We asked Jamie Edgecombe to write an analysis of a haiku using the ontological concept of metaxy currently under discussion by various philosophers and increasingly applied to literary works (see Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light, by John F. Desmond). We believe this tradition of metaxy, which comes down from Plato, provides crucial insights into poetry, including haiku. -- Ed.
The Poem
kaidō ni shōji ni shimete kami hitoe
highway [preposition denoting on, to or along] / paper doors shut / paper single sheet
Kigo: shōji (winter)
Translation by Mark and Kodaira from The Essence of Modern Haiku, Manajin, Tokyo, p.218:
along the high road,
sliding doors closed to the world,
but one page away
Translation by author
on the old highway
shōji are shut –
a single sheet of paper
Critical Analysis
First, to identify the components of the haiku: the prepositional phrase initiates the base, which is completed by the image of shut shoji, while the image of the sheet of paper, of which the shōji is constructed, forms the superposed image.
The house , whose walls are formed by the shoji, is a habitation along, or situated on a road. Mark’s and Kodaira’s translation makes reference to the ‘world’ surrounding the house. My own translation stresses the house-over-against the world: perception arises within and against this world. This stress on situation – of the house’s being in the midst of the world – receives an unexpected analogue in the emphasis on the thinness of the door.
In the base, the gap between exterior and interior is definitive. And yet, with the superposition of the single line, the poem invites imaginative participation in the space between – the metaxy. The walls are walls, but are only paper thin, the interior life of the house is barely separated from the world beyond and around that life.
Life in the metaxy is equivocal: there are constant and varied horizons all about the bodily-located psyche. These horizons can be engaged imaginatively, as by this poem, and the going-out and return journeys can illuminate the tensions of the metaxy, just as these tensions illuminate the “reality” of the scene. The shōji are paper doors, but become symbols of the tension between the objective (here, synonymous with the immanent) and subjective (which is both imaginal, but not removed from the world).
The structure of traditional haiku requires that both section “reverse” the other: informed by metaxic tensions comprising the middle, each part echoes the other while the overlap creates an impossible unity – impossible, that is, except for the act of participation that the poem, structure and diction, makes possible.
Here, the superposed line, ‘kami hitoe,’ also has its own polarities that, when brought into the dynamic complex of the poem’s structure, reveal further depths to the seeming simple act of observing the paper door. It is an idiom in common speech that denotes a degree of difference, due to the thinness of a single sheet of paper (kami - paper, hitoe - a single sheet). It would be instantly recognisable as such by a native reader. This choice of idiomatic phrase is significant because it directs the reader towards the 'language' dimension of the poem's dynamics, without reducing the ‘single sheet of paper,’ which it denotes, to an abstract afloat in the cultural memory. This line further illuminates, within the context of the poem’s tensions, the thinness of the paper and also the thinness of the divide between language, the cultural memory and that which it represents.
The way in which the verb ‘shut’ (written in the ‘te’ form in the original; a verb form that denotes the process of the verb, similar to the continuous tenses) emphasises an act of volition (the doors have been shut / or are being shut), and that reveals the boundary between exterior and interior to be even ‘thinner.’ The interior life of the house (its inhabitants), have the choice as to whether the doors, the symbol of their lives’ separation from the poetic subject, the stranger walking the street, are shut. There is the intuitive possibility of the barrier opening, of the dissolution of the external / internal sensible dualism. However, such an act wouldn’t prevent the road from being outside, or beyond, the house’s interiority. None-the-less, such speculation is invited, but of course, it is imaginary.
The choice of kaidō in the original is interesting because it implies an old, and therefore rural, highway. The word was archaic even in 1966 and was seldom used for highways.
I have not yet dealt with the kigo aspect of the phrase “paper doors.” As kigo, the phrase is not obviously of the natural world. And yet, the fact that the paper doors are shut (as opposed to open – which would indicate hot weather), implies winter.
