Akutagawa & Autumn at Sankeien

Loose Leaves – Essays on Haiku

 

Akutagawa Ryūnosoke (1892-1927)

Last December, during a visit to Sankeien, near Yokohama, I came across a haiku written by a famous Japanese writer, Akutagawa Ryūnosoke (1892-1927). The haiku was about a visit he made to these lovely gardens in the autumn of 1915. Akutagawa included the poem in a letter he wrote to the son of the garden’s founder shortly after his visit:

 

ひとはかり浮く香煎（こうせん）や白湯（さゆ）の秋

ひとはかり | うくこうせんや | さゆのあき

Hito wa kari | uku kousen ya | sayu no aki

-        Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1915. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)

 

I found the haiku reproduced on an information board about the Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋), a small hexagonal wooden teahouse in Sankeien, where a black iron pot used to hang from the ceiling, heated by a fire. Here, Akutagawa notes in his letter, tea was served during his visit by a woman, as shown in the accompanying postcard:

 

Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋)

The information board provides a translation of his haiku in English:

 

A spoonful of tea / herbal tea and hot water / float through autumn air

 

However, this is an inelegant, and somewhat tautological, translation of what I think is a very deftly and densely-layered haiku. I asked my wife, who is Japanese, what she thought of this translation. She agreed, there’s a lot more going on in the original Japanese. But, how to capture all of the elements of Akutagawa’s haiku in English?

 

Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋) Information Panel

Modern English haiku, as it is represented in most of the leading contemporary English language haiku magazines and journals, tends to eschew the 5-7-5 syllable structure as “too wordy” and cumbersome when compared to Japanese haiku. But here, as I soon discovered, we have a haiku in Japanese which is so tightly and compactly layered it is supremely difficult to render it into English and do the original poem justice. Consequently, it posed a challenge to me which I simply could not let go. Over the course of the next week or so, I kept coming back to the haiku and tinkering with it – trying to see if I could come up with a better English version.

 

Yoshida Hiroshi - Sankeien (1935)

Checking the website of Sankeien, I found there the original poem was given again. When I clicked on the automatic translation function of my web browser my computer rendered the haiku into the following English version, which was a slight improvement on the one printed on the information board:

 

Autumn of floating incense and white-hot water

 

This prompted me to try using Google Translate, which perhaps fared slightly better still, giving me:

 

A delicate incense floats, and plain hot water — autumn

 

These two computer translations succeed in giving the haiku a more poetic tone, perhaps – but they are still too literal. In essence, neither of them is poetry. So clearly, we need to start afresh. And the best way to do this is to begin with a genuine literal translation:

 

one small-scoop/measure | floating kousen | hot (white) water of autumn

 

Two points to note here are as follows: 1. 香煎茶 kousencha is tea made from powdered green tea or roasted barley flour, with spices and herbs (such as kelp, red shiso, and dried plum), and 2. ひとすくい [一掬い] hitosukui is a small ornamental spoon​ (usually written using kana alone). These two elements each convey a wealth of input to the original haiku. One implies a small measure [a spoonful] of something [tea] which expands out into something far larger and more diffuse, hence the poem speaks of ‘floating’ – which is perhaps why the automatic translations appear to default to the term ‘incense’ even though the word incense is not actually used in the poem. My wife thought this aspect of the poem referred more to the very small grains of powdered tea which were ‘suspended’ in the ‘sayu’ or ‘white-hot’ water, perhaps suggesting both fresh, pure water and white steam at the same time. Consequently, reading this haiku in Japanese, we get a double suggestion of the fragrance of the tea as well as the visual of watching the tea slowly dissolving into both the hot water and the air, most likely in the form of the rising steam and smoke from the fire boiling the water in its iron pot. As such, the tea and the open-sided wooden teahouse become the essence of autumn itself as it is experienced by the senses of sight and smell. In this manner, the haiku makes us feel autumn.

 

But that makes for a lot of separate elements to cram into an English translation of this haiku! – Breaking the haiku down, we need to include the following: 1. The smallness of a measured spoonful; 2. The spiced tea powder (kousencha); 3. The expansive notion of floating or suspension; 4. The white-hotness of water; 5. The association of the water (and all these separate elements) with autumn (kigo). Given the quantity and complexity of these components, I found it very hard to distil everything down into a suitably brief and spare, free-form haiku. But, wanting to avoid excessive “wordiness”, I decided it was best to add the limitation of crafting the translation into a 5-7-5 structure. In doing so, I thought that this would give the poem some sort of order as well as limiting its length within the somewhat traditional confines of a 5-7-5 haiku. Within those confines, of course, as always with haiku there are further divisions which need to be employed for greater expressive effect, such as splitting the haiku either into units of two (using a kiregi), or three (the standard three lines of 5-7-5), or, ideally a combination of both. Working five elements into such expressive divisions is the real challenge in translating this particular haiku. In the end, I went through more than 33 iterations before I settled on a version which I thought worked reasonably well. This took me from my first spare and impressionistic (free-form) rendering of:

 

Scent and sediment / suspended – / autumn’s hot water.

