3 February 2004. One thing I planned to do in these notes was write a tribute to the Peter Pauper series of four little (but hardbound and jacketed) books devoted to translations of Japanese haiku. Published in the fifties, these were the books that made me a lifelong devotee of haiku as soon as I'd thumbed through a few pages of one of them in the store where I bought them. On rereading the selections in Japanese Haiku, the first volume of the set, though, I am shocked by how banal most of them seem. About the best once I've come on so far is Buson's:

A marvelous picture of dedication, yes, but I want more from poetry. Ah, but even as I meditate on what I've just written, and on the poem, my mood starts deepening back to my original appreciation of at least some of the haiku in this collection--or what I guess that appreciation must have been. Here we have the implacable fisherman--and the implacable rain. The fisherman's pursuit is raised in purposefulness, importance, ever-returningness to what rain, to what Nature--to what the Universe itself--does. Simultaneously, the rain takes on the everydayness, the localness, the ephemerality of the solitary fisherman (and how crucial his solitariness is). All is dwindlingly flowing to some nearly-reached, final zero, the temperature and light of day, the atmosphere's moisture, the ageing fisherman . . .

One needs to be in the proper mood to feel all this--and feel it all nearly at once.

Here's another specimen from the book, this one by Issa, one of the Big Three of Japanese haiku with Buson and Basho:

Actually, it was this haiku that defeated my nullity toward the previous haiku. It was on the page facing that poem, and I decided it was a better poem, so typed it here before commenting on the Buson poem. Surely, I thought, its complex of pathos and tender humor would be enough to redeem the haiku volume. Apparently, it got me thinking about ongoingnesses, which opened me to the significance of the Buson poem, which I now rate more highly than this nonetheless fine piece.

In paraphrase of Poe, I believe that all first-rate poems are essentially haiku, or arrangements of haiku.