Haiku Writing Center

The status of haiku

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:58:00 +0000

The question of the status of haiku in literature is ultimately a question of the status of the haiku poet as a human being. Does the haiku poet, by virtue of personal suffering and artistic engagement, illuminate the perplexities of life?

If the haiku poet keeps returning to Basho or Issa, perhaps it is because Basho and Issa come to mind when he reads the opening lines of "Asides on the Oboe" by Wallace Stevens:

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.

This haiku poet cannot but choose to keep reading Basho and Issa and the others (even some of his contemporaries who belong to that world, his world) and writing haiku in the spirit of their examples. Other possibilities -- and they do occur to him -- do not survive the edge of his need.

Haiku and the traditional modern American style: on a haiku by Roberta Beary

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:37:00 +0000

on the church steps
a mourning dove
with mother’s eyes

—Roberta Beary

Roberta Beary is an award-winning haiku writer and someone who would be considered a potential “breakout” poet. That is, Beary seems p0ised to help establish haiku as a genre of poetry both commercially and critically. Her work, as here, is both accessible and emotionally charged. The qualities associated with, among other types of modern American writing, haiku – precision, concision, and clarity – can easily be illustrated by discussing this haiku and many others by Beary.

The public associates haiku with an objective report-- a captured moment-in-time, a sort of emotional snapshot. Here we may imagine a mourner mounting the steps of the church to attend a memorial service for her mother and being haunted by the eyes of the “mourning dove” she passes on the steps. At this moment in time, even the common pigeon reminds her of her mother! The poignance is hardly obscure; the moment happens TO the poet/speaker and by extension the willing reader. The moment is one of grief and as such must be acknowledged; only a cad would question the reality of the emotional scene from which the poem grew.

And yet, studying the poem, one may feel a slight break in the glaze of the poem – the unity that vouchsafes the poet’s sincerity – by the pun on the name of the bird. That crack may widen for some readers with strong imaginations, and/or a knowledge of this particular bird’s way of seeing and looking. Nor would this opening of questions be of the sort sponsored by the form of haiku, which is marked by “cuts” starting with the fold between the vertical – the CHURCH steps – and the base – the last two lines. The fact that such a bird is a common denizen of church steps, indeed frequently the object of attention by those who must scrub the steps, does not make the kind of use of the formal fold that is characteristic of many great haiku, though it does contain the potential note of derision, or “low” value, that is typical of the comic dimension of haiku.

It’s not that all haiku must exhibit a tension between the superposed line and the base (or narrative scene, usually in two lines), only that the tension is more than a formal figuration expressed in the diction. The tension of the major cut is that between the “vertical” or transcending dimension and the self-enclosed givens of the “horizontal” section. That is, the “gap” typical of haiku form – and only it would seem of this genre – is a “metaphysical” feature; as such it can move around within the actual verbal structure of the poem. In any event, haiku as a genre bears witness to the perplexity occasioned by the amazement of “that there is anything at all”: the wonder of being. As William Desmond says, “To live as human is always to be porous to beng struck by this astonishment and perplexity about origin” (Art, Origins, Otherness, 3). Haiku attends to the “being happenings” that characterize this metaxic view of life. Beary’s haiku certainly does seem to aim at recovering such an experience in poetic form, but it does so with perhaps too little concern for loose ends and a sense of sentimentality that makes the poem about the poet’s emotions – her grief -- rather than about anything else. Certainly not her mother or even the bird. And of course mourning one’s mother would be hard to write about (and yet Basho and Issa, and no doubt others, managed to write great haiku about just that).

In traditional Japanese haiku, the gap creates a space in which metaphor happens, analogies and proportions, and these animate the disparate parts that make up the whole poem. But, you may say, well, that’s just how our type of haiku is: it’s about the emotions experienced by the poet and “hopefully” the willing reader. To which I would say, that’s not enough to make haiku stand as a genre of world poetry; it does not distinguish haiku from a conversation, a letter, a phone call, or some other communication. And it does not reflect the artistic accomplishment of the founders of the genre. The virtues of concision, precision, and clarity are hallowed in the US by generations of stylists. Beary’s achievements as a haiku poet aside, these qualities raise questions about the conventions of the master culture; much of experience simply cannot be rendered by these stylistic qualities. Grief may indeed open up to include all of existence – even the pigeon, but then the creatureliness of mortals would be the focus of the moment. Perhaps the unintended issues raised by Beary’s poem suggest the limits of just such a model of excellence.