 

To my final, 5-7-5 rendering of:

 

Infused with white steam – / a pinch of spiced tea gently / drifts into Autumn.

 

I’ve anguished a lot over whether nor not ‘drifts’ should be ‘floats’ – and it could easily be either; but, in the end, I felt that ‘drifts’ better serves as a bridge between the parallel inference of both the water-soluble and the airborne aspects of the poem’s central allusion. To my mind, ‘floats’ works well for the air, but otherwise it rather implies something simply borne on the surface of the water, rather than something equally suffused or suspended within the water and the air. Hence, recalling that old nostrum of earth and heaven: “As above, so below,” –  to my mind, in both eye and ear – ‘drifts’ successfully carries both connotations; as well as perhaps also a third, which is that sensual experience of the two combined in a feeling, as I described it earlier on, when I first broke down the essential elements of the original poem, i.e. – its autumnal essence.

 

Hatsunejaya (初音茶屋)

In his letter to his friend, Akutagawa described this haiku as being ‘commonplace,’ meaning he thought it too conventional or unoriginal.  Nevertheless, 110 years after it was first written, I think his poem is actually a very subtle and deft work of art. It is an exemplary haiku. It manages to do what the most challenging haiku strive to achieve, which is to embody and express a multitude (of images, ideas, and/or sensations through associations, suggestions, and allusion) in the simplest and sparest of forms.

 

Yoshida Hiroshi - Teahouse (1938)

In concluding his pioneering four-volume survey of Japanese haiku, the scholar, R.H. Blyth, observed: “The three-line translation [of haiku] obscures something fundamental in the originals, something that belongs to the Japanese mind, the Japanese language and the literature it produced and which produced it. We see it in linked poems, in the puns of the language of Nō[h], in the empty spaces of pictures, the absence of things in rooms, the silences of conversation. This ‘something’ is a certain continuity, a lack of division, a feeling of the whole when dealing with the parts.”* – I think this reflection sums up very well the challenge of translating Akutagawa’s haiku about a simple little wooden tea house at Sankeien into English in a way which attempts to do justice to the dense complexity, and yet also the light and buoyant subtlety, of his original poem.

 

ひとはかり浮く香煎（こうせん）や白湯（さゆ）の秋

Infused with white steam –

a pinch of spiced tea gently

drifts into Autumn.

 

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1915. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)

translated by Tim Chamberlain, 2025. 三溪園 (さんけいえん)

 

 

*R.H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 4, Autumn-Winter (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), pp. 1008-1009.

Sun-Dappled Stones

Leaf 351 – Essays on Haiku

 

Shizu Okino - Tied Rocks

Whenever I want to find a calm point of focus in my mind I try to visualise a round, palm-sized pebble on the bed of a clear stream or brook. It’s a very specific, eidetic scene. One which is based on any number of different, but similar streams which I’ve seen flowing down countless rugged, rocky valleys along the Cornish coast. This naturalistic image of water and stone appeals to me and lends itself to my sense of inner calm because it simultaneously represents stasis and motion. It is both calm and refreshing. Permeable and impermeable. The pebble is solid, rounded and unmoved. The water is fresh and clear, and it passes all around the smooth rock, roiling and flowing fast – almost invisible, except for the sharp motes of sunlight which glint and flash golden from the surface down to the rocky, gravelly, sandy riverbed. I have tried to capture this mental image in the following haiku:

 

 

Pebbles shimmying

beneath

sun-dappled water.

