icon images & haiku
by
Sonia Coman
Constanza, Romania

About My Iconography
by Sonia Christina Coman

Techniques:

As a result of the research I have been doing for some time, I am now able to produce icons on glass or wood with a gold layer on top. The colours I use are in conformity with the dogma of the Orthodox church. In the future, I am planning to approach the field of miniature and glass-painting, in general. The techniques impose some strict rules concerning the colours used for the clothing of Jesus, Saint Mary and other saints, and there is a full range of restrictions regarding the gold layer. There are various materials which are used to fix the shades and the gold and silver layers to the glass.
Besides all this, the artist is free to choose whichever shade he wants in order to obtain the effect by s/he desires, making orthodox iconography absolutely fascinating from a technical point of view. The technique of the Japanese painting genre, sumi-e imposes some strict rules, too, and by these rules, great pictures have been created. The technique used to get the final product is very intricate. I would be happy to share with you some information about the processes undertaken to produce the icons:

First, I make a rough drawing of the subject as a linocut. I try to make it from a personal point of view.

Next, I engrave the contour with the appropriate tools (chisels).

I then try to emphasize the garments, making them deep and bold.

Paper is laid over the engraved linoleum and this is placed in a special mould in order to press it (I use an ancient device, made in Austria in 1800 and which is very good, yet). I use a special, hand-made paper, manually manufactured, resembling the American paper made of 100% cotton, or the Japanese paper made with rice straw.

By pressing the paper over the mold, a bold image of the icon is produced. I apply several layers of a special ground coating which hardens the consistency of the final product.

The tri-dimensional image of the icon is glued to a wooden prop which was previously covered with cloth and painted with layers of the ground coating.

Afterwards, I paint the sacred faces in accordance with the rules of wood painting, I try to imprint my vision of the faces.
I learned to paint icons in a special technique, which gives them the appearance of being old.

History and Stories of Romania Behind the Iconography:

I want to stress the fact that I had this icon blessed in Saint Andrews Cavern, the first apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ, and acknowledged as the apostle of the Romanian people. Dobrudja was once called Scythia Minor, an ancient province of the Roman Empire, with a Geta population and many old Greek citadels on the Black Sea Coast. Among them, is Tomis, later Constantiana, from Constantius the 2nd, the Byzantium Emperor (the Constantza of our days, where I was born).

Saint Andrew’s Cavern lies in the South of Dobrudja, in the great forest of Migilet, where there is a spring whose water never goes dry. The South of Dobrudja is made of boundless plateaus covered with wild bushes where drought and wind are at home. The thick, beautiful forest about which I’m telling you seems to be God-given, left alone as a real wonder amidst the surrounding steppe. Saint Andrew settled in Dobrudja, a little bit farther from this place, near the Saint Monastery of Dervent, neighbouring the Danube, which is the first convent which was blessed by The Sacred Steps of Saint Andrew. There, you can find the healing spring which springs out of Saint Andrew’s. Its waters flow only on the condition that the believers have their hands joined in prayer.

Saint Andrew later moved towards the Black Sea, sprinkling along the road some other miraculous sources. No modern specialist or scientist was able to find out the mystery formula of these Springs whose water, is so sweet and smooth and has an unmatched healing power when you drink with faith.

When he reached the above mentioned forest, the apostle Andrew put up at a hamlet, knelt, crossing Himself, and asked God for some water which he wanted to use in order to baptize the pagan people of The Geta into the Christian faith. Out of the four points that he touched with his cane, four springs come out of the ground, and from the middle grew out a stone font. The four sources remained unchanged until today. Tens of miles all over the rest of the territory Dobrudja is stony and dry. In the most abrupt slope of all, there is the famous cavern where the apostle Andrew led his life for 20 years.

People come to the cavern to pray, having faith in its wonder-making power. Inside, there are hundreds of candles flickering in the wall cracks, the wax dripping on the cold stone. The walls turn into oily wax, plunging icons and people in a restful, yellowish light. Left within these cracks, people insert their written prayers to God, addressed to the walls themselves, not to the priests! Inside the cavern, strange things happen: some places you are hot, some places you are cold; your feelings may change by the place you are in; you may feel peaceful, gloomy, passionate or eager to leave this cavern of wonders or of curses.

It’s all about energy exchanges which shift in a chaotic manner in the hazy atmosphere of the cavern. Seemingly, this is due to the presence of Holy Relics to which are attributed these strange things. Around 1600, there was a huge Monastery, with 183 men. Above the cavern, a wooden church was placed where Turks had incarcerated the monks, strawed the entrance and burned them alive. The Holy Relics are spread all over the place.

In the cavern, there is a stone slab which used to be Saint Andrew’s bed. Everybody who sat or prayed on his bed, was healed. Saint Andrew eventually over the Danube on a pilgrimage across the district of Arges, near Campulung, where the present Church of Namaiesti is to be found. Legend has it, that looking through the stone-carved pagan temple window and not seeing any priests around the place, he uttered: ” Nemo est,” therefore, the name “Namaiesti”. There, they built, right in the mountains, the church as an altar of poverty and simplicity. Namaiesti is like a vulture nest. Carved in the mountain of God Himself, man’s hand came only to complete the work.

The Icon of Virgin Mary brought over here by Saint Andrew and discovered by three shepherds on the Northern wall, stays untouched by the passage of time. It is a wonder-making Icon, painted by Luke, The Evangelist Saint, after the real image of the Virgin.

Sonia Christina Coman,
Ambassador of World Haiku 2000
Constantza, Romania
Date of birth: 11/06/88

WHChaikumultimedia

Photo-haiku

In 1999 Mitty (Mitsugu) Abe developed the first interactive website for photographers and haiku poets to do something new and collaborate with their arts: “Overcoming Time and Distance”. Along with others around the world, WHC members have enjoyed Mitty’s sites by writing haiku for a wide variety of photographs of nature, people and places. Recently Mitty created Beacons, a web site in which people submit photos and haiku about the seasons related to the places where they live. Already this site enjoys submissions from the U.S., Canada, UK, Japan and Italy.

Calla Lily Image
by Carol Raisfeld

don’t you hear
the music
of the trumpeteer?

peigi ann sway

how dark
the shade of sun in the light
of a calla lily

hortensia anderson

golden sword
in white linen shroud
calla lily

deborah russell

wrapped in white
your core of pollen
waits for the bees

carlos fleitas

carrier of light
calla lily in bloom
the whole day

marjorie buettner

early morning -
a calla lily
open for business

carol raisfeld

WHChaikumultimedia – Art & Photo Haiku

For this edition we asked Roderick Stewart, designer of Photohaiku Arts, to select from a set of submissions of art and photography illustrations of the haiku of the Masters done by members of the WHCmultimedia group. A selection of Roderick’s own work is featured in a special portfolio in this issue of WHR. In addition, multimedia editor Ray Rasmussen presents his choices of the best of the submissions not selected by Roderick Stewart.

Ray Rasmussen, Alberta, CA & Debi Bender, Florida, USA: Art Haiku

Ray Rasmussen, Alberta, CA – Photo Haiku

Comment by Roderick Stewart: Excellent, clean photo with the moon’s reflection in the pond and a bonus of a treeline pointing to lily pads which, in turn, lead to the haiku. Nice detail in highlights and shadows (which become a black background for the haiku). The lily pads seem to rise from the surface of the image; they add an extension to the haiku, as if they are witnesses or participants, or as if they’re the moon’s footsteps promenading the pond. The typeface is clear, and goes well with the lily pads.

From a Haiku Editor’s Desk

Reflections From Behind The Novice’s Eye-Shade
Part 2

Matt Morden
Wales, UK

Despite working in education, I do not consider myself an academic. My teaching style is based upon a basic knowledge of my subjects, awareness of the needs of the students and the hope that more often than not, there will be a little wind in my sails.

Since these principles have served me well in my job, it seems to make sense to use them in my hobbies. While there is a place for those with great knowledge about the history and development of haiku, tanka and related forms, these are not things that I have spent any great time worrying about. While this may leave me as the village idiot as far as history and tradition goes, it does serve as a useful way to spot the Emperor’s new clothes.

However far I have come down the haiku path, an open mind and a willingness to make mistakes has always helped me on the way. One of my many mistakes has been to try, from time to time, to formulate a list of rules for successful haiku. These can be found buried deep in the archives of various mailing lists around the web.

What becomes clear when one attempts this exercise is that those who know far more about Japanese poetry than I do can always produce the haiku evidence (usually in the form of the work of Japanese masters) to contradict the stated rule. And every day, I thank them. However, I have persevered with my attempts to draw up some guidelines that might be of use to those beginning to write haiku.

I find this form of advice particularly useful when trying to knock the poetic sensibilities out of mainstream poets who try to write haiku. What follows is based upon my own few steps as a writer of short forms, my attempts to give feedback to other writers, a few short months behind the associate editors’ eye-shade and things I have ripped off from other people. Just don’t take them as gospel.

Forget About Formats

All of us beginners write short verse, as opposed to poetry. Whether it is haiku, senryu, tanka shouldn’t really matter to the beginner. If your attempt has got one syllable, it is probably too short and twenty syllables is probably too long. Above all, don’t worry about 5-7-5. It might be what your Chamber’s or Webster’s says, but life’s too short to lose any sleep over it. Remember that it is your moment that matters.

If You Are In It, Get Out Of It

Take a look at what you have written. If you can see yourself in there loving, hating, longing, regretting and worst of all judging, it is even money your attempt isn’t going to work. So as my metalwork teacher often commented, “Morden, get out of it!”

Ask Yourself “So What?”

It is important to think if your moment is important to anyone apart from yourself. While you might be cringing with embarrassment at the thought of the over-long Christmas kiss with your colleague, does anyone else give a kipper?

No Cheap Tricks*

There are a range of devices that haiku writers use to attempt to draw the reader into their little world. So by writing haiku about haiku or haijin, reworking the Basho “frogpond” haiku or by making references to Buddha’s, mah jong, wind chimes or prayer mats, the author can hoodwink the reader into thinking they have produced something mystical and therefore of worth.

Avoiding Clichéville

There are various subjects that have been done to death in haiku and have become clichés as a result. Regular exposure to haiku magazines and mailing lists helps the writer to get a feel for those topics that appear repeatedly. My personal dislikes centre around herons generally, shadows meeting themselves, anything abandoned and the range of Eastern mystical themes mentioned above. I also have a big problem with cat haiku, though my fellow eye-shade wearer disagrees. So try something new — it might just work.

Vivé La Difference!

One of the great strengths of haiku is its’ ability to cross cultural borders. Readers of classical Japanese haiku begin to understand the importance of the seasonal references in classical works. Cultural and political boundaries begin can be removed and the common human experiences are shared. This can only lead to a greater feeling of community and humanity amongst poets around the world. For this reason, I think local season words are important in the positive celebration of our regional identities. While some readers may not understand particular words or the nuances behind them, the beauty of the internet is that many people now have easy access to a medium that can answer their questions. A few minutes searching can quickly reveal the meanings to words in Croatian, Innu or Welsh and give pictures of the wild flowers of New Zealand. We have the tools to understand, should we wish to use them.

