Ripples from a Splash by Chen-ou Liu

Ripples from a Splash: A Collection of Haiku Essays with Award-Winning Haiku by Chen-ou Liu

A Room of My Own Press 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

A Room of My Own Press 74 Perfitt Crescent Ajax, ON L1Z 1J3, Canada E-mail: maple0801@gmail.com ISBN: 978-0-9868947-0-1 Printed in Canada

To my parents, 劉興 and 薛富美, who have spent their lives giving me the opportunity to study and pursue my life goals. And to Mary Macdonell and my wife, Hing-fan, who have offered their unflagging support of my writing since the day I started writing in English.

Contents Preface: My Writing Journey in a World of One Color ………………..7 Section One: Personal Critical Essays 1 Three Readings of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Haiku” …………………...21 2 Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: …………………………………27 A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective 3 The Breach of Meaning?: .………………………………………….39 Roland Barthes’s View of Haiku 4 The Ripples from a Splash: .………………………………………..51 A Generic Analysis of Basho’s Frog Haiku 5 Waking from Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream .………………………..59 -- Plagiarism or Honkadori 6 Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: ……………...74 Basho’s Transformation of Haikai Prose 7 Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: ……………..91 Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival Section Two: Featured Haiku 1 Award-Winning Haiku ………………………………………….109 2 Editor’s Choice Haiku …………………...….…………………..115 3 An Evaluation and Introspective Look at the Haiku of Chen-ou Liu by Robert D. Wilson ……………………………………………123

Acknowledgements

As a struggling poet as well as an essayist who writes in a language he adopted at the age of 43, I wish to express my sincere appreciation of the help and support I have received during the various stages of writing and publishing my essays and haiku. In the first place, I must give special mention to Aurora Antonovic, Mark Brooks, Robert Wilson, and Saša Važić for their editorial help. I also owe deep gratitude to my friends and fellow poets, Florence Jung, Peggy Willis Lyles, Brian Zimmer, Stacey Dye, Kay Tracy, Nia Sunset, James Dickinson, Susan Constable, Julie Cain, and Jo McInerney, Bill Kennedy, and Gabi Greve for their continued support of my writing and for helping me to grow in writing haiku. And I would also like to thank my family. Without them, there would be neither me nor this book.

Preface: My Writing Journey in a World of One Color

My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems. -- Ishikawa Takuboku Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live, something dangerous, something honest. -- Dionne Brand blizzardâ&#x20AC;Ś reciting Basho in a world of one color 1 -- Chen-ou Liu

I was born in 1963 in Taipei, Taiwan, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from National Chiao Tung University. The first time I came to North America I was driven by social norms and parental expectations. In 1988, after finishing a two-year compulsory military service, I followed in the footsteps of the Taiwanese elite by going to the USA to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science. I dreamed of 7

getting a teaching job there after graduation. During my first two years in the USA, I began to envision a different kind of life, that of a film/literary critic, a life that I would enjoy and not just be obliged to live. After getting my masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree, I quit the Ph.D. program and went back to Taiwan in 1991. I found a teaching job in a college and, relatively speaking, had enough time and money to develop my own life interests, such as film theory, literature, philosophy, sociology, and writing. In 1992, I married my wife, Hing-fan. Later I found two part-time jobs related to reading and writing about literature and film: hosting a radio book review program and writing review essays or opinion pieces for magazines. After years of endeavor, my radio program had won the national â&#x20AC;&#x153;Best Book Review Programâ&#x20AC;? twice. In the 1990s, one of the most tumultuous and ideologically charged eras in Taiwanese history, everything was easily reduced to support for or opposition against Taiwan Independence. Through reading and living in an identity-seeking society at the time, my worldview was influenced by European existentialism, postcolonial literature, and Taiwan native soil literature, a literary movement that arose in opposition to both mainlandcentered governmental geopolitics and the West-oriented modernist movement. I constantly asked myself the following questions: in what contexts were my identities situated? What kind of life would I like to live fully? These questions prompted me to think seriously about how to pursue my self-chosen field of study, the newly-emerging discipline of cultural studies. No universities in Taiwan offered such inter/multi-disciplinary programs; even in North America, there were only a few. And I thought it would take more than ten years to get a Ph.D. degree because of the change 8

in my field of study. Meanwhile, Hing-fan’s profession, social work, was not fully developed in Taiwan. In 1998, she went to the University of Toronto to pursue a master’s degree. Shortly after graduation, due to her good performance during work placement, she found a job at a mainstream social service agency. At that time, both of us thought immigration was the best possible way to fulfill our life goals. Therefore, we decided that I would stay in Taiwan to earn money for our living expenses while she applied for permanent residency in Canada. Driven by a personal vision of life that I would live and die for, I came to North America for the second time in the summer of 2002, and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto, where I continue to struggle with a life in transition and translation. I still vividly remember the day I left for Canada. My parents were virtually silent. My older brother and his wife told me to take good care of myself, and my nephew kept begging me to buy toys for him. I waved goodbye to them as I walked toward the Airport Departure Entrance. My parents didn’t wave back. I thought that they must have been too heartbroken, because all of my decisions went against their expectations, which were mainly shaped by the socio-cultural norms of the society in which we lived. First of all, I didn’t obtain my Ph. D. degree. One of the main explanations that I gave to my parents at the time was that I didn’t want to financially burden them and let them pay all of the expenses I needed to finish my studies.

Secondly, Hing-fan and I decided that we would not have children because we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t foresee that we would be able to provide a stable family life for children if both of us pursued our life goals. Thirdly, while I stayed in Taiwan and saved money for my future studies, I had great difficulty explaining to my family why I wanted to make a drastic change in my field of study. My parents always tried to dissuade me by saying that I was no longer young, and that I had an important responsibility to take care of my family. Finally, in 2000, due to the unstable socio-political-economic situation in Taiwan, the housing market was in decline. In 2002, when I sold my house, I only got half of what I had paid for it. This money was supposed to be used for our future expenses in Canada. My parents wanted me to give up my immigration plan, but I rejected their suggestion. When they did not wave goodbye to me at the airport, it hurt me deeply, but I fully understood how much I had disappointed them in the first place. after arriving in Canada, I was frustrated by my learning experience in terms of the depth and scope of classroom discussions as well as stressed by the financial burden. So, I quit my studies and wrote essays in my adopted language, English. After two years of striving, I published three essays in Cultural Studies Monthly 2, but got little attention from the scholars in the related fields. Furthermore, I was frustrated by my inability to master English quickly, and also struggled with my newly-racialized identities. My pent-up emotions began spilling over onto pieces of scrap paper in the form of free verse, later of tanka and haiku. The more I wrote, the more I thought about becoming a poet. In order to practice English writing, at first, I participated in a bilingual poetry forum, whose participants and target readers were mainly 10