 

 

However, I’m not sure it successfully captures the essence which I was aiming to grasp. Sometimes the sentiments (in the married-forms of thoughts and feelings) don’t seem to merge or coalesce quite as easily as we intend. It can be hugely frustrating. There is that sense of certainty; a clarity of perception which somehow resists us and refuses to let itself be translated from pure feeling into words. This is why, as poets, we continue to wrestle with thoughts and themes, with images and words, revisiting verses we have written – revising and reshaping them – over and over again. It’s not so much an obsession, but rather an inexhaustible striving towards perfection. All art is a process of polishing. But in this particular instance, having already tried to capture this impression in my poem, I was taken aback to find the following, almost identical haiku written by Natsume Sōseki, one of my favourite Japanese writers, over a century before me:

 

The stones at the bottom

Seem to be moving;

Clear water.*

– Natsume Sōseki 

 

I think all haiku poets share in this experience of finding another poet who has had a similar experience or moment of inspiration which they have attempted to encapsulate, just as we have (see also, Leaf 33). It certainly is a deeply curious thing, to peer deep into this mirror. It is a moment of connection. But, in this particular instance, stumbling across Sōseki’s haiku – its discovery was immediately qualified by a passage of interpretation which I found along with it. In this passage, R.H. Blyth comments on Sōseki’s poem, saying: “This poem is a failure, for the poet has allowed his intellect to interfere with his imagination. Movement, simple movement, is perhaps the greatest mystery of the universe. This is the meaning of our deep interest in earthquakes, the stormy sea, horse-races, the clouds, streams, rivers, tobacco smoking. In the above verse, the stones of the bottom of the brook are moving. The water is so clear that the movement can be exactly and vividly seen. The intellect qualifies this with ‘seems to be moving’ but the imagination takes no notice of this. It loves movement for its own sake; whether the movement is in the mind or outside it, does not matter.”*

 

I have to confess I am completely baffled by this interpretation. It seems curious to me that Blyth, if I am reading him correctly, has completely missed the zen-like contradiction which is placed at the heart of Sōseki’s poem. It seems to me as though Blyth is muddling the ‘seems’ and ‘are’ in relation to the movement of the stones. I read Soseki’s poem and it strikes me that he is attempting to convey the same notion as I am in my poem. This notion is quite a simple point: the stones are not moving, but it looks like they are. The play of the clear water moving around them and the way the water refracts the light causes this illusion, and this is perhaps a very zen-like perception; i.e. – even when things are still and unchanging, they change and are changing. One only has to think of Heraclitus’s statement that it is impossible to step into the same river twice, or Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability.’ Contradictions abound in life, but the ability to accept those contradictions is what is most essential to maintaining our equanimity, our balance. It seems remarkable to me that Blyth missed this, if I have read him correctly. Especially given how acutely perceptive he usually is in other instances to the zen-like nature of haiku, and also how easily he relates it to similar sentiments as expressed by Western poets, such as Keats and Wordsworth.

 

Having made this observation though, I think Blyth might well be right all the same. I was not sure my poem worked as well as I had originally intended it, even before I had discovered Sōseki’s poem. I’m still not convinced mine works any better because of this coincidence. Perhaps both Sōseki and I each missed our mark?** – Maybe I will one day manage to rephrase and reframe this poem into something better; or perhaps it may simply have to remain as it is. Unmoved and unmoving amid the flow which continues to pass all around it, glinting and ungraspable to the last. Not quite a success, but not entirely a failed effort either. After all, haiku are simply words which come together albeit only briefly fixing a thought, a feeling, or a view – extending a moment which we hope others might share.

 

 

Shizu Okino - Cho Knot (Butterfly)

 

*R.H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume Three: Summer-Autumn (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), p. 713.

**It’s interesting to note how few of Natsume Sōseki’s haiku Blyth includes in his canonical four volume work on haiku. One gets the feeling that Blyth perhaps didn’t rate the celebrated novelist’s efforts in the art of haiku very highly.

This poem was originally written and posted on Bluesky in response to a #dailyhaikuprompt - dapple.

Poems in Process

Leaf 122 – Essays on Haiku

 

‘Poems of the Late T’ang,’ translated by A.C. Graham (Penguin, 1988 [1965]), was almost certainly the first book of East Asian poetry which I ever bought or read. And it remains one of my absolute favourites. I recently re-read it once again after a neglectful pause of more years than I care to count. It was a book, which when I first acquired it during my early teens, I read and re-read over and over again. I even managed to memorise some of the verses it contains and I still find fragments of its lines echoing in my mind even today. Recently re-reading its introduction, I found it far more insightful than I must have done when first reading it more than three decades ago. Since that time, my subsequent study of the Japanese language, I now found helps me to better understand some of the nuances of translation (from Chinese) as Graham describes them. Likewise, my efforts at penning poems of my own and studying the craft of writing short verse which aims at both versatility and subtlety, in order to help me better understand poetic sensibilities and the virtues of diction, have had an effect too.