Juxtapose

Many of the best haiku work because the author has chosen to juxtapose two seemingly unconnected scenes in a way which compliments both. I believe that another point in favour of season words is that they offer an ideal opportunity to compare and contrast aspects of the haiku moment. Since Spring offers the chance of rebirth and Autumn brings decay and melancholia, the seasons provide the beginner with an chance to counterpoint the scenes that they find around them.

Go Easy On The Verbs

Most novice haiku authors are guilty of too many verbs within their haiku. Since a moment is just that, one verb should usually suffice. In rare instances, two verbs can work, as can no verbs at all. And if you have three verbs in there, you should go back to the drawing board.

Humour and Irony

My Friday evenings are spent watching two TV programmes that I find very amusing. The wife, however, can’t stand them. One man’s Benny Hill is another woman’s Seinfeld. As a result, attempting to write humorous haiku is very difficult and not recommended for the beginner. More often, budding haijin come up with Alanis Morrisette “ironic” moments masquerading under the guise of senryu. So you will be doing editors and their readers a favour by sparing them the details of your shoelace snapping just as you miss the bus for your job interview.

Everyone Needs An Editor

The short time that I have spent as an assistant editor, has strengthened my view that we all benefit immeasurably from constructive criticism of our work. Where this becomes more difficult is in finding people that we trust and respect sufficiently to enable us enter into a balanced, two-way dialogue. The range of haiku magazines and on-line resources is such that no-one starting to write haiku should be short of places to go for advice. Here again, it is essential to read the magazines and websites you are submitting to before you send work off. This gives you a better idea of what the editor will publish and if you are unsure, ask. In my experience of the haiku world, editors are only too willing to point those looking in the right direction. It requires a leap of faith, but it is worth it.

Learn All The Rules, Then Throw The Rule Book Away

Most arts have some maxim along the lines of the one above. We have to get an understanding of the mechanics of what we are doing before we are able to do it effectively. Following some or all of the suggestions above should start you on your haiku journey. But if any art is to progress, rules have to be broken and moulds thrown away. You will not have to look far to find examples of short poetry that transcend all of the suggestions made above — and that is how it should be. And as Basho reputedly taught:

“Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.”

Enjoy your walk!

Matt Morden
Associate Editor – Snapshots

* I’ll confess to pinching this from advice that the late, great Raymond Carver gave to short story writers. It is all the more relevant as I believe haiku authors have more in common with short story writers than they do with poets.

** So named for the Alanis Morrisette song, “Ironic” which recounts a series of so-called ironic moments.

*** translated by Haas R (1994) in The Essential Haiku Ecco Press

]]> http://whrarchives.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/reflections-from-behind-the-novices-eye-shade/feed/ 0 whrarchives editor whc_blmed http://whrarchives.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/of-persimmons-and-bells/ http://whrarchives.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/of-persimmons-and-bells/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:37:48 +0000 whrarchives http://whrarchives.wordpress.com/?p=527 Continue reading →]]> WHR November 2001

WHC Translation Project of Haiku Poems by Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)
Part 1 – Project 1

 OF PERSIMMONS AND BELLS
kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Horyuji  

A Question of Interpretation

Compiled and Edited by John E. Carley
Pennines, UK

Aims:

In May 2001 Susumu Takiguchi, Chairman of the World Haiku Club, proposed, as part of the Masaoka Shiki Centenary Celebrations, an On-line Joint Translation Project to be undertaken by WHC Haiku Forum Members. Susumu posted:

“This is part of the incentive for all of us to study, share and enjoy Shiki’s works in a practical and real way.

It is also intended to address the issue of haiku translation (…) how difficult such translation is, how the results differ according to different interpretations of the same poem and how the translation itself, as a “living thing“, must evolve and be open to improvement and new interpretations (…) a point stressed by such scholars as David Lanoue.”

The procedure would be straightforward: the poem selected would appear in Romanji with an English breakdown of the constituent components; Susumu would offer a provisional translation to be complimented by a published translation from another source.

“Then,” Susumu continued, “anyone interested can post his or her opinions, comments and interpretations.”

Or, in the words beloved of any British child on Bonfire Night: ‘Light blue touch paper and stand well clear’!

Of Persimmons and Bells – kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Horyuji

The first poem selected was, arguably, the most famous of all Shiki’s haiku of which the foreword says – Horyuji no chaya ni ikoite – Resting at a tea house of Horyuji Temple.

kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Horyuji

Masaoka Shiki  25-26/10/1895

kaki – persimmon   kueba – as I eat   kane – bell   naru – rings   nari – an adverb*   Horyuji – Horyuji Temple

*see below
as I eat a persimmon
the bell starts ringing
at Hôryûji Temple

(version by Sususmu Takiguchi)
I bite into a persimmon
and a bell resounds -
Hôryûji

(translation by Janine Beichman)

Read Shiki Essay #2:  Using Same Themes  (Persimmons), Volume 1, Issue 1
Susumu Takiguchi  [use your browser's back arrow to return to this  page]

So, the project was off. Immediately came a request, from the author of this article, for clarification:

“Please could you indicate the nature of the modification that the adverb ‘nari’ brings to the verb ‘ring’.”

To which Susumu replied:

” It has a number of different senses in which it modifies verbs (and other parts of speech) but in Shiki’s haiku it is generally held that ‘nari’ has two functions. One is dantei (predicative adverb) whereby it makes the verb into strong affirmative. So, Shiki’s bell is not just vaguely ringing but ‘definitely’ and ‘certainly’ ringing: the reality of the ringing bell is very keen. Another function of ‘nari’ in the haiku is eitan (exclamatory adverb) which is used in Japanese verses very often. It shows how deeply Shiki was moved. The strength of his feeling is palpable.”

Good… that was two syllables-worth cleared up. Or at least the parameters defined. Maybe. As will be seen the exact nature of the bell’s ring would prove to be something of a conundrum. And as to the meaning… well, perhaps one way to throw some light on the poem would be to provide a degree of context. Obligingly Susumu posted:

“Like many other good haiku poets, Shiki had his favourite topics on which he wrote haiku over and over again. Persimmons were not only such favourite haiku theme for him but also his favourite food…

“The poem gives out the impression of a calm and peaceful scene (…) However, like many of his other haiku, there are sadder and more sombre realities behind this poem.”

The full text of this essay appears elsewhere in the magazine, however, as we skim these extracts, a question arises: If this degree of background is needed for a successful translation, how much is needed for a complete reading?

“The doctor who saw him gave him drugs which enabled him (…) to visit Nara, and it is possible that he may have thought that this could be his last chance to go there (…) the poem gives the impression that a sightseer was resting, while coincidentally the bell started to ring – all natural sequence and no contrivance whatsoever. Not quite so.

‘It is believed that Shiki was in Nara on 24, 25 and 26 of October. He wrote quite a few haiku poems during these three days, including some on persimmons (…) At an inn where he was staying he asked a maid to bring him a bowl of persimmons. The maid peeled and cut them for him, which he enjoyed eating when he heard the bell of Todaiji [a nearby temple], telling the start of night. He loved this moment so much that he could not wait the following morning to hire a rickshaw to take him to Horyuji Temple, which he apparently preferred.

‘In other words, he consciously went to Horyuji Temple in order to enjoy the bell and the persimmons there and to write a haiku.”

Hmm, one poem… two temples. Quite what this meant for the more rigorous exponents of ‘shasei’ was a question for another day. But for those project participants unfamiliar with the information, it raised a lot of questions about this poem in particular: Was it a conflation? An invention? A souvenir? Was the experience of eating the fruit intended as specific, or generic? Debra Woolard Bender had been researching, and, quoting from the Asahi Haikuist Network, Oct 24 2000, had come up with an interesting aside:

“David McMurray wrote that while Shiki loved persimmons, his illness and the fact the fruit is difficult to digest prevented him from enjoying them as often as he might like:

Then, quoting directly from David McMurray:

” – Shiki therefore paced himself so as not to overeat. His limit was apparently two persimmon per three thousand haiku, as described in this delightful poem -

Examining
three thousand haiku
two persimmons “

As to the issue of specific vs. generic, D.W. Bender had found an earlier posting from James Karkoski to a Shiki Salon debate in 1999. James is discussing the condition of the verb:

“The -eba is a conditional that means ‘if’ or ‘whenever’,  which makes the statement ‘whenever I eat a persimmon’

“So, the ringing of the bell isn’t something that happens independently outside of Shiki, it is something that he remembers whenever he eats a persimmon (…) By ignoring the verb tense (…) the original gets translated as a haiku moment even though it was the farthest thing from what is going on in the Japanese”

As it happens James Karkoski is taking issue here with the ‘persimmon’ translation by Janine Beichman that Susumu had selected as introductory material, and which appears at the head of this article. Only twelve hours in to the project and the questions were multiplying – from the nature of the bell’s ring, via the little matter of where and when, to the condition of the verb ‘to eat’.

Ever industrious, Ms. Woolard Bender, meanwhile, had opened up another field of enquiry, this time thanks to haijinx and Nobuyuki Yuasa’s article Laughter in Japanese Haiku:

“Yuasa sees humor in an incongruous relationship between eating a persimmon and hearing a bell (…) he points out that if Shiki were against laughter, he then was also equally against dead seriousness.

When I took a bite
Of persimmon, a bell rang -
Horyuji Temple.”

[Yuasa] 

D.W. Bender continued:

“I would (…) agree with Nobuyuki Yuasa that there is a (wry) humor expressed in Shiki’s poem while at the same time it expresses a deadly seriousness: a juxtaposition of emotion, if what I’ve surmised about life (“persimmons”) and death (“tolling bell”) is true.

“Shiki was serious about poetic truth. However, he evidently did not find a discrepancy in such by mixing in haiku a “present,” (eating persimmon and a temple bell), “future” (the bell at Horyuji Temple), and “past” (whenever).

“(…) Shiki has done a masterful job of writing a multidimensional haiku. It presents, past and future as well as the outer world and the inner man, light and dark (humor and seriousness). It combines season/nature and human. In addition, there would be the parallel of a piquant (sharp) tasting fruit and the startling sound of a bell, a (sharp) reminder of his brevity on earth.

“From these short studies, I would present a possible version:”

whenever I bite a persimmon   a bell tolls   Horyuji Temple

(version by Debra Woolard Bender)

Paul Conneally too had arrived at a similar conclusion – the juxtaposition of eating and hearing the bell could be both specific and generic:

“I think that the poem is not just about eating a persimmon and literally hearing the Horyuji Temple bell but the act of eating a persimmon now bringing to mind Horyuji where the bell was heard (…) So it is (written) to reflect the “bringing to mind” of the occasion.”

the temple bell rings
as I eat a persimmon–
Horyuji

(version by Paul Conneally)

By now James Karkoski had joined the debate in person and was keen to underline the significance of ‘kueba’ – the condition of the verb ‘to eat’ – not least for its implications with regard to the idea of a ‘haiku moment’:

“It’s already on record that Shiki didn’t simply bite into a persimmon and miraculously hear a bell that happened to start ringing. Which is what the choice of “as I eat” leaves the reader with.”

