yesterday, it's like a high-level graduate seminar in contemporary haiku without the term paper requirement. Pure joy!

I promised to share my ideas about the two haiku. Here goes...

When I presented Fay's red piano haiku for discussion at HNA in Ottawa, she was sitting in the audience. After everyone else had reported their thoughts and feelings, I asked Fay to share her own. Her first point was a thing that a few of you have mentioned (I told you this seminar is high-level!): the season word (ants emerging in springtime) is important to how she feels about the scene. She went on to say that, for her, the out-of-tune plunking sound of the toy piano is central to "the" meaning to her - but she's not upset that no one else in that room, that afternoon, came up with this particular association. She said that she was happy to hear her poem live so many different lives in different minds. This is not only OK but what she aims at as an artist.

The haiku leaps from an external view of ants to an inward, childhood memory, presenting for our contemplation an emotionally charged artifact of half-remembered childhood. Fay's writing of the haiku (and our reading of it) is an unlocking of remembrance. Ants emerge one by one from their hole, hinting at an inner process of memories rising from the subconscious mind, suddenly unearthing the red toy piano. I love the surprise.

Umberto's haiku also "leaps" (to use Robert Bly's term): from sight (the cadavers of mosquitoes in the cemetery of a lamp) to sound: someone sobbing in a room. I don't get the feeling that the sobbing person is grieving for the little deaths in the lamp. In my imagining, I see a triangulation of mosquito corpses, a sobbing person and the poet, who is also there, looking at the mosquitoes and hearing the sobbing. It is the poet's consciousness that brings together the two stimuli: the seen and the heard. Interestingly, he doesn't describe the sobbing person but instead chooses to focus on the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. Senegal is the author of a collection of atom-sized fiction titled Cuentos atómicos (2006). As in many of those stories, here he evokes a micro-drama, a mini-tragedy of pain, loss and unspoken suffering. He leaves the reader to meditate and conjure.

The imagination must choose, and mine chooses to picture this unspecified sobbing person in different ways. In one vision she is a grieving woman whose pain is so keen the poet cannot bear to look at her and so instead gazes at the dead mosquitoes in the lamp. It might even be his once-wife and literary partner who, after a messy divorce, burned ten years of his manuscripts. But this biographical detail flits into my mind only because I happen to know about it; it's not essential to the poem. In another vision, the sobbing person, though seeming to be external to the poet (after all, Senegal describes this individual as a third-person "someone") is the poet. In his contemplation of the tiny-sized deaths, the poet finds himself interrupted by the sound of sobs coming from the mouth of "someone": himself! I like imagining the scene in both ways and feel no need to pick one or the other. One of them hints at a story of a man and a woman; a husband and a wife, perhaps--rich with history and subtext. The other suggests the psychodrama of a personality coming unglued: a fragmenting of self such that the poet, detached and alienated from his own grief, notes its expression--the sobbing--with eerie objectivity.

I should mention: when we discussed this haiku in Pasadena and Hot Springs, people brought up the association of mosquitoes and tropical diseases such as yellow fever. Also, in both discussions, people imagined a corpse laid out for a wake (in the room) but the poet cannot bear to look, so his eyes remain fixed on the mosquitoe corpses-avoiding the human one. A rich brew of images and possibilities, this one...

Glad I don't have to vote!

[Peter Yovu]

I wrote what follows prior to reading David's statement.


Knowing, as I now do, that "ants coming out of a hole" is a kigo, I feel that I have no basis for "judging" Aoyagi's poem side by side with Senegal's. They are not on the same playing field, at least not for me. I could say, of course, that I prefer Senegal's because I feel it is more aligned with how I tend to view things—phenomenologically. I do not want to go to a reference guide to find out what "poetic essence"  is in operation. I could bypass that, I suppose, by assuming that despite all cultural connotation, Aoyagi was drawn to "ants out of a hole" for reasons that go deeper, to where, as I explored it earlier, the nature of "something emerging from nothing" is as much in play as any seasonal or cultural overlay. I suspect, however, that in a discussion with a haiku traditionalist raised in kigo culture, that would not wash.