The poet’s subtle combination of words creates a vivid scene. Kaidō, in connection with the kigo, places the poetic subject on a harsh wintery road in the countryside (adding to a sense of desolation and silence), and thus makes the boundary that separates him from shelter and warmth all the more prominent and definitive, despite its thinness. Again, the paper thinness of the walls is at once able to be penetrated, but also obstinate.
The kigo then broadens the sense of the poetic subject’s journey by places them within the cycles of the natural world, but through a symbol of semi-permanence. His journey is finite, but the world is not; just as he must walk on and leave the house.
Finally, as the journey into the metaxic tension arises from this subtle juxtaposition, the reader’s journey towards narrative unity moves through the difference between the closed door, facing out towards the highway, and the materials of the doors themselves. Above all, the metaxic journey respects boundaries and differences, including the universal difference between this moment and all possible moments, this moment and some visionary resolution of the tension that informs life in the middle.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Gilbert on Shiki: the original "image"
Richard Gilbert’s discussion of Shiki’s haiku about the wet sparrow (see Simply Haiku #1 link to the right of the blog) repays close rereading.
Towards the end of the piece, Gilbert writes: “Blyth’s translation proves to be a more powerful poem in English than our own—yet the misreading of the original image cannot be ignored.” Rhetorically, this may throw the baby out with the bathwater (we may revisit this argument in a later blog), but the phrase “original image” needs comment.
By “original image” Gilbert refers to what is rendered by words about a wet sparrow. His research into Shiki’s life suggests to him that this poem is a response to the fate of his good friend, who was 18 when he died.
The “original image” would refer not to an “image” in the poem – the sparrow image – but the image of the poet’s friend. Gilbert uses the word “original” a few sentences later in the phrase “original authorial intentions.” It is hard to know how one can be sure of such intentions, but Gilbert’s use of the phrase does seem in sync with his use of the word “original” in “original image.”
I would like to suggest that the autobiographical context of a poem is hypothetical by nature, yet there is no reason to consider it irrelevant. Haiku simply do prompt narrative interpretations. Other factors must be weighed as well in an act of interpretation.
For me, the “original image” in Shiki’s haiku is that of sparrow tracks that fade. By “original” I don’t here refer to a point in time but a point in the interpretive process. This “original image” is not literal; it arises in the act of interpretation from the “gap” between the parts of the poem – the fundamental “cut” in the poem. As Gilbert argues elsewhere, haiku feature kiri or “cut”; I would argue that this is because haiku focuses on the experience of the “metaxy,” or the cut/gap “between” (between the ungrounded, free particular – the sparrow, the sparrow track – and the no-thingness of being that transcends each particular being).
The experience of the metaxy is often just that: experience of fading prints, of traces of particular being absorbed by the ungrounded ground of being. As it turns out, both Blyth and Gilbert read the haiku metaxically, whether it is a veranda or a hall where the sparrow leaves its footprints.
Towards the end of the piece, Gilbert writes: “Blyth’s translation proves to be a more powerful poem in English than our own—yet the misreading of the original image cannot be ignored.” Rhetorically, this may throw the baby out with the bathwater (we may revisit this argument in a later blog), but the phrase “original image” needs comment.
By “original image” Gilbert refers to what is rendered by words about a wet sparrow. His research into Shiki’s life suggests to him that this poem is a response to the fate of his good friend, who was 18 when he died.
The “original image” would refer not to an “image” in the poem – the sparrow image – but the image of the poet’s friend. Gilbert uses the word “original” a few sentences later in the phrase “original authorial intentions.” It is hard to know how one can be sure of such intentions, but Gilbert’s use of the phrase does seem in sync with his use of the word “original” in “original image.”
I would like to suggest that the autobiographical context of a poem is hypothetical by nature, yet there is no reason to consider it irrelevant. Haiku simply do prompt narrative interpretations. Other factors must be weighed as well in an act of interpretation.