Rather more arcane though, at least at first sight, was his query over the exact brand of Persimmon:

“what kind of persimmons as “food” are they? Are they the ones where the skin of the fruit has been peeled and served chilled? Or are they the”hoshi-gaki” ones, which have been hung and dried during the winter?”

Susumu Takiguchi, though, was alive to the relevance of the question:

“the persimmons Shiki was believed to have eaten at the inn on (presumably) the evening of 25 October 1895 were the kind called “Gosho-gaki”, the kind which grows well in Nara area.

  “(…) more important is the point you have raised, namely, in what way were these persimmons served? It is customary (…) that someone (…) peels the skin of a persimmon, cuts them into small slices (like small pale orange moon slices) and serves them on a small plate with a ‘yoji’ (toothpick kind of thing) or a small fork.”

Erm, yes… So?

“Children sometimes eat persimmons without peeling the skin or slicing it but they are often advised that that could cause stomach ache.

So, it is most likely that Shiki was served with peeled and sliced persimmon. Therefore, ‘biting into’, as Beichman translated, is most likely to be a mistranslation.”

Which is plain enough. The action of the verb was starting to take shape: munch, chomp etc no longer being options. But the condition of the verb was doing less well. Susumu continued:

“Another point you raise is the translation of “kueba”, which has been the main focus of investigation in Japan for a long time. Debi quoted your earlier posting on this point. “If I eat” is one of possible interpretations. However, “whenever I eat” does not really apply. The general view is that this is not the case of “if” but “when” and more precisely “as” or “while”. Therefore, it should be “as/while I am/was eating”, indicating that the act of eating and hearing the sound of the bell happen simultaneously.”

Mindful perhaps that the principle juxtaposition of the poem is between persimmon and bell Susumu also offered the following observation:

“Japanese bells are huge and hung in a special bell place of a temple. A long wooden pole horizontally suspended is swung at speed to strike the bell. The length of time between tolls is quite long, longer than Big Ben. The toll is heavy, austere and reverberating.”

Dina E Cox had been puzzling on just this aspect of the poem:

“Would I be right in assuming that the sound of the temple bell then (…) is more that of a ‘large’ sound, more like a gong, than a bell (to our western ears)…. with a heavy sounding reverberation, which continues with diminishing intensity…. and only once that has disappeared, would the bell seem to be ‘struck’ again?”

It would seem that we had at last found the least contentious area of the poem. Susumu replied:

“Yes, you are absolutely right, exactly so (…) The typical kane is something like 8 or 9 foot high and 6 foot in diameter, and weighs goodness knows how many tons!”

And there was the wider point:

“This is the practical side of understanding (Japanese) haiku  – before we start thinking about the cultural and spiritual side – that actually is necessary in order to make any sense of it.”

Which is quite a daunting proposition – for a translation to succeed the translator, or team of translators, must have a comprehensive grasp of the socio-economic fabric, past and present, of both the culture of origin and the culture of destination.

Email though, like the White Rabbit, tends to be too busy to stop for long and James Karkoski, whilst sceptical of the efficacy of an uninflected present simple or present continuous translation of ‘kueba’  – such as Susumu’s draft proposed – had also raised an entirely fresh set of considerations.:

“After the rhythm which Shiki set up in “kaki kueba kane ga naru nari”, the phrase “Horyuji” is a perfect “yo-in” for the “gong” which echoes off and on and on into space when one of those bells are struck.

We were 24 hours into the project and the question of sound had taken on a new aspect: can a translation respect the phonic properties of the original? And what then are the implications for the presence, or otherwise, of phonic effects in English language haiku?

But good poetry is not necessarily dependant on analysis and Laurene Post proposed a draft “from the gut translation only…”:

taste of persimmon
as sharp as the bells
Horyuji

  (version by Laurene Post)

As with Janine Beichman, Laurene had omitted the word ‘temple’. Mary Angela Nangini, by contrast, preferred the Takiguchi approach:

as I eat persimmon
a temple bell rings
Horyuji

(version by Mary Angela Nangini)

To date every version of the poem proposed or scrutinised had been faithful to the image order of the original: persimmon/bell/location. Alenka Zorman wanted to explore the effect of inverting the last two elements:

eating a persimmon -
at Horyuji Temple
bell’s ringing

(version by Alenka Zorman)

Or, using the noun form of the verb ‘resound’:

eating a persimmon -
from Horyuji Temple
bell’s resonance

(version by Alenka Zorman)

Carmen Sterba too considered the sound of the bell to be central to the poem:

“the sound of the bell takes Shiki out of himself and links him with sound of an ancient temple bell (…) Whether that was the precise moment that he wrote it or not, is not as important as the epiphany Shiki experienced to create this haiku. (…) he realized that this bell had been heard before he had been born, and would also be heard after he died. (…) When he went back to Matsuyama, and ate many more persimmons… (…) It would give him a feeling of wholeness.

as I eat a persimmon
the temple bell resonates -
Horyuji

(version by Carmen Sterba)

These remarks on the nature of Shiki’s personal exegesis were strongly endorsed by Dina E. Cox who had an important observation of her own to make:

“the temple bell is resonating (…) it is interesting to consider the many layers of possibilities, as well as meaning, in this haiku – augmented I’m sure, by the ambiguities of translation.”

‘the ambiguities of translation’ – a crucial concept in so many ways, and never more so than for this most elusive of verse forms.

Some clarifications though may be in every way desirable. And Carmen Sterba’s thoughtful post had contained one such:

“The ‘ji’ in Horyuji means temple, so the word ‘temple’ is not (strictly) needed (as with Beichman). On the other hand, the sounds of a temple bell and a church bell are quite different, so I prefer to use the word ‘temple’ to modify ‘bell’ in the second line even though ‘kane’ (bell) stands alone in the original Japanese.”

Michael Nickels-Wisdom, meanwhile, brought some clarification of his own to the debate: a comment on the significance of persimmons, and – by implication – humility, to Shiki. Quoting from a translation by Hiraki Sato and Burton Watson contained in The Country of Eight Islands he posted:

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

And in the matter of the juxtaposition of ‘persimmon’ and ‘bell’, Don Socha had points to make about the significance of synesthesia in haiku via a translation of a poem by Chora:

insects
scattering in the grasses–
sound-colors

Mary Lee McClure had been quietly digesting (sic!) the implications of persimmons large and small. Unbeknownst to her she was about to light everyone’s favourite fireworks:

the taste of this persimmon
and the deep bell of Horyuji
resounds once more

(version by Mary Lee McClure)

“I’ve taken many liberties, I know. But I happen to share with Masaoka-san his love for those lovely persimmons. And the gorgeous deep BONG of a temple bell is a sound never-to-be-forgotten. It resonates forever in your mind and gut and the simplicity of a bite of persimmon is all that’s needed to start it ringing.”

This lyrical excursion to the land of all-things-persimmon was to prove our undoing, or, just possibly, our fulfilment. But first Kevin Ryan had some rhetorical questions to ask, and some comments on the nature of simplicity:

“does the sound of slowly biting into one and the gap between bites have any reference to the slow deliberate striking of a Japanese temple bell?

“is this essentially a comment on mindfulness?”

savouring a persimmon -
Horyuji
bell resonates

(version by Kevin Ryan)

“I see this verse as a simple acknowledgement of what we all know at some time – that we may find insight, upliftment and resonance anywhere – Shiki points a way to this beautifully and resonantly himself – in the simplest action, if undertaken fully.”

Kevin used the word ‘savouring’ to shade the action of the verb ‘to eat’. Earlier Laurene Post and then Mary Lee McClure had proposed ‘taste’, and it was this usage that attracted the present author who also had an alternative suggestion with regard to the bell:

“I am not too keen on ‘resonates’. I’d argue that its principal figurative sense in English tends to notions of interiority. To that extent, and in this setting, ‘resonate’ might be said to describe rather that evoke.”

a taste of persimmon   at Horyuji   the bell rings out

(version by John Carley)

Don Socha too had settled on ‘taste’, and had been musing on the effects of synesthesia and ‘distant’ reverberations:

“So, first I thought: tintinnabulation/ with this taste of persimmon–/ Horyuji  (but) While poetically, the term “tintinnabulation” may serve both the taste in the mouth and the sound in ear, the word itself may be too ornate or complicated.”

reverberations
of the bell at Horyuji–
taste of persimmons

(version by Don Socha)

By now the process had been rolling for more than seventy-two hours. Under the heading ‘Nuts and Bolts’ the points raised might be summarised as:

1/ The tense and condition of the verb ‘eat’, its
physical nature and abstract connotations
2/  The actual and symbolic nature of the sound of the bell
3/ The type and taste of the persimmon eaten
4/ The nature of the juxtaposition bell-fruit.
5/ The most effective image order
6/ The inclusion of the word ‘temple’

The heading ‘Translation Issues’ would group some concerns such as:

A/ Literal, word for word, substitution vs.
the translation of concepts
B/ Capturing tone
C/ The inclusion of phonic effects
D/ The uses of ambiguity
E/ Layering the meaning.
F/ The degree of context needed

Clearly then, Haiku Forum members were poised on the brink of a magisterial synthesis which would yield the definitive translation of Shiki’s masterpiece.

Well… readers at home might like to try that for themselves. Us, we’re off to Persimmon Land. Michael Nichols Wisdom in reply to Mary Lee McClure:

“There’s an annual persimmon festival in, of all places, Gnaw Bone, Indiana (…) At the festival, we had the opportunity to eat persimmon pudding. Was this the American persimmon?”

Alenka Zorman, plus poem:

“November gray -
a ripe persimmon
the only sun

An unripe fruit is yellowish orange and very astringent. A ripe kaki is reddish orange, mellow, very tasty and sweet, I like it very much. The best are those with some small black lines on them.

Susumu Takiguchi:

” In order to understand Shiki’s “persimmon/Horyuji” haiku really well, one must visit Horyuji around 25 October, take a rest at the tea house, eat persimmons and wait for the “tsuri-gane” bell to toll. Short of that, one should at least eat persimmons.”

Which, obligingly James Karkoski did. Both the persimmons:

“Our property came with a couple of trees from which the dry persimmons are made. The dried persimmons are roughly about half the size of the full bodied persimmons which are peeled and served as is with the knotted pieces knifed out.”

And the temple visit:

“There was a row of souvenir shops and tea houses on the road which led into the temple, but there was a distance between them and being inside the temple. I can’t remember if I heard a bell being gonged or not, but it is easy to imagine how the gong would roll out and echo and expand across the distance between where you were.

