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A few minutes ago, a Facebook friend posted the story of how her grape crop, having fermented on the vine before it could be harvested, was consumed in its entirety by a herd of deer. In telling the story, she composed the phrase, "drunk deer dancing in the moonlight." I noted that it was a great line. Another friend responded, "The first line of a poem?"
I thought about it briefly and decided that not a poem, but a haiku, could best contain the image:
xxxxxgrape arbor stripped clean
drunk deer dance in the moonlight
xxxxxno jelly this year
And that's how 2013 the Year in Verse, comes to an end.
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Showing posts with label Haiku. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haiku. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Readings & Reflections: Simic, Haiku, and the Blues
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I plan to kill at least two birds with the one stone that is this post. Or rather, to eliminate the violent imagery, let’s just say that I plan to settle at least two perceived debts. (Fly on and be well, little bird!)
Item #1: I wish at this time to give an overdue plug to the beautiful blog, Life at Willow Manor, and to Tess Kincaid who writes it. It was this post at that blog which introduced me to the wonderful work of Charles Simic—an investigation that I’d been putting off for years. (At this point, I would usually find a link to a site somewhere dedicated to Charles Simic. But I’m not going to do that. Persons who take the trouble to make that inquiry themselves shall be doubly rewarded by encountering Simic, as well as by their sense of accomplishment in having made the effort.)
Item #2: I had stated to my Facebook friend, Phillip Maguire—after Phillip posted a haiku—that I would dig out some examples of haiku that I wrote years ago and share them. My primary reason for doing so was to provide a demonstration of why I stopped trying to write haiku many years ago. It was my contention that, as a Zen art form, haiku is beyond my ken. The Zen sensibility necessary to successfully and authentically work within the form is a thing which I do not possess, since I do not practice Zen. I have some intellectual knowledge of Zen, true. But I cannot claim to see my world through the eyes of a daily practitioner of that religion. I got some blowback on Facebook for voicing that contention, but not a whole lot.
Segue: Now here is how Items #1 and #2 come together: In the pursuit of my new-found interest in both the poetry and the prose of Charles Simic, I came across a short essay entitled “No Cure for the Blues” in the anthology of his “essays and memoirs,” The Unemployed Fortune Teller. [highly recommended] Consider the following excerpt from that essay in the light of the comments I just made above concerning haiku:
The blues prove the complete silliness of any theory of cultural separatism which denies the possibility of aesthetic experience outside one’s race, ethnicity, religion, or even gender. Like all genuine art, the blues belong to a specific time, place and people which it then, paradoxically, transcends. The secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude. Lyric poetry has no closer relation any where than the blues…etc.
The key sentence here is, of course, the first, which would seem to proclaim “the complete silliness” of my expressed point of view regarding haiku.
However, while I must admit that it calls my perspective into question, I would still argue that my position is a valid one. It is not that my background is Christian while that of, say, Bashō, is Zen Buddhist, which makes haiku inaccessible to me. It is rather that the writing of true haiku constitutes actual practice of Zen Buddhism. It is not merely an art form within the context of a particular cultural perspective; it is an act of worship. I can, therefore, write something which looks like a haiku, but it will be a hollow form; an imitation.
In Western poetic forms, we are addicted to the practice of metaphorical observation. For us, a falling leaf is almost never merely a falling leaf. It becomes of butterfly, or a fleeting dream or aspiration; or perhaps a harbinger of impending death. The falling leaf is a piece of a puzzle which we are trying solve. In haiku, as I understand it intellectually, the falling leaf is Zen poet/practitioner, puzzle, and solution, all in one—but still very much simply a falling leaf. I can understand that intellectually—kind of—but I can’t do it.