Basho as a "singular thinker"

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:26:00 +0000

In contemplating the long history of haiku, one becomes familiar with contexts that constrain interpretation. It's tempting, of course, to reduce haiku to an act of "mere" attention, as if "attention" itself were not a construct based on a complex of beliefs and habits of perception. In any event, avoiding that temptation may lead to an opposite extreme: the imposition of beliefs in a non-historical way. In many contemporary commentaries, there's a kind of loss of difference between the text and the commentary; even the act of commenting seems to be a para-poetic act, as if in competition with the poem. The original is subsumed by the commentary. The rest is "gloss" as J. V. Cunningham would say.

It's always possible, however, that we can recover a set of habits of mind -- the "habitus" -- of a poet from the past, and that we may discover it in our own search for truth. Take for instance Basho's haiku "winter sun -- / frozen on horseback, / my shadow" (Barnhill trans., #227 in Basho's Haiku).

This is clearly based on not only an act of attention but an act of contemplation -- one might say a contemplation of the poet's own death. That would be hardly unique in Basho's oeuvre. But the clarity of structure in THIS act of attention, based on the two-fold haiku structure, suggests a paradoxical awareness of life beyond death. It's a short step to think of the horseman as a "thinker."

The following passage from William Desmond, Being and the Between, 13, helps me explore the possible ramifications of Basho's haiku as "thought" -- thought made possible by haiku form. Obviously, the idioms are worlds apart: one idiom is based on a digestion and comprehension of modern philosophy (and not only modern), the other draws on Basho's own complex cultural frames (including the Zhuangzi, as Pipei has so persuasively set forth). And yet reading the haiku in light of the following passage does suggest why we might consider Basho a "thinker."

"Metaphysics is initiated, carried, renewed by singular thinkers, not just by anonymous systems. These singulars have tirelessly worked to think better . . . To speak of tirelessness is misleading if we forget that, in the intimacy of being, such singulars have fought weariness and bafflement, despondency and bewilderment. Yet the very freshness of their work comes from a different source that is not itself work, or the production of a work, or a system. This source is manifested in the gift of fertile astonishment. Needless to say, redeeming the promise of this gift is not common. The more mature a singular metaphysician becomes, the more there is a refinement of childlike astonishment. It is never dead. It may simplify itself to an elemental power of mindfulness, a simplicity not of defect, but of a perfection of attention that defies all determinate objectification."

For me, this passage opens up the haiku in ways that go way beyond justifying the exercise of reading poems in terms of metaphysics. It's as if the text were a profound commentary on the poem. It brings me much closer to what is singular, unique, about the poem and about "Basho" as an artist/thinker. One advantage such a juxtaposition has over other contemporary forms of commentary is that there is no contamination of the commentary by the target text. The two texts sit side by side sharing light from beyond.

Gap and Gift: Madeleine Findlay on a haiku by Issa

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:57:00 +0000

hana no kage aka no tannin wa nakari keri

thanks to the blossoms -

on the ground that they’ve shaded

no one’s a stranger

trans. by Lewis Mackenzie

When I was a kid, I used to doodle during classes. Drawing made it easier for me to concentrate and hear what the teacher was saying. The girls competing for attention, the teacher’s next move or a spitball flying through the air worried me. For me, this haiku captures a similar feeling of finding connection through otherness. The pencil and paper grounded me and allowed me to hear what was being said in an uninterrupted flow of words.

The broad picture in this haiku is of cherry blossom viewing and the unity it creates in admiring crowds, not unlike star-gazing, or moon viewing. However, the word “shaded” dilutes the awe. It has deep associations. It suggests relief from the heat and a more reflective state of mind. “Stranger” adds mystery. The word feels coded and is hard to fit with the rest of the haiku. Like a puzzle where the pieces are not yet turned in the right direction, the haiku needs to be shifted around in consciousness. Secondary meanings are usually inherent in haiku but here the words for a second meaning are out in the open.

“No kage” is polyvocal. It means both “in the shadow of” as well as “protected by” or “thanks to.” This points to the idea of the gift which opens the haiku up to a bigger concept. Without the blossoms, there would be no shade. So, paradoxically, more than the transient beauty of these ephemeral flowers, there is a more permanent interpretation. The shade exists on the ground. It creates otherness – not unlike a reflection. This doubleness opens up the gap with the gift giving of itself. For me, feeling the shade helps me to see the blossoms by giving them dimension. This furthers their actuality. Similarly, I furthered my actuality by drawing, by proving myself real so I could go beyond the distractions and hear what was being said.

“No one’s a stranger” in this context extends beyond the unity of the group under the tree and into the realm of each individual where no one is a stranger to him or her self. This allows the sense of community to split into its opposite with each person experiencing the gift, not just receiving it.