For me, the “original image” in Shiki’s haiku is that of sparrow tracks that fade. By “original” I don’t here refer to a point in time but a point in the interpretive process. This “original image” is not literal; it arises in the act of interpretation from the “gap” between the parts of the poem – the fundamental “cut” in the poem. As Gilbert argues elsewhere, haiku feature kiri or “cut”; I would argue that this is because haiku focuses on the experience of the “metaxy,” or the cut/gap “between” (between the ungrounded, free particular – the sparrow, the sparrow track – and the no-thingness of being that transcends each particular being).
The experience of the metaxy is often just that: experience of fading prints, of traces of particular being absorbed by the ungrounded ground of being. As it turns out, both Blyth and Gilbert read the haiku metaxically, whether it is a veranda or a hall where the sparrow leaves its footprints.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
We Invite Comments on Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness (Red Moon Press)
The unkindest cut?
An Invitation to Contribute to the Ongoing Conversation
Richard Gilbert’s book Poems of Consciousness is a “before and after” text -- the most important book on haiku poetics in a long time. Its impact on haiku theory and practice should be like that of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) on 20th century poetry. By exploring the structure of haiku in terms of the principle of kiri --“cut” -- it provides a new approach to haiku (traditional as well as modern and contemporary). The fact that the book also introduces the voices of several contemporary Japanese haiku poets makes the arguments even more compelling.
The issue of “consciousness” raised in the title has many ramifications. From our point of view here at SIP, consciousness is very much at the center of haiku practice, and Gilbert’s approach to “cutting” provides many testable insights into form as shaped by a crucial fact of consciousness: consciousness turns on a “gap” or “cut” in reality.
Conversations of the “metaxy” – the word for conscious reality as the “between” -- will become part of this blog, along with more practical matters. In a model of the style we hope to see in contributions, the contemporary Japanese poet Hasegawa Kai discusses how this “cut” in reality impacts our interpretation of one of the iconic poems, Basho’s old pond haiku. The “old pond” of the poem exists in a dimension different from that of the base, which includes the sound of the frog. The dimension of “the old pond” is named “mind.”
We believe that Gilbert’s book will have a profound effect on the way we see haiku – what we think haiku is – and how we write haiku. So, we are devoting the blog to a conversation begun in its pages. To participate send us a short essay (no more than 400 words) which addresses a specific passage. Cite the text and comment.
We will get back to you as soon as possible if we feel your brief commentary would advance the conversation taking place in this space.
--Tom D'Evelyn, Single Island Press
An Invitation to Contribute to the Ongoing Conversation
Richard Gilbert’s book Poems of Consciousness is a “before and after” text -- the most important book on haiku poetics in a long time. Its impact on haiku theory and practice should be like that of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) on 20th century poetry. By exploring the structure of haiku in terms of the principle of kiri --“cut” -- it provides a new approach to haiku (traditional as well as modern and contemporary). The fact that the book also introduces the voices of several contemporary Japanese haiku poets makes the arguments even more compelling.
The issue of “consciousness” raised in the title has many ramifications. From our point of view here at SIP, consciousness is very much at the center of haiku practice, and Gilbert’s approach to “cutting” provides many testable insights into form as shaped by a crucial fact of consciousness: consciousness turns on a “gap” or “cut” in reality.
Conversations of the “metaxy” – the word for conscious reality as the “between” -- will become part of this blog, along with more practical matters. In a model of the style we hope to see in contributions, the contemporary Japanese poet Hasegawa Kai discusses how this “cut” in reality impacts our interpretation of one of the iconic poems, Basho’s old pond haiku. The “old pond” of the poem exists in a dimension different from that of the base, which includes the sound of the frog. The dimension of “the old pond” is named “mind.”
We believe that Gilbert’s book will have a profound effect on the way we see haiku – what we think haiku is – and how we write haiku. So, we are devoting the blog to a conversation begun in its pages. To participate send us a short essay (no more than 400 words) which addresses a specific passage. Cite the text and comment.