I seem to remember eating a soft ice cream cone. Vanilla, of course.

a taste of persimmon   at Horyuji   the temple bell   resounds

(version by John E Carley)

Haiku #1 and Translation Versions

kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Horyuji

Masaoka Shiki, 25-26/10/1895

as I eat a persimmon
the bell starts ringing
at Hôryûji Temple

(version by Sususmu Takiguchi  Oxford, UK)
I bite into a persimmon
and a bell resounds -
Hôryûji

(translation by Janine Beichman Tokyo, JP)
whenever I bite a persimmon   a bell tolls   Horyuji Temple

(version by Debra Woolard Bender Florida, US)

the temple bell rings
as I eat a persimmon–
Horyuji

(version by Paul Conneally Loughborough, UK)

taste of persimmon
as sharp as the bells
Horyuji

(version by  Laurene Post, Florida, US)

as I eat persimmon
a temple bell rings
Horyuji

(version by Mary Angela Nangini, Toronto, CA)

eating a persimmon -
from Horyuji Temple
bell’s resonance

(version by Alenka Zorman, Ljubjana, Slovenia)

as I eat a persimmon
the temple bell resonates -
Horyuji

(version by Carmen Sterba, Kamakura, JP)

the taste of this persimmon
and the deep bell of Horyuji
resounds once more

(version by Mary Lee McClure, North Carolina, US)

savouring a persimmon -
Horyuji
bell resonates

(version by Kevin Ryan, Loughborough, UK)

reverberations
of the bell at Horyuji–
taste of persimmons

(version by Don Socha, Michigan, US)

a taste of persimmon   at Horyuji   the temple bell   resounds

(version by John E Carley, Pennines, UK)

Guest Speakers Column

From time to time, WHC’s forums invite guests to present lessons or essays, and to judge kukai. World Haiku Review is pleased to announce a new Feature Article, “Guest Speakers’ Corner”, christened by Peggy Willis Lyles. A member of World Haiku Club, Peggy was invited by WHCschools’ Hibiscus School instructor, Ferris Gilli, as a Guest Speaker to give a lesson in September 2001. Peggy invited members to “kansho” (appreciate) a haiku by Mrs. Gilli. The results of the kansho may be found in the WHCschools Hibiscus Petals Column.

Regarding Poetry: the Shape of the Song
Peggy Willis Lyles
Georgia, US
Members of The Hibiscus School understand that there are many differences between haiku in English and most other Western poetry. In fact, on March 3, 2001, Ferris sent you a message that included this directive:

Regarding poetry. Folks, when you start to write a haiku, forget everything you know and have ever been taught about Western-traditional poetry. Haiku is not like any other form of poetry, and it is dangerous to think “poetically” or to even consider using poetic words or phrases when you are ready to write a haiku.

Some of you probably found yourselves writing better haiku the minute you began taking that advice. Others may remember an earlier time when you recognized the need to set aside poetic and figurative language–and preconceived notions in general–so that you could meet haiku face to face and begin writing effectively about your discoveries.

Assuming that you are well-grounded now in the attitudes and techniques that lead to good haiku of the Hibiscus School, I believe there may be some value in looking again at basic discussions of English-language poetry and giving a little thought to how English-language haiku fits in. In the Preface to his 1997 award-winning haiku collection Endgrain, published by Red Moon Press, Dee Evetts wrote, “Fundamentally, haiku is a literary genre. For all its brevity, it must ultimately be assessed by the same standards as all other literature. That is, by its aptness, wit, accuracy, felicity of language, and by its lack of sentimentality and moralizing. The future of English-language haiku is unknowable, but there is no escaping that such criteria will continue to apply.”

I have been thinking recently about the place in Twentieth-Century British and American literature of what we call “The Haiku Movement.” It is much more significant, I believe, than literary scholars have yet recognized. In pursuit of this thought I have considered many anthologies of twentieth-century poetry and also reviewed some standard Introduction to Poetry textbooks, especially various editions of Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama by X.J. Kennedy; Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry by John Frederick Nims and David Mason; and Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine The latter, my favorite, is also included in Perrine’s more comprehensive Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense.

Much of what the various texts say about good poetry in general is applicable to haiku. The language of poetry is compressed. Poets and readers of poetry must pay close attention to the denotations and connotations of words. Poetry relies on sense images to convey its meaning, and that meaning is more a matter of the poem’s total experience than something that could be summed up or paraphrased. The dictionary meanings of a poem’s words plus connotations that collect from past experiences with them plus the immediate experience of sense images and the complex associations they touch–all these things and more contribute to the meaning of a poem–and a haiku. Haiku along with other poems deserve more than one reading. If possible, they should be read aloud. While they often spark immediate recognition and appreciation, they give up their full meanings more slowly. They are, in fact, the most compressed of all poems. I like to think that means they are charged with extra energy and vitality. Certainly, they engage the reader as a co-creator. All good poetry is selective, leaving much unsaid. As Yoko Sugawa tells us, “In order to say ten things a haiku presents only two.” Those two, though, are so carefully selected, simply and clearly presented and so interwoven with rich textures of suggestion and association that the receptive reader, willing to enter the poem and do his part, has what he needs to find the other eight things and possibly even more!

Western poetry often introduces additional sense imagery through figurative language. In his valuable essay “Toward a Definition of the English Haiku” George Swede examines various criteria or “rules” governing haiku and concludes that the one which insists it “usually avoids poetic devices such as metaphor, rhyme, etc.” is unnecessary; Global Haiku:Twenty-five Poets World-wide, edited by George Swede and Randy Brooks, Mosaic Press 2000, and on-line at:

http://www.epiphanous.org/mark/haiku/swede.definition.html

Why, then, are newcomers to haiku writing urged to avoid simile, metaphor, personification and other traditional tropes? There are many good answers, I think, but the most important is that haiku poets, certainly those who follow the guidelines of The Hibiscus School, place high value on the creatures and things of this world just as they are, each unique in its essential nature and worthy of unobscured attention. Comparing one thing to another often seems to diminish both. Consider Speculation 813 by Robert Spiess (Modern Haiku, Vol. XXXII, No 2, page 89): “Although simile occasionally occurs in Japanese masters’ haiku, it is rather rare. Perhaps for us the main reason that good haiku seldom use simile is exemplified by the proverb ‘Comparisons are odious.’ Haiku is the comparison-less poetry of Suchness.” On March 24, 2001, Christopher Herold addressed The Hibiscus School directly concerning “Poetics and Personification in Haiku.” Here is part of what he said: “The haiku is capable of taking us to a place of simplicity and thusness that cannot be even closely approached with the use of flowery Western poetic devices. For the most part I find that those devices, used as lavishly as we tend to use them, block our reaching to the very crux of an experience. Simile, personification, overt metaphor, personal pronouns, narrative constructions, all tend to be jeweled fingers. We gaze at them rather than the moon towards which they point.”

Please don’t get carried away, though, and start drafting a strict RULE prohibiting figurative language in Hibiscus-worthy haiku. Instead, let’s look at a delightful haiku by Ferris Gilli herself:

night rain
the small serrated song
of a frog

The Heron’s Nest
Vol. II, No. 1
January, 2000

The nine words tell me enough that I can recreate the essence of the experience. Can you? I can imagine it as either an inside or outside moment. I am conscious of darkness and of the sound of rain, and perhaps the sight, touch, and smell of it, too. Then the frog song starts–small in the context of night and the rain, but this is not a weak sound. Not a smooth one either. I would like the haiku if it read “night rain/the small song/of a frog.” I like it ever so much better because Ferris has included the figurative adjective “serrated.”

How can a song be serrated? It is not a thing with saw-like teeth or sharp projections. A frog doesn’t even sound much like a saw. Besides, don’t we usually trim adjectives from haiku whenever we can? I happen to know that Ferris counts this among her personal favorites. Both the experience and the words to record it came simply, clearly, and naturally as true haiku gifts. How do you “see” the haiku? How do you “hear” it? Thoughts of patterned roughness, and of ability to cut slowly, expand sensation and meaning. What other associations do? What does the haiku say about nature and the poet’s response to it? How do you enter the poem and participate? What do you find there?

I invite you to write a brief kansho (appreciative commentary) about this haiku and send it to me at:

plyles@worldnet.att.net

I will save your notes until midnight eastern time on Monday September 10th and then collate them to post to The Hibiscus School. I will include your name or not according to your instructions. It should be interesting and informative to compare the responses. As you are considering “night rain” and collecting your thoughts, please have a look at this award winner which also suggests more than it says:

June breeze
a hole in the cloud
mends itself

an’ya
The Heron’s Nest
Valentine’s Awards 2001

Ferris’s essay about it might help you decide how to approach an appreciation of “night rain.” Even if you don’t need that sort of model, reading an’ya’s haiku and Ferris’s commentary side by side will be a fine experience. You will find them here:

http://www.theheronsnest.com/haiku/0302V7935/thn_rc_2.html#POEM3

Now let’s think a little more carefully about the figures of speech we would want to use sparingly, if at all, in haiku. Perrine describes them clearly and well: “Metaphor and Simile are both used as a means of comparing things that are essentially unlike. The only distinction between them is that in simile the comparison is expressed by the use of some word or phrase, such as like, as, than, similar to, resembles, or seems; in metaphor the comparison is implied–that is the figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term” (Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, fifth edition, Laurence Perrine with Thomas R. Arp, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1988, page 565. All page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition).

Personification gives “the attitudes of a human being to an animal, object, or concept” (568). An apostrophe “consists in addressing someone absent or dead or something nonhuman as if that person or thing were present and alive and could reply to what is being said” (569). Probably you are already thinking that you would not want to waste valuable words setting up a formal simile in a haiku.

Maybe you are thinking, too, that juxtaposition in haiku sometimes calls attention to similarities between two essentially dissimilar things. That is a much more compressed and efficient way of doing so, isn’t it? It seems to show more respect for the reader, too, letting her draw her own conclusions instead of directing or spelling things out.

Are you also thinking about Issa’s use of personification and apostrophe? Maybe you have some specific examples in mind from other haiku masters, too. There are many of them. Such tropes are seldom used in contemporary English-language poetry, though, except perhaps to create humor. Most of us would feel awkward and a bit silly using them. That’s probably just as well because our readers would be likely to find direct address to an owl, lily, or moose pretty far out.

Perrine says, “a symbol may be roughly defined as something that means more than what it is ” (585). Then he goes on to clarify various figures of speech in a passage that I find especially relevant to haiku:

“Image, metaphor, and symbol shade into each other and are sometimes difficult to distinguish. In general, however, an image means only what it is; the figurative term in a metaphor means something other than what it is; and a symbol means what it is and something more, too. A symbol, that is, functions literally and figuratively at the same time. . . . Images, of course, do not cease to be images when they are incorporated in metaphor or symbol” (585).

We know the importance of sensory experience to the perception of haiku and the value of concrete images in presenting those perceptions to readers so that they can recreate the experience and share the feelings it evoked. We know too that words and images stir associations in perceptive readers and suggest more than the haiku says. Some simple words, “home,” for instance, or “forest,” or “snake” may call up deep images with associations that touch the universal or archetypal. Colors often mean more to us than we can explain. Tastes and smells are powerful in raising memories. Some haiku mean what they say and nothing more. If they recreate a given time and place in clear sensory detail so that readers can go there again and again–and continue to find value in doing so– that is certainly enough. I don’t think good haiku mean something different from what they say. Haiku have a way of being honest and true. They don’t mislead us. Most, though, mean what they say and more as well.

Let me say that again: most good haiku mean what they say and more as well. Take season words, for example. Frogs, herons, chrysanthemums, and snowstorms mean what they are in haiku, but they also enrich the poems with a whole context of the season they represent and whatever the poet and reader may associate with that season. Spring suggests youth and beginnings; autumn ripeness and completion–and we could write pages and pages about the connotative, suggestive, associative, and symbolic possibilities of each season.