 

In essence, I realise I’ve come to see and appreciate this book in a new light. Certainly, with each renewed re-reading, a favourite and familiar book (such as this one undoubtedly is for me) seems to change, just as we change, with age. This morning, as I sat reading once again through Poems of the Late T’ang, all these thoughts and reflections began to coalesce. While I slowly leafed through the poems collected in this book, I realised that (like many paperbacks do) its pages – which had been freshly printed when I first bought it – were now distinctly yellowed with the passage of time. Hence, I found myself pondering writing a poem upon these thoughts and associated feelings. But, while some poems – particularly haiku – simply seem to spring from a moment such as this and often require little or no tinkering, others need a bit more labour.

 

And because these processes are usually unfathomable (even to us ourselves as poets), they often remain unseen. Not least because we almost immediately discard the mental drafts we make as we go. And, likewise, we tend to quickly dispose of whatever aborted versions we scribble down while en route to the finished article. So, on this occasion, I thought I would save mine and share them here. What follows, I hope, might help to illustrate how a thought, a feeling, a sentiment, a reflection, all come together and slowly begin to cohere and combine through a process of convolution. Constricting and stretching. Shifting shape and twisting dynamics, until they seem to consolidate into a final form – or a series of semi-finished forms from which we can perhaps choose the one (or ones) which seem to work best.

 

I am still as yet undecided as to which of the following haiku I feel is the most suited to the sentiments I was aiming to capture and express, but I think it is likely to be either one or other from the first or later drafts as presented here in chronological sequence of composition. Thinking and reflecting upon these drafts as I walk myself through them, hopefully, it might help to elucidate which of them might rise to the fore – solvitur ambulando! [–  it is solved by walking!]

 

Let’s begin:

  

[#1]

Sunshine and silence,

with a pot of coffee

and an open book.

 

This first attempt basically sets down the four solid elements that make up the subject and set the scene; simply: sunshine, silence, coffee, book.

  

[#2]

Early morning sunshine,

silence – coffee and a

well-thumbed book.

 

The second draft attempts to begin crafting these words into ideas which are expressive or suggestive of a certain amount of (for want of a better term) ‘sense-feeling.’ That is “early morning sunshine,” coffee and quiet (relaxation) with a book which is “well-thumbed,” – i.e., a familiar favourite tome (one which has been read and returned to repeatedly over time).

 

[#3]

Early morning sunshine,

quiet, coffee – slowly

leafing pages left.

 

The third draft attempts to whittle down some of the wordiness – but, perhaps paradoxically, also with an eye to aiding further elaboration. This version is definitely not aiming at being a finished article, but instead it aims at serving as a cognitive or conceptual bridge, a stepping stone to the next version.

 

[#4]

Early morning sunshine,

quiet, coffee – leafing

pages slowly read.

 

The fourth draft simply presents what looks like a very minor tweak, but that change is more than superficial. It is the start of a bigger change that is now beginning to take shape in my mind.

  

[#5]

Morning sunshine stilled,

warm coffee scent – turning

pages browned by time.

 

The fifth draft makes a bolder leap. It starts to flesh out that change of thought into something more appealing to the senses – the smells and the textures of the moment, elements which essentially give flavour to the ideas of stillness, contentment, and the idea of an appreciation (both of, and for) time passing.

  

[#6]

Morning sunshine stilled,

warm coffee scent – leafing

pages browned by time.

 

Draft six simply plays upon the direction of a single brushstroke: ‘turning’ becomes ‘leafing’ once again. Both gerunds suggest a temporal shift, but the second intends to add an image allied to seasons changing while still suggesting the action of turning an actual page.

  

[#7]

Morning coffee-scented sunshine,

stillness settles – sifting again

pages warmed brown with time.

 

The seventh draft makes a last strive to home in once again on the visceral element of the feelings evoked by the ‘here and now’ (the present time and place) prompting reflections on past times and places having shifted through the course of one’s lifetime, or an acceptance of that process of shifting as a deeply personal reflection – the fact that our ‘here and now’ evolves and changes with us (it ages as we age), and so our life is both unchanging and changing in the same unending instant which we perpetually perceive – both are one and the same.

 

This seventh and final draft seems to have successfully condensed all of the elements I was originally aiming for, but which I was only hazily aware of at the start of the process of penning this particular poem. Yet it still seems a little too wordy (and perhaps worthy) for a haiku. There is always an inclination to over-think a haiku, attempting to cram too many ideas and/or images into it. But this is only natural. The simultaneity of thought and feeling tend to encourage this. What we experience as but brief and fleeting moments are in fact filled to the brim with thoughts, ideas, feelings and sensations. Hence, we can’t help but succumb to the temptation to over-egg the pudding and elaborate, when what we should be aiming for is the opposite. We need to pare back. Haiku don’t necessarily need to be simple or spare, but they do need to be short. In this regard, haiku should always aim for brevity and concision. And so, walking back through the various iterations of the potential poem above, the second draft may well be the best version in terms of its size, its openness, and its likelihood of appealing to other readers as something essentially universal, and hence something they could probably relate to easily.