the Chinese writing community living abroad. Months later, I joined English poetry forums to hone my poetic skills, and also spent more time reading poetry. One of my favorite poets was Canadian poet Dionne Brand. Her poetry spoke from the perspective of an outsider -- the narrator who, because of race, gender, sexual preference and ethnic background, found herself at odds with the surrounding society, a type of poetry with which I could fully identify. More importantly, her view on poetry -- “Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live, something dangerous, something honest” 3 -- gave me an existentially contextualized compass. Since my arrival in Canada, I’ve been constantly stuck in the middle of finding the exact words to convey my feelings. Even in the best case scenarios, in the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent, or vice versa, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech were lost. As Chinese-American writer Ha Jin emphasized in an interview with Dave Weich, “[dealing] with the question of language is at the core of the immigrant experience: how to learn the language -- or give up learning the language! -- but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency.” 4 In one of my prose poems, “Why believe you can write verse in English?,” I described this constant struggle with my faltering confidence in writing: To write verse in English is not like growing ideograms inside your heart, reaping the sentences matured by the 11

muse of desire, taking your clothes off with words, and exposing yourself in the rhythm of the stanzas so that you can hold your passport and cross the borders of linguistic solitudes, emigrating from the ideographic to the alphabetic. English still remains an unmastered means of deciphering the musings of your heart and mind, and it is constantly intruded upon and twisted by inflections from the old language. Often, you are not able to connect emotions to words, to feel the weight of their syllables. Without emotional vocabulary, everything becomes elusion, confusion, and the fear of things you needn’t be afraid of. Ha Jin also stressed in the interview, “your life is always affected by the insufficiency” 5 of language, an inability to capture the interplay between thought and expression of emotions. To write in English requires a different way of thinking, and it focuses more on the expressivity and innovation of words and phrases. During the course of my adjustment to English writing, I have slowly begun to squeeze the Chinese literary mentality out of my mind. As Ha Jin emphasized in his interview, “it was like having a blood transfusion, like you are changing your blood.” 6 Up to now, I’ve been going through a blood transfusion for almost five years. English writing, for me, has been and still is a wrenching process of heart and mind. I used to be a columnist who wrote mainly from the

analytical side of my mind, but I was now the quintessential struggling poet writing from his agitated heart. After almost a year of striving to write so-called free verse poetry without much success, I came across a book of tanka poetry, Sad Toy, written by Ishikawa Takuboku and translated by Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda. In the introduction, Takuboku emphasized that My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems. And I had absolutely nothing except that mind… I want to say this: a very complicated process was needed to turn actual feelings into poetry… Poetry must not be what is usually called poetry. It must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man’s emotional life. Accordingly, it must be fragmentary; it must not have organization… Each second is one which never comes back in our life. I hold it dear. I don’t want to let it pass without doing anything for it. To express that moment, tanka, which is short and takes not much time to compose, is most convenient… 7 The emotional power, socio-political sensibilities and colloquial language of Takuboku’s tanka, a kind of poetry in the moment and for the moment, appealed to me, and I came to view tanka as a poetic diary that recorded the changes in the emotional life of the poet. I went on to read Carl Sesar’s Takuboku: Poems to Eat, and got a deeper understanding of Takuboku’s conception of a new kind of poetry, “poems to eat:” 13

The name means poems made with both feet upon the ground. It means poems written without putting any distance from actual life. They are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal. To define poetry in this way may be to pull it down from its established position, but to me it means to make poetry, which has added nothing or detracted nothing from actual life, into something which cannot be dispensed with. 8 In some aspects, Takuboku’s view on poetry is similar to that of Dionne Brand: “Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live… something honest.” 9 Since encountering Takuboku’s poetry, I started writing tanka as a diary and kept on reading books of or on tanka. Through the practice of composing tanka and its related genres, I felt the urge to enrich my writing experience, and thus decided to expand my limited understanding of another Japanese short verse form, haiku, and to try my hand at it.

Haruo Shirane’s book, Traces of Dreams: Landscape,

Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, helped me look beyond the haiku moment and debunk some of modern haiku myths. With the aid of a newly-acquired poet friend, Brian Zimmer, I was exposed to the Japanese gendai haiku, monostiches, and one-line haiku, all of which have enriched and deepened my writing experience. After two years of exploration into these Japanese short verse forms, I had more than 700 poems published or forthcoming in various journals of tanka and haiku, and won 12 awards, including Grand Prix in the 2010 14

Klostar Ivanic Haiku Contest in English, 特選 (Prize Winner) in the 12th Haiku International Association Haiku Contest, Second Place in the 2011 North Carolina Poetry Society Lyman Haiku Award, and Tanka Third Place in the 2009 San Francisco International Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay Competition. In November, 2009, I was invited by Ms. Aurora Antonovic, Editor in Chief of Magnapoets, to write a closing article for the January 2010 issue. I wrote my first personal critical essay

on haiku composition and aesthetics,

especially on different readings of the first published “hokku” (ancient name for haiku) in English, “In a Station of the Metro,” written by Ezra Pound. This essay was well received among haiku poets. In March, 2010, my essay and haiku drew the attention of Mark Brooks. After an exchange of emails, he invited me to write a review column for his online haiku journal, Haijinx. Since then, my essays on haiku aesthetics in general, and on the relationships between Japanese haiku and Chinese classics in particular, have got close attention from haiku poets and editors. Within one and a half years, I’ve written seven personal critical essays for various haiku journals, print and online, including Magnapoets, Haijinx, Simply Haiku, and Haiku Reality. Academically speaking, these essays show nothing new or innovative, mainly revealing my intense interest in reading and doing research, and demonstrating my capabilities to explore all of the related issues in a historico-culturally contextualized way. But, what is most important is that my study of haiku aesthetics has helped to hone my craft, of which my award-wining poems are the fruits. I hope that the publication of my collection of essays and haiku will contribute to broadening the crosscultural literary horizon of the English-speaking haiku community. It’s my

expression of gratitude for being accepted as a haiku poet who writes in notso-perfect English. Finally, I would like to conclude my preface with the following poem that describes the first stage of my writing journey in a world of one color. Confessions of a Struggling Writer: A Zuihitsu 11 drunk on moonlight from Taipei I stand alone under the Ajax sky. My heart is depressed, my poetry schizophrenic, but nonetheless, my hand is normal, and I am a writer. a Taipei key opens the door of Ajax twilight I pursue my poem throughout the night put it down on paper Writing haiku: two lines sound perfect, yet I struggle to write a third to perfect my poem. my anguish crumbled into a ball 16

I continue to write as the wastebasket waits for one more throw Sunlight drifts through the window and settles again on the worn cover of my Chinese-English dictionary. My heart is a lonely hunter seeking the place where the odor of words is strongest. Writing poetry is an endless and always defeated effort to kill my shadow. I am fortyâ&#x20AC;Śsomething in the attic waiting alone four years gone by and yet no chapbooks My lifeâ&#x20AC;Ś a void. I hit my head with books by other poets. Being a writer means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with the voices whispering, we all know youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a failed writer. Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence.