We often hear comments about the metaphorical qualities of kigo. According to Perrine’s definition we would do better to think of them in terms of symbol. For those who know traditional Japanese literature, season words stir memories of earlier haiku, too. Sometimes a haiku alludes to a well-known earlier one that uses the same kigo. Image, metaphor symbol, allusion? There is little to be gained by quibbling over definitions and distinctions. What matters is that season words can expand the meaning of a haiku and deepen its emotional resonance.

Please have a close look at another exceptional haiku:

a curtain billows
before the rain
scent of roses

Ferris Gilli
The Heron’s Nest Award
Volume II, Number Eight
August 2000

Beautiful, isn’t it? I feel the motion, sense the coming rain, smell the roses. If there were nothing more to the haiku than that, it would be a gift and a pleasure. The specific details create a strong sense of anticipation, too. Pleasant anticipation. “a curtain blows” means what it says . . . and much more. Christopher Herold’s appreciative Heron’s Nest Award essay presents a fine reading of it. You will find it here:

http://www.theheronsnest.com/haiku/0208w6565/thn_issue.c1.html

For enjoyment and to learn more about good haiku, I recommend all the Heron’s Nest essays. The haiku discussed are of high quality and are varied in subject matter and technique. The essays underscore many ways that haiku can succeed and excel.

Other excellent resources are the Kansho Column features at WHCacademia. Susumu Takiguchi posted an especially fine one on July 26, 2001. It discusses Yamaguchi Seishi’s superb 1944 haiku about winter wind blown out over the sea and unable to return, a poem of deep imagery and profound sadness. That universal, perhaps archetypal, sadness of winter and loss deepens almost unbearably as we realize the poet was thinking of young Japanese airmen flying toward their deaths at sea. They were given enough fuel to reach their targets but none for return or escape. I agree with Susumu that this may be one of the best haiku ever written. Please find and study the Kansho if you haven’t done so already. There is, in fact, considerable value in each of the Kansho postings so far. I intend to go back to them often and to watch eagerly for new ones.

Haiku thrives world-wide. It can be both accessible and profound. It celebrates moments of human life and establishes bonds among poets and between poets and readers. For many, it is at least as much a way of life as a form of literature. There is every reason to believe it will become even more popular in the twenty-first century and that among the millions of haiku composed and shared there will be many that should be recognized as great literature.

Is it safe, then, for haiku poets to remember some of what they know about Western poetry and even, perhaps, to have a fresh look at its characteristics? I think so. If Hibiscus poets keep the school’s basic criteria firmly in mind, they are not likely to go astray as they consider the many ways that haiku communicate experience and the many levels on which some of them can be read. It won’t hurt us either to review ways we can make sound reinforce meaning. But that is a topic for another time. For now let me go on record as one who will continue to use figurative language and other poetic devices sparingly if at all while concentrating on openness, participation, and discovery. At the same time, I believe that genuine haiku are likely to be multileveled and not easily exhausted. I would expect perceptive observation, deep feeling, and fresh insight to result in images that mean what they say–and much more. English-language haiku is a valuable part of world literature with an audience capable of nurturing great poets.

Peggy Willis Lyles has been contributing haiku to such journals as Frogpond and Modern Haiku for more than twenty years. Her work appears in a number of anthologies, including The Haiku Handbook, 1985, by William J. Higginson, with Penny Harter; and Haiku World, 1996, edited by William J. Higginson; The Haiku Anthology, 2nd and 3rd editions, 1986 and 1999, edited by Cor van den Heuvel; A Haiku Path, 1994, the Haiku Society of America; and Global Haiku, Twenty-five Poets World-wide, 2000, edited by George Swede and Randy Brooks; Haiku Moment, edited by Bruce Ross; and several Red Moon Anthologies. She was a grand prize winner of The Heron’s Nest Readers’ Choice Awards 2000, and a grand prize winner in the 2000 Einbond Renku Competition. Peggy’s chapbook Thirty-Six Tones was published by Saki Press in 2000 as a Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award winner.

1 A World Poet

ST: As an American, you have been a true international author. From the perspective of this magazine, World Haiku Review, we call you a “world poet”, which I hope is not a misnomer?

JR: Thank you. That is a high compliment and I praise you for using the word haiku and poet in the same sentence. I feel that is the way it should be. And thank you for inviting me to converse (shall we do this in verse? I wish we could) with you. I have followed your rise with great interest and admiration for all you have accomplished in a very short time. Sometime you must tell us how you got started on your amazing path.
2 German Connection

ST: Your German connection is strong, especially during the years after you moved to Germany in 1971. What brought you there?

JR: Werner, my husband. We met because he had read a letter I had written to someone else and sent me one of his drawings as a thank-you for my words. I sent him a thank-you note for the drawing and the correspondence continued for five years until I went to Hamburg where we finally married, now 30 years ago.

3 American Factor versus German Factor

ST: How do your German factor and American factors co-exist within yourself?
JR: Fairly easily. I have Austrian-German ancestors on maternal and paternal sides, was raised mostly in a Mennonite (read German) community, had studied German in college. It was nothing like the leap you have made from Japan to England. What was that like for you? And how did it come about?

ST: A leap, indeed, and a giant one at that. It was like coming out of a world of one set of ways into another world where everything is done in the opposite way! To my relief, studying at Oxford sorted it out for me splendidly.
4 Encounter with German Poets

ST: How have your relations been with German haiku poets?
JR: One day in 1980, I went to the dentist in the village where we lived, at the edge of Hamburg where it disappeared into the woods, and he had a new assistant. She was eager to practice her English on me because she was preparing for a trip to America and Canada to visit haiku writers. What? I nearly fell out of the chair in my excitement, there are other people who write haiku? The dentist had better things to do with my mouth, so we arranged to meet when we found our homes were only a short bicycle ride away from each other.

Thus I met Sabine Sommerkamp and she informed me of the current activities on the other side of the pond. All these years I thought that I, and my daughter Heidi, were the only ones in the world writing these little verses we called haiku. After Sabine returned from her trip, seeing Elizabeth Lamb, Alan Ginsberg (she was staying in his apartment the night Reagan was shot), Kenneth Rexroth, and attending meetings of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society and American Haiku Society, she began loaning me books and publications which I greeted like a Lost Continent.

I began to take my haiku writing seriously and Sabine became editor of a haiku column in a small journal called Apropos. Even though we were good friends she would refuse to publish my haiku because I refused to count syllables in either my German or English haiku. She would let me do translations for her magazines and through her I was introduced to the Grand Lady of German Haiku – Imma von Bodmershof with whom I corresponded until her death in 1977. It was some time after this that Carl Heinz Kurz organized the Deutsche Haiku Gesellschaft (German Haiku Union). For many years, after we had moved to the States, both Werner and I were its members. But again, the requirement of 17 syllables was a serious drawback to our co-operation.

ST: Have you had similarly strong contact with any other Europeans?

JR: Actually, my contact has been closer with the Dutch poets, because even though they profess in their publications to obeying the rules, many of the women were tanka writers and free enough with their own work and independent enough so that they readily accepted what I was doing. At this point I still have close correspondence with quite a number of Dutch writers and subscribe to their publication Vuursteen (Firestone or Flintstone). The Dutch writers have also been more active in the Internet, so I have broadened and maintained my acquaintances through that method also.

5 An Artist I Am

ST: Jane, in addition to being a writer, you are also an artist, especially in pottery and sculpture. You are, for example, the first American woman artist who had ever been accepted into Deutsche Kunstlerbund (German Artists’ Organisation)– no mean feat. How has your art background influenced your poetry?
JR: I see both artwork and writing streaming out from the same place; rather on alternating currents. I do not feel I am switching back and forth, though the materials change, but basically I see a continuum. A valid comparison would be for the artist who uses various media or the writer at home in several genres. In both cases it is still the quest for a form for the vision. I guess your connections between your art  sumi-e  and haiku is so much closer (as you have just recently demonstrated with your exhibit of “Floating Stone,” that it is hard for you to feel how connected art and writing are for me. What comes first for you: the painting or the haiku?

ST: Both painting and haiku are there within me all the time, but they are all over the place in a chaotic way, and not necessarily connected. When they make the connection, a haiga is created, in my case.
6 Visual Art and Poetry

ST: To push the point little further, what kind of interaction or creative tension do you experience within you between your visual art and your poetry, especially haiku? For instance, do you experience any negative interaction or tension?
JR: I see no negative tension between them. They actually feed each other. Titles for my sculptures were often haiku. In fact I have a series of fibre sculptures done in bottles with haiku as titles and parts of the sculpture which is in the hands of Gunther Westerman of Stuttgart, that he shows when my themes co-join with the themes of the other shows he is organizing. Many of my haiku come through while my hands are busy handling my materials which now are ropes and fabrics. For example: -
cirrus clouds
a net is cast
into the sea

7 How It All Started with Haiku

ST: I am bound to ask what made you interested in haiku in the first place?
JR:  Like most people, I can remember so clearly my first contact with haiku. I had gone to San Francisco to pick up a load of clay for my studio/store in Dinuba. Too tired to drive the four + hours back home that night, I booked a hotel room and then found it was too early to go to bed. So I went sight-seeing but after dinner most everything was closed except night-clubs and bars where this small-town girl was not at home. Then, I saw a bright place on the sidewalks and there City Lights book store was – still open. I bought a copy of Japanese Haiku translated by Peter Beilenson and printed by the Peter Pauper Press (hardcover, jacketed for $1.25).

At the time, I was writing and illustrating stories for children in the Mennonite church literature, and had just discovered William Everson who was the poet of the San Joaquin Valley. Back home I had the time and space to fall in love with the haiku which I admired from a great distance of a different culture.

Then, one day while throwing a pot on a kick wheel outdoors under a huge pine tree, I had a deep shock. Just as I was pressing my thumbs into the spinning ball of wet, slippery clay, as the walls were just beginning to rise up by pressing against my palms, a mockingbird gave a long, clear whistle. In that second, the ball of clay moved into being a walled vessel. I recognized that I was capable of experiencing one of these profound moments these Japanese masters had evidently felt, and now all I had to do was to put that moment into a haiku. I am still doing it and still not happy with any of my many, many  versions. Just last week, during a sleepless night, I was working with the latest version: -
spinning clay
the mocking bird whistles
up a pot
or
spinning clay
the mocking bird whistles up
sides of a bowl
or
centered
the mocking bird whistles up
a clay bowl
8 Still Learning

ST: So has haiku become your lasting interest ever since that time?
JR: Yes, and I am still learning, still trying to do it better. And the universe is still surprising me with these miracles and I show my gratitude by giving the words which are the gift boxes in which I bring my delight and joy of living to you: -
the phone rings
without answering
it begins to rain

9 Mentors?

ST: To try to see your involvement in haiku and related genres such as tanka is, in its scope and versatility, like visiting the British Museum or Metropolitan Museum in New York. Can you tell us about perhaps one person who has been one of the greatest and most positive influences in the directions you have taken in your haiku and related poetry? Did you have any mentors?
JR: I have never had a mentor and I have spent all my life seeking a guru, or a teacher for my art, for my poetry and for my spiritual life. I have never been given the gift of having endless admiration for a teacher.

