Moon and Finger 11 – the past part 3

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Keith.

The past is never dead…

In the previous two posts concerning the past and the past tense in haiku, we looked at first, the immediate past leading to a present moment of awareness on the part of the poet (and thus of the reader), and then, ways of marking a past that was often more distant. In almost all the examples, it was/is possible to connect that part of the verse that was expressed in the past, with a present moment: be it awareness, or a conversational question, or a seasonal or key word that we might take to approximate the present—even if that “present” is a period longer than ‘a present moment.’ As long as snow may remain on the ground, as it were.

I’m now going to look at quite a few haiku, and also senryu, from Japanese and from anglophone poets, where events are wholly in the past and the verse is all written in the past. Yet even so, they can be seen as re-lived moments as the poet, in the present, recollects, draws insight, and communicates them. And in the present for the reader who is reading them, and likewise reflecting.

1.
いにしへに踏みつぶしし蝸牛かな
inishie ni / fumi-tsubushishi / katatsumuri kana
—Uejima Onitsura
in the long-ago / I stepped on and crushed / a snail !
or:
Once in the past I stepped on a snail and crushed it
—tr Hiroaki Sato

Not only is there a clear marker of the distant past with “inishie” (“the long ago,” “bygone times” or “once upon a time”), the conjoined verbs fumi (“step”) and tsubu (the stem of tsubusu, “crush”) are each put in the past tense by the past tense auxiliary “shi”し which also attributes the action to the person, in this case the poet. Hence the first person. At the end we have the cutting-word “kana” that is not an auxiliary as “keri” can be, but nevertheless also marks an emphatic moment of emotion that invites the reader to pause, return, and contemplate this confession of the poet. In case of doubt, in Sato and Watson’s Eight Islands anthology this verse is preceded by a short preamble: “Remembering with feeling.” Although the text is in the past tense, a single continuous sentence with the exclamatory cut at the end, the “kana” can be seen as keeping the past moment ‘alive.’ The poet revisits the moment of long ago, and now confesses. Perhaps,  we could read this cut as  an “arrgh” moment instead of an “aha” moment?

2.
ある月夜 ことごとく籠の 虫を放つ
aru tsukiyo / kotogotoku kago no / mushi wo hanatsu
—Shiki
one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free
or:
One moonlit night / I released every last bug / From its cage
—tr Keene
or:
On a certain moonlit night I set all the insects in their cage free
—DeepL

The verse presents some problems for a translator. “Hanatsu” is the dictionary form of the verb, no tense. In classical Japanese, it appears that this form can be used to end a sentence definitively. There’s no kireji in this verse, so the ‘hanatsu’ does the work of closing the sentence, and in effect, is cut at the end.

There is no indication of person in this verse, as far as I can see. To assume “I” looks like an interpreter’s choice. That presents a difficulty in that the tenseless verb isn’t in the past, but would be a Damon-Runyon-like present: “one moonlit  night I release every last bug….”.

So I like it without the first person. In a way, “one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free” becomes timeless.  However, it is pretty clearly a recollection, so someone has to be having the recollection. Hence Keene’s translation, and DeepL’s. The verse documents a past moment. The sentence seems complete but nevertheless, across the implied cut at its end, inviting awareness and completion by the reader who on contemplation deduces the reason and emotion behind the release of the bugs, most likely singing crickets. Almost certainly (because there is a dated version of a related verse) Shiki wrote this while he was bedridden. I read into it that Shiki, conscious now of his approaching death, in his own ‘confinement, is retrospectively glad that he set the crickets free. Or is he also contemplating the future?  For if we take my provisional version “one moonlit night every single insect in the cage set free” —could Shiki have been numbering himself among the “bugs set free” on a moonlit night soon to come?  The haiku not in the past, but in the future?…

Another by Shiki using “aru”:
shirobotan aru yo no tsuki ni kuzurekeri
white peony / one night of the moon… (and) / crumbled—ah!
or:
The white peony; / At the moon, one evening, / It crumbled and fell.
—tr Blyth

This one has “aru:” “a certain…” “one” or “once upon…” and also “keri,” the functions of which, as a verb modifier for a completede action, and as a cut indicating sudden awareness, are by now well appreciated.  So there’s little room to escape  the past tense in this one, I suggest.  Again, we have a recollection wholly in the past. It is being revisited by the poet, which leads to an implied (and indeed, this time to a marked) moment of awareness: cf. in the last post, the Past Part 2, Shiki’s “a poppy blooming / and by the wind of that day / it was scattered.”

