Moon and Finger 5: Beanpoles and Ritual, Shasei and Shiki

Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the moon, 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 Evetts.

Independence Day: Beanpoles and Ritual

As this is my first substantive post for this feature, perhaps a word of introduction from me, too.

Orense is a racehorse. I am a carthorse. But we graze happily in the same field. I find Orense’s over-arching analyses thrilling for their scope, their grasp, their penetration, and their magisterial drafting. I can only describe them as compelling.  I plod along, trying to keep up.

A naturalist in boyhood, natural scientist by education, I tend to take an empirical approach. I like to see what’s actually out there. I like fieldwork.  As to haiku, I think that the genre develops mainly through its body of accumulated practice. Theories, which I love as much as anyone, try to make some coherent sense of practice, they suggest tests, they suggest experiment, they suggest challenges.

I can tell you our background conversations are synergic, fruitful, sparky and a whole lot of fun.

—–

This began as a short supplementary post for Independence Day, but acquired a broader scope.  Grab a coffee and a Danish, and relax for twenty minutes.

When I was posted in New York, I used to enjoy Independence Day. Our UK Mission to the UN was based on Third a few blocks away from UNHQ, but as members of the Security Council, we had a nice suite of offices overlooking the East River from an elevated floor of the UN building. There was even a fridge. With most of the diplomatic corps out “fulfilling their representational functions” at parties, the offices were deserted on the evening of the Fourth of July and so I would invite a UN friend to join me there, quaff dry martinis or Pimms, and watch the spectacular fireworks over the river.

As this is the Fourth of July, I’d like to explain why the verse below caught my attention last year. Not because of personal memories, I hasten to make clear.

giving the beans
a pole to climb
Independence Day
—Susan Yavaniski
tsuri-doro issue 30 Nov/Dec 2025
& Red Moon Anthology 2025 “turtle dreams”

I hope that Susan will forgive me for revealing that she is not an enthusiastic waver of flags. But she is a keen gardener. So what could be more natural than attending to the young runner beans on Independence Day, as the best thing to do, and routinely noting that down?

And behold, we have a fine haiku! From the young runner beans it has a recognisable season, early summer, even a very well-known date. It is from the notebook, from life. It is all true: authentic. It is in plain unadorned words that can be understood pretty universally. It stands out for being original. It doesn’t indulge morbid melancholy or other emotion. The poet’s ego is not thrust upon us.  It isn’t a virtuous haikuist’s routine genuflection to a beauty of nature. We have humankind in nature, though. We have a clear semantic cut, so that “Independence Day” becomes more than just a timestamp. Thus juxtaposed with the beans and the beanpole, it becomes an internal comparison across the cut.  The verse is tightly written with no redundancies.  It reads and sounds well.  I think that Shiki would have approved.

In most countries, public celebration of a national day is seen as a way of binding a nation together. Confucius would nod. He became known for advocating ritual and ceremony in government, religious observance, and every aspect of family and social life. The way to bring order and stability to the world, and to reduce friction, was through a society’s forms of ritual, or “li.” Such means of building and binding a new utopia are a main thrust of the Analects. Not only in Eastern thought. Governments, religions, and societies everywhere do the same.

Thus in Susan’s haiku I can see considerable depth as well as fine insight. Independence Day is a pole given by the national authorities for beans to climb. Something for the people to bind on to. Something to grow them on upwards in a controlled, directed way. The beans can be read across to the populace, the beanpole for a flagpole.

Thinking on, the beans are given their crutch, are fed and watered, to be harvested. The pole attracts them and makes it easier to see and pick them. There is some quizzical irony in that this is linked with independence. Food for thought, O beans!

For all the above reasons, including that subtle spice of haikai humour or irony, Susan’s classic verse went immediately into my file of favourites where it has given much pleasurable meditation.

