Haiku in Crisis?

One might characterize the haiku nation as beset by malaise. Despite haiku’s popularity, those who speak for the “haiku community” (this phase deserves critical attention) are concerned that despite the “success” in numbers of poets and publicity, haiku have yet to be accepted as “poetry” in the highest sense.

FORM AND ANXIETY

In an article for Blithe Spirit (March 2002), Caroline Gourlay, past president of the British Haiku Society, asks, “Does haiku have a future . . .?” She feels that during the 1990’s haiku reached a “watershed.” Three futures are possible: 1. the immense popularity of haiku can permanently degrade the form; 2. haiku societies can turn inward and maintain high standards; 3. haiku can grow into a competitive poetic form.

The third possibility, which she favors, raises more questions than it answers. Gourlay compares haiku to “the Italian sonnet.” “I don’t know by what stages the Italian sonnet was assimilated into our literary tradition but it would be sad indeed if it needed a society to give it credibility.” Gourlay is an activist: “We must be prepared to approach poetry festivals with ideas for haiku events, maybe start a column in a local newspaper, join writer’s groups, take workshops, enter into dialogue with mainstream editors.”

I agree. But there’s another job that needs doing if these actions are to bear fruit: haiku must have cultural significance. The Italian sonnet in Sixteenth century England was a coterie form, along with the epigram; sonnets were part of humanist culture and politically charged during the anxious period called the Renaissance when skepticism in all its varieties changed the spiritual landscape for good and ill. They circulated in manuscript among the few until the moment had passed; Shakespeare’s sonnets looked back, his relativism did not deny the demands of conscience and consciousness.

In the end, the sonnet did not say one thing but many things, but the turn of the sonnet allowed for a sudden perspective that broke the hegemony of received norms. It was and is an dynamic form but only because of the proportions and the interplay of inner and outer form.

Haiku is like the sonnet in this interplay of inner and outer form. In haiku literature, “form” refers to syllables and lines; inner form is rarely discussed. That concerns for form have become a cause for anxiety is illustrated by the front matter of the anthology The New Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2002). In the Preface, editor John Barlow notes first that English-language haiku has come of age; no longer derivative of Japanese models or isolated by national identities, haiku writers participate in a global movement, thanks in part to the Internet. Due to this dissemination, Barlow argues, “the haiku has been as successfullly assimilated into English poetry as forms such as the sonnet have been before it.” It is with pride that he can say that the anthology contains “over 300 real poems rooted in real life.”


The Introduction by Martin Lucas is more defensive. Detailing the emergence of “The New Haiku” from its origins in the work of R. H. Blyth (1898-1964), Lucan rejects the quality of “selflessness” as prescribed by Blyth (the “moral superiority” that it attributes to the poet is “impossible to sustain”) and suggests: “It is perhaps better to see it as a need for transparency. The poem should vanish, leaving us holding the moment it describes.”

This virtue of transparency – “honesty to experience”— may conflict, he suggests, with the role of the imagination in Japanese haiku as discussed by Haruo Shirane and others. Indeed, Lucas says that the publication of an essay by Shirane in the Winter/Spring 2000 issue of Modern Haiku contributed to “the small earthquake in awareness of ‘imaginative haiku’ . . .” So events seem to have overtaken the publication of The New Haiku.

According to Lucas, the article by Shirane, along with the publication of Ban’ya Natsuishi’s “A Future Waterfall” (1999), opened a new horizon for haiku: with this acknowledgement, the “moment” celebrated by The New Haiku is now historical. Lucas explains, as if the meaning of “new” were now ambiguous, that “our poems are ‘new’ in the sense that they represent the consolidation of English-language haiku as an independent genre.”

A note of pleading appears as the Introduction draws to a close. “We need a center of gravity, which the values of immediacy and presence provide. We need to be able to pick up an anthology like this one and see evidence of cohesion and shared purpose. Yet we should not huddle together too closely, unwilling to dare diverse and unpredictable forms of expression.”

The note of anxiety is real; it is the undertone of the drift of the prefatory matter of this distinguished anthology. But if the prefatory matter of The New Haiku documents the fact of the malaise, Shirane’s article deserves recognition as a diagnosis of the malaise.

Shirane’s article, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths,” makes a real contribution to the study of haiku by exploring the structure of haiku along two axes, horizontal and vertical. (Lee Gurga’s discussion of “allusion” in Haiku: A Poet’s Guide may be cited as background.)