(Part of the text published in Simply Haiku, Summer 2010, Vol.8. No. 1)

Notes

1 “[A] world of one color” alludes to the following haiku by Matsuo Basho. Winter solitude-in a world of one color the sound of wind. translated by Robert Hass My “blizzard haiku” was written in response to Basho’s and dedicated to him. 2 These three essays are “Disrupting Imperial Linear Time: Virginia Woolf’s Temporal Perception in ‘To the Lighthouse’”, “On Gibsonian Cyberspace in ‘Neuromancer’”, and “Cops: Packing and Policing the Real”, published in Cultural Studies Monthly. 3 Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections on Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming and Politics, Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994, pp. 195-6. 4 Dave Weich, "Ha Jin Lets It Go," Author Interviews, Powells.com, accessed at http://www.powells.com/authors/jin.html 5 Ibid.

6 Ibid. 7 Ishikawa Takuboku, Sad Toys, trans., Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda, West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1977, p. 31. 8 Ishikawa Takuboku, Romaji diary; and, Sad toys, trans., Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda, Rutland, Vt. : C.E. Tuttle Co., 1985, p. 44. 9 See Brand, p. 1995-6. 10 A "personal critical essay" is an essay that reflects the analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of a literary work by a reader. For further information, see â&#x20AC;&#x153;Writing the Personal Critical Essay,â&#x20AC;? accessed at http://bit.ly/heQnFg 11 The original version of "Confessions of a Struggling Writer: A Zuihitsu" was published in the July/August 2010 issue of Sketchbook. Zuihitsu is a classical Japanese poetic form derived from the Chinese literary tradition that employed random thoughts, diary entries, reminiscence, and poetry. The first book of zuihitsu in English is The Narrow Road to the Interior written by a Japanese-American poet, Kimiko Hahn who received the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Section One: Personal Critical Essays

Don't follow in the footsteps of the old masters. Seek what they sought. -- Matsuo Basho

Three Readings of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Haiku”

Throughout the history of English poetry, there seldom is a poem like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (hereafter referred to as “metro poem”) that has been endlessly researched by scholars, literary critics, and poets alike. 1 Most of his readers are familiar with at least two versions of his metro poem: the original version published in the April 1913 issue of Poetry as follows: The apparition Petals

of these face

in the crowd:

on a wet, black bough.

and one of the revised versions published in his 1916 book entitled Lustra as follows: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Everyone may have his/her own reading of this ever-famous poem from different perspectives. But due to the limited space of this chapter and for readers who are interested in the Asian poetic traditions, I will discuss 21

two major popular readings – the haikuesque and ideogrammatic ones -- in the following sections. In his most widely-read book, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, William Higginson rightly emphasizes that Ezra Pound’s metro poem is the “first published hokku in English”

and “very

important to its author‘s development.” 3 In his essay on “Vorticism” in the September 1914 issue of The Fortnightly Review, Pound “explicitly credits the technique of the Japanese hokku in helping him work out the solution to a ‘metro emotion:’” 4 The Japanese have evolved the… form of the hokku… I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokkulike sentence: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. Higginson first points out that the main effect of the change between the 1913 version and 1914 one is “to smooth the rhythm, making the poem less choppy,” 5 and then he focuses the discussion on the most recognizable version by haiku readers, the one that was published in his book, Lustra, as follows:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. From the perspective of a haiku poet, Higginson singles out the most important change Pound made: that is the one from the colon at the end of the first line to a semicolon. In his view, a colon tells the reader that the statement made in the first line introduces the statement made in the second, making one a metaphor for the other. Conversely, a semicolon shows that two statements are independent of each other, though maybe related, and that both images -- “faces” and “petals” -- portrayed in the poem are real and stand out against its own background. 6 As Higginson stresses, “by revising the poem Pound turned an otherwise sentimental metaphor into a genuine haiku… This is a haiku that Shiki would have been proud to write.” 7 However, Higginson’s reading of the metro poem is chiefly through the haiku lens. He doesn’t consider the contexts of Pound’s struggle with a new kind of poetry, not just with one poem, but of the growing impacts of the Chinese language in general, and Chinese poetry in particular, upon his view of writing poetry. Outside the haiku community, the metro poem is viewed as a haiku-like, yet new kind of poem: the most influential imagist poem based on his ideogrammatic poetics. In the introduction of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Volume D), it firmly states: "Pound first campaigned for 'imagistic,' his name for a new kind of poetry. Rather than describing something -- an object or situation -- and then generalizing about it, imagist poets attempted to present the object directly, avoiding the ornate diction and complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry." Following Ernest Fenollosa's view of the Chinese written language as a medium for poetry, Pound bases his ideogrammic poetics on the false assumptions that Chinese characters are essentially ideographic and non23

phonetic in nature, and that the sense of individual characters is visually generated by the juxtaposition of their graphic components.

The famous

example used by his mentor, Fenollosa, is the following:

人見馬 --> MAN SEES HORSE “First, stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space; a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third, stands the horse on his four legs ... Legs belong to all three characters; they are all alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.”

Fenollosa claims, and Pound

echoes him, that the Chinese ideogram presents a necessary relationship between its components: “eye on legs” can only mean “see,” because in “this process of compounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them.” 10 The 1913 original printing of the poem, which is ignored by Higginson, Pound emphasizes the intervals that punctuate the poem, each semantic unit of words functioning as a discrete character, three characters to each line. His “ideogrammic juxtaposition” of images is relatively simple and straightforward. Through the metaphoric suggestion of the catalyzing word “apparition,” Pound combines the mundane image of "faces in the crowd," with an image possessing visual beauty and the rich culturalaesthetical connotations of countless poems about spring. There is a quick transition from the factual statement of the first line to the vivid metaphor of the second one. As Carol Percy emphasizes, “what Pound wants is to bring out ‘some fundamental relation between things’: the two lines are 24

juxtaposed, and this should enable one to read them in much the same way that he believed a Chinese person would read ‘eye on legs’ as ‘see.’” 11 For anyone who is interested in understanding the writing process of an innovative poet, no matter which reading of Pound's metro poem one would adopt, the heart of the poem lies in relations. In his view, “relations are more real and more important than the things related,” on which Pound adds a footnote: “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics: Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius."