Haiku and Metaxic Attention

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:06:00 +0000

In light of at least three aspects of the haiku tradition -- the social nature of linking verses, the tradition of interpretation preserved by Ueda in “Basho and His Interpreters,” and the performative nature of the commentaries coming from the Haiku Foundation feeds— a surplus of interpretation, I suggest, is a DIRECT outcome of the FORM. That is, the gap! Shirane's useful distinction between the "vertical" and the "horizontal" as dimensions of the tension that holds the two-part form together has many ramifications. In his essay in Matsuo Basho's Poetic Spaces, Shirane notes that "Basho once described haikai as 'thirty-six steps forward, no steps backward,'" and comments, "The added verse must push off the penultimate verse to create a new world." The fecundity of Basho's polyphonic technique, as discussed by Shirane, seems to characterize the ethos of haiku. Metaxically speaking, the tension between the vertical (for Basho, as Shirane says, the vertical is sometimes represented by the ancient and medieval poets) and the horizontal -- the contingent world of the poet's biographical time or an imagined worldly place and time -- is the cause of perplexity, a restlessness that results in open-ended "journies" toward sources of fresh realization. It is too easy for us to overlook the difference between the vectors: the vertical is grounded in an awareness of the porosity of presence from the Beyond. The horizontal is the "thatness" of given space/time experience. For the interpreter, then, there's a kind of "anxiety" of influence in the process of interpreting haiku. The gap “re-presents” formally the perplexity, the polyphony, of the middle, the metaxy. Interpreters must above all "mind the gap" or be "mindfull" of the tension that characterizes haiku as a genre. What we sometimes hear in current discussions is an abuse of interpretation, as if haiku were a license for solipsistic self-confirmation. It is clear what is happening, however. The space structured by haiku is the "middle" between the extremes of absorption of the self in the other and of absolute certainty. It is the middle where we "live" as mindful creatures. The middle can be a confusing place; the tension may indeed create a sense of bewilderment. Especially in America, the poet may long for the "certainty" bestowed by the aura of an object in space/time; but that certainty is illusive since it betrays the polyvocal nature of objects of attention in the metaxy. William Desmond says, "The middle equivocities cry out for more intensive interpretation. Without some seeking of intermediation, the celebration of equivocity, even though it not cease from babbling, will finally be indistinguishable from mute autism, connecting nothing with nothing. We must speak of the ultimate via a metaxological discernment of the between and its equivocity" (God and the Between 122).Haiku as a poetic form is uniquely suited to this way of communication.

From Longing to Metaxy: An Analysis of Basho’s Longing for Kyoto Haiku

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:23:00 +0000

Gilbert's concept of metaxu is crucial to the study of haiku form as cutting. We believe the conversation should start with the concept of metaxy, since it places haiku in a conceptual world of great significance. One of the outcomes of Gilbert's emphasis on formal cutting (as opposed to the conceptual or categorical cut between beings and being) is a self-multiplying kind of interpretation. I need only refer to the outputs -- the "feeds" -- of the Haiku Foundation. While this emphasis on form often produces eloquence on the part of the interpreter, it has a tendency to reframe the poem as a "prompt" for interpretation rather than being itself an "interpretation" of existence as marked by the master distinction (or cut) between being and beings. What is lost in the exuberance is the poet's poise before the mystery of the otherness of being. The current discussions about Zen and Blyth are seriously anachronistic: the issue is contemporary and philosophical (see e.g., William Desmond, Being and the Between). The poet's ontological discretion, his fidelity to the ontological difference, is subject to the oblivion caused by this new poetic divertissement. We've asked Jamie Edgecombe to write short blog essays exploring haiku in terms of the metaxy. Ed.

by Jamie Edgecombe

At times we get homesick, too, while in our own homes.
Keion (translation Ueda, 1992: 294)

Kyo nite mo / Kyo natsukashi ya / hototogisu
Kyoto to be there too/ Kyoto longing for the past / cuckoo

even in Kyoto
I long for Kyoto –
cuckoo’s call

On its surface, the poem’s structure places the individual poet’s desire to recapture the cultural world he has inherited (which forms the poem’s baseline), against the superposed line, the seasonal reference of the cuckoo (which indicates early summer).

What is striking about this poem is the immediate sense of nostalgia (J. natsukashi), the longing for Kyoto, within the immanent experience of being in Kyoto. Shuson, states that the first Kyoto is the real city, while the second is the ancient city than lives yet on in ancient poetry and fiction’ (Ueda, 1992: 294). The objective view of Kyoto becomes overlain with a nostalgic view of the ancient city, in which the poet finds himself, as an individual, confronted by the milieu of history. At such a moment, there is a great sense of the physical impermanence of greatness, while it continues to linger in the cultural memory (see Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku), and the meagreness of the individual in the face of the great and historical.

If one were to be adventurous and apply a dialectical approach, one could say that the greatness of one illuminates the meagreness of the other and vis-versa.