Far more than my finding someone to follow, to admire, to worship, I have learned the most the quickest as the result of negative actions by others. When barriers go up I dig in to get over the top. When people in Germany would not publish my non-17 syllable haiku I only dug harder into the Japanese to see why the Masters wrote like they did, why they said what they did and how their poems really were in Japanese. When at last I found someone who would give me word-for-word translations, I finally truly (I think), understood how their poetics worked, what techniques they used, how and why. Working with Hatsue Kawamura, whose middle name is surely patience, has opened up worlds for me. Every time I find out what a Japanese poet has written, realms of meaning are illuminated for  me.

By the way, Stone Bridge is bringing out our latest book A String of Flowers, Untied  The Love Poems from The Tale of Genji this autumn. My favorite tanka is from the time when Genji has been exiled to the remote Suma coast, where he stands in the moonlight holding on to a robe given to him by his dead father, the one who made him a commoner instead of declaring him crown prince:
a single robe
yet the two sleeves
are wet with tears
on one side bitterness
on the other affection
10  Tradition and Innovation

ST: In 1996, you wrote in your article entitled ‘I Am Delighted by Haiku’, “: [I am delighted by] Haiku that open me to a different way of viewing a common thing or belief. It is too easy to have a set or closed mind. Poetry is vision of what is here and now and what it can be.”  Haiku itself is a living thing, yet all too often a set or closed mind develops in the haiku community so easily, which hinders its healthy development. You and Werner, while being rooted in tradition of Japanese haiku and related verse also accept, practice and encourage innovation. How do you do it?
JR: I suspect that I just naturally follow the rebel in me. But I am also supported when I read in a letter written, in 1912, by Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe when she asked for his help with her new magazine, Poetry: Can you teach the poet that poetry is an art, an art with a technique, with media, an art that must be in constant flux, a constant change of manner if it is to live? Can you teach him that it is not a pentametrical echo of the sociological dogma printed in last year s magazine?

I do feel there is something holy about haiku. I feel it is a spiritual practice that is far more valuable than the poems we get out of it. The most important thing about haiku is the way it makes us look at our lives, to be aware of what we are experiencing at each moment. Therefore it doesn t matter to me whether people value my haiku or not, because I do. They are gifts given to me by spirits thankful for the nourishment of my attention.

We think we are at the top of the food chain, but I believe we, as people, are maintained on this earth to produce the fine energy-food of our emotions upon which the spirits live. They cannot eat rice and hot dogs so they let our digestive systems work for them. They scoop off our feelings as if harvesting a field or touching a battery. But they are also gracious and give back gifts. Therefore I write the haiku down when they come to me, I honor them by saving them in leather-bound books, I carry them in my pockets, I revise them endlessly and much of my day I often feel I am thinking in haiku.
breath of the sea
in the buoy bell
a voice

11 Explosion of Poetic Innovation

ST: What have been the results of your acceptance of innovation so far?
JR: We have seen an explosion of not only new people eager to learn about haiku, but they have very quickly expanded their interest to renga, tanka, haibun, sijo, and ghazals in what often appears to be an effortless swing. I know that this tremendous accomplishment is not effortless, but the ease and grace exhibited by these writers has made it seem so.

This just shows you that when you give people information they can absorb it very quickly, run it through their own systems and sensibilities to show us wonders never before conceived. I know people like to sneer at  the Internet, but we are in a revolution greater than any before in the history of humans. If you refuse to look at the sex sites and the scams but sink down into the vastness of what has been accomplished already on the web you cannot help be amazed.

It used to be galleries and bookstores were the only ways we had to tell our personal stories, but now that we have the Internet, every story can be told! Think of that! And think, if you can encompass the hours, the dollars spent by those who have already made a web page with their heart s interest, how this enriches all of us. People who could not afford to publish a poetry magazine can and will buy a computer and publish their spirits journeys. Never before have we been so close to each other. I am always thrilled when I get poems for Open Mic from India, Sri Lanka, Russia and Africa. The magic we are in is so powerful we barely perceive it. We have to act like this to stay alive, I guess.
12 Negativity in the Haiku Scene

ST: Do you know any other ways in which such negativity in the haiku scene can be avoided or mended?
JR:  Ah, why does it seem haiku writers are so cantankerous? Why do we seem to have the shortest fuses and the quickest fists to grasp the poisoned pen? No other group with whom I associate are as feisty as haiku writers. It seems to take only two people and one haiku for a fight.

I have wondered if people who turned to haiku are persons looking for more discipline in their lives and so they love the rules, the gates, the fences, the watch-towers with bull horns. I am also continually amazed how the newest haiku writer is the one most eager to write up a set of rules for the rest of the world to follow. Haiku seems to inspire a missionary zeal and any indigenous people can attest to how cruel and dangerous that can be. But remember, people cannot hurt others unless they have learned hurt from someone else. As writers we tear off some sheets of our skin or get it rubbed off by the abrasion of life, so we feel more keenly the world around us. This sensitivity is at once our sword, tool and a weapon.

Still, the haiku scene has a special atmosphere which I have wondered came about because when haiku was introduced into the US, it was rather fashionable to be dictatorial and there definitely was a race on for someone to become the haiku pope. I feel this insistence on My right is the only right. has scarred a great many people and driven them away from the organized haiku community.

Another factor has been this insistence on naming poetry forms, drawing circles to close in some ideas some work, some people in and others out instead of opening up the ideas and accepting it all as poetry which it is. There should be enough room in our world for holy haiku, spam haiku, 5-7-5ers, beginner s haiku, blahku, desk ku, your haiku and my haiku without this naming and name-calling.

With the coming of the Internet, the stranglehold of small magazines, and small-minded editors  has been broken. Suddenly everything is possible and I think this is great! I feel we have proved that we could avoid this harmful aspect with the introduction of tanka. Already you see that tanka writers seem a gentler, more refined breed. I have worked to keep the doors to innovation open while at the same time accepting for publication both the modern and the classical 5-7-5-7-7 authors. I have supported everything except the dictators (and they are out there) but I accept their zeal as giving a richness to the scene which assures that writers of all persuasion will find a place for their ideas, visions and hearts.
a cherry tree
the house where spring lives
blossoms

13 Invitation by Japan’s Imperial Palace

ST: You also wrote, ” [I am delighted by] HAIKU which remind me to be more aware of what I am doing, how I am doing it, and how it touches the world”. The work you are doing now, especially on the Internet through Aha! Poetry is touching the world in a major way. It is probably the richest resource for poets of haiku, tanka, renga and related Asian verse on the Internet today, and all given so freely — received by countless number of readers at the touch of a fingertip. It contains the magazine Lynx, your Tanka mailing list, a wealth of essays, articles, and poetry, online books and books for sale, not to mention ongoing games and contests. How has the world, conversely, come back to you, and touched you?
JR: Surely the ten-day pinnacle was the invitation (http://www.ahapoetry.com/invitat.htm)  to the palace in Tokyo by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko to attend the New Year s Poetry Party in 1998. I have not been one to enter many contests, because I see too clearly their drawbacks, but a few of my haiku have been awarded by the Museum of Modern Haiku in Tokyo, Itoen Tea Company put one of my haiku on cans of tea and several of AHA Books have been given Haiku Society of America s Merit Book Award.
coming of age
with my many years
to an ancient rite
a party for Imperial poetry
and I have been invited

14 Against Isolation of Haiku

ST: You are a doyen and a most celebrated figure in the Internet haiku community. However, we hear negative comments on this community, mostly emanating from those outside it. Quite apart from the hopeless cases of haiku-dinosaurs, techno-phobia and narrow and mean-mindedness, do you know of any cases where any such comments are justified and worth listening to for our progress?
JR: I see two distinctly different camps which are problematic for the writer who admits to an interest in haiku. The one is on the inside, which I spoke of before, and the other one is on the outside which we often call the mainstream poetry scene. When haiku first came to America, via Amy Lowell, direct from London, and the Imagists around Ezra Pound, she treated it as a valid poetic genre, one in which she had great delight and understanding as she attempted to adapt it to her own poetry. However, just one year later, Ezra had turned his back on both haiku and tanka, treating them as games to play when half-drunk and had dissolved the Imagists group into his new fad term Vortex . With the flack and ridicule that Amy received from the male poets of America, it was no wonder everyone else let English-language haiku die with her.

Then after the Second World War, when haiku arrived in the books of translation and education by Blythe and Henderson, it was almost immediately put into an association or society atmosphere. With the first little magazines (like American Haiku) haiku was treated as something outside of poetry. Jean Calkins, the very first publisher of haiku, resisted this by publishing haiku along with other poetry forms in her magazine. But there were people interested in haiku who insisted (in fact, even as late as the 80s) that haiku was not poetry and should be kept separate. This is pure nonsense as it has been pointed out again and again how poets of this century have taken up the haiku form, mixed it in with the other genres they were using to make poetry out of it all.

It is equally odious to maintain that most popular poetry genres in over 14 centuries of Japanese culture were not poetry. Groups wishing to inform the world (with the zeal of the newest haiku writer) of what a haiku is and the message that only this one chosen group knew what a haiku was, have built more fences, moats and landmines around the form so that the academic poet is happy to stay as far away as possible from this small-mindedness. And this is sad and wrong because if they were allowed to get closer, to do the studying the rest of us are doing, they could be writing better haiku and therefore better poetry.

And it seems very wrong that haiku writers are discriminated against simply because they admit to loving just this one genre in all their poetry. This false barrier is so complete it reaches clear out here to the very edge of the continent where the local poets of our tiny but charming non-incorporated town do not consider me one of them even though I have written more in other forms than they have. I have been branded a haiku writer and am therefore an outcast. This is not fair.

an hour is a sea
circumference is the bride of awe
herein a blossom lies
perhaps you see me stooping but
a wounded deer leaps the highest

15 Encouraging New Talent

ST: World Haiku Club and World Haiku Review champion new talent and little known poets. You also introduced last year, on Aha! Poetry, the popular column, “Poet Profile of the Month” written Ty Hadman. The purpose is “to introduce poets who are not known to the many newcomers of haiku and to give praise to those haiku poets who have often been over-looked or underrated by the establishment…I am most interested to know how this column is faring and what impact it is having on aspiring poets.
JR: I feel it is too early to judge results on this, other than the flurry of compliments Ty and I received when he began. Basically, Ty and I came together because we believe that haiku has been included in the work of poets a lot longer than the leaders of haiku groups like to acknowledge as Ty has shown with his profiles on Paul Reps, Richard Wright and Jose Tablata. We also felt that new haiku writers have roots that should be known, recognized and honoured. Especially the haiku Internet scene seems to have grown up out of nothing with no past or history. We are trying to tie (pun intended) these parts together.

invited by larks
to the top of the hill
a great idea

16 Newness and Originality Based on Traditional Values

ST: World Haiku Club is all about future in the sense that, rooted in traditional values, the Club encourages innovation, newness, originality and individuality. In other words, we hold haiku as dynamic and creative evolution. Do you approve of this?
JR: Yes, certainly. But I do have reservations about the use of the word, “club”. I hope you see your club more as a staff or a magic wand? And you and I are a bit at cross-purposes in that I want to break down the barriers between haiku and poetry instead of reinforcing them by setting haiku aside as a special form. Or perhaps I misjudge your aims and direction?