We will get back to you as soon as possible if we feel your brief commentary would advance the conversation taking place in this space.
--Tom D'Evelyn, Single Island Press
Friday, February 27, 2009
Madeleine Findlay's Haibun
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams
In writing memoir haibun, I have begun a process that turns up a lot of significant times.
This poem was one of the things that surfaced recently and I wanted to study it to try and see what was happening at the time I first read it and why it was so important.
Williams wrote poetry that was rooted in simple, everyday images with an internal sound system that he called the “variable foot.” For him this short, modern style that used heavy enjambment reflected the brevity found in newspapers and radio broadcasts. “The Red Wheelbarrow” consists of 8 lines that mentally divide into 4 couplets. Rather than rhyme, Williams uses rhythms. For me, the sound of this poem is jazzy. Because of the enjambment, the sense of the lines is not initially clear. For example, “so much depends” needs “upon”, “ a red wheel” needs “barrow” and so on. Also note the contrasts in the big, heavy statements: “so much depends” being followed by small, restful images “upon.” “Glazed with rain” gives a luminous quality to the collection of images until “chickens” followed by a period cuts short the mood with a living thing.
In the late ‘70s, my husband and I had a silk-screen printing business. We did fine art printing for artists as well as commercial work like t-shirts and posters. Despite my artistic background, I had not found a way to express myself. During our usual 2-week summer vacation in the Adirondacks, I picked up a book of poetry and read “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It happened to be raining and as I looked out the window at the glazed surfaces of the rocks, pines and shingles, I recognized something about participation. Despite years of search after that, it wasn’t until I read my first haiku that this feeling of connection locked.
Writing and seeing come together.
snow on snow --
light is more luminous
late in the day
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams
In writing memoir haibun, I have begun a process that turns up a lot of significant times.
This poem was one of the things that surfaced recently and I wanted to study it to try and see what was happening at the time I first read it and why it was so important.
Williams wrote poetry that was rooted in simple, everyday images with an internal sound system that he called the “variable foot.” For him this short, modern style that used heavy enjambment reflected the brevity found in newspapers and radio broadcasts. “The Red Wheelbarrow” consists of 8 lines that mentally divide into 4 couplets. Rather than rhyme, Williams uses rhythms. For me, the sound of this poem is jazzy. Because of the enjambment, the sense of the lines is not initially clear. For example, “so much depends” needs “upon”, “ a red wheel” needs “barrow” and so on. Also note the contrasts in the big, heavy statements: “so much depends” being followed by small, restful images “upon.” “Glazed with rain” gives a luminous quality to the collection of images until “chickens” followed by a period cuts short the mood with a living thing.
In the late ‘70s, my husband and I had a silk-screen printing business. We did fine art printing for artists as well as commercial work like t-shirts and posters. Despite my artistic background, I had not found a way to express myself. During our usual 2-week summer vacation in the Adirondacks, I picked up a book of poetry and read “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It happened to be raining and as I looked out the window at the glazed surfaces of the rocks, pines and shingles, I recognized something about participation. Despite years of search after that, it wasn’t until I read my first haiku that this feeling of connection locked.
Writing and seeing come together.
snow on snow --
light is more luminous
late in the day
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tom Painter's haiku
Modern Haiku, vol. 39.3, Autumn 2008
The favorite haiku of the summer 2008 issue, we read on page 5, is this one by Tom Painting:
year’s end
the weight of pennies
in the mason jar
We had a good conversation here at SIP about this haiku. We noted the economy of the form – a sort of lack of playfulness that this haiku shares with many contemporary haiku. That said (and it alone is not a bad thing at all), the sharpness of the division between the short line – “year’s end” -- and the base produces a real “gap” between the two parts, which is essential to haiku structure. After the short line, there’s just no telling what may come.
Formally speaking, then, at first glance this haiku is a model of a certain conservative type.