Such a direct expression of emotion is not unusual for Basho, who vouched in the Red Book, that his ‘Wayfarer I shall be called’ poem, in which he directly indicates the poetic-subject’s intentions and emotions, is the product of his ‘effort to infuse the verse with the strings of the heart at this particular moment’ (Kawamoto, 2000: 90) The expression of longing in this poem acts likewise. Such a direct expression of emotion dates back to Shinkokinshu poetry, where these expressions became the vehicle for reasoning (and thus were attacked by Masaoki Shiki as such – see Beichman, 1982), whereas Basho’s use presents something quite different.

The most obvious cause, or trigger, for this sense of longing is the cuckoo’s call, a traditional kigo that has formed in the community of the Kyoto / Osaka (Kanto) area, due to the region’s literary and cultural heritage.

Here art and culture have entangled to make the image of the cuckoo equivocal. The cuckoo, within the haiku’s articulated moment, is both an immanent, sensible phenomenon (i.e. it is a bird that is heard), but it is also a symbol that has developed through and over centuries.

Left as such, the cuckoo’s call, which is both temporal and spatial in its being there, within the created scene, reminds the poet of the Kyoto of old, the cultural, religious capital and artistic hub that it once was.

However, to just leave the poem’s analysis standing at a moment of nostalgia (where nostalgia is to be taken as a longing for the pastt), is to turn the poem into an empty, univocal expression of closure, where the individual, the finite, and the infinite find themselves in a closed circuit made up of the immanent and the imaginary (the imaginary being the only way to make contact with the lost world of cultural importance).

If it were this simple, the poem would not have captivated as many poets, and analysts, as it has. Something in the poem astounds us. It requires more thought and exploration. This is not to say that the steps so far made in this essay are wrong, but they are incomplete.

Attention needs to be given to the poem’s gap, or cutting (J. kire).

Yes, the baseline places the poet-reader within a spatial and temporal context. Yes, the superposed line then destabilises that world through the cuckoo’s call, a sensory perception that is so fleeting that it has vanished before it can be fully grasped, although it has been heard. The call lingers in the memory. A reflective moment arises where the poet longs for a Kyoto that no longer has the prestige it once did (the poem illuminates man’s bodily-located-psyche).

The cuckoo call still lingers; Kyoto still lingers: Basho is astounded by the cuckoo’s call within his contemporary Kyoto. The metaxic tension of Kyoto, which was there all along, has been brought into focus by the cuckoo’s call.

At this moment it is important to note that the cuckoo image, within the complex nature of being a kigo, is also a waka word. It was used in a similar way by the 9th century monk Sosei, in his poem about hearing a cuckoo in Kyoto (translation in Ueda, 1992: 294).

Within Sosei’s waka, the poetic-subject hears a cuckoo and comes to reflect on how that voice hasn’t changed over time, while the city, Kyoto, has. One gains a sense of the ancientness of the city that has changed so much, but more so the vastness of the cuckoo’s symbolic nature, of the natural world within which the actions of man take place. An intertextual depth becomes apparent within Basho’s haiku, where the cuckoo once again calls out within the physical world of the city and is once again heard by a poet, who reflects upon it. The ancientness of Kyoto is further deepened, but the horizons of the natural stretch further still and will continue to do through the flux of the passing seasons. This said, knowledge of the Sosei poem forms a pole within the event of the poem, and is not a prerequisite for understanding the poem’s tensions.

To continue with Basho’s poem: the cuckoo’s call declares that there is at all Kyoto, an immanent experience to be lived, and thus illuminates the continuum that has made all this at all, that has made me and led me here. Basho and his art are revealed to be entangled. Haiku, a thread in the religious and cultural fabric of Japanese literature has led him to this moment, but he also is a product, a conduit and fashioner of concepts and images, that he has the will to explore and create, but which have been forming for centuries and will continue to do so. Basho is both a creator of haiku and is partially fashioned by it through his alignment to its aesthetics and his knowledge of it. He is both himself and is other to himself.

Consequently, the present Kyoto of the baseline is both the Kyoto familiar to Basho, but is revealed to be other. The Kyoto of history, also familiar to the master poet, is both known and ultimately unknowable, although he has knowledge of it. They are both entangled, though. One Kyoto is a culmination of all that Kyoto has been in the past, but is also the physical entity before him; the other stands before and within the present Kyoto, but is beyond that Kyoto in its immanence.

Likewise, the cuckoo, intimate in its sensible presence to the poet, is beyond his full grasp, despite having been grasped (heard) physically and having knowledge of its use in ancient literature.