3.
春の山のうしろから烟が出だした
haru no yama no ushiro kara kemuri ga dedashita
—Hõsai Ozaki
spring mountain / back-of-from smoke (ga→subject marker) / began to emerge
or:
from behind / the spring mountain / smoke began to emerge
—tr. Susumu Takiguchi

Here, the key part for the tense is “dedashita” — the past tense form of the compound verb 出だす (dedasu), assembled from two elements: the stem of “deru,” to come out, emerge, and “dasu” meaning to begin to. Thus 出だす means to begin to emerge, and 出だした with -shi し and -ta た puts it in its past tense: began to emerge.

This is believed to be Hõsai Ozaki’s death poem. Although it is wholly in the past tense, a reader can suppose that the poet is imagining his future as the smoke (perhaps as he is cremated)… and that the “spring mountain” was there, is there, and will still be there. Rather a collector’s item.

4.
新年の 柩にあ ひぬ夜中頃
shinnen no hitsugi ni ahinu yonaka goro
—Shiki
new year / met with coffin / about midnight
or:
in the New Year / about midnight / I met a coffin
—tr. Blyth

The tense here is governed by the past perfective “nu” of ahinu, modifying the stem of “to meet.” If this was a real encounter, the coffin at midnight is suggestively linked with the death of the old year. It is difficult to manufacture any link or leakage to the present, as the whole tone of the senryu seems somewhat final. All the reader can do is to supply a present: that Shiki is telling us in the now about this recollection of the recent past; life continues in this new year.  Or, could it be that Shiki, the champion of realism, has composed a haiku entirely from his imagination?

5.
蝿打つまで蝿叩なかりし
hae utsu made haetataki nakarishi …
—Kawahigashi Hekigodõ / Hekigotō

This verse has now been covered in Orense’s close readings of it, to which are appended my comments from May’s Haiku of the Day, so is repeated here as a reminder that it is completely in the past as written:

until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter
or:
Until I hit the fly, the fly-swatter did not exist.
— tr. Makoto Ueda

In effect, the reader is invited to complete it:
“until I hit the fly there was no fly-swatter… ”
“…but there is now!”

Which reminds me of another verse, entirely in the past tense:

6.
Two flies locked in love
Were hit by a newspaper
And died together
—Richard Wright
Haiku: This Other World: The Last Poetry of Richard Wright

This time written by a poet in English, and indubitably wholly in the past tense. A narrative, to boot. Season word, continuous sentence… There’s no obvious invitation for a reader to complete the poem in the present, unless we respond “Aww.” An Aww moment instead of an Aha! moment? Otherwise we are driven either to Orense’s framework that any haiku, in whatever tense it’s written is essentially and always speech in the present. Wright is telling us about it. Or to the idea that any memory of the past occurs in the present as a mental event, the poet’s and the reader’s.

7.
ポケットからキャラメルと木の葉を出した
poketto kara / kyarameru to / konoha o dashita
—Kawahigashi Hekigodõ / Hekigotō
pocket from / caramel and / tree-leaf took out
or
from my pocket
I took out a caramel
and a leaf
or:
He took a piece of caramel and a leaf out of his pocket.
—tr. DeepL

One of Hekigotō’s later haiku. Here the tense in English is unequivocally the past: “dashita” is the past perfect everyday form of 出す (dasu – to take out) with its ending た, “-ta.” There’s no indication of becoming aware, and nothing to indicate whether this was in the last few minutes, or a story from the more distant past. It’s a clip of narrative expressed as a single sentence (with three separate noun images). No cutting word and no clear semantic cut (just an inversion).

The use of two gairaigo or foreign loan-words, pocketto and kyarameru, together with a rather formal poetic Japanese word for leaf, konoha, and the plain form of “I took out” lends a little quirkiness to this verse, the resonance of which arrives on contemplation: gold-brown caramel, the leaf now clearly autumn (Hekigotō valued fresh encounter with the season rather than inherited formulae from classic saijiki). Caramel made by heating sugar until it browns, the leaf by the heat of the sun for a season. The poet sensitive to nature has thought to preserve the leaf awhile in his pocket along with the sweet; the sweet and the leaf are things of transience—and so, one may add, is the poet. The poet’s recollection and telling us about it, and the reader’s contemplation and decoding of it, are mental events in the present.

9
戦争が廊下の奥に立つてゐた
sensō ga rōka no oku ni tatte iwata
—Hakusen Watanabe (1913-1969)
war / in the innermost corridor / it stood
or:
War stood / at the end of the corridor
—tr Ban’ya Natsuishi
or:
The War / in the dark at the end of the hall / it stood
– tr. Dhugal J. Lindsay
or:
war was standing / at the end / of the hallway
—tr. Alex Fyffe

“Senso” is a combination of war and conflict/struggle. “Oku” is inner part or depth. The tense is determined by the perfective aspect marker つ and た (ta), the past tense ending. The past perfect, as Natsuishi and Lindsay have rendered it.  The full breakdown is given in Haiku of the Day of May 31.