 

The seventh draft certainly captures the manifold elements of the scene as they applied to, and were felt by me as the poet; but, by the very nature of that precision (in addition to it being overly wordy), it is probably too ‘point specific’ to be a truly versatile haiku. Put most simply, both versions are suitably reflective, but #2 suggests, whereas #7 presents or records. As such, the former is perhaps better ready to leave home and make its own way in the world; while the latter should perhaps best remain content to stay at home with me and enjoy its long-laboured for, and well-earned retirement, knowing it has successfully exorcised its aim.

 

But, just before laying down my pen, I find myself pausing – still hesitating. I can’t help but hear the soulful voice of Jack Kerouac’s shade, looking wisely over my shoulder, whispering his old adage, that: “first thought, is best thought.” Hence, looking back one more time at #2, I see a last (and most-likely final) adaptation smiling back at me. It doesn’t say it all, but often that’s the very nub of the thing; and so – at last – draft #8 is born, and the umbilical cord of a thoughtful moment reflecting upon the re-reading of a favourite book is happily tied off. A very near return to my first thoughts:

 

[#8]

Warm morning sunshine

– coffee, quiet and a

well-thumbed book.

 

 

 

 

 Photographs by Tim Chamberlain 

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)

Criticism

Leaf 37 – Essays on Haiku

 

CRITICISM

There’s always one, isn’t there. Someone who takes umbrage at other people’s enjoyment. One can’t help wondering why they don’t leave well alone. Horses for courses, etc. However, I suppose they feel they’ve had their toes trodden on, somehow, and so need to retaliate – when in truth, it would simply be better for both parties if they agreed to disagree, parted company, and continued to go about their business, each minding to their own.

 

Back in 1999, still – a journal of short verse was entering its third year of publication. It was a bold and stylish new venture in the world of small-press magazines. Innovatively, it published a poem a page. And very quickly it boasted a global contributor list which balanced big names and new poets alike. The ‘comments’ section in the journal’s back pages reflected the widespread enthusiasm and praise for its appearance, its style, and its ethos. But not everyone shared in this view. The editor very bravely chose to show the journal’s commitment to openness and honesty by including a very derogatory piece of literary criticism which the journal had received (see, still 3 one).

 

I won’t retrospectively dignify his action by reproducing the chap’s name, or quoting him directly – but suffice to say, he deemed the new journal to be onanistic, self-indulgent, self-serving, without meaning and frankly absurd. He knew what real poetry was; he had an honours degree in English literature. He thought much the same of the poets featured in still, he said, as Byron had thought of the poems of Keats: i.e – condescendingly. Amusingly, his dismissal was riddled with spelling mistakes, which certainly didn’t help to reinforce his case. Nevertheless, it was quite a shocking thing to read at the time, and I understand it provoked quite a few angry responses – a couple of which were featured in the next edition (still 3 two). And I’m now somewhat shamefaced to say that it was me who inadvertently led the rebuttals with a somewhat barbed senryu. I’m not ashamed of what I wrote, because it was an honest response which was written at the time. But it does now seem to me to have been a little undignified to have sunk to the level of responding at all. For what it’s worth, this was my response:

 

His mind –

like a small room,

without a lightbulb.

 

In some ways, our erstwhile literary critic’s acid and asinine remarks did get to the nub of the matter. They touched a raw nerve. One of the reasons still was being so applauded was precisely because it had opened up a space to confront such optically-nasal-descending dismissals. It was a forum for accepting and treating short verse with respect and dignity. Its open and honest ethos was genuinely trailblazing. It offered a space in which to share enlightenment without being dogmatic, proscriptive, or overly didactic. Its unflinching stance had clearly rattled some empty-headed birdcages.

 

I am sure many of us writing haiku and short verse at that time in the late 1990s were, like me, riddled with doubts about the validity of the endeavour. I know I felt mildly (or even, acutely) embarrassed by some of my early efforts in this arena. I remember one occasion when a very good friend of mine picked up a copy of still (still 3 one, as it happened) and began leafing through it. After a long while, he looked up and said he didn’t get it. He read out the poem on page 3, the first poem in the magazine, and said “What does it mean?” – I felt myself cringe inwardly. The poem he had just read expressed almost exactly the same sentiment which a poem of mine had expressed in the previous issue (still 2 four, p.73):

 

Leaving,

her scent

remains.