Susan responds:

These insightful comments pretty much cover the myriad feelings and thoughts that gave birth to this verse: Fourth of July as Confucian “ li,” or, as I was thinking, Roman “bread and circuses.” As an environmentally-minded gardener who enjoys peace and quiet, I am no fan of the illegal fireworks that go off into the wee hours in my neighborhood, for the weeks around the holiday, polluting the water and soil, frightening the animals, and sending veterans of war into post-traumatic flashbacks. Alas, the authorities indulge the populace, and all I can do is tend my garden plot, collect the fireworks debris that falls into the gardens, and patiently wait for all to return to normal.
So yes, the beans are the populace… and also my own refuge from the mayhem.

——

From the Notebook: Shasei and Shiki

I’d like to use Susan’s beanpole as a prop for some comments about Shiki and shasei, an approach you all know as “sketch from life,” that maybe has become controversial.  写生 is a compound expression.  The dictionary entry for 写生 is “sketching or drawing from nature; portrayal; description.” 生 means natural; as it is; unedited; unprocessed. 写 on its own has also come to mean ‘photo.’  I prefer the term “drawn from life” rather than “sketch from life,” as the word “drawn” in English has an additional meaning that I think is closer to Shiki’s intentions: extracted from life, rather than simply copied-exactly-from-life-and-that’s-it.

Before getting into that, here are a few more companion verses to Susan’s, that also have that ring of authenticity and apparent simplicity that comes with “drawing from life”—from the notebook.

生きて世に人の年忌や初茄子
ikite yo ni hito no nenki ya hatsunasubi
–Takai Kito
still alive in this world
attending someone’s memorial service—
first eggplant
年忌 (nenki) is a Buddhist memorial observance for the dead

Shiki used this one as an example in his haiku manual for students, of which more later.

うかうかと常正月や池の鴨
uka-uka to tsune shôgatsu ya ike no kamo
—Kobayashi Issa
as usual
heedless of the New Year!
pondful of ducks

Issa’s choice of うかうか    (uka-uka : inattentively, carelessly, paying no heed) might also remind you subliminally of the sound of quacking.

鶯や餅に糞する縁の先
uguisu ya / mochi ni fun suru / en no saki
—Bashõ
ah the bush warbler!
doing poops on the rice-cakes
at the verandah’s edge

And a couple in this summer’s Modern Haiku 57:2:

a cabbage
for the coop
New Year’s Day
—Denise Fontaine-Pincince

the bareness
of rose bushes
Valentine’s Day
—Ravi Kiran

The main point I’d like to make for consideration is that a haiku in plain words, based on a real and present experience—a shasei—should like any other haiku contain insight, or something that goes beyond notes recorded in a notebook, to lend depth, originality and what for want of a less elusive word I can describe only as “haiku spirit.” Haruo Shirane writes: “If haiku is to rise to the level of serious poetry, literature that is widely respected and admired, that is taught and studied, commentated on, that can have impact on other non-haiku poets, then it must have a complexity that gives it depth and that allows it to both focus on and rise above the specific moment or time.” Agree?

It’s a result partly of the poet’s selectivity, to begin with.  All of these verses take an observation and combine it with a ceremony to generate an insight.  A taking and combining that reveals perception by the poet; not simply the shutter of an automated surveillance  camera.   From a sombre ceremony to the first eggplant, a delicacy of the new season, without batting an eyelid—it’s all part of being alive. New Year’s Day is all the same to the ducks as they drift across the pond: what are we making a fuss about? Bashõ’s verse invites the inference that it is the leftover rice-cakes from the Japanese New Year that are being defiled by the early spring uguisu that cares not for ceremonials (more complex, and—as with his kawazu in the “old pond”—brings down to earth the elegant courtly kigo of the bush warbler). Meanwhile the hens get a treat as their owner marks the fresh year with an act of kindness, a resolution to be considerate. And while the rose bushes might already be bare elsewhere in February, they bloom in India where Ravi lives and writes: so we have the enticing thought that they’ve been stripped for romantic bouquets, and  the ironic thought that Valentine’s Day may have a downside for the roses, even that it may not deliver the true love that it’s supposed to.  All that’s left on the bare rosebushes are the thorns.