As one who is an English learner as well as a

struggling “poet”, I can identify with Pound’s six-year epic struggle with one poem, which embodies his audacious proclamation of “Make it new!” Every time I confront the following impasse: Respect English is whispered into my left ear Make it new into my right -the page remains blank I always think of Ezra Pound: an American unties tangled threads innocent of Chinese ideograms and weaves them anew

(First published in Magnapoets, #5, January 2010)

Notes

1 For anyone who is interested in getting a glimpse into the different readings of Pound’s metro poem, MAPS offers a helpful webpage entitled “On In a Station of the Metro," which can be accessed at http://bit.ly/glnMrv 2 William J. Higginson (with Penny Harter), The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1989, p. 51. 3 Ibid, p. 134. 4 Ibid, p. 135. 5 Ibid, p. 135. 6 Ibid, pp. 135-6. 7 Ibid, p.136. 8 Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, New York: New Directions, 2003, pp. xviii-xxiii. 9 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound, San Francisco: City Lights. 1936, pp. 8-9. 10 Ibid. 11 Carol Percy, “Ezra Pound and the Chinese Written Language, “ accessed at http://bit.ly/hfp6Ya 12 See Fenollosa, p. 22.

2 Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective

The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyph…From our point of view, [haiku] are montage phrases. Shot lists. -- Sergei Eisenstein [What] fascinates Eisenstein about this form of ‘ideographic’ representation is the way in which both haiku and Chinese characters act simultaneously as linguistic signifiers and denotative images of “natural” things. -- Ron S. Judy

In chapter one, I stress that Pound “explicitly credits the technique of the Japanese hokku in helping him work out the solution to [his] ‘metro emotion'.” 1 I also emphasize that Pound must be read in the contexts of his struggle with a new kind of poetry, not just with one poem, and of the growing impacts of the Chinese language in general, and Chinese poetry in particular, upon his view of writing poetry His metro poem is viewed, from outside the haiku community, as a haiku-like, yet new kind of poem: the most influential imagist poem based on his ideogrammatic poetics, one that develops from Ernest Fenollosa's perception of

the Chinese written

language as a medium for poetry. Pound holds onto the flawed assumptions that Chinese characters are essentially ideographic and non-phonetic in nature, and that the sense of individual characters is visually generated by the juxtaposition of their graphic components. 2 Like Pound who was enamored with the poetic aesthetics of China and Japan, Sergei Eisenstein, often hailed as the foremost film theory and director in the history of cinema,

had tried to develop his own brand of

montage as an organic tool to design a new film language whose cinematographic principle operates according to those similar to Poundian ideogrammatic method. More importantly, in order to counter the conception of montage as a means of linkage and transition, one that is advocated by the “old, old school of film-making,”

he appropriated and later expanded the

notion of literary montage that he found in Japanese haiku as his theoretical foundation for montage as collision and progression (or progression through collision). In the following passages, I will explore Eisenstein’s view of haiku as ideogrammatic montage from a linguistic-cinematic perspective. Read in the socio-historic-cultural contexts of his days, Eisenstein’s montage theory is an exemplary product of one’s striving for newness and 28

engaging with other people’s ideas and cultural legacies from other parts of the world. During the tumultuous period from 1910s to 1930s, often viewed as the era of the Russian avant-garde, 5 he constantly absorbed new ideas and engaged in heated debates on the nature of film art with his colleagues and friends. These lively discussions were often about the concept of the filmic shot and its relation with montage, which basically mean how shots communicate with one another in time. According to Eisenstein, his opponents, such as Kuleshov and Pudovkin, insist that a shot is “a single piece of celluloid... in which there is, organized in some way, a piece of an event,” together, these shots form montage.”

and that when “[cemented]

That is to say that “[the] shot is an

element of montage, and [montage] is an assembly of these shots.” 8 For his opponents what counts most in film-making is that a succession of shots situates the viewer definitely in relation to the narrative content of the film. Therefore, the meaning of a film is created through the linkage of shots. This conception has since dominated the minds of most film makers. Eisenstein criticizes this flawed understanding of the filmic process as a whole, one that “derives only from the external indications of its flow (a piece cemented to another piece).”

In his view, the approach of this kind

overrules dialectical development of events and dooms one to mere evolutionary ‘perfecting’”

and in the long run “such evolutionizing leads

either through refinement to decadence, or, on the other hand, to a simple withering away due to stagnation of the blood.”

Today we can see his

prophetic warnings are fulfilled in the both popular and professional perception of montage that is all about cutting and a quick succession of shots as exemplified in commercial advertisements, MTV, and most of the Hollywood-influenced movies. 29

For Eisenstein a film is not only for the viewer to watch, but also food for thought. He envisions a new kind of cinema that can draw the viewer into an ongoing intellectual and psychological experience. Due to his intense study of the Japanese written language during 1920

and his long-

time interest in Japanese culture and literature, he develops a different understanding of the shot and its relation to montage. In his one of most famous film essays, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein stresses that the Japanese written language is representational and made up of various hieroglyphs, and he states that the hieroglyph is “the naturalistic image of an object as portrayed by the skilful hand of Ts’ang Chieh 2650 years before our era.”

importantly, for him the “copulation (perhaps we had better to say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs… is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused – the ideogram,” 14 the picture of a concept. For example, the picture of a bird and a mouth signifies “to sing,” while the picture of a child and a mouth means “to scream.” A change in one object, from bird to child, creates not a slightly variant of the same concept, but a totally new one. 15 Eisenstein’s understanding of the signifying function of ideogram is similar to that of Fenollosa and Pound, yet placing an emphasis on the consequence or product of the combination of two separate hieroglyphs. In this linguistic characteristic of the Japanese written language, he sees the basis for cinema dynamics: that is the principle behind the process of combining hieroglyphs into ideograms is applicable to the cinematographic method of montage he envisions -- “combining shots that are depictive, 30

single in meaning, neural in content into intellectual contexts and series.”

He regards film as “a kind of language and, in particular, as a kind of Imagistic picture writing composed of hieroglyphs,” 17 and he goes further in claiming that “the film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning ideogram. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning -- an indicator for the exact reading -- placed alongside the basic hieroglyph.” 18 Equipped with his inspired learning of the ideogrammatic nature of Chinese and Japanese written languages, Eisenstein adopts an organic view of the shot as a montage cell.