Here are two examples (from a group of eleven) of pseudo-haiku that I attempted before I gave it up. Two will be more than sufficient to prove my point. In reading them, keep in mind that I had read (in English translation) hundreds of haiku by Bashō, Issa, and other Japanese masters, prior to making these lame attempts. I had also studied the Japanese language for a couple of years in college, and could add a patina of linguistic understanding to the purely aesthetic surface level:
xxxa blank sheet of sky—
distant wisdom of the crow—
xxxmy wife is sleeping—
This is terrible. Of the three lines, both the first and the second contain metaphors. The sky is not a blank page, presumably waiting for me to come along and fill it with my brilliant words. And crows have no capacity for wisdom. Or, even if they do, I have no way of knowing from its cawing that this particular crow is wise.
This one may be the best of a bad lot:
xxxbuds bursting sunward—
with a quick thrust a crow drinks—
xxxmy shoes bind my feet—
The primary thing wrong with this one is that buds “burst sunward” only over time. This line depicts an event which is not of the eternal moment, but of an elapsed time which does not fit into the context of essential immediacy demanded by a practitioner of haiku. It is an observation where an epiphany is called for.
So I rest my case with regard to the possible refutation of my position on haiku as embodied in Charles Simic’s praise of the blues. And I simultaneously affirm my complete agreement with Simic’s assessment and praise of the blues. Thank you— Charles Simic, Phil Maguire, and Tess Kincaid—for having come together to provoke these stimulating and enriching (for me anyway) thoughts and conjectures.
X
I plan to kill at least two birds with the one stone that is this post. Or rather, to eliminate the violent imagery, let’s just say that I plan to settle at least two perceived debts. (Fly on and be well, little bird!)
Item #1: I wish at this time to give an overdue plug to the beautiful blog, Life at Willow Manor, and to Tess Kincaid who writes it. It was this post at that blog which introduced me to the wonderful work of Charles Simic—an investigation that I’d been putting off for years. (At this point, I would usually find a link to a site somewhere dedicated to Charles Simic. But I’m not going to do that. Persons who take the trouble to make that inquiry themselves shall be doubly rewarded by encountering Simic, as well as by their sense of accomplishment in having made the effort.)
Item #2: I had stated to my Facebook friend, Phillip Maguire—after Phillip posted a haiku—that I would dig out some examples of haiku that I wrote years ago and share them. My primary reason for doing so was to provide a demonstration of why I stopped trying to write haiku many years ago. It was my contention that, as a Zen art form, haiku is beyond my ken. The Zen sensibility necessary to successfully and authentically work within the form is a thing which I do not possess, since I do not practice Zen. I have some intellectual knowledge of Zen, true. But I cannot claim to see my world through the eyes of a daily practitioner of that religion. I got some blowback on Facebook for voicing that contention, but not a whole lot.
Segue: Now here is how Items #1 and #2 come together: In the pursuit of my new-found interest in both the poetry and the prose of Charles Simic, I came across a short essay entitled “No Cure for the Blues” in the anthology of his “essays and memoirs,” The Unemployed Fortune Teller. [highly recommended] Consider the following excerpt from that essay in the light of the comments I just made above concerning haiku:
The blues prove the complete silliness of any theory of cultural separatism which denies the possibility of aesthetic experience outside one’s race, ethnicity, religion, or even gender. Like all genuine art, the blues belong to a specific time, place and people which it then, paradoxically, transcends. The secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude. Lyric poetry has no closer relation any where than the blues…etc.
The key sentence here is, of course, the first, which would seem to proclaim “the complete silliness” of my expressed point of view regarding haiku.
However, while I must admit that it calls my perspective into question, I would still argue that my position is a valid one. It is not that my background is Christian while that of, say, Bashō, is Zen Buddhist, which makes haiku inaccessible to me. It is rather that the writing of true haiku constitutes actual practice of Zen Buddhism. It is not merely an art form within the context of a particular cultural perspective; it is an act of worship. I can, therefore, write something which looks like a haiku, but it will be a hollow form; an imitation.