In experiencing the gap, what comes “at the end” is a solid, somewhat dour image: a mason jar with pennies in it. Presumably a lot of pennies, since the emphasis is on “weight.” Usage points in the direction of “heaviness” and the vernacular turn adds to the realism, as does the naming of the jar. The specificity of “mason jar” accentuates the no-nonsense sturdiness, and suggests that something else could have been in that jar – preserves perhaps!
In any event, no Greek urn this!
The reader may reconstruct the moment of the haiku as the “lifting” of the jar, the judgment of the year’s collection. We are not told if the weight is sufficient to generate any pleasure in the lifting.
Behind the poem, or assumed by it, is the maxim: Time is money.
We could imagine other versions of the haiku. For example,
year’s end
the pennies in a mason jar
how heavy
Does the ultimate value of the haiku as written by Mr. Painting depend on the quality of insight afforded by the maxim: time is money? We believe most readers would reject that idea. Most people prefer their haiku “open-ended,” even when, or perhaps because, that means they need not come to any conclusions about its meaning.
Short of such conclusions, we note that its formal structure embodies the “go and return” movement commented on early in the tradition (see Keji Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse). The “flatness” of the base or two-line segment is thrown into relief by the superposed line –that is, the base is animated by the “return” to the base of the consciousness now informed by the complete haiku. According to Kawamoto, this “dualty” has penetrated to the core of the Japanese haiku’s structure of meaning. We believe "go and return" is essential to haiku in English.
Back to the issue of meaning: Read with the full ambiguity of the word “end” -- embracing both the notion of cessation and the notice of fulfilled intention -- the haiku as Mr. Painting wrote it may be an example of—or a comment on -- nihilism: the denial of any meaning to time beyond the clock-work units of time. But since “spots of time” or moments of aesthetic arrest are part of haiku heritage in its metaphysical dimension (including the profound background of Zen), the haiku can be seen as a resister of such interpretive habits, and thus a “radical” poem intent on shaking up the tradition of sentiment. And it may also be seen as an avoidance of the richness of the paradox of “end,” a refusal to get involved in metaphysics. We consider it a flaw that one cannot finally decide from the poem itself.
The favorite haiku of the summer 2008 issue, we read on page 5, is this one by Tom Painting:
year’s end
the weight of pennies
in the mason jar
We had a good conversation here at SIP about this haiku. We noted the economy of the form – a sort of lack of playfulness that this haiku shares with many contemporary haiku. That said (and it alone is not a bad thing at all), the sharpness of the division between the short line – “year’s end” -- and the base produces a real “gap” between the two parts, which is essential to haiku structure. After the short line, there’s just no telling what may come.
Formally speaking, then, at first glance this haiku is a model of a certain conservative type.
In experiencing the gap, what comes “at the end” is a solid, somewhat dour image: a mason jar with pennies in it. Presumably a lot of pennies, since the emphasis is on “weight.” Usage points in the direction of “heaviness” and the vernacular turn adds to the realism, as does the naming of the jar. The specificity of “mason jar” accentuates the no-nonsense sturdiness, and suggests that something else could have been in that jar – preserves perhaps!
In any event, no Greek urn this!
The reader may reconstruct the moment of the haiku as the “lifting” of the jar, the judgment of the year’s collection. We are not told if the weight is sufficient to generate any pleasure in the lifting.
Behind the poem, or assumed by it, is the maxim: Time is money.
We could imagine other versions of the haiku. For example,
year’s end
the pennies in a mason jar
how heavy
Does the ultimate value of the haiku as written by Mr. Painting depend on the quality of insight afforded by the maxim: time is money? We believe most readers would reject that idea. Most people prefer their haiku “open-ended,” even when, or perhaps because, that means they need not come to any conclusions about its meaning.