“Just as cells in their division form a

phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage.”

For him, the

individual ‘cells’ become a living cinematic whole through montage, the life principle giving meaning to raw shots.

Confronting Pudovkin’s view of

montage as a linkage of shots, Eisenstein emphasizes that montage should be viewed as a collision of shots, a view “that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept,”

and that among all of these collisions, the

weakest one, in terms of impact, is “degraded to an even movement of both [shots] in the same direction… which would correspond with Pudovkin’s view.” case.”

According to Eisenstein, “linkage is merely a possible special

Utilizing the fact that the human mind is highly capable of associating ideas or images in a way that the “senses overlap, subconsciously associating one with another to produce a unified effect,”

Eisenstein

argues that film can communicate by a series of juxtaposed images that do 31

not need a linear, narrative or consequential relationship between them.

the mind of the viewer, shot A followed by shot B will create a new meaning C, one that is greater than the sum of its component parts, A and B.

For a

cinema “seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts,” 28 the employment of montage as a collision of shots is a “means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition…the starting point for ‘intellectual cinema.’” 29 Furthermore, Eisenstein likens montage to haiku, “the most laconic form of poetry.” sketch,”

He describes haiku as the “concentrated impressionist

in which minute details are highlighted by using minimal

language. In the following haiku written by Japanese haiku masters: A lonely crow On leafless bough, One autumn eve. -- Basho What a resplendent moon! It casts the shadow of pine boughs Upon the mats. -- Kikaku An evening breeze blows. The water ripples Against the blue heron’s legs. -- Buson

It is early dawn. The castle is surrounded By the cries of wild ducks -- Kyoroku 32 Eisenstein thinks that haiku is “little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases,”

and that each of these haiku is made up of montage phrases

or shot lists. 34 The “simple combination of two or three details of a material kind yields a perfectly finished representation of another kind – [the] psychological.”

For him, “haiku… act simultaneously as linguistic

signifiers and denotative images of ‘natural’ things.”

Structurally and

consequentially speaking, he considers haiku as an extension of the ideogrammatic structure characterizing the Chinese and Japanese writing systems. He believes that a Japanese haiku master’s juxtaposing two or three separate images to create a new meaning parallels his crashing two or three conflicting shots with each other to produce a new filmic essence. The juxtaposition of contrasting images in haiku (or the collision of conflicting shots in cinema) may single out, highlight, and purify a particular quality. Take Basho’s ever-famous frog haiku for example: an old pond... a frog leaps in, the sound of water His juxtaposition of two contrasting images of "an old pond" and " a frog leaping into the pond" makes a larger meditative, lonely silence “heard” through the opposition of the water sound.

More importantly, juxtaposed 33

images of some haiku engage the reader in more than one sense, as can be seen in the following ones by Basho: Their fragrance Is whiter than peach blossoms The daffodils Over the even sea The wild ducks' cry Is faintly white It is whiter Than the rocks of Ishiyama The autumn wind Onions lie Washed in white How chilly it is 38 A color is employed to suggest the quality of scent, a crying sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature.

As in the case of the Kabuki theatre,

Eisenstein argues that the montage effect of haiku results in the experience of synaesthesia or multisensory experience.

This characteristic helps him

to develop the key principles of audiovisual montage and color-sound montage. 41 It is through his intensive study of Japanese culture in general, and haiku along with Kabuki theatre in particular, and his engaging discussions 34

with his contemporaries that Eisenstein develops a different conception of montage. It is one that is highly influenced by his fascination with the ideogrammatic structure embedded in haiku and Chinese and Japanese writing systems. What he finds so intriguing about haiku is “how it manages to present a conceptual image, or mise-en-scene effect without resorting to any direct copulative ‘is’ or word to link the series of disjunctive images.”

As Steve Odin emphasizes in his essay regarding the Influence of traditional Japanese aesthetics on Eisenstein’s film theory, “Eisenstein's incorporation of basic principles from traditional Japanese aesthetics into his universally acclaimed montage theory of film, together with his practical application of this theory as a film director in the making of Potemkin and other landmark motion pictures, ranks as one of the most significant twentieth-century achievements in East-West comparative aesthetics and philosophy of art.”

Moreover, many Japanese haiku poets and scholars have recently reappropriated his ideas about montage to write or interpret haiku. Among them, Yamaguchi Seishi applies the concept of “nibutsu shogeki (collision of two objects),”

borrowed from Eisenstein's notion of montage, to haiku

writing, and he believes that “haiku should focus on the interrelationship between different objects of nature, a relationship that must ‘leap beyond’ the predictable.’” 45 The famous Basho scholar, Haruo Shirane, also excels in applying the montage theory to interpret Basho’s “poetics of scent,”

claiming that “the notion of the montage can be helpful in analyzing the dynamics of linking.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenstein’s

montage theory has made and will continue to make a great contribution to reading, writing, and interpreting haiku and its related genres.

(First published in Haiku Reality, #5)

Notes

1 William J. Higginson (with Penny Harter), The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, New York: McGraw-Hill Book, 1989, p. 135. 2 Eliot Weinberger, ed., The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, New York: New Directions, 2003, pp. xviii-xxiii. 3 Ron S. Judy, “The Obtuse Ideogram: A Second Look at the Imagist ‘Third Term,’” Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, 22 (Summer 2006), p. 77. 4 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans., Jay Leyda, San Diego : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977, p. 36. 5 Steve Odin, “The Influence of Traditional Japanese Aesthetics on the Film Theory of Sergei Eisenstein,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol., 23, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), p. 69. 6 Ibid., p. 36. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 37. 11 Ibid. 12 A See Odin, p. 75.

13 Ibid., p.28. 14 Ibid., pp. 29030. 15 J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, London: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 51-2. 16 See Eisenstein, p. 30. 17 See Odin, p. 78. 18 See Eisenstein, p. 65. 19 Ibid., p. 37. 20 Ibid. 21 See Andrew, p. 52-3. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 38. 24 Ibid. 25 Constantine Santas, Responding to Film: A Text Guide for Students of Cinema Art, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 60. 26 Richard Howells, Visual Culture, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, p. 242. 27 Ibid. 28, See Eisenstein, p. 30. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 31. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 30. 34 Ibid., p. 32. 35. Ibid. 36 See Judy, p. 78.