Kyoto, in the return, becomes metaphysically doubled. The nostalgia that was experienced on hearing the cuckoo can be seen to develop. It is an openness to the Kyoto that was, but also a longing to enter into the Kyoto that is. There is an attraction, felt by the poet-reader, to the Kyoto that has become backlit by its own metaxic nature. Equally, through the mutuality of Kyoto and poet, the poet has become backlit, as well. The attraction returns the self as other in understanding the experience of being in Kyoto and Kyoto’s being; that nostalgia has the power to transform and is empowered by transformation. Through this longing and return to the present, Kyoto and the poet-reader do entangle.

Nostalgia, through the imagination entanglement with the immanent (with man’s bodily-located-psyche), not only illuminates consciousness through memory, but also through the movement outward, towards the other.

Basho’s contemporary Kyoto becomes a perceptional horizon, as does the cuckoo, Basho’s longed for Kyoto and, ultimately, the poet himself. There is a continuous sense of excess, but no end that can gather these horizons into a graspable whole, despite the evocation of these tensions within a single poem, other than that found in the erotic self’s will to understand the passion of being (the wonder that there is this tensional, metaxic Kyoto at all).

The structure of the poem, the movement from immanent place, to fleeting sensory perception, to the perception of the agefullness and agelessness of the place, comes back upon the immanent place, the cuckoo’s sensed call, and the imagined Kyoto of old, and finds no closure in its return, despite the sense of truth the return is imbued with. The poem’s experience becomes perplexing and therefore enigmatic. Such a metaxic tension reveals the depths of reality, while not denying the facticity of the immanent.

References

Beichman, Janine (1982), Masaoka Shiki, Kodansha; Kawamoto, Keiji (2000), The Poetics of Japanese Verse, University of Tokyo; Ueda, Makoto (1992), Basho and his Interpreters, Stanford University Press; Yamamoto Seisaku and Carter Robert E. (1996): Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, State University of New York Press.

Issa's Metaxy

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:35:00 +0000

ISSA (1763 -1828)

over my legs
stretched out at ease,
the billowing clouds

nagedashita ashi no saki nari kumo no mine

Translated by R.H. Blyth

In this haiku written in 1813, the base contains an image that places the poet and the reader at the same vantage point. One imagines being slouched in a deck chair, on a lawn or in a field. Studied carefully before reading and connecting the superposed line, the base becomes grounded and forthright. The tone is one of assurance. “Stretched” is reassured by “at ease” and the phrase “over my legs” has an intimate feel to it. The reader doesn’t know what to expect. What could animate this blissful fragment?

The superposed line holds for a moment and then connects back to the first line. Instantly, there is a more emphatic sense of “stretched out at ease” and yet the base is still stable. The clouds then resume their metaxic otherness as they float in the sky despite the illusion that they are close by.

David Lanoue cultivates the most extensive on-line listing of Issa’s haiku (9200 out of over 20,000 written in his journals ) and 31 of them use “billowing clouds” as the superposed line. His translation of this haiku goes like this:

on the tips
of my outstretched toes…
billowing clouds

Here the clouds are pictured as touching the tips of the poet’s toes. The haiku is a univocal experience made possible by the hyperbolic use of “outstretched toes” and “tips” may explore the epiphanies for the translator but they close the gap of the haiku.

--Madeleine Findlay

A Metaxic Analysis of a Haiku by Seishi by Jamie Edgecombe

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:03:00 +0000

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.

Gilbert on Shiki: the original "image"

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:03:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:50:00 +0000

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

Madeleine Findlay's Haibun

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:31:00 +0000

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

Tom Painting's haiku

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:54:00 +0000

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.

A Revision

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 19:13:00 +0000

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.

A very short haiku lesson

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:53:00 +0000

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.

BASHO’S SEARCH for the SELF of HIMSELF

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:39:00 +0000

Among these hundred bones and nine orifices there is something. For now let’s call it ‘gauze in the wind.’ Surely we can say it’s thin, torn easily by a breeze. It grew fond of mad poetry long ago and eventually this became its life work (the opening of “Knapsack Notebook” translated by Barnhill).

What is this “something” that Basho locates in his body? His word is Furabo. On p. 79 of Qiu (Basho and the Dao), we learn that Furabo is Basho’s name for Zhuangzi’s True Lord, the principle of the Dao. Fu, wind; ra, thin silk; bo, priest or boy. “Furabo is a creature that is easily broken, that is devoid of worldly values, and that willingly submits to nature’s force, the wind,” says Qiu.

Notice Basho doesn't say: I grew fond of mad poetry and it became my life work. IT -- the Zhuangzi's "True Lord" -- grew fond of mad poetry. What is this "it"?

Chuang Tzu says of the True Lord: “ . . . Whether I succeed in discovering his identity or not, it neither adds nor detracts from his Truth.” This indicates the nature of Basho’s “search.” He is searching for his identity, his inner identity as Furabo, the existence of which is beyond doubt but the exact nature of which is perhaps beyond knowing, it doesn’t matter.