The horizonal axis is the here and now of the haiku moment; the vertical axis is "cultural memory, a larger body of associations that the larger community can identify with." Vertical themes include seasonal words, literary allusions, and references to cultural sites of historical significance. Shirane notes the absence of the vertical in most British and American haiku.

Put positively, with the veritical axis – or reference to something “beyond the moment” – the moment – the horizontal axis – may endure as long as there are readers of the haiku. For “survival’ in the literary sense – and there is no doubt that the haiku of Basho et al. have “survived” – “the present moment has to engage with the past or with a broader sense of time and community (such as family, national, or literary history).”

Could it be that the very moment of triumph as celebrated by The New Haiku is a moment of anxiety because suddenly one becomes aware of the limitations of the achievement? It is there, for all to see: yet what is it? The rhetoric of the “moment” seemed unassailable. To question it – as does the title of Shirane’s article – is to immediately cast doubt on the qualities celebrated as the new haiku.

If the moment is not all in all, what is “transparency,” what “immediacy,” what “presence”? Is Time a factor in the haiku moment? Is Tradition-- "cultural memory, a larger body of associations that the larger community can identify with"--inseparable from the individual talent?

I believe these three qualities – transparency, immediacy, presence – are rooted in one truth: relativity. Relativity, as readers (like Basho) of Chuang Tzu have reason to understand, is not conceptual chaos but a recognition of each thing's particular essence in light of its position in nature. The absolute is invisible but it vouchsafes that which is visible its own difference—its presence in the order of things. The Tao is the eternal background of all things.

Haiku brings this structure of consciousness home. In this, it is like all art. A contemporary writer says: “The presence in art is . . . a presence within what is made that generates difference, self-questioning, in the perceiving subject. It makes us present to ourselves in a fresh way, and so engages us in dialogue with ourselves as well as with the object and with the artist and with what the artist is responding to.” (Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 150).

Notice the triangle in the last sentence: ourselves in dialogue with the object/artist/signified. And read this haiku by Jamie Edgecombe:


back to school—
graffiti visible
beneath fresh paint

The fragment states the conventional topic: “back to school.” This is a kigo: children return to school in the fall. It is a time of reconnecting with Shirane’s “vertical”: the absolutes of time and timelessness. But timelessness is no-thing and only approached through time. The pensive student, perhaps distracted by the confused sense of renewal in repetition, as he gazes down at his desk, notices graffiti the new paint couldn’t quite erase.

The present never quite erases the past: the present is the presence of the past, of time, ambiguous in its duration, implacable in its withholding, bountiful in its gifts. Grace supervenes, and graffiti is itself the sign of a consciousness undeterred by the duties of the moment, wandering in its own labyrinthine desires, leaving symbols where a blank nothingness would otherwise mock it. Graffiti connects a wandering self and the consciousness of the poem.

In its own very specific way, Edgecombe’s haiku is informed by what David Bentley Hart calls “the special pathos of the human.” In The Beauty of the Infinite, Hart writes: “the special pathos of the human is one of ubiquitous metaphor, the condition of being always an interpreted being, never to be traced back to a place prior to culture or language, to a state of nature or simple presence; there is always in the action of the person a formidable absence of the person, an ‘otherwise’ within presence . . .” (111). School is where we learn to understand ourselves as vulnerable—even haunted -- in this way.

Out of the moment governed by the rhetoric of “fresh start” stares back the face of the other who has been there before us, whose desire for more than what is given will be repeated by us, whom we can only acknowledge as “hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frere.” Edgecombe’s haiku plumbs – think of a plumb line as an image of the haiku’s vertical -- the depths of the reading experience in which we read ourselves as other, even in a trace whose origins are to be found in the generic “pathos of being human,” full of desire to be en voyage, under the spell of the otherwise.

It is then insufficient to praise this haiku for its plain diction, for its contemporary subject matter, for its compact expression of elusive but profound feeling. There is an architecture here. The surface of the poem is broken – perhaps this is one meaning of the dash in haiku – to reveal the timeless: a name, that of lover or self, the name of self-love (Shakespeare’s sonnets provide one intertextual pespective as do, as suggested here, certain Baudelaire texts).

What is signified by this artist’s attention to this object? Only a close reading of the structure—the “secret architecture” inseparable from allusions and analogies-- will put us in dialogue with the poem and provide a series of answers to the questions of value. Along the way, we become aware that Edgecombe’s haiku is a very good poem.