37 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams : Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 77. 38 Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1967, pp. 162-3. 39 See Odin, p. 80 40 Ibid., p. 79. 41 Ibid., pp69-70. 42 See Judy, p. 78. 43 See Odin, p. 80. 44 See Shirane, p. 314. 45 Ibid., p. 114. 46 Haruo Shirane, “Matsuo Basho and The Poetics of Scent,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jun., 1992), pp. 77-110. For further reading, see the section titled “From Words Links to Scent Links” in Chapter 4 of his book, Traces of Dreams. 47 See Shirane, Traces of Dreams, p. 97.

3 The Breach of Meaning?: Roland Barthes’s View of Haiku

The brevity of the haiku is not formal; the haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form. The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that! -- Roland Barthes

Since his death in 1980, Roland Barthes’s reputation as an influential thinker and a great writer has continued to grow. His works on semiotics and literary theories have exerted a major impact on aspiring scholars and laymen alike. In 1970, he published a slim yet influential “travel book” on Japanese culture, Empire of Signs. 1 In it, he wrote about Japanese food, such as obento, sukiyaki, upscale tempura restaurants, and about his adventures into puzzling, centerless Tokyo with its numerous train stations and pachinko parlors. He also wrote about his fascination with flower arranging, people bowing instead of shaking hands, gift packaging, Bunraku, haiku,

calligraphy, and facial physiognomy. One of the well-explored ideas about Japanese cultural phenomena is his discussion of haiku, to which he dedicated almost one-sixth of the book (pp. 69-84). Since the publication of the book, Barthes’s view of haiku has been well received among haiku critics and poets, as well as his readers of literary theory and criticism. In his introduction to The Essential Haiku, Robert Hass writes that: They [Basho's, Buson's, and Issa's haiku] have a quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely, and because of this they seem to elude being either traditional images of nature or ideas about it. The formal reason for this mysteriousness is that they don’t usually generalize their images . . . what was left was the irreducible mysteriousness of the images themselves. The French writer Roland Barthes speaks of . . . the haiku’s “breach of meaning” and is able to make a post-modern case for them as deconstructions and subversions of cultural certainties. This case can be made, but the silence of haiku, its wordlessness, also has its roots in Buddhist culture, especially in Zen . . . Zen provided people training in how to stand aside and leave the meaning-making activity of the ego to its own devices. Not resisting it, but seeing it as another phenomenal thing . . .2 In his essay on tanka and Tawara Machi, Eiji Sekine further explores Barthes’s view on haiku and emphasizes, “[Barthes] thinks that the haiku is 40

essentially the same as Zen koan and that it exercises freedom from clinging to meaning . . . the West moistens everything with meaning.”

He also

thinks “Barthes’s understanding of haiku as snapshots of a thing as ‘event’ is important and correct.” 4 In order to extend Barthes’s line of thought in his own way, Sekine examines Basho’s frog haiku by contrasting it with Arthur Rimbaud’s and William Wordsworth’s nature poems, and he concludes that: Both Rimbaud and Wordsworth assume that the described moments are special because they reveal life’s ultimate meanings (eternity, divine intervention). In other words, nature is worthy to talk about insofar as it symbolizes something deep and metaphysical that transcends reality’s physical surface. In Basho’s poem, the described moment is not connected with life’s conclusive meaning. Instead, it stresses that something has happened at the described moment and he reconstructs

the

moment

interactions

among

articulately simplified components of the happening … The haiku thus shows appreciation for small mysteries, which one is constantly exposed to as a series of small yet inspiring incidents in everyday reality. 5 Generally speaking, both Hass and Sekine capture the key notions of Barthes’s view of haiku described in Empire of Signs: relating haiku to the Zen project of confounding the fixed categories of language, and reading it as a breach of meaning, an exemption from the Western compulsion to commentary. These notions are widespread and inscribed on the minds of 41

haiku poets and readers, but what do they really mean in the contexts of Empire of Signs, his other writings, and his view of Zen Buddhism? Furthermore, does his view of haiku help deepen our understanding of the poetics of haiku? In the following passages, I’ll try to answer these questions in this introductory chapter. First of all, Empire of Signs is generally viewed as part of Roland Barthes’s “post-structuralist” phrase in which his main concern for explaining systems of sign is overtaken by “a desire to disrupt and decenter their authority.” 6 As Rolf J. Goebel rightly points out in “Japan as Western Text,” the book’s “philosophical context is the deconstructive critique of the Western concepts of transcendental truth, determinate meaning, and epistemologically transparent language.”

One of the main notions he

employs in the book is that of the text: “freed from the origin of authorial intention, related to an infinitude of other discourses and cultural codes, the text, as a centerless network of free-floating signifiers, offers an irreducible plurality of meanings to be realized by the productive reader… to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases -- reason, science, law.”

Empire of Signs is the realization of the above-mentioned

theoretical concept, and he “transforms what the innocent tourist would call objective reality particles of Japan into a self-referential network of linguistic signification.” 9 Secondly, reading Japan as text provides Barthes “a temporary and tentative escape from Eurocentric ideology and writing practices steeped in the tradition of Western metaphysics.”

He focuses mainly on the “signs”

of Japan rather than on the “real” Japan, making this very clear from the onset that for him Japan is a “fictive nation” (p. 7), a semiotic system. Japan provides him an exercise to experience cultural differences on an abstract 42

level, one in which it is the operations of signs as much as their content that is of primary concern. For him, “the real Japan becomes a mere support for the sign, one in which ‘the inscription obliterates the wall’” (p. 108).

Japanese culture becomes “a diagram of the semiotic process, one whose heuristic value in semiotic terms is enhanced by the underlying void:” 12 …[t]he public place is a series of instantaneous events which accede to the notable in a flash so vivid, so tenuous that the sign does away with itself before any particular signified has had time to ‘take.’ One might say that an age-old technique permits the landscape or the spectacle to produce itself, to occur in a pure significance, abrupt, empty, like a fracture. Empire of signs? Yes, if it is understood that these signs are empty and that the ritual is without a god (p. 108). In Barthes’s adventures in this empire of signs, every cultural product is explored not only for the difference from its Western counterpart, but also for the way it throws light on the semantic void underlying it. The most exciting example for him is the haiku. 13 Thirdly, after contextualizing Empire of Signs in its relationship to Barthes’s other writings, we can now turn our attention to his well-received view of haiku. In the chapter entitled “The Breach of Meaning,” Barthes writes, “for [Westerners], poetry is ordinarily the signifier of the ‘diffuse,’ of the ‘ineffable,’ of the ’sensitive,’ it is the class of impressions which are unclassifiable; [Westerners] speak of ‘concentrated emotion,’ of sincere notation of a privileged moment” (p. 71). Conversely, “The haiku has this 43