 

For me, in my case, my poem was quite personal. It reflects a genuine ‘haiku moment’ which had happened to me when laying my head down upon a pillow in the absence of my (then) girlfriend. The other poem, I think, seems somewhat more abstract, given that it occurs in a public space. Mine is perhaps more ambiguous because it is less specific – there’s no hint of it referring to a pillow, a bedroom, a home, or a private space. It could easily be something which could occur anywhere. Anyhow, this friend of mine was then at pains to explain that he understood the words and what they were saying, but to him it “didn’t seem like poetry” – it was just too short. But, horses for courses, etc.

 

I did (and still do) feel some sympathy for this. It’s not unusual for me to read short poems by other poets which simply do not speak to me, or they evoke feelings, images or reflections which I don’t get, or simply don’t enjoy. Not all poetry needs to be enjoyed. There is just as much efficacy in being shocked or discomfited by a poem. But on the whole (and notably, only for me), how I feel I have evolved as a haiku poet since those early days is that I am very much in the traditional, zen-like mould of Matsuo Bashō and his followers. As he taught: poems should strive to be ego-less, although we know this to be impossible. All expression is essentially anchored by (and to) the ego. Therefore, it needs to strive towards something universal in which all our egos share. Hence, why I find it amusing when I hear or see people talking about the ‘Great Haiku Poets’ of our time. Because what does that even mean? – Surely that’s simply contradictory? – Well, it is to me at any rate. But, if it’s your thing: that’s fine. Each to their own, and long may that be the case! – After all, we must learn ‘to live and let live’, if we are to live well, and live well with one another.

 

Big name,

small world

– haiku.

 

 

Photographs of still 3 two [left] & still 3 one [right] by Tim Chamberlain.

The Fly

Leaf 33 – Essays on Haiku

 

Illustration from 'Zen Mind, Beginners Mind' by Shunryu Suzuki (1970)

R.H. Blyth writes: “Senryu originated in the eighteenth century with Karai Hachiemon, 1718-90, whose pen-name was Senryū. They are more cynical and less refined than haiku, but what is more important, they lack the element of interpenetration which is the religious aspect of all haiku. […] It is after all, to some extent, a personal matter. If you emphasize the humour, it is senryu: if you look more at the poetry it is a haiku.”* – I think the fine line distinguishing between haiku and senryu can sometimes be a bit fuzzy, but I’d probably go along with that last sentence as good basis for a definition. If a short poem has a wry, self-aware or knowing quality, or if it provides a purely amusing diversion that awakens a smile, then it could be called a senryu.

 

 

The fly,

rubbing its hands and feet

– a villainous plot?

 

In the contemporary tradition of modern English language haikai the distinction between haiku and senryu is a little different. Most modern practitioners, haiku poets and haiku journal editors alike, tend to bracket short verse which is centred on nature as ‘haiku’, and short verse which is centred on human life as ‘senryu.’ For me personally, I find the distinction a little too blurry on the one hand, and a little too didactic on the other. I think most people would agree that there is a good deal of crossover between the two. Personally, I prefer Blyth’s definition. But in many ways, it is all fairly arbitrary. Haiku and senryu both look to ‘zero in’ on finding the universal in the everyday, the sublime in the mundane – essentially the moment when something ineffable clicks in the mind perceiving. Perhaps one form does so with a certain degree of profundity (haiku), while the other (senryu) does so in a manner which is more askance and wry – yet both are self-reflective. Looking inwards through looking out. But what is key to each is a sense of originality, while knowing that no such originality exists. This is maybe more in line with Blyth’s belief that at its core haiku is a ‘zen-like’ form of poetics. How deep or superficial that ‘zen-like’ nature is very much depends on three factors: the poet, the poem, and the reader. All three open themselves to different avenues of perception and reception. What I write may not necessarily be the same as what you read. And likewise, what I write may well be original and unoriginal at the same time. Take the poem which I have presented above in this leaf – a jokey haiku/senryu about a fly wringing its hands and feet. I wrote it spontaneously, and it sat in one of my notebooks for many years in splendid isolation, unread by anyone other than me. For all I knew it was 100% original. But then one day while reading Blyth, proving once again that there is never anything new under the sun, I came across a very similar poem written by one of the great masters of Japanese haiku, Issa:

 

Do not kill the fly!