Short of such conclusions, we note that its formal structure embodies the “go and return” movement commented on early in the tradition (see Keji Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse). The “flatness” of the base or two-line segment is thrown into relief by the superposed line –that is, the base is animated by the “return” to the base of the consciousness now informed by the complete haiku. According to Kawamoto, this “dualty” has penetrated to the core of the Japanese haiku’s structure of meaning. We believe "go and return" is essential to haiku in English.
Back to the issue of meaning: Read with the full ambiguity of the word “end” -- embracing both the notion of cessation and the notice of fulfilled intention -- the haiku as Mr. Painting wrote it may be an example of—or a comment on -- nihilism: the denial of any meaning to time beyond the clock-work units of time. But since “spots of time” or moments of aesthetic arrest are part of haiku heritage in its metaphysical dimension (including the profound background of Zen), the haiku can be seen as a resister of such interpretive habits, and thus a “radical” poem intent on shaking up the tradition of sentiment. And it may also be seen as an avoidance of the richness of the paradox of “end,” a refusal to get involved in metaphysics. We consider it a flaw that one cannot finally decide from the poem itself.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
A Revision
Haiku by Tom D'Evelyn, with revision
Comment by Madeleine Findlay
They almost touch --
the wingtips of the cormorant
the dark wintry river
Seems the cormorant
flying up river is the river
this fall day
This haiku carries the full weight of the previous haiku that relied on “almost” as it now skims the surface of the water in a fleeting, “moving out of the picture frame” motion. “Seems” inherits the sound of “seam” and this unconsciously captures the distance of the wings to the water by separating the mass of the bird and the liquidity of the water. “”Fall day”, a simple kigo, goes on to lend itself out to “up” in the previous line giving a sense of the balancing act required to underscore this powerful image.
Comment by Madeleine Findlay
They almost touch --
the wingtips of the cormorant
the dark wintry river
Seems the cormorant
flying up river is the river
this fall day
This haiku carries the full weight of the previous haiku that relied on “almost” as it now skims the surface of the water in a fleeting, “moving out of the picture frame” motion. “Seems” inherits the sound of “seam” and this unconsciously captures the distance of the wings to the water by separating the mass of the bird and the liquidity of the water. “”Fall day”, a simple kigo, goes on to lend itself out to “up” in the previous line giving a sense of the balancing act required to underscore this powerful image.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
A very short haiku lesson
A breeze
stirs the hairs
in my cat’s ear
The “tension” between the universal kigo — a breeze — and the particular setting — the hairs in a cat’s ear — is pretty firm. There’s also a dimension of silence here. The “breeze” kigo is late summer, usually a time of silence. The (sleeping?) cat is still “listening,” but the ear is the site of stirring of hairs not sounds.
In the way we do haiku at SIP, the “tension” between the parts is “ontological”-- that is, based on the difference between the universal and the particular. In this sense, the dense particularity of reality is highlighted against the background of the universal. Without the separation of the two, there’s no “participation” the one in the other, which takes place in the imagination, or “zoka,” or Voegelin’s imaginative dimension of It-reality.
The ontological difference is underscored by the sounds of the two parts, which are linked by the zed-sound; the base has a slant rhyme (hair/ear) binding it together.
stirs the hairs
in my cat’s ear
The “tension” between the universal kigo — a breeze — and the particular setting — the hairs in a cat’s ear — is pretty firm. There’s also a dimension of silence here. The “breeze” kigo is late summer, usually a time of silence. The (sleeping?) cat is still “listening,” but the ear is the site of stirring of hairs not sounds.
In the way we do haiku at SIP, the “tension” between the parts is “ontological”-- that is, based on the difference between the universal and the particular. In this sense, the dense particularity of reality is highlighted against the background of the universal. Without the separation of the two, there’s no “participation” the one in the other, which takes place in the imagination, or “zoka,” or Voegelin’s imaginative dimension of It-reality.
The ontological difference is underscored by the sounds of the two parts, which are linked by the zed-sound; the base has a slant rhyme (hair/ear) binding it together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