For me, Furabo is “inner form”: it is the principle of the self’s composition of itself through creativity, and the creativity is analogous to cosmological creativity, or Zoka, which is always trying out new transformations (evolution bears witness to that) given new circumstances, nor can it be understood apart from context.

So my “True Lord” is this inner act of composition: try the pun Esse/Essay. To do “thy Will” is “To Be” and “To Be” is to “essay” – to attempt to understand, to search. In terms of Christian theology, this “inner act” exists by analogy with God, who is Act, Esse (to be). This is why I can’t “know” it in the positivistic sense.

Depart from the barbarian, break away from the beast, follow the Creative, return to the Creative (Basho, Knapsack Notebook, trans. Barnhill). To search is to follow and return to the creative but unknowlable Beyond, the light Dante in Purgatorio 3 calls the un non sapeva che bianco (“a something of I-did-not-know pure white” Fitzpatrick trans.) Yes, that light. An unimaginable light.

In that light, each of us is “mankind,” and it is the nature of mankind to search for the self of itself this way.

Commentary

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:33:00 +0000

summer dawn’s dazzle
doesn’t make that much difference
the Piscataqua

--Tom D'Evelyn

Wonderful display of tensions.

The first line is almost unreadable, letting sound come through the text of season, time of day and motion.

Then this is allowed to waffle in the second line so that the punch of the third line hits as a double take -- all flow beneath the surface.

-- Madeleine Findlay

Findlay on a haiku by Issa

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:08:00 +0000

Human Nature

Liza Dalby, in her wonderful book East Wind Melts The Ice: A Memoir of the Seasons, translates an Issa poem: Hatsuyuki wo imaimashii to yube kana:

First snowfall
a nuisance
by evening

Kobayashi Issa (1810)

We can’t help but take things for granted. Art prevents us from falling into the ennui of assuming that things are mundane. It helps us find the moment to actualize the particulars that are going on around us.

This haiku maximizes simplicity in each line. “First” projects us into an alerted consciousness. Then the ubiquitous turn with the word “nuisance” which anoints the custodial “first” with an awful curse. Suddenly we are in limbo. Then we have “evening”, a softened likelihood of demured acquiescence. These three movements like those in music create an impression and a rendition or translation of what it means to be human. Words are used in such a way that they are suggestive in a collective way.

The Old Taoist

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:04:00 +0000

Fukuda Kodojin (1865-1944) was known as the “Old Taoist” because he carried the old traditions of the sage-poet-painter into the modern age. He studied with a few haiku masters including Shiki who, although he was two years younger than Kodojin, was paving the way for haiku reform by way of “direct observation and natural language” (Stephen Addiss, “The Haiku of the Old Taoist,” Simply Haiku, September-October ’04).

Here is a haiku that shows simple, clear language as well as the theme of the old and the new:

A small boat
next to the battleship
casting for mullet

I like this one too:

Short summer night –
passing through the gate
two nuns

According to Addiss, Kodojin explored the “tradition of midnight visits to temples.” In this haiku, there is a strong image that requires, at least for me, the formula of proportions: “Short summer night” is to Zoka as “passing through the gate” is to the “two nuns.” Examining the first line, the kigo, we have to reflect on the symbolism of the topic “short summer night” in light of the universal Creative, Zoka. The temperature is changing and the days are getting shorter. Time is precious. Just let that sink in.

As for the base, there is ambiguity as well as a precisely-rendered image. We don’t really know if the nuns are arriving at the temple or leaving it. Are they going out to enjoy the night or are they going into the temple because of the night? The haiku deepens considerably when the interpretation is that they are so inspired by the brevity of the summer night that they want to be in the temple: Zoka is awakened in the nuns (and potentially the reader) by seasonal fullness and transcendence, which is portrayed by the image of them passing “through” the gate. The transition is as brief as the summer night. The use of “two” suggests communion and flow, oneness of mind, between the nuns.

So there are vertical structures of mind – between Zoka consciousness and the poet/reader – and horizontal, between the nuns and between poet and reader. This structure is very tight and boundlessly expressive.

This haiku is perfectly balanced. The “short summer night” inspires the nuns and instead of rushing out to enjoy the moment, they turn inward. Balance of consciousness through “acts of attention” (Ed Block, “Poetry, Attentiveness and Prayer” in New Blackfriars, March 2008) lets things be absorbed rather than superficially experienced. This way, the event becomes part of consciousness rather than a deflation of ecstatic momentum fueled with imbalance.