Good questions have been raised. I find this kind of discussion somewhat disheartening though. I long for the day when haiku can be discussed without reference to things Japanese. Over on Troutswirl, under Essence # 6, Rod Willmot says something which I did find heartening, if perhaps a bit harsh. He is describing his discovery of haiku:

"Illumination!  I knew at once that I'd been blocked because the kinds of poetry I was used to reading and writing were irrelevant to what I'd been living. And I knew the solution was haiku. Let me emphasize that I never had any interest in things Japanese, that romantic enchantment that infects haiku circles across North America. Discovering haiku, for me, was like coming across an old tin can at a time of need. I need a drum—there's my drum!  I need a scoop—there's my scoop!  I need a knife, an amulet—there they are!  I've got no need for an old tin can from Japan, to be preserved and worshipped and imitated. When I was starting out this was so obvious I had no need to think it; but I did think it when I began to meet other haiku poets".

In psychology, the term rapprochement is used to describe the childhood phase (roughly between 14 and 24 months) when the child is beginning to move away from the mother, going farther and farther into the "world" and rejoicing that the mother is still there to go back to. I feel that there are many of us who are stuck in this rapprochement stage: making short forays into autonomy, but not yet able to break free from mother Japan.

To do this does not require rejection—though in some ways, it might. Nonetheless, I suspect that a period of separation—maybe a hundred years—would allow us to revisit questions like kigo with freshness. Or maybe I should speak for myself: I need a hundred years.

I've said this before, but if Japanese culture nourished the insights that gave birth to and inform haiku, I am grateful for it. But I am grateful for other things as well: for the insights of modern psychology that many poets, including haiku poets, have explored; for the insights of neurology and brain science, which I feel could be explored more; and for individual poets, artists and spiritual teachers who have gone beyond culture in ways which have enriched it.

[Mark Harris]

Good questions have been raised. I find this kind of discussion somewhat disheartening though. I long for the day when haiku can be discussed without reference to things Japanese...I've said this before, but if Japanese culture nourished the insights that gave birth to and inform haiku, I am grateful for it. But I am grateful for other things as well: for the insights of modern psychology that many poets, including haiku poets, have explored; for the insights of neurology and brain science, which I feel could be explored more; and for individual poets, artists and spiritual teachers who have gone beyond culture in ways which have enriched it. --Peter

romanticizing Japanese culture? No interest here. Orientalizing? Distasteful. One the other hand, a lot of great ideas have been conceived by Japanese haiku poets (there are more of them than us). If we write haiku, and call it that, isn't it natural to be interested in those ideas? Do you control what goes in, and what comes out? For me, what goes in is used, one way or another.

[Peter Yovu]

I don't think I'm saying anything different. But let me be clear: I am by no means suggesting that anyone should not be interested in those ideas. I was pretty clear, I think, in saying that I am grateful for them; I didn't feel it necessary to say that  I intend to continue to be open to them.   

[Mark Harris]

sorry. I'll continue to be open to your ideas.




   in a seed I don't know the answer


                                      Peter Yovu

[Peter Yovu]

Mark, so tell me, does saying "sorry" mean never having to say "I love you"? If so, well shucks.

In fact, a lot of my ideas have some degree of emotionality about them, if not reactivity. I think that is the case with what I have to say right now about kigo; maybe 80% is reaction based on my own stuff. It came out when I felt I had been barking up the wrong piano in looking at FA's poem. As i said, I felt "played with". But it's been quite valuable to me.

Is it time now to gather all the participants of this discussion and call for a group cyber-hug?

[AlanSummers]

A cyber-hug is always a good idea. ;-)  We all have strong opinions, and as a temporary moderator for Matsuyama University's "interlude" during shiki-temp, I've seen how valuable it is to respect each other's differences.

I forget who said that Umberto's haiku is the one they'd vote for over Fay's haiku, but I see the Seashell Game as both a weakness and a strength when two different styles and cultures are brought to bear.

Fay's haiku isn't as easy to read perhaps as Umberto's, and where they come from, both in cultural background, and in their approach to these individual haiku, makes it hard to choose.