See how it wrings its hands,

Its feet!**

 

Blyth’s commentary suggests that the humour in this verse relies on the fancifully improbable interpretation that the fly is “rubbing its hands together in supplication for its life.”** Whereas my verse suggests that the fly is doing so in the theatrical manner of a vaudeville villain plotting some dastardly nefarious scheme. Both poems, however, are doing exactly the same thing: projecting the human onto (non-human) nature, associating two totally disassociated things through a humorous moment of reflection. Similarly, my poem unwittingly connects me back to one of the original practitioners of the artform which I am attempting to emulate – in essence showing that at the heart of all things we are largely one and the same.

 

Consequently, there’s no need to feel overly precious about our own artistic creations (a common enough tendency in modern English haiku), or how rigidly our short poems need to be defined and categorised, because we are all effectively toiling towards the same ends in the same field. We might as well do our best to sing along together, and hope to think of ourselves united – all working alongside each other as one. There are echoes of sentiments, of themes, and of ideas which vibrate back and forth between haiku and senryu, just the same as echo back and forth between individual poets – because we each draw and drink and benefit from the same overflowing well-head, the same abundant spring of poetry.

 

 

 

*R.H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume One: Eastern Culture (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1981 [1949]), p. 198.

**R.H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume Three: Summer-Autumn (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1982 [1952]), pp. 794-795.

Definitive Definitions

Leaf 3 – Essays on Haiku

Katsushika Hokusai - Boy Viewing Mount Fuji (1839)

 

This is another essay I wrote early on, while I was in my twenties, having first begun publishing haiku and short verse in a small magazine titled, ‘still’ (UK, 1997-2001). I remember at this time it seemed like there was plenty of navel-gazing and self-reflection going on in the English language haiku ‘movement.’ There were a lot of questions batting back and forth about ‘how valid’ was this endeavour? – People didn’t really use phrases such as ‘cultural appropriation’ back then, but this was a large part of that process of questioning and self-doubt. I remember my own doubts and tribulations were actually centred upon the language aspect more than the ethos or the appropriation aspect. The newest trend in those days among English language haiku poets was a fairly united consensus in a collective assertion that haiku should not be centred upon a five-seven-five syllable count, as was the traditional characteristic of haiku in Japanese. The justification was that five-seven-five in English was overly wordy compared to the same structure in Japanese. Instead, English language haiku should aim itself more at brevity in order to achieve authenticity and so thereby adhere closer to the spirit of the original tradition in Japan. I always felt that there was something more to this, something intangible or rather a deficiency which I was incapable of grasping or mastering without any knowledge of the Japanese language. Since then, I have taken formal classes studying Japanese – I have even attempted to write some haiku in Japanese conforming to the five-seven-five structure – although I am still far from fluent in Japanese. Even now, I continue to wrestle with these thoughts and ideas in my own approach to writing haiku in English, but I do continue to adhere to that idea that haiku in English need not follow the five-seven-five structure, but rather should attempt to evoke the original spirit of haiku through brevity and the use of caesura. As with my ‘On Haiku’ (c.2003) essay (reproduced on this blog as ‘Leaf 1’), I am similarly reproducing this second essay (largely) unchanged purely as another self-reflective starting point. A means of looking back, in order to begin looking forwards. No doubt, I may well develop my current thoughts and opinions on this topic in future posts (or ‘Leaves’) here on Shinobazu Pond.

Edward Luper - 36 Views of the BT Tower: Window Cleaners (2021)

 

 

DEFINITIVE DEFINITIONS – REFLECTIONS ON MODERN HAIKU (c.2004)

 

Personally – reading English language haiku (i.e. – haiku written by contemporary poets from Western backgrounds), generally sparks one of two distinct reactions in me. Sometimes such poems will enliven and inspire me and it’s not long before I have a pencil in my hand in place of the haiku magazine which I had been reading. More often than not though, my reaction is one of acute ridiculousness which usually progresses into the dispirited feeling that finds me resolving to abandon my own pretensions in haiku. How can any non-Japanese really write true haiku? Can a single word, set isolated and alone upon a page, appended by the poet’s nominally-possessive assertion, amount to a legitimate expression? No. No – might constitute a suitably concise and apt response. Yes. But equally – yes –  (a most poetic opposite) could be supplied as the definitive answer, and, just as sensibly, find itself the final word on the matter.

 

What is the end though? What resolution can be drawn? The defining of a “haiku movement” in English? Necessarily, to find a serious sense of comprehension we need to refine a cogent terminology. Set up guidelines. Hem the skirts of this particular poetic parade. This would all be very well if the “movement” which we are trying to pin weren’t itself so intent on breaking its own conventions!