--Madeleine Findlay

Thoreau and Donovan Hohn

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:24:00 +0000

The essay by Donovan Hohn in the April Harper's (www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/page/0059, but you must register to get into the website -- it's worth it!-- or better yet, buy a copy!) should be read by everybody interested in American haiku culture. Many haiku writers will of course deny that their poetry has any thing to do with the culture Hohn's memoir is about. That's a pity because in most cases such a refusal is just another way of marginalizing oneself as a poet, a failure to see oneself as part of a cultural moment (one may of course consciously resist the prevailing culture but one must be articulate in that culture to resist it successfully)--another trick of the prevailing default narcissism. Anyway: "We were 'forest Christians,' " he writes, "followers of that American brand of pantheism founded by Henry David Thoreau and John Muir." In the 90s, Hohn was deeply involved in identity politics; his readers will themselves identify, however fleetingly, with his case. As an essay-memoir, "Falling" is exemplary. Haiku, as currently understood, is a kind of creative non-fiction; it needs to be re-understood, but it's best to start with the givens.

Jim Kacian's review of Shaped Water (first edition) in Frogpond Winter 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:33:00 +0000

Findlay, Madeleine Shaped Water: A Haiku Year (Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth NH 03801, 2007). ISBN 978-1-4243-3366-0. 60 pp., 4.25” x 5.5” perfect softbound, letterpress, stitched in signatures with gloss dustjacket, $14.95 from the publisher, also at >.

If we as haiku poets believe anything at all it is that our small packages are indeed big things. We mouth truisms about giving a poem sufficient space to breath (as though the “breathing” wasn’t taking place in that oxygen-free zone we call mind) so the full drawn-out resonance of each poem will not bump up against the competing resonances in previous or subsequent poems. We know better, and we can be mildly ironic about our particular fetishism. All that being said, we still like it when our work is treated well, couched attractively, respected. Haiku may, as Blyth suggests, aim at significance, but given a chance to commingle with beauty, we’ll take some of that as well. Which brings us to this handsome little book: this is what we’d like for our next volume. Easy to hand, tactile, well-considered and -judged, this is a beautiful production in every regard. Haiku will live and die with its poetic products, but such a volume suggests that good companionship with the book arts certainly heightens the experience. As to the poems: the author is primarily of the “nature observer” school, with a slight tendency at times to draw conclusions or hypothesize. Overall, however, the poems are consonant with the book, beautiful, easy to hand, and attractive. We look forward to more such volumes from this press.

The Hem of Your Kimono

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:02:00 +0000

If only I could tie
The string of my kite
To the hem of your kimono

Chiyo-ni, trans Patricia Donegan

In one of Chiyo’s fluid (and erotic!) haiku, we can follow the syntax to locate the sections in this translation: lines 1 and 2 make a unit, then there's the prepositional phrase that completes the sentence.

Reading this haiku is like watching a figure emerge from the brush of a painter! Except that it’s a rare painting that becomes so upclose and personal—or is it?

As for the analogies informing the poem: The "hem" is to Zoka as the kite is to the poet: zoka consciousness "takes in" the hem the way a person "takes in" a kite -- with a "tie"; otherwise it will fly away in the (Spring) breeze.

Zoka sees the hem of the kimono as full of energy and independence, perhaps as an emodiment of the spirit of the lovely “you” addressed by Chiyo.

Seeing the hem in light of zoka saves the poem from being merely sexy, though it is delightfully that: zoka as The Creative loves to see "things" in their act of being, and this hem must fly!

>

Commentary on a haiku by Jamie Edgecombe

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:01:00 +0000

remembering Basho
a scarecrow emerges
from my brush

-- Jamie Edgecombe

In this haiku, “Basho” is a symbol, a reference to a man, yes, but also a reference to what he means to the poet and, potentially, the reader of the poem. Edgecombe’s haiku – Edgecombe is a painter as well as a poet – reveals Basho as the name of a substance carried through meditation into a work of art.

The poem is grounded in actuality. “Scarecrow” is one of the historical Basho’s favorite images, so there’s an allusion and an homage to the poet in the image. But it’s also a specific image that carries with it narratives of boundaries – seasonal, organic, cultural. The haiku shows a modern poet participating in the symbolic world of his master poet through an image.

Of course none of this would matter were the haiku not well written, if the gap between the superposed line – remembering Basho – and the base where not a formal and persuasive acknowledgement of the master distinction between time and eternity, between particulars and Being as One. The sense of immediacy one gets from a good haiku is achieved here not by sentimental feeling but by juxtapositions of present/past, thing/art – several paradoxes – which, taken in by the reader, produce an experience of “flow” of consciousness which is parallel to the one mentioned in the poem. That is, the poem reveals through juxtaposition and paradox the “simplicity” of Way over against the complexity of the life of composition.

This distinction between complex, plural composition and the simple oneness of “nonbeing” (in one tradition) or Being (in another) is the “unwobbling pivot” of haiku and finds its equivalences in world cultures including Chinese, Japanese, Medieval Christian, and contemporary theology.

