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.

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