I like both, but learnt a lot over the discussion for Fay's haiku.

I also feel we are still having growing pains over haiku, and we don't have the luxury of having hundreds of years of writing, reading, and studying haikai literature (and Chinese literature) as the writers of Basho's time and before him.

But Umberto's haiku does show we have come an awful long way since the early 20th Century, and a long way since the Haiku Wars, and even the 1990s.

It would be great if someone could bring out a series of books that could compete with what R.H. Blyth attempted to do, but this time mostly non-Japanese, but with a volume or two (or three) on Japanese haiku (and hokku) since Basho, reaching right up to 2010 or 2011.

That would call for a huge grant, or someone with deep financial pockets and time on their hands of course. ;-)

Alan

[Mark Harris]

Is it time now to gather all the participants of this discussion and call for a group cyber-hug? --Peter

A cyber-hug is always a good idea. ;-) --Alan

maybe Fay could play kumbaya for us...

isn't that a classic summer kigo from old Japan; hon-i --summer-camp love/togetherness?

[AlanSummers]

You are sooo bad Mark, it's good. ;-)

Perhaps a THF video conference with us singing around the camp fire, before the venue sprinklers kick in, is a good idea. 

Good to see we can still utilise humor without the need of a senryu. ;-)

Alan

[Lorin]

Is it time now to gather all the participants of this discussion and call for a group cyber-hug? --Peter

A cyber-hug is always a good idea. ;-) --Alan

maybe Fay could play kumbaya for us...

isn't that a classic summer kigo from old Japan; hon-i --summer-camp love/togetherness?

;D Mark!

Save me from kubaya, please, though. In the old people's home I end up in, we'll be doing group hugs or whatever to the classic Spring kigo, subterranean homesick blues; hon'i -- hon'i The Joy of Spring!

- Lorin

[Mark Harris]

I'll be in the basement mixing up the medicine...

[Lorin]

Reading all the comments I'm pleased that Fay's haiku not only compares favourably with Umberto Senegal's poem, but shows us the power, depth, and uniqueness of Japanese kigo, and why it's such a useful tool.

I don't say "useful tool" lightly, as I know it's been called the soul of haiku, but to emphasise that although the haiku may be difficult to read along the vertical axis, it's a rewarding and purposeful process.

As much as I admire Umberto Senegal's haiku, my vote in a head to head such as this, is to Fay's haiku.

Alan

Kigo is certainly the 'group soul' of Japanese haiku (or arguably so, anyway) but am I reading you right, Alan, that you mean that kigo and the associated hon'i (the part of kigo I suspected was there but have only very recently confirmed and begun to understand) is a "useful tool" for EL haiku? If so, could you please explain this view in more detail?

Or do you simply mean that knowing kigo and the associated hon'i is essential for anyone who wants to read Japanese haiku? I'd tend to agree with you there, since this haiku seems to fall into place quite easily as a perfectly traditional Japanese haiku once one understands the hon'i.

Yet, as Peter mentions, it was written in English (one assumes) as an EL haiku for EL haiku audience. Or maybe it wasn't.


- Lorin

Yes, Fay would have written it in English first, unlike Dhugal who always writes in Japanese first. ;-)

re my statement, I was directing it towards kigo first and foremost in a generic manner. 

We in the West cannot duplicate kigo, but we can come up with respectful alternatives, as we do have a rich cultural history.  It might not go back as many thousands of years as Chinese culture, which the Japanese can utilise, but we have barely scraped the surface of what we can do in the West.

I would imagine that writers born in the Indian sub-continent probably have a better chance of creating near-kigo than we do because their culture goes further back than the West.

Alan

Hi Alan,
I'm not sure that the term kigo can be used "in a generic manner". If we use kigo to mean both kigo (Japanese, by definition) and the developing references to seasons and nature in EL haiku, we rather obscure the very real differences. I don't believe that an authentic EL 'kigo culture' can be "created", certainly not by us and not by anyone in the near future. If it is to be, it will develop, through the literature, over many generations.

" Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to afterthought and forethought . . ."

- T.S. Eliot, 'Little Gidding', Four Quartets

- Lorin

- Lorin