ST: Yes, fortunately for both of us, you are misjudging my aims and direction here, because they are completely the same as your own. We are not at cross-purposes. Names are but a poor reflection of the substance. Americans dislike the word “club”, or clubby mentality, while the British still feel comfortable somewhere with the notion of a club for its exclusivity and cosy closed nature.

I am actually a member of Carlton Club in London, which is one of the most clubby, conservative and stuffy institutions in Britain. But I like it. If you visit me at Carlton, you will see me dozing off behind The Times, or dining like a mouldy English gentleman at the time of Around the World in Eighty Days! However, rest assured, because if you visit our official Website, you will see an illustration of a staff or magic club, which is the symbol of WHC. It should probably be called WHTC, with the word “tanka” in it, or WHPC, with the word “poetry”.

Jokes aside, WHC aims at removing all manner of silly barriers, clique-culture, isolation, monopoly, petty rivalry, negative haiku politics, sectionalism, idolatry, mysticism, hierarchy, false authorities, corruption and dogmas, which those what you have referred to as little “dictators” have carefully and slyly cultivated and are still cultivating for their petty self-aggrandisement and misguided pursuit of power. WHC wishes to liberate haiku and haiku-related forms from these prisons and let them flourish as genuine wild flowers and be shared by non-haiku poets and newcomers, namely by all human beings to which they legitimately belong. Now, are you satisfied?
JR: Yes, completely. And I do wish you well, indeed, with whatever you are doing but I have long wondered why haiku has failed to catch on in England. Do you know?  It seems to me that haiku is so right for the British sense of humor. I think the Brits love nature as much as any other people, and they have certainly been quick enough to adopt and adapt other poetry forms. Is their own poetry heritage so rich, so marvellous and so very strong that they cannot relinquish its hold on their hearts and tongues? I have no answers, but I do have continued hope that something or someone (maybe you?) can bring haiku to the English people in a way that excites their inspiration. Perhaps bringing the world of haiku to England and your acceptance of innovation will open the door for the British, and others, too, to fly off on the wings of excitement.
moon light
filling our shoes
for a walk

ST: Your words would almost certainly make the British blood boil!?! The British are very talented people with pots of distinct sense of humour and love of nature. In fact, they are often described by foreigners as people who love nature (and dogs) far more than human beings! Their sense of humour is so distinct that no other nation would understand it. I think many characteristics of the British place them in one of the best positions to write good haiku.

Our staff at WHC and myself travel up and down the UK to disseminate haiku at schools, community centres, libraries and museums, local Japan societies, local governments’ educational programmes and various festivals. The enthusiasm, instant favourable responses and the display of the quality and potentials of their first attempts are overwhelming. It just shows how important it is to teach haiku and guide the uninitiated in the right way and in the inspiring way you mentioned. One wrong approach, you kill it.

In many things, Britain is somewhere between America and Japan in real terms, though they claim to be distinct and one and only, i.e. British, full stop. Haiku is no exception, albeit being very close to haiku practiced in America. As a matter of fact, there is more haiku activity going on in Britain than you indicate but on the whole you are right. Apart from such brilliant individual pioneers as Basil Hall Chamberlain and R. H. Blyth, the British did not take up haiku on any significant scale until very recently and the number of active haijin is still relatively small. However, I believe that the potential of good haijin and the quality of their works are great and they will be realised if the way in which haiku is introduced and appreciated improves.
17 Blending All Forms into Poetry and Doing Deeper study of Each

ST: What are the concrete plans you would like to put into practice in order to encourage innovation, new direction and changes for the future in this new century?
JR: I have set for myself the gigantic job of at once blending all forms into poetry and offering deeper study of each form, so while learning, the poet is also adding to the literature of that form that can serve as a positive example for others. I believe in Debussy s aphorism: No fixed rule should guide the creative artist. Rules are made by works of art and not for works of art. And I also believe in Frost’s (or was it Sandburg’s) axiom that if you are going to play tennis, you need a net . I also feel that one of the best ways of showing what the Japanese have written is to translate specifically for poets. It is one thing to translate for readers (the largest group) and another job when you are giving the poets what they need  the bare bones, the work instead of a product. This is why I have spent so much time on the works of Fumi Saito, Akiko Baba and Lady Murasaki and now, also, Basho. I want the poets to see, to feel, to understand how Oriental poetry works, its techniques, its tricks, its sensibility and its incredible beauty, because I believe all these aspects are something we can share.
growing slowly
over golden sea meadows
summer clouds

18 Sources of Poetic Inspiration

ST: Where does your poetic inspiration come from? For instance, in July you copied the first lines of 800 of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to inspire poems of your own.
JR: I find that any poetry form soon forms a vocabulary that if one is unable to enlarge it will soon strangle the genre with sameness. How many times can one put a frog or the moon into a haiku and when is there enough longing and sighing in a tanka and how often can you drink wine and make love in a ghazal?

One of my ways of expanding the subject matter in my work is to cut words and phrases out of magazines and newspapers and then write in various genres using only these randomly chosen snippets that form a sense to my feelings.  In my summer doldrums I decided that just reading Emily Dickinson’s lines was not enough for me. I wanted to crawl inside of the poems. I got the idea of copying out the first lines of her poems, cutting them apart and then helping her to write tanka. At this point the work is only an exercise and the results are neither truly hers nor mine, but they are a lot of fun and I can feel my poetic horizons expanding as we both bounce out of our ruts. (Hers is deeper, being a grave, but I am helping her all I can. And she likes me because I wear only white as she did.)
19 Growing Spiritually Each Day

ST: Do you often find inspiration for writing in the poetry and literature of classic poets and authors?
JR: Over one-half of my library contains books on non-Japanese genre poetry. And I read everything that comes into the house; I underline it, jot in the margins, write haiku on the fly-leaves, argue with the authors, toss their books aside in disgust and cannot help picking the book up again to read on to that very last page. A year ago I got an e-book which I love. I have read so many out-of-print books -  books I could never afford to buy, but thanks to the e-book libraries which are still free I can have them all without having to dust them.

However, my inspiration does not come from books. They only show me what others have experienced and how they reported it. My truest inspiration comes from the world around me. I feel that the writer needs a fine balance between education and experience. And as in the same way one studies other forms, works and results, the best writers / artists are those who have also enlarged their spirits, their faith, their spirituality.

This is especially true for haiku because of its brevity, its clearness, its cleanness. The soul of the writer shines through as if caught by the glance a prism. In perhaps no other form can one see so quickly the soul state of the author. If that person is mean-spirited, low-minded — interested in only the ugly, the painful, the hurtful — this will be reflected in his or her haiku. Some persons will be attracted to this kind of haiku, and that is fine for them so their haiku can reflect their level of living. For me, I demand that I grow spiritually each day by maintaining a strong religious practice, not only so that my life will be better but also so my haiku will be greater.

rocky river
the blue tongue
of God
20 Ten Choicest Haiku

ST: We are eager to see some of your poems. Will you share 10 of those poems inspired by Emily Dickinson’s lines with us here?
JR: This has surely gotten long enough. Could we just point your readers to the blogs where they can get the exercises in small daily doses along with the other work I am doing?

ST: Fair enough. In fact, you have been quoting your poems already, which number 14 altogether. So, you are spared! Instead, let me list up ten of my favourite of your haiku, then.

Haiku by Jane Reichhold

1.

outgrowing
its circle of ice
spring pond

(Publ. in “Reflections, a Haiku Diary”)

2.

outer space
limbs of the bare oak reach
the farthest stars

(Publ. in “The Heron’s Nest”, Vol. 1, No. 2, Nov. 99)

3.

Tribute to John Crook from Jane Reichhold:

climbing a path
he is the mountain
that rises up

(Publ. in “World Haiku Review”, Vol.1, Issue 1, May 01)

4.

after lovemaking
all is quiet until
rain begins again

(From “spring/being loved”, A Dictionary of Haiku, by Jane Reichhold, Aha! Poetry)

5.

after a shower
stars also shine
brighter

(From “spring/showers”, A Dictionary of Haiku, by Jane Reichhold, Aha! Poetry)

6.

visiting relatives
the narrow bed holds
us together

(From “summer/visitors”, A Dictionary of Haiku, by Jane Reichhold, Aha! Poetry)

7.

wild seas
footprints fill
with foam

(From: “winter/sea”, A Dictionary of Haiku, by Jane Reichhold, Aha! Poetry )

8.

a barking dog
little bits of night
breaking off

(Publ. on “gilbert – Quiet Site/fine haiku)

9.

moving into the sun
the pony takes with him
some mountain shadow

(Publ. in “Haiku Techniques” by Jane Reichhold, Aha! Poetry)

10.

winter begins
leaving me alone
with autumn

(From “Old Woman Haiku”)

The Other Side of the Coin:
Haiku and the Harsh Realities

Peter Brady

For many of us, our introduction to haiku was through such masterpieces as Basho’s frog pond or Issa’s fly rubbing his forelegs and back legs in a comic plea for mercy. These were light poems, pleasing, uplifting and enjoyable. Consequently when we began writing haiku, we chose the same subjects and strived to achieve the same emotions. Based on this limited, one-sided view, we gained a certain although limited expertise. However, we have overlooked another and equally important aspect of haiku.

First and foremost, haiku are intended to depict our life and our interaction with the world around us. As well as the natural beauty so often written of — and which is mistakenly assumed to be the only appropriate subject, haiku must include the unpleasant, the harsh and downright ugly. There needs to be an acknowledgment of the world as it is, not as we would like it to be or as we think we remember it to have been. In other words, a more open and more balanced approach.

Taoism speaks of yin and yang and the constant shifting between the two as we try to find the balance of the two poles. Psychologist C. G. Jung makes much of the two facets of our personality, the light and the dark. He discusses the tension between the two and the need to acknowledge and to know both sides if we are to know ourselves. Likewise, the world around us has two facets and it is best to acknowledge and know them both. It is here we live, it is here we should write, presenting both aspects – the bright and beautiful and the dark and ugly.

No one is continually surrounded by beauty. Television and newspapers very frequently show the sensational, the lurid, the violent side of the world. Often we also see car accidents and their aftermath, or we experience pollution, such as smog, or simply the neighbor’s dog barking or howling in the middle of the night or a stereo blaring loudly. These too are valid subjects for haiku.