In Western poetic forms, we are addicted to the practice of metaphorical observation. For us, a falling leaf is almost never merely a falling leaf. It becomes of butterfly, or a fleeting dream or aspiration; or perhaps a harbinger of impending death. The falling leaf is a piece of a puzzle which we are trying solve. In haiku, as I understand it intellectually, the falling leaf is Zen poet/practitioner, puzzle, and solution, all in one—but still very much simply a falling leaf. I can understand that intellectually—kind of—but I can’t do it.
Here are two examples (from a group of eleven) of pseudo-haiku that I attempted before I gave it up. Two will be more than sufficient to prove my point. In reading them, keep in mind that I had read (in English translation) hundreds of haiku by Bashō, Issa, and other Japanese masters, prior to making these lame attempts. I had also studied the Japanese language for a couple of years in college, and could add a patina of linguistic understanding to the purely aesthetic surface level:
xxxa blank sheet of sky—
distant wisdom of the crow—
xxxmy wife is sleeping—
This is terrible. Of the three lines, both the first and the second contain metaphors. The sky is not a blank page, presumably waiting for me to come along and fill it with my brilliant words. And crows have no capacity for wisdom. Or, even if they do, I have no way of knowing from its cawing that this particular crow is wise.
This one may be the best of a bad lot:
xxxbuds bursting sunward—
with a quick thrust a crow drinks—
xxxmy shoes bind my feet—
The primary thing wrong with this one is that buds “burst sunward” only over time. This line depicts an event which is not of the eternal moment, but of an elapsed time which does not fit into the context of essential immediacy demanded by a practitioner of haiku. It is an observation where an epiphany is called for.
So I rest my case with regard to the possible refutation of my position on haiku as embodied in Charles Simic’s praise of the blues. And I simultaneously affirm my complete agreement with Simic’s assessment and praise of the blues. Thank you— Charles Simic, Phil Maguire, and Tess Kincaid—for having come together to provoke these stimulating and enriching (for me anyway) thoughts and conjectures.
X
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Reflections: Existence Is a Trip
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You may be aware that my profile avatar is a portrait of the great Japanese haiku master, Bashō. In the "Translator’s Introduction" to his translation of Bashō’s classic spiritual travelogue, Narrow Road to the Interior, Sam Hamill gives us these thought-provoking words :
Bashō knew well the Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-sutra and its primary teaching: “Of one thing it is said, ‘This is good,’ and of another it is said, ‘This is bad,’ but there is nothing inherent in either to make them ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The ‘self’ is empty of independent existence.”
Later in the same introduction, Hamill gives us this advice of Bashō on the nature of creativity:
“Learn the rules well, and then forget them.”
And,
“When a great act presents itself, it does so without rules.”
Ah-so.
X
You may be aware that my profile avatar is a portrait of the great Japanese haiku master, Bashō. In the "Translator’s Introduction" to his translation of Bashō’s classic spiritual travelogue, Narrow Road to the Interior, Sam Hamill gives us these thought-provoking words :
Bashō knew well the Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-sutra and its primary teaching: “Of one thing it is said, ‘This is good,’ and of another it is said, ‘This is bad,’ but there is nothing inherent in either to make them ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The ‘self’ is empty of independent existence.”
Later in the same introduction, Hamill gives us this advice of Bashō on the nature of creativity:
“Learn the rules well, and then forget them.”
And,
“When a great act presents itself, it does so without rules.”
Ah-so.
X
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Readings: Mizu No Oto
Mizu no oto is the final line of a haiku by Bashō, the consensus choice as the greatest of the Japanese practitioners of the form. As most of you will know, a haiku is a poem consisting of three lines with a syllable count of 5-7-5.
Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
In English:
The old pond:
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.