All of these are “drawn from life,” but additional meaning within them is generated by the selection and combination of the elements, beyond a mere copy.  All these verses strike me as fresh and true.

Susan’s verse, I suggest, has greater depth than these. It deals with Independence Day, in a dominant power, in the context of rituals in general for more than a millennium. A grand insight. Yet it is based on a humble observation in a garden, a seasonal ritual for any gardener who grows runner beans.

Shiki’s realism

It is often (but of course, not always) the case that a haiku written from real and present observation has, as well as freshness, an originality and authenticity that a verse written primarily from the imagination (or a prompt) may lack. This was a main plank in Shiki’s case for realism.

Let’s look closer at what Shiki actually wrote.

In his manual for haiku students, Haikai Taiyõ (Essentials of Haikai, 1895) I was surprised to find that a search for the full term 写生, shasei, yielded only one hit—and that was a quote from a painter.

His view of what could go into a haiku was much broader than often portrayed by ELH sources:

“When comparing composition and language, there is no fixed hierarchy of superiority or inferiority. Some excel in the beauty of their composition, while others excel in the beauty of their language” wrote Shiki in Part 3.

“First, in design, there are forms that are vigorous, gentle, grand, delicate, elegant yet simple, graceful, profound, plain, solemn, light and lively, ingenious and striking, understated, complex, simple, serious, humorous and whimsical—and if we were to distinguish them further, there would likely be countless variations”

“Themes can be subjective or objective. A subjective theme describes the state of one’s mind, while an objective theme describes, as they are, the objective things reflected in one’s mental image.…. Designs can be natural or human. Human designs depict all aspects of human affairs, while natural designs depict things other than human affairs, such as astronomy, geography, living things, minerals, etc. None of the above distinctions are superior or inferior to any other. All of the above distinctions are merely relative distinctions. Therefore, their boundaries should not be strictly defined.”

“Themes can be natural or human-related. Artistic expression of human affairs refers to the depiction of all matters pertaining to humanity, while artistic expression of nature refers to the depiction of all things outside of human affairs….None of the distinctions outlined above imply superiority or inferiority. All are merely relative. Therefore, their boundaries should not be strictly defined.”

I am growing to like Shiki all the more for his aversion to  pigeonholes.  Continuing:

“There are two approaches to composing haiku: relying on imagination and relying on realism. Beginners generally tend to rely on imagination. When one’s imagination is exhausted, one must rely on realism. Realism encompasses both human affairs and nature, as well as the accidental and the deliberate. “

“If a poet leans too heavily toward imagination, they easily fall into banality and find it difficult to capture nature. If they lean too heavily toward realism, they easily fall into mediocrity and find it difficult to achieve the extraordinary.”

And for the most advanced:

One must fuse imagination and realism to produce a grand literature that is neither purely imaginary nor purely realistic. Those who are overly fixated on imagination or overly rigid in their adherence to realism are, of course, far from the mark.

Shiki criticises literary descriptions based on stock phrases and abstract notions, rather than real and present observation of things. He’s critical of explicit emotional declarations. But this is not to deny any mediation via the author. For Shiki, realism is not mere description but disciplined seeing: the poet should capture things as they truly are, observe with freshness, accuracy, and sincerity. Haiku poets should avoid forced cleverness and instead cultivate senses that respond directly to what is seen in everyday life and on walkabouts.   But as you see from the above, at this stage in his thinking he does not want to see realism unmediated by the imagination—the mind—otherwise it would be likely to result in the banal and mediocre.  Realism is a commitment to truth over convention. It restores haiku to the actual world, grounding it in nature, seasons, and daily life.  Imagination (or “fantasy”) detached from observation leads to “nonsense” and “ornamentation without substance.” Imagination clarifies or intensifies what is seen, it does not replace it.  In a process that is secondary, imagination may deepen or interpret the real.  A poet may also seek “elegance” but the real should remain.