 

Perhaps the current climate of haiku in English is too changeable. No pithy epithets can possibly define it. It seems not to want to conform, yet oddly it simultaneously appears to break the strictures applied to it almost as though it were unaware of its own creative anarchy. This characteristic wilful versus unconscious inconsistency is its present dynamic. Like a river in its thundering torrent, it is moving the unseen boundary markers of the fields it has overwhelmed, engulfing its own natural landscape so that it can shape and then re-shape that landscape over and over. This constant process of transformation is what, for me at least, makes the current flow of English language haiku so captivating – it’s what inspires me both to creativity and to despair. I would urge all poets taken by this tide to jump off the rafts of rules and strictures being floated by anyone who wants to still the waters! The time for critical reflection will come once the waters have receded, once the deluge has dried into the salt crystals of piquant memory – only then will it be possible to peel back the sediments which will be left and accurately describe the formation of this landscape that is currently being created in its first era of flux, an epoch already several decades old and still showing no signs of slowing. We might well have to leave off defining this Diluvian for quite some time yet, realistically it might not even be up to ourselves at all.

 

 

 

Tani Buncho - Man Resting Under a Pine Tree (1815)

On Haiku

Leaf 1 – Essays on Haiku

Tsuchiya Koitsu - Ueno Shinobazu no ike (1930)

  

This was a short essay, titled ‘On Haiku’, which I originally wrote circa 2000-2003. At the time I had been a regular contributor to ‘still’ – a very beautiful and professionally produced little magazine which described itself as “a journal of short verse.” Published in the UK, it was edited by ai li chia and ran from 1997 to 2001. I was (and continue to be) very proud of it and my small contributions to its pages. I was very young at the time, and reading some of my poems from that period, I can see I was still somewhat naively venturesome in my early efforts at haiku and short verse, but ai li was a wonderfully thoughtful and encouraging editor. I remain very grateful to her for that. It was always a real joy receiving ‘still’ through the post. Accompanied by elegant notes from ai li, always handwritten on thin tissue paper in black ink, with red hanko stamps. A lot of time, effort and love went into the creation of that little ‘zine’, as the small press poetry magazines were called in those days. I still have the full run of ‘still’ sitting proudly on my bookshelf, twenty volumes plus one anthology – cherished tomes standing alongside my books on and by Matsuo Bashō, R.H. Blyth, et al. They have followed me on many a house move in the UK, ultimately ending up here in Tokyo, next to a window with a wonderful view of Mount Fuji – something remarkable which, if anyone had foretold me back in those days, I’d never have believed might come to pass. If I were writing this essay now, I would no doubt write it very differently. But I think it’s best to leave it as it is, and simply post it here as a starting point, some three decades on, now in 2025. Looking back, in order to begin looking forwards. It’s been many years since I last shared any of my short verses in public. I am doing so now purely for the sake of my own amusement, but if it should happen to be of passing interest to others of like-mind and outlook, then I hope that’s a good thing.

 

Kajita Hanko - A Nap (1906)

  

 ON HAIKU (c.2000-2003)

 

after rain -

shining green leaves,

the sound of birdsong.

 

 

You want to learn haiku? --------- Don’t. --------- You already know how.

The art of haiku is clear – it is innate, something which everyone possesses. Haiku is. You see haiku. You feel haiku. Because haiku is. And because haiku is – haiku isn’t so simple.

Although haiku looks short, it isn’t short. Haiku is concise. Although haiku looks quick, it isn’t quick. Haiku is mindful. As a form of verse haiku is centred upon brevity. Its virtue is to be pure and untrammelled. Haiku speaks. It says more by appealing to the innate virtue which resides in the heart of all living things. Haiku speaks of truth. Haiku works through honesty and clarity. Haiku is open.

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about haiku and its place in modern literature. Many people are reading haiku and many people are writing haiku. Today haiku is definitely an art form which is rapidly disseminating from its point of origin in Japanese literature. This is because the essence of haiku is universal. Haiku is nature. Haiku is mind. Haiku is a double reflection. The world as it is. The world as we feel it. Instance and response. Image and feeling. Haiku appeals because of its benevolence. To slam haiku (and certainly modern haiku does have its detractors) is to close one’s mind.

Haiku is freedom. --------- Or at least, that is how I feel it.

 

 

through mist and

ripples of cloud

- evening sun.

 

Kobayashi Issa - Orphan Sparrow Haiku

我と来て　あそべや　親のない雀

ware to kite asobeya oya no nai suzume

Come to me / and let’s play / little orphan sparrow

- Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828).