rather phantasmagoric property: that [Westerners] always suppose [Westerners themselves] can write such things easily… [Westerners] tell [themselves]: what could be more accessible to spontaneous writing than this (by Buson) It is evening, in autumn, All I can think of Is my parents. The haiku wakens [the] desire” (p. 69) of being a writer inside Western readers because it frees them from the rhetorical labor of Western literature. Moreover, he emphasizes that “the West moistens everything with meaning, like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples; the objects of language (made out of speech) are obviously de jure converts: the first meaning of the system summons, metonymically, the second meaning of discourse, and this summon has the value of a universal obligation” (p. 70). Readers of the book up to this point at which this statement appears will notice that his simile is theologically motivated, “for he thinks that the Western problem of meaning is a specifically Christian inheritance, one that depends on the Christian ‘metaphysics of the person’… through Christianity, the problem of meaning, of making it and finding it, confronts Westerners as imposition… finding and making all of life meaningful is not an option; it is a duty.” 14 On the contrary, “while being quite intelligible, the haiku means nothing, … it seems open to meaning in a particularly available, serviceable way -- the way of a polite host who lets you make yourself at home with all 44

your preferences, your values, your symbols intact; the haiku’s absence… suggests subornation, a breach, in short the major covetousness, that of meaning” (pp. 69-70). For Barthes, the haiku is an arrangement of related words or signs that share little of the governing meaning construction in Western sign systems. In his view, the haiku “seems to afford in profusion, cheaply and made to order… scarcely a few words, an image, a sentiment -where [Western] literature ordinarily requires a poem, a development or (in the genres of brevity) a chiseled thought” (p. 70). And he continues to stress that reading of the haiku is invested by the Western commentators with “a symbolic charge.” If one of Japanese poets, such as Joko, writes: How many people Have crossed the Seta bridge Through the autumn rain! [The Westerner] perceives the image of fleeting time” (p. 71). Subsequently, he quotes Basho’s ever-famous frog haiku and criticizes that Western commentators only want to see in this poem “a syllogical design in three tenses (rise, suspension, conclusion)” (p. 71) and fail to see that the poem may invite readers to stop commenting. Barthes’s polemic against the Western misreading of haiku is an implicit attack on its hermeneutical tradition: “Deciphering, normalizing, or tautological, the ways of interpretation, intended in the West to pierce meaning, i.e., to get into it by breaking and entering . . . cannot help failing the haiku; for the work of reading which is attached to it is to suspend language, not to provoke it. . .” (p. 72). At the end of the chapter, he 45

compares reading haiku with working on a Zen koan, and emphasizes the difficulty and necessity of this enterprise recognized by the haiku master Basho (p.72): How admirable he is Who does not think “Life is ephemeral” When he sees a flash of lightning! Fourthly, for Barthes, haiku writing is not intended to propose messages, and any sense or meaning deduced from it comes as an accident, as a side effect, or as he puts it, is exempted.

The haiku as an exercise in

exemption from meaning is merely the “literary branch” of Zen Buddhism (p. 74). In the chapter entitled “Exemption from Meaning,” which mainly is his philosophical musings on Zen Buddhism and its relationship with language, emptiness and meaning, he stresses that Zen baffles the logical categories operative in Western thinking and recommends to avoid assertion, negation, ambiguity, and ambivalence, which have the effect of destroying the linguistic paradigm as “[Western] structural linguistics has framed it (A -- not A -- neither A nor not A [zero degree] -- A and not A [complex degree])” (p. 73). In his view, “the Buddhist way is precisely that of the obstructed meaning…all of Zen, of which the haiku is merely the literary branch, appears as an enormous praxis destined to halt language… to empty out, to stupefy, to dry up the soul’s incoercible babble; and perhaps what Zen calls satori… is no more than a panic suspension of language, the blank which erases in us the reign of the Codes, the breach of that internal recitation which constitutes our person” (pp. 74-5).

Barthes thinks that haiku “functions at least with a view to obtain a flat language, which nothing grounds on superimposed layers of meaning” (p. 74), and that Bashô’s frog haiku embodies this idea perfectly: “there is a moment when language ceases (a moment obtained by dint of many exercises), and it is this echoless breach which institutes at once the truth of Zen and the form -- brief and empty -- of the haiku” (p. 74). Because of his recognition of the emptiness of forms that is Buddhist reality, Barthes idealizes in the haiku this Buddhist notion of emptiness. When reading haiku, all that one can do with it is to scrutinize it, as recommended to the Zen apprentice who is working on a koan. He is told “not to solve it, as if it had a meaning, nor even to perceive its absurdity (which is still a meaning), but to ruminate it until ‘the tooth falls out’” (p. 74). As an alternative to Western thinking, although proposing such a radical blockage of sensemaking structures, Zen Buddhism teaches its practitioners to meditate on the sign as sign, not as meaning but as an operation just like working on a koan. For Barthes, “the brevity of the haiku is not formal; the haiku is not a rich thought reduced to a brief form, but a brief event which immediately finds its proper form” (p. 75). Unlike Western literature that transforms the impression of an event into description, “the haiku never describes; its art is counter-descriptive, to the degree that each state of thing is immediately, stubbornly, victoriously converted into a fragile essence of appearance… the haiku… corresponds to the Buddhist Mu, to the Zen satori, which is not all the illuminative descent of God, but ‘awakening to the fact,’ apprehension of the thing as event and not as substance” (p. 78). Therefore, Barthes emphasizes that “the measurement of language is what the Westerner is most unfit for…all his rhetoric obliges him to make signifier and signified disproportionate” (p. 75). The accuracy of haiku has less to do with an exact 47

description of reality, and more to do with an adequation of signifier and signified (pp. 75-6). Finally, throughout the book, Barthes successfully sustains a comparison between “Japan” and “the West,” one that opens up “the possibility of a difference… in the propriety of symbolic systems” (pp. 3-4) between these two places. In particular, he tries to demonstrate that these two systems work differently and orient themselves differently towards meaning. The different attitudes towards meaning become clear in the chapters titled “The Breach of Meaning” and “Exemption from meaning,” as I have explained in the contexts of Empire of Signs, his other writings, and his view of Zen Buddhism. In these two chapters, he proves to us that Japanese haiku, like Zen koans, does not insist on signs bearing meanings in the way that the West does. Following his line of thought, we discover that Japan is an empire of empty signs by virtue of its difference from the West, which is an empire of meaning. 16 One of the most important things about his portrayal of Japanese culture in general and of haiku in particular is not if he makes convincing arguments about haiku or if he gets Japan right. It is that from the beginning of the book he already establishes that the Japan he talks about is a Japan he constructs semiotically, a foil to draw out what lies behind the obsession with meaning in the West. In his view, unlike Western literature that “requires a poem, a development or (in the genres of brevity) a chiseled thought (p. 70), the haiku can write on any kind of incidental and insignificant subjects (“the haiku shows no partiality for the subject”) (p. 83), deliberates Western readers from the burden of meaning (especially religious) and a “long rhetorical labor” (p. 70), and uses “scarcely a few words, an image, a sentiment” (p. 70) to establish what he calls “the vision without 48