It is a famous haiku in Japan and beyond. As a one time lesser habitué of the corridors of power, this verse speaks to me. Wars are begun in prestigious offices these days, not in hot blood in the field. That war, World War 2, began at home for Japanese poets. Hakusen Watanabe (the pen-name of Takenori Watanabe) was among those poets arrested in 1940 for “home front” and anti-war poetry. Indeed for him, war stood in the depths of the corridor. As it stands today in the offices where power is seated.

For our purposes this verse is perhaps the closest we can get to an acclaimed, fairly modern haiku by a Japanese master that is quite definitely all in the historic past. The question is whether it is sealed off from the present, or does anything “leak through” to now? There is no marker nor cutting word for “sudden awareness” in the present moment, scarcely anything except that the verse ends, to invite the reader to meditate. Yet meditate in the present moment, we do. And we arrive at Watanabe’s awareness and insight when he penned it.

For the rest of his life Watanabe wrote in private and refused to publish. His former students rectified that on his death in 1969.

10.
In the beginning
he was just pretending
to sound grumpy
— John Stevenson, Frogpond 45.1 Winter 2021/22

One of my favourite examples. This single-sentence, one-theme senryu is wholly expressed in the past. But “in the beginning,” plus the cutoff at its end, invites the reader to supply the ending, the missing part, the juxtaposition, the present, the denouement: “but now, he really is grumpy!”  An act of co-creation, in the present.

11.
gone from the woods
the bird I knew
by song alone
— Paul O. Williams
Frogpond 12:2 (1989)

The poet’s tribute verse to the late Nick Virgilio (1928-1989). The verse is expressed in the past, the bird has gone. However, use of the adjectival past participle makes the state of absence timeless (like “an old olive tree / listed / among the dead” that we had last week).  Once gone, it has gone, and it is gone now, and forever.

12.
I whispered of death
one winter night in a voice
we both never knew
—Raymond Roseliep, Haiku Journal 1977

Wholly in the past: but wait…at least one of the interlocutors remains alive, and at the time the verse was written, is telling us about it.

13.
I turned round to see
if my shadow was still there
it, too, had turned round
—James Kirkup
Blithe Spirit vol 7:3 1997
Picked as favourite haiku by Yasuhiko Shigemoto, a Japanese stamp of approval. Again, written wholly in the past tense.

14.
the old concrete pipe
we called the tunnel of love
first kiss
—Louise Hopewell
Failed Haiku vol 9 issue 100

Although, if you wish, you may suppose that the old concrete pipe is still there today, or even that the poet is physically revisiting the site, or only now getting her first kiss there, that’s up to you: there is nothing to put the whole verse definitively in anything but the past tense. Yet it is clearly a personal recollection, of which the poet is now ‘speaking’ to us, or to old friends. Full of amusing irony as well as nostalgia, and a thought-inducing comparison of the youthful “tunnel of love” with what is now an “old concrete pipe.”  This contemplation and drawing of inference or insight is an awareness, a mental event happening in the present moment.

15.
the mother my summer died
—Susan Antolin
Mariposa #49, Winter Issue 2023

A Touchstone Award winner.  Written in the past simple perfect tense.  A recollection, happening as the poet speaks her grief and enduring confusion. A present (and continuous) mental event.

And lastly, if you grant me an indulgence after all that work:

16.
the girl next door
how sweet she was
had I noticed
—Keith Evetts, Asahi Haikuist Network, 4 March 2022
This is entirely in the past… but only in the now am I recollecting and musing on it to reach an ironic insight, and telling you about it. This is our ‘present moment.’

In conclusion:

The subject of the past in haiku and senryu, from classic Japanese masterly precedents to the modern era, and to verses in English, has been explored in three consecutive parts, working from examples.

Part 1 considered classical haiku, that some have translated to English in a simple past imperfect or perfect, where the action is in the immediate past—the immediately preceding moments—and is completed. These can generally be rendered in our present perfect “has been…” They end in a present moment of awareness. The auxiliary verb modifier “keri” for the recent past, a completed action, and simultaneously a cutting word indicating sudden awareness, is often encountered.  On scrutiny, therefore, they can be seen as a completed action leading to the contiguous present moment in a broad sense.

