Poems Evolve

Leaf 86 – Essays on Haiku

 

Tsuchiya Koitsu - Naga-ame, or Long Rain (c.1930s)

Sometimes it is hard to know if more is less, or less is more. One of the persistent pleasures in penning haiku is all its possible permutations. In many ways, it can pose an almost unresolvable dilemma, much like for a painter wondering which brushstroke will be the last when attempting to complete a particularly cherished painting? … Some poems spring from the poet’s head – like Zeus – fully-formed and divinely perfect. But others need a bit more work. Re-working can become laborious, or it can even span decades, until the poem finally “feels right.” I think the key thing to remember is not to rush things. If it takes decades, let it. And there’s no shame in revising an existing poem, if one feels a newer version works better. Time changes, and things evolve – we certainly do, so why not our poems too?

 

I recently wrote a poem which seemed to evolve of its own accord out of a haiku into a tanka, as follows:

 

#1. (Haiku)

Enjoying the soft,

pitter-patter  

– early morning rain.

 

 

#2. (Haiku >> Tanka)

Enjoying the soft

pitter-patter

beyond the screen,

early morning rain.

 

 

#3. (Tanka)

Enjoying the soft

pitter-patter

beyond the screen,

still feeling sleepy

– early morning rain.

 

I think the reason it evolved was because, like many of my poems, it is based on a real memory/experience. In this case, it reflects a specific moment sitting on the tatami-floor of a room at an onsen ryokan in Izu (the same ryokan in fact where the writer, Kawabata Yasunari used to stay, and which is the place that inspired his short story, ‘Izu no Odoriko’, or ‘The Dancing Girl of Izu’), where I stayed in June 2005. Hence, I think I felt like I wanted to include two specific elements of the memory – namely the gentle sound of the rain and the fact that I was hearing it through the meshed-screen drawn over an open window. If I could, I’d have probably tried to shoehorn in the strong scent of the tatami floor as well, but that really would have been overdoing it!

 

On the whole, I think this particular ‘haiku moment’ works best as either a haiku (i.e. #1.) or as a tanka (#3.), the middle verse (#2.) is merely a stepping stone, and one that’s only barely raises itself above the waterline at that. I posted all three on my Bluesky account, and quite rightly the haiku (#1.) won the most “likes.” And I think the reason for this is because, while haiku can be specific in terms of details, place, timing, etc., they still need to be universal. In order to aim for that, they need to retain an openness which makes them accessible to others – people reading that first haiku will not be seeing the same room/place/time/scene in the same way that I saw it, but rather their own internalisation of it. Hence the two subsequent versions get bogged down and become too heavy, too didactic.

 

But a curious thing happened almost a month after I posted the three versions of this poem on-line. I was sitting on the sofa in our living room here in Tokyo one evening, reading a book, with the window open and the mesh-screen pulled over to prevent unwanted insect visitors from simply wandering indoors, when it began to rain. It was the end of May, almost the same time of year as the “haiku moment” in Izu occurred twenty years ago. The same gentle pitter-patter of the rain heard outside, just as it is usually encountered here during the rainy season in Japan. Instantly, another haiku moment popped into my head. This one, fully-formed:

 

Gentle sound of rain,

beyond the screen

– moonless night.

 

There’s still no scent of tatami in this one, but that’s because we don’t have tatami floors in our apartment. And it’s now late night, rather than early morning. But I think this poem works equally well as does the first. In many ways, many haiku speak to the same moment, the same idea; essentially, they paint the same picture, they set the same scene – but it’s something ineffable which tells us when they’ve hit the right note and can be left alone at last, just as they are.

 

Kasamatsu Shirō - Passage (1962)