Subsequent to Haikai Taiyõ, Shiki developed a little further the concept of shasei, not just in haiku but in all forms of written literature (as well as being a major reformer of waka, he was interested in prose and novels, and had tried to write a “fantasy novel”). In Jojibun, “Narrative Text” or “Descriptive Prose,” also published in the newspaper Nihon five years later, he writes: “One should not embellish words or resort to exaggeration; one should simply depict things as they are, exactly as they appear.” And: “It is a method of creating interesting writing by depicting the things and events that appear in the world, whether in nature or in human life.”

This is not photographic copying. Observation disciplines imagination, subjective truth may emerge from the scene grounded in reality, from things as they “appear,” the poet seeks vividness and life, not mere factual recording, with feeling arising from faithfully rendered reality.  The aim is to create ‘interesting writing.’ Not just to say that “behind the star jasmine there’s a round brass doorknob ” (looking at our front door at the moment and wondering what to write).  The difference, I suggest, is the difference between your holiday snapshots and a thoughtfully-composed artistic photograph of nature, or a shot where a street photographer captures something ordinary but remarkable, a haiku-like “extra layer.”

In short, some insight, some realisation, some suggestivity, some “surplus meaning,”  some added beauty, some humorous surprise…something else should be present in the resulting verse.

In 1902, two years after Jojibun, Shiki wrote in his diary Six Foot Sickbed: “Shasei is a vital element in both painting and descriptive writing: one might say that without it, the creation of either would be impossible. The sketch from life has been used in Western painting from early times….In Japan, however, the sketch from life has always been looked down on, so that the development of painting was hampered, and neither prose, poetry, nor anything else progressed … even today nine out of ten …reject it as very shallow. The truth is that it is imagination which is shallow and has nowhere near the variety of the sketch from life.”

None of which gainsays what he wrote about realism and imagination earlier, I contend. He’s simply defending his position.

Shiki made further comments in articles for the journal Hototogisu.  I don’t yet have texts.  Research never ends.  You have to write the article. But it seems that the concept of shasei became twisted in all directions after his death. The conservative Kyoshi, who inherited the editorship of Hototogisu, held that 客観写生 —kyakkan shasei, “objective realism” is vital, but also endorsed imagination and feeling as essential to haiku’s spirit.  In “praise of nature’s beauty” haiku is not merely a sketch but a lyrical response to nature, where the poet’s sensibility—aware, elegance, emotional tone—is essential. His rival Hekigotō went the other way: a pure record of perception, devoid of convention, sentimentality, lyricism, even of imaginative mediation. Liberated, eventually, from other traditions too—the form, the kigo…

And so we come to our era in English Language Haiku. The thread of shasei somehow became entangled with Zen, first in Blyth, then in the influential work of Kerouac that appealed to a generation. The archetypic shasei poem being Shiki’s:

濡足で雀のありく廊下かな
nureashi de suzume no ariku rōka kana
with wet feet a sparrow hops along the verandah (or hall or corridor)
—which Blyth regarded as the model haiku, the tiny wet clawprints on the floor giving, he averred, a great sense of transience and impermanence. This poem was picked up by Japhy in Dharma Bums (“A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing“), and by its author Kerouac in his definitions of American Haiku (“Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella“).

Did I hear “Cool, man!” ?

In the period 2005-2016, the continuing influence of Shiki and shasei (and also of the Zen view) was being felt as uncomfortably restrictive by some leading anglophone haikuists and essayists.  For example, Richard Gilbert: “A main element of constraint acting on contemporary haiku composition has emanated from Shiki’s nineteenth century western-realist-inspired compositional guidelines.”  I suspect that the key word in this is “emanated.”  For shasei had already got out of Shiki’s hands and into those of Kyoshi and others, and later became part of the ping-pong of academic literary criticism.