From a reading of Basho, Issa and other haiku poets in Japan and elsewhere, it is clear that they had moments of heightened awareness that included excrement and urine and wrote of them:

Fleas, lice,
The horse pissing
Near my pillow

Basho [trans. R.H. Blyth]

Ah! The uguisu
Pooped on the rice-cakes
On the verandah

Basho [trans. R.H. Blyth]

after pissing
rinsing the hands…
hard winter rain

Issa [trans. David G. Lanoue]

evening—
wiping horse shit off his hand
with a mum

Issa [trans. David G. Lanoue]

A stray cat
Excreting
In the winter garden

Shiki [trans R.H. Blyth]

More recent examples include haiku by the Balkan haiku poets who depict their world in wartime:

the waiting
for the bombers
prolongs our night

Dragan J. Ristic

smoke and fire –
near the destroyed home
cherries still in blossom

Vid Vukasovic
Belgrade, Yugoslavia

way to shelter –
someone’s phone is ringing
and ringing…

Milenko D. Cirovic-Ljuticki
Belgrade,Yugoslavia

too early for sunrise
the horizon glows with the red
of burning villages

Ruzica Mokos
Croatia

Takashi Nonin has described his own experiences in World War II:

dead quiet…
no signs of bombers -
going out for food

scorching ground -
running to safety
naked and barefoot

The world around us and our life in that world contains things and people which we see as bothersome, irritating, upsetting, terrifying and worse. Since these have been haiku moments for others, all of these can be the same for us:

roadkill
the wake of passing cars
ruffles its fur

cut-off
to the abandoned death camp
its rails still shiny

mum just dead
the neighbor’s stereo
blaring

muggy afternoon
the stink of garbage
put out for pick-up

(all above four by Peter Brady)

In all of the haiku cited above, the images elicit anger, outrage, pathos, tears — a wider range of emotions than joy or calm or a nod of recognition at some pleasant memory. Again, both the pleasant and the painful emotions should be explored and written about; if we do not want to share these haiku with others, that is our choice. However, what unpleasant emotions we experience should be written down. If we are to leave an accurate record of our world, these moments must be written down.

Often, through exploring the darker facet we expand our viewpoint and ultimately our vocabulary. This will expand our ability to write and in the end will influence how we write all our haiku. We will see more, we will feel more, and most important end we will write more profound and perhaps better haiku.

As when exploring anything new, there is the danger of being overly enthusiastic. We embrace our new experience wholeheartedly and run the risk of exaggerating or overstating. This is the reverse of what makes a haiku. An extreme example of this can be seen in many films which include gratuitous violence or sex or surfeit of computer graphics which do nothing to advance the story line.

The key to haiku is understatement when describing our experiences. The animals, things, and people depict the moment and provoke the reader to respond. Haiku touch each reader differently and the less bias in each haiku opens it to a greater interpretation. By the choice of details the reader is led in a certain direction; but nothing more.

This is so different to most Western poetry where the tradition is to bare one’s emotions, to hold back little, and to control the reader’s reaction through a plethora of words. Haiku, regardless of subject, do the opposite. By maintaining an understated tone we can present the uglier side of the world without praising or condemning it. This will move a reader far more deeply than a lengthy ode venting all our emotions.

As mentioned earlier, Taoism preaches finding and maintaining the balance in our lives. Though seldom found or maintained, it makes life a continual effort to experience it. This striving allows us to find the harmony between the two extremes and experience the full range, the sweet, the bitter, the happy, the sad – all that comprises life. If we write of the same topics, we have a tool to explore the greater gamut that is our life.

May 2001

WHC’s Japan Director, Yasuomi Koganei, gives a unique view on the structure of haiku in his paper “Seeking a Four-Dimensional Haiku” and claims that the four-dimensional haiku with a bipolar structure could realize the greatest power of poetic expression.

This is a view which is rarely heard outside Japan. By introducing the concept of the fourth dimension, the paper attempts at the importance of time element in haiku. This would be particularly of interest, or more precisely, a challenge, to those Western haiku poets who have come to believe in the “present tense” canon of haiku writing. It indicates the depth and richness which time holds in a haiku, a point largely lost in most Western haiku.

Koganei is a founding member of MIFA International Haiku Circle, based in Meguro Ward of Tokyo. (MIFA stands for Meguro International Friendship Association) The Circle was created in February 1995 and since then it has been growing steadily. It has over sixty members from nine countries. Last year, it published an anthology and essays, their achievements of five years. The book was shown at the World Haiku Festival 2000 Exhibition in London (August 2000) and in Gunma (October/November 2000).

One of Koganei’s own haiku poems goes: -

Pale moon
Resting on skyscrapers
Cold rising from toes.

Seeking a Four-Dimensional Haiku
Yasuomi Koganei

In what follows, some excellent haiku shall be analyzed, in an endeavor to discover just how the truly fascinating ones are composed. Though many favorable haiku have a three-dimensional structure, four-dimensional haiku which have a bipolar structure, provide the greatest power of expression.

1. Three-dimensional haiku

A haiku about Tanabata (Star Festival) appears in the chapter of Echigo  Road in Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi: The Narrow Road to Oku[1]₁.

araumi ya Sado ni yokotau amanogawa (Basho)

Araumi ya: wild sea

Sado ni yokotau: stretching to Sado Isle

Amanogawa: the Milky Way (literally)

This must be the masterpiece of three-dimensional haiku with bipolar structure. That is, Sado connects the wild sea (Earth) and the Milky Way (outer space) to demonstrate an extensive perspective, or three-dimensional field (Fig.1).

The Milky Way (according to an ancient legend associated with Star Festival) excites pity for the Altair-Vega couple. They can meet only once a year at the time of the Star Festival called Tanabata in East Asia. Sado recalls the sadness of noble people who were exiled there, such as the famous Noh-dancer Zeami or Saint Nichiren (Buddhist). The violent sound of wind-whipped sea arouses great fear in readers.

The images of the Milky Way, Sado and wild sea work in synergy to induce readers to feel hopeless sorrow. Those who are familiar with European history may recall Saint Helena, and the exiled Napoléon Bonaparte, to strengthen their interpretation. The haiku can be interpreted adequately without knowledge of the Star Festival of Tanabata.

shibyo ete tsume utsukushiki hioke kana (Dakotsu)

Shibyo ete: terminally ill
Tsume (nails) utsukushiki: her beautiful nails
Hioke (brazier) kana: (over) the brazier (literally)

The brazier connects the terminally ill (death) and beautiful nails (life) to create a bipolar structure (Fig. 2). It reveals what is in the woman’s mind, namely that she is manicuring her fingernails even though it is useless since she is approaching death. The lady, knowing that death is near, is manicuring or polishing her fingernails over the brazier, also warming herself, desiring to live the rest of her life beautifully and, possibly with a faint hope of love. The brazier suggests healing. The field (three-dimensional) of this haiku is the room, in which we find her and the brazier.

2.  Four-dimensional haiku

oteuchi no meoto narishi o koromogae  (Buson)

Oteuchi no meoto: a married couple sentenced to capital punishment which is to be carried out by the landlord (Daimyo) in person

Narishi o: have been given a reprieve and years after that

Koromogae: are changing garments for the season (literally)

Following is the traditional interpretation of this typical four-dimensional haiku. In the feudal era of Tokugawa (1600-1868) which upheld a strict code of conduct, a young samurai (warrior) who fell in love with his lord’s maid was sentenced to capital punishment.

However, they were given a reprieve because of their contribution to the lord’s government, and because they lived unobtrusively. As the years went by, they gradually felt relaxed, and when the season came to change clothes, they replaced padded clothes with lined kimono (summer wear), and felt grateful for their lord’s lenience._[2]2

From a structural viewpoint, “oteuchi no meoto: the married couple sentenced to capital punishment” implies a space including the married couple, or a three-dimensional field, and “narishi o koromogae” implies what a long time passed before they were able to change clothes for the season with a feeling of ease (Fig.3.A). Moreover, “oteuchi: capital punishment” and ” koromogae: changing clothes” forms a bipolar structure (Fig. 3. B).

My favorite interpretation of this haiku is slightly different from the above. A young, runaway, married couple who have eluded the pursuit of the lord, gradually become relaxed as the years go by. Now they are comfortably changing clothes for the season. However, they are always suspicious that strangers passing by or people talking in whispers might be pursuers or informants. They never feel completely free from pursuit. The latter interpretation is more thrilling than the former.

Nowadays, local war is still breaking out in some areas, though tension from the Cold War is neutralizing. The haiku may ring true with a married couple who are refugees seeking political asylum after crossing a border, tearing themselves from the hot pursuit of intelligence. In the case of a single refugee leaving his family in his country, his heart would be even more miserable than those expressed in this haiku.

3. Quasi four-dimensional haiku

A diffusing sound or smell produces the image of an expanding sphere with the elapse of time. Thus, such haiku might be called quasi four-dimensional since they give us the perception of a relatively short elapse of time. The following haiku of Basho composed at Ryushaku Temple is used to exemplify a quasi four-dimensional haiku. Ryushaku Temple is built on a towering rock mountain with other smaller temples and pine trees around it. It is located near Yamadera station on the Senzan line between Yamagata and Sendai stations.

shizukasa ya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe (Basho)

Shizukasa ya: how calm

Iwa ni shimiiru: soaking into rocks

Semi (cicadas) no koe: tremolo of cicadas (literally)

“Shizukasa” suggests a scene without people, just a rock mountain, temples and a pine forest (three-dimensional field) (Fig. 4. A). “Iwa” is the rock mountain on which Ryushaku Temple stands. Many cicadas might have been trilling at that time, but the emergence of one cicada’s tremolo is illustrated for simplification (Fig. 4. B).

“Iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe: the cicada’s tremolo is soaking into rocks in the surrounding area” gives a deep impression of stillness after the short stop of the tremolo or it could imply that Basho is becoming unconscious of the cicada and preoccupied by the scenery around him (concentration on seeing).

furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto (Basho)

Furuike ya: old (quiet) pond

Kawazu (frog) tobikomu: frog jumps in

Mizu no oto (sound): sound of water (literally)

“Furuike ya” is a field that conveys the image of an old quiet pond in a dense forest, farm or plain. ” Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto” suggests loneliness or stillness in the unbounded space formed by the diffusing sound that went through Basho (the reader)’s body and vanished beyond the horizon. Required time for the perceptual process is not so long.

4. Selected Haiku from MIFA Meetings

I have encountered several very talented haikuists and significant haiku at MIFA Haiku Meetings and this gratification urges me to join every MIFA Haiku Meeting. So many good three-dimensional haiku are composed at MIFA Haiku Meetings that you can easily find them in Part 2 of this book. I will therefore introduce a quasi four-dimensional haiku here. Four-dimensional haiku as good as Buson’s may, conceivably be composed at a Meeting in the near future.

Some quasi four-dimensional haiku may suggest a relatively short elapse of time in which the author is waiting for something emotional or staring at the thing which has moved him or her.

Waiting for you
crossing country borders
the spring moon.              David McMurray (Canada)

This haiku suggests a wide variety of situations from happy to fearful. “The spring moon” normally suggests a hazy, warm image in Japan, therefore, the haiku may imply a warm, happy and romantic time for the person who is waiting for his lover flying over countless countries to finally reach Japan. On the other hand, the moon may imply an image of inconstancy, or even insanity in the West. If he is waiting somewhere on a continent where there is social unrest or countries are in the midst of a civil war, the spring moon may cause him to fear that she may not come or that their future life may be less than secure.

Embers flicker
as fallen leaves kindle
a new kaleidoscope.              Denise Harford (Ireland)

A lady may be staring at the leaves which are falling intermittently upon embers, while recalling her past, be it gloomy or glamorous, and also looking to the rest of her life in the embers.

[3][1] Donald Keene, The Narrow Road to Oku, Kodansha International Ltd., 1996, page 126-129