esejieng

Usually we understand haiku to be a “new light,” a second seeing into the ordinary things of the world. This “gift of freedom” in exploring the present moment is what Japanese poet Santoka intends when he says, “both things that should exist, and things that cannot help but exist, are contained in things that do exist.” When we love something or become aware of it in a special way, we create a mental space for it, a subjective reality which can be expressed only through art.

Santoka’s unhappiness with life is one of the things we know best about him. On more than one occasion he attempted to escape it through suicide, and his practice of drunkenness was his daily routine in confronting it. However, he also used the “way of haiku” to find things of value in life, in an attempt to break his large unhappiness into small pieces of happiness. He focused his life on those things directly in front of him in trying to find the treasures hidden in the present moment:

I walk and cuckoo I hurry and cuckoo (2)

Unlike Kobayashi Issa, Santoka excluded “things that cannot help but exist” from his poetry but dared to comment on the grayer aspects of Japanese social life:

Legs and arms left in China you are back to Japan (3)

In this poem about wounded Japanese soldiers, Santoka, a known leftist, openly criticizes the Japanese militarist police in China. It is possible that he believed nothing could be done to improve his personal and familial life, but it is evident that he believed that positive changes in society were attainable. Underpinning this belief in his ability to alter realities is a faith in the magical power of poetry. Issa created poems out of personal and family reality in trying to re-establish his family life. This is quite the opposite in the example of the ex-samurai Matsuo Basho, who identified strongly with matters of national and state power, and who tried through many of his poems to construct the reality of his public voice and role.

That's our Rose –
A lot she cares, how she looks,
How she goes!

Issa (4)

summer grass -
all that remains of
warrior's dreams

Bashô (5)

The subjective nature of reality becomes visible in a superb way in this contemporary haiku by Jim Kacian:

the river
the river makes
of the moon (6)

The realities of the river, moon and human are here neatly intertwined. I think Kacian was perhaps kayaking as he experienced this poem and, being immersed in the reality of water, expanded his human reality to include the moon. During a visit to my poetic homeland of Japan, an event caused me to enlarge my own rather banal reality as a smoker in a similar fashion to volcanic dimensions:

breathing smoking Mount Aso (7)

My identification with the “reality of volcano” was so real and strong that it created for me serious doubts in my decision to quit smoking: I liked much being volcano, as it is so close to my nature. I became angry with people who were concerned for my sake because they, in my opinion, didn't understand the poetic nature of my smoking.

Santoka's assertion that “haiku can express anything but the past” is also related to his belief in the magical powers of haiku to expand and alter reality--since it is logical that history cannot be changed. An opposing point of view may be found in the poems of Hoshinaga Fumio. In many of his poems Hoshinaga calls upon the distant history of his people to inform the present, utilizing a technique he calls “Kotodama Shinko”-- the magical power of language. The following poem comes from his collection Kumaso-Ha (Kuma Tribe):

from the spine of Kyushu
holding the mercurial alchemy
of arrowpoints (8)

I don’t know how many Serbian poets have created alchemic poems about Kosovo, or Bulgarian poets about Macedonia, but Hoshinaga makes tribal-national historic frustration the central reality of his poetry as he tries to revive the historic role of the Kuma tribe in its native Kyushu. This tribe in the Middle Ages was overrun and assimilated by the Yamato tribe, the later founders of the nation of Japan. The alchemy of arrowpoints turns into an alchemy of poetry—a power the poet commands.

Poets attempt to enlarge and change not only the realities of present times but also those of the past--anything upon which they wish to exert influence--which is the archaic, religious and eternal function of poetry. But what of future reality? Do haiku poets dare to try exerting their poetic influence on the future? Consider this haiku by Richard Gilbert, an American poet living in Kumamoto, Japan:

three oceans
exported into orbit
in a small cocoon (9)

Gilbert published this poem on the last page of his book Poems of Consciousness, in which he undertakes a pioneering approach to the postmodern understanding of haiku. Perhaps the point is that the last page of this book is the beginning of the future of haiku. But Gilbert is also concerned with the future of the planet. His haiku offers a poetic solution for the future in the manner of his beloved science-fiction.

This haiku by Ban'ya Natsuishi deals with future in both a personal and a general way:

From the future
a wind arrives
that blows the waterfall apart (10)

This poem supplies the name to Natsuishi’s important and famous collection A Future Waterfall. The future is posited as an established “space,” placed perhaps somewhere in our own unknown mind. In this poem the poet comes from this space, along with the wind, and reports what will happen. The backstory of the poem concerns Natsuishi’s cataract--an eye ailment, a kind of misting over of the iris, which troubled the poet for many years--which also incorporates the usual meaning of “waterfall” as well. By extraordinary poetic power the poet was able not only to transform his personal worries into the poem but also to give birth to his poetic platform for the future. In this way he not only explores the inner reality of the future but also creates a new abstract content for haiku. The wind arrives to blow away his cataract, meaning also a symbolic human blindness – which is the function of poetry.

Another example of creating new, subjective worlds is the following poem by Tohta Kaneko, the most prominent leader of the Gendai (Contemporary) Haiku Movement in Japan:

A lake in my heart
on its banks prowls the shadow
of a tiger all black (11)

The backstory of the poem lies in the past, perhaps in the jungles removed from Japan where many Japanese solders were sent in fight during WWII. This poem is in fact a kind of “inner landscape,” examples of which we find in abstract painting but also in the classical music of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy or Mahler, or in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, Juan Jiménez and many other explorers of unknown mind.

One more example from my own haiku:

Do I speak a language
of dry fields or evergreen forests
or perhaps of coral reefs? (12)

This poem’s backstory is unclear to me since it came to me suddenly. I suppose it has to do with my complex, long troubled experience with the Balkans' political reality. Using the keyword “language” as a portal, I create an abstract world of nature for the mystical reintegration of my alienated personality.

In my “flying fish” poem at the beginning of this article I wished to stress the suddenness with which we might alter worlds through writing poetry. Because a flying fish is able to fly for only a very brief time. But even so brief an opportunity to penetrate into the unknown world is a gift of freedom--the most valued gift we have in writing haiku, commented upon by Bashô and many others.

The nature of poetry is to expand the reality of human existence and to establish magical influence over it. For both the exploration of simple reality or the complex unknown and unconscious, the nature of the poetic process is identical. This process is essential to the expansion of content in haiku, in the 21st century. It is in the creation of this inner space, where second sight will be valued, will be loved, that will keep haiku significant.

Footnotes:

(1) Anakiev, Dimitar: published in Haiku Reality, June 2008.

(2) Santoka: Grass and Tree Cairn, tr. Hiroaki Sato, Red Moon Press, 2002.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Issa, Kobayashi: The Autumn Wind, tr. Lewis Mackenzie, Kodansha Int.,1984.

(5) (trans. Richard Gilbert, personal communication, April 19, 2008).

(6) Kacian, Jim: Presents of Mind, Katsura Press, 1996.

(7) Anakiev, Dimitar: published in Haiku Reality, June 2008.

(8) Hoshinaga, Fumio: "Shiranui" sequence, tr. Gilbert & Ito, unpublished.

(9) Gilbert, Richard: Poems of Consciousness, Red Moon Press, 2008.

(10) Natsuishi, Ban’ya: A Future Waterfall, first edition, Red Moon Press, 1999.

(11) Ibid.

(12) Anakiev, Dimitar, unpublished.