Just as in Shiki’s day, and for that matter Bashõ before him, and other schools before them, anglophone poets evidently began to feel that formulaic, conventional haikai/haiku, particularly shasei, were running out of road.  They wanted that poetic trickery, or some perhaps wanted more scope for English poetics; or surrealism; or shock, or something in between.  Some wanted a return to Bashõ’s zoka. There has been debate among Japanese poets also, including tanka poets where the idea of unembellished verses and realism may be harder to take.

Shiki has his defenders, too: it’s worth reading “Masaoka Shiki and the Origins of Shasei” by Charles Trumbull, in Juxta 2, 2016.  After looking at the arguments over shasei under the heading “Shiki’s Legacy (p.112 onwards) he concludes “The upshot of all this is, I think, that Shiki is getting a bad rap.”  Defenders also in Japan:  Kaneko Tõta, pinning the blame on Kyoshi’s “objective shasei” says: “It has been a grave mistake on the part of English language haiku poets to believe for so long that Shiki required ‘objective’ sketches of nature. This misunderstanding has nurtured half-a-century of haiku poets.” (Views; Galmitz, 2012, p.91)

I wonder whether the difficulties arise more from having the label of convenience “shasei” to go at, than from reading what Shiki actually wrote.

It was not so much that Shiki’s ideas were rejected outright in the twenty-first century by shasei’s ELH critics, but that it was time to draw on other inspirations.  To loosen the editorial shackles and allow for moving on, for experimentation.  In fact, as we noted in Orense’s intoduction to this feature, and in my introduction to May’s Haiku of the Day, the supposed “rules” constraining anglophone haiku these days do not correspond with the full range of verses that the greatest haiku poets of the past actually wrote.  Leaving aside the Anything Goes school, our literary haiku horizons today seem much narrower than those when Bashõ,  Buson, Issa, Chiyo and Shiki were writing haiku.   Restoring them would be good start.

Do you think that haikai or haiku must be flexible enough to develop, or that it must remain confined to a rigid, classic form in which all the conventional themes are already covered, repeatedly, and it is ever harder to find even a tiny variation that is original? Doomed to stagnation and the back room of the library.  Isn’t the genre broad and generous enough to allow for new as well as old approaches to live side by side?  As long as they can trace a shared heritage and continue to produce good haiku.  And what is a good haiku? That may be more a matter of visceral feeling, of “haiku spirit,”  than anything else—as hard to define as it is to catch the moon’s reflection in a fishing net.

— Keith Evetts

——-

Key takeaways:

From Shiki:

—Shiki’s shasei is more about drawing from a lived, real and present experience than photocopying it

—direct lived experiences can make for fresher and often more original, authentic verses

—unnecessary exaggeration or embellishment risks weakening a haiku

—but a plain snapshot of a real scene does not of itself make a good haiku

—mediation and imagination of the poet is not discouraged, particularly in the process of selecting for composition.

—Shiki was harsh on banality, mediocrity, repeated tropes; strong on originality.  (Who would disagree?)

From this post:

—there must be some insight (or some something!) from the resonance of the images or other recorded things to generate wider meaning.

—Shiki (who did make further statements focusing on shasei after Haikai Taiyõ and Jojibun) may have been unfairly tarnished by his inheritors, not least those who assumed a much stricter view of shasei than he did; including the progenitors of anglophone haiku

—Shiki’s approach still works well to produce good verses, as demonstrated

—That one approach can be good should not rule out other approaches.  There’s more than one way to write haiku.

—there should be room for haiku to develop if it’s not to become fossilized

What do you think? Please do take the anonymous poll — we need the data, as well as your observations in comments below.

Haikai Taiyō:

I haven’t found an English version on the web, but I’ll post a translation of Shiki’s Essentials of Haikai in a week’s time. There are many things of interest in it. Meanwhile the must-read book on Shiki, freely accessible in the THF library, is Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works by Janine Beichman.

At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 5 questions).

It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. 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.

Take this week’s 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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