In the tension of its two-part form, the ideal haiku acknowledges the invisible behind the visible world of images, the unimaginable behind the floating world of existence. This secret architecture is the basis on which to evaluate haiku as a poetic form “equal” (sub specie aeternatis) to all comers — for example, Dante’s “comedy.”

Theory of course only prepares us to enjoy the gift of this contemporary haiku, which is quite expressive, lively, ardent -- human. The flow of the brush becomes not only an act of tradition but an act of eros: the poet participates through love in the life of the master. Reading the haiku is a pleasure because of the meditative integrity of the composition. A “moment” yes but also a process, a flow toward a transcendent horizon.

Finally, to return to the opening line (which we can now understand in terms of the whole), the act of “remembering” brings into being “consciousness” by which the ego transcends itself in the name of Basho. Indeed, the act of anamnesis (as Plato called it) is profoundly erotic and the essence of humanity.

Our Debut debuts!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:01:00 +0000

Madeleine Findlay. Shaped Water: A Haiku Year (first edition)

a review by William J. Higginson at haikaipub.wordpress.com

Portsmouth, NH: Single Island Press, 2007. 4.25×5.5″ (11×14 cm), approx 64 unnumbered pages, $14.95 from the publisher, 379 State St., 03801.
With thanks to Tom D’Evelyn.

With Shaped Water, editor, publisher and author Madeleine Findlay inaugurates her and Tom D’Evelyn’s “small press” in fine style.

From a four-color wrapper to the letterpress-printed interior in sewn signatures of deep cream Ingres paper bound in “Turner Blue” boards embossed with the book’s title, this book is a class act. Its one-to-a-page haiku, elegantly set in Pastonchi monotype by Ed Rayher at Swamp Press, speak quietly to inner places engaged with the outer world.

Some of Findlay’s haiku seem simple in the extreme, as in this almost uncommentable occurrence:

blown
across the kitchen floor
dead leaves

. . . but, on the facing page, we see that more is at stake in these poems, where each word approaches silent, subtle gesture:

out in the cold wind
I walk into my shadow
my back warm

But I have jumped ahead into winter, so let’s back up to see what we might discover in spring, toward the front of the book:

across the counter
 and through a crack in the wall 
snakeskin

Sounds like my grandfather’s old shed out back, where I found such things after a snowbound winter finally melted away and his worn hands sought tools for work in the soil.

This is a carefully crafted book in every dimension, a “year” to set above any other I know in haiku lately. A wonderful debut book for both press and poet. I’ll not give away any more of these poems here, but recommend that you check them out yourself. The price is low for a book of such quality, and there are only 200 to be had in this limited edition. Check it out further on the publisher’s web site: http://www.haikumuse.com/.

Copyright © 2008 William J. Higginson. Reprinted by permission.

A Commentary

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:06:00 +0000

the bridge’s shadow
motionless on the river
bright January

-- Tom D'Evelyn

Connections are in disconnect, removed, abstracted and yet nourished by the shadow. The bridge as a symbol is cultivated on the water. This internalizes the message and makes one think of this distillation -- crossing, intentions and directions. "Motionless" is the way we feel this time of year as we wait insouciantly for spring. We are in suspended animation, putting things off and rationalizing -- buried in unfurnished hope. In contrast January is "bright" -- metallic -- often foiling the self-image of being curled in a cave. You have everything going here -- the river bringing change is flat -- supplicant to the structure crossing above it. The tension is in perfect suspension and the bridge -- the main character, the hero, the knight, keeps re-emerging. -- Madeleine Findlay

Haibun: i.m. Patricia Gordon

noreply@blogger.com (Tom D'Evelyn) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 16:04:00 +0000

My mother died this spring, an old lady with a halo of white hair, her classic features unfallen. A great beauty in her prime, she firmly and rather shamelessly denied imperfect reality. Today, Good Friday, I remember the eloquent silence of flowers, which she arranged with true flair, and indoor, pampered cats, with which she felt a certain kinship.

In the haiku, which I wrote the day of her death, the seasonal word is strong -- the high clouds, the spring light. The sense of distance is immense. That's the base. The fragment is: “mother's last dream.” The "lastness"—the extremity-- of this dream has to click with the image in the base; the gap between the sections must become a bridge between the universal and the particular. The click – the ahah!-- gives a particular quality to the dream -- a very pure dream, just that pearly light. That and the high transformations!

The "proportions" in the base are then: as the daylight is to the high clouds. And the analogy is: so mother's dream is to X. The "X" is the unnamable identity, the “dark enigma” behind the clouds, which the dream symbolizes; but also the consciousness capable of knowing itself as such. So the haiku witnesses the open identity of this dreamer at the edge of her life.

How high the clouds
this perfect spring day—
mother’s last dream.