Part 2 moved on to haiku that have some other marker for the past, sometimes in addition to keri, sometimes without keri.  The exclamatory “kana” is sometimes used.  When keri is used, it is still a marker for a present moment of ‘awareness,’ but from context or the tense of earlier verbs the action may now be in a longer or more distant past. To render it into English a past tense verb, or a formulation such as ‘long ago’ or ‘that day when,’ seems right. But when keri (or, at a pinch, ‘‘kana’) is not used to flag awareness, we may have nothing in the text that indicates arrival at ‘a present moment’ except our instinct or our conditioning

In the absence of a definite marker or clue in the text, if we feel that a present moment is necessary, even obligatory, in haiku, we have to hang the argument on either:

— a kigo or keyword image that is taken to be ‘present’ and acts as a frame or a prompt for a phrase in the past, a memory or historical reference;
or :
— the position that it is the very act of recollecting that is ‘the present moment,’ when what is recollected and written is all in the past. Revisiting the moment, if you like. Re-living it. Re-evaluating it.

This seems notably the case in several haiku in English.

Part 3 today brings in haiku and senryu in Japanese and ELH that are clearly all in the past and a past tense. In contemporary Japanese verses ‘keri’ has all but been relegated to the archaic, except where a classic ‘feel’ is sought (e.g. “I cleaned the house like a matador” in Pt. 1). The past verb modifier is usually the た (ta) form.  In English verses we do not have to take into account translation, of course.

If these verses too are to be seen as ‘in the present moment’ to meet a wish for some unifying principle then we are left with ‘the present moment’ as either:

— the present moment of recollecting/revisiting/re-living the past, or even being in essence invited to complete the verse in the present.
or:
— the present moment of enunciation i.e. the poet ‘is now speaking’ to us of the past
or:
—the moment, the flash, of awareness, of the insight itself, that occurred in the poet’s ‘present’ in experiencing and writing, and occurs in the reader’s ‘present’ on reading.  A memory, and for that matter a thought of the future, are mental events happening now.

Naturally, editors are of course entitled to have their own preferences where tense is concerned.  The bulk of verses in English are written as if in the present, in a present tense.  That lends freshness and immediacy.  Yet there is abundant evidence both from tradition and from current practice to show that it is not the case that haiku *must* be written in the present, and *cannot* be written about the past, in a past tense, even wholly in the past tense. For in these examples we have arrived at a present moment of recollection, awareness, communication, reception and insight nevertheless, whether it has taken centuries, a lifetime, a season, a night of sleep, or the minute it takes for a horse to have just eaten a roadside flower.

—Keith Evetts

Footnote:

Again, my thanks to Shoko Kanenari for proof reading.

Well, those are my findings, based on studying what’s actually “out there,” with an open mind on theory. Now shared with you.  If you spot any errors, or make different determinations from the material supplied, do comment with reasons and evidence.

A comment I added in Part 1, drawn upon here:

けり (keri) is no longer used in everyday speech or in haiku,  having been replaced as auxiliary by the modern verb ending た (-ta) to indicate past completed action. But keri had its other role as a cutting word, the ‘moment of awareness’ – Ah! As did かな (kana) -Exclam!

In their beginnings, English haiku often tried to mimic the effect of keri or kana with words such as ah, oh, lo, or exclamation marks. These were not ‘wrong’, but clunky. More recent haiku in English generally avoid these explicit signals. Moreover, it is the fashion now to avoid punctuation, which may well have deprived us of something useful.

Nothing as far as I know has directly replaced keri or kana as cutting- words that signal awareness. Modern Japanese haiku have evolved from grammatical markers towards structure and context as ways of indicating or producing awareness in the reader, rather than devices for “and now I realise…ah!” This may stem in part from Shiki’s inheritors (here are the real and present images → discover their meaning → draw the insight). But also there is “the cut” which has morphed from specific markers to clear or subtle semantic cuts. Connecting across the cut is a moment of active, live awareness.  There is plenty of scope in anglophone haiku. We have line breaks, punctuation, semantic or grammatical ‘cuts’, juxtaposition by break or by preposition, white space, brackets, various means of distinguishing parts of a verse by manipulation; and sometimes an abrupt ending, or a hanging one, that invites the reader in to contemplate and sometimes to co-create by supplying the intended ‘missing part’ that completes a verse. I have been collecting forms of ‘the cut’ in anglophone haiku for a number of years, and a piece is in preparation, though it is unlikely to get a slot for some months.

A few weeks ago, Alan Summers kindly posted some of his published verses in the comments, that make use of a past tense.  When this post appears, I’ll add them in the comments below to see how, in the light of these three posts, you read the written tense and the overall sensed tense of them.

There’s a poll this week on the three posts that considered use of the past and the past tense within the tradition and in anglophone haiku and senryu now.  See below.

Please take the anonymous poll concerning use of the past tense.  It covers these three posts, so it’s a bit longer than usual.

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether the poems do what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve learned. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.

Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.

PLEASE TAKE THE POLL

Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:

Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.

Introducing the hosts:

Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.

Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).

A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.

Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.  Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group.   Married with five grown children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short haiku bio is here.

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