I was introduced to the haiku form, to an understanding of its relationship to Zen Buddhism, and to this particular haiku, by the writings of R. H. Blyth, decades ago when I was an undergraduate. I have “known” during all this elapsed time that Furuike ya epitomizes the genre. I had thought to be able to find words to this effect in one of the three books by R.H. Blyth that I have in my personal library; but I came up dry. It is possible that I gained this appreciation of Furuike ya from D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, or one of the other translators of, and commentators on, Asian poetry, culture and religion whose works I was reading back then, and continue to read today.
Of Bashō, Blyth writes in volume one of his great multiple-volume study Haiku, Eastern Culture:
There are three great names in the history of haiku, Bashō, Buson and Issa; …Bashō is the religious man, Buson the artist, Issa the humanist. Bashō is concerned with God as he sees himself in the mind of the poet before flowers and fields. Buson deals with things as they exist by and for themselves, in their own right. Issa is concerned with man, man the weak angel…”
Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644. He was the son of a feudal lord. Bashō left the samuri service at the death of his father, when he was 23 years old. At the age of 29, he traveled to the capital, Edo. He spent most of his life on the road. In addition to his poetry, Bashō is the author of the often-translated Narrow Road to the Deep North, a diary in prose and poetry of his travels through the villages and mountain temples of Japan’s northern interior.
I recommend reading Bashō and Japanese and Chinese poetry, in general, if you have not done so already. Asian art forms have a beauty that is distinct from those of the West; and it is a distinction from which there is much—very much—to be gained. But my real purpose in this post is to introduce the writings of R. H. Blyth.
I own three books by Blyth: Haiku, volume one, Eastern Culture; A History of Haiku, volume one; and Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. I highly recommend all three. Blyth was a genius, in my opinion, in synthesizing for the Western mind the elements of Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen both in their historical and cultural context in Asia, and as they relate to Western ideas of religion, art, and culture. For this reason, I particularly recommend Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics as a text that will repay the effort put into finding a copy and reading it, many times over. Here are the opening sentences of his preface:
The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of as consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in peoples and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature.
In his introduction to A History of Haiku, volume one, Blyth writes:
Haiku is an ascetic art, an artistic asceticism. Of the two elements, the ascetic is more rare, more difficult, of more value than the artistic.
The preface to the book I most highly recommend, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, begins:
Zen is the most precious possession of Asia. With its beginnings in India, development in China, and final practical application in Japan, it is today the strongest power in the world. It is a world-power, for in so far as men live at all, they live by Zen. Wherever there is a poetical action, a religious aspiration, a heroic thought, a union of nature within a man and the Nature without, there is Zen.
Chapter 1 of the book is entitled “What Is Zen?” and begins:
Consider the lives of birds and fishes. Fish never weary of the water; but you do not know the true mind of a fish, for you are not a fish. Birds never tire of the woods; but do not know their real spirit, for you are not a bird. It is just the same with the religions, the poetical life: if you do not live it, you know nothing about it.
As an example of the practical application of Blyth’s critical sensibilities, I will quote a bit of his comparison of a haiku by Buson, whom Blyth ranks second only to Bashō, that is superficially similar to Furuike ya. Here is Buson:
The old pond,
A straw sandal sunk to the bottom:
Sleet falling.
In comparing this to Bashō, Blyth states:
To put it in a word, Buson lived in the world of phenomena, and his inner life was thin compared to that of Bashō. … Bashō’s verse has a life within it, it has Life, whereas Buson’s verse is dead, in this sense. The dreariness of the scene with the straw sandal is not superficial, but it does not involve within itself all the dreariness of the world; it is the thing-as-it-is, but not the Thing-as-It-is. We choose one or the other, according to our character and mood.
We all need, be we Catholic or Protestant, Muslim or Jew, be we even Marxist materialist or Logical Positivist, to be in touch with the Thing-as-It-is. As a Christian, I recall that St. Paul admonished us to pray constantly. I find that the writings of R.H. Blyth are an aid to understanding what Paul meant by that.
The bibliography of books by R.H. Blyth on amazon.com is here.
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