commentary” (p. 82). “This vision (the word is still too Western) is in fact entirely private; what is abolished is not meaning but any notion of finality” (p. 82). Any sense or meaning deduced from it comes as an accident or a side effect; meaning in the haiku is “only a flash, a slash of light: When the light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world, Shakespeare wrote; but the haiku’s flash illuminates, reveals nothing” (p. 83). The haiku is like the child’s designating gesture pointing at whatever it is, “merely saying: that!” (p. 83). Through his semiotic reading of Japanese culture as text, I believe that Roland Barthes offers his readers an enriched understanding of haiku aesthetics from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective.

(First published in the bi-monthly column, “Haiku, A Looking Bird, “ of Haijinx )

Notes

1 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. 2 Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, and Issa, New York: Ecco, 1994, pp. xv-xvi.

3 Eiji Sekine, “On the Tanka and Tawara Mach,” Simply Haiku, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), accessed at http://bit.ly/geKh5k 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Peter Trifonas, Barthes and the Empire of Signs, UK: Icon Books, 2001, p. 3. 7 Rolf J. Goebel, “Japan as Western Text: Roland Barthes, Richard Gordon Smith, and Lafcadio Hearn,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1993), p. 189. 8 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image, Musk, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 155-64. For anyone who is interested in this notion, one can get a succinct summary at http://bit.ly/fIIk85 9 See Barthes and Heath, p. 147. 10 See Goebel, p. 189. 11 Ibid, p. 190. 12 David H. T. Scott, Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 38. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Matthew Eric Engelke and Matt Tomlinson, The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 212. 16 See Scott, p. 39.

4 The Ripples from a Splash: A Generic Analysis of Basho’s Frog Haiku

I once met an avid reader of haiku who could recite at least ten different English versions of Basho's frog haiku, but when I asked him, “what makes Basho's haiku so great that is worthy of more than a hundred different translations published in book form?”

How could there be

significant meaning in such a simple poem which merely describes a frog jumping into an old pond? If I replace “frog” with any other amphibian creature or any creature that can dive into a pond, is it still considered to be great? ” At the time I received no good answers from him, but a few days later I received a lengthy email, in which he gave me a list of books or websites on Basho’s frog haiku. One of them was an often-quoted website page titled “Matsuo Basho: Frog Haiku: Thirty-one Translations and One Commentary.”

The commentary was taken from Robert Aitken’s A Zen

Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen, a collection of essays on Basho’s haiku. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers from his sources because of their individualistic, de-contextualized, and Buddhist-influenced interpretations of Basho’s haiku. More importantly, they didn’t help answer my question. I pondered, “What would Basho say if he were alive today and could read these English language reviews of his frog haiku written by writers or lovers of haiku?”

After an extensive reading of the related materials, I believe that Basho would say, “It might be better to read my poem (a text) in context.” Unlike modern haiku, “which [are] often monologic, a single voice describing or responding to a scene or experience,” 3 the haiku Basho wrote were mainly situated in a communal setting and dialogic responses to the previous verses in haikai sequences or to earlier poems by other poets. “The brevity of the [haiku] is in fact possible because each poem is implicitly part of a massive, communally shared poem.” 4 And as a genre firmly rooted in the centuries-old tradition, its unabated rigor and cultural richness lie in the haiku poet’s keen awareness of utilizing the poetic legacy and cultural associations.

In what follows, I’ll give a generic analysis

of Basho’s

haiku, hoping that this contextualized reading of his poem would broaden our understanding of some enriching characteristics of Japanese haiku. The old pond;

Furu ike ya

A frog jumps in —

kawazu tobikomu

The sound of the water. 7

mizu no oto

First of all, at the denotative level, Basho’s haiku simply says that there is an old pond, that a frog jumps into it, and that the sound of water is heard. Semantically speaking, as is typical of haiku, his poem is made up of two parts through the use of the cutting word, “ya:” “the old pond” and “a frog jumps in --/ the sound of the water.” The tension is thus created by the collocation of these two parts: the sharp contrast between the static image of an old pond, evocative of stillness and loneliness, and the lively image of an energetic animal that jumps into the pond and makes the water sound. 8 This

tension leaves something for readers to ponder, furnishing both meaning and imagery for themselves. Based on linguistic knowledge of the target language and on literary literacy, a textual analysis of this sort, generally speaking, would give readers a sense of pleasure in understanding this poem, but it would not answer the questions I posed above. There are a lot of poets who write good haiku that leave something unsaid for readers to ponder. However, I don’t see any differences that would be made if Basho changed “frog” to any other amphibian creature or any creature that can dive into a pond. So far, my questions posed above are not answered. Secondly, at the connotative level, Basho added an extra layer of meaning or surprise by using a kigo, kawazu (frog), in an unusual way. With its circle of associations, kawazu provided a special pipeline to the reader, increasing the complexity and capacity of the poem. 9 For example, there are some 140 poems classified under the section titled “ponds” in Fubokusho (Selected Poems from the Land of the Rising Sun), a standard waka anthology, none of them depicts a frog.

More importantly, read in the

context of classical Japanese poetry and the haiku poetics, kawazu is a seasonal word for spring used in poems since ancient times, and had always referred to its singing and calling out to a lover. The preface to the first imperial anthology titled Kokinshu describes “listening to the warbler singing among the blossoms and the song of the frog dwelling in the water” 11

as in the following poem: On the upper rapids a frog calls for his love. Is it because, 53

his sleeves chilled by the evening, he wants to share his pillow? 12 Instead of giving “the song of the frog,” Basho focused on the water sound of a diving frog. He was the first poet ever to defy the poetic essence (honi) of the frog by emphasizing the “splash” that it makes, working against what one would expect from reading classical waka or renga.

juxtaposing these two seemingly incongruous worlds and languages of ga (elegance) and zoku (vulgarity), Basho humorously inverted and recast established cultural associations and conventions of the frog. In doing so, he created a comical effect: a “parody of classical poetry that refers to the frog as expressive of romantic longing.” 14 A contextualized reading of his poem, like the one I present here, would reveal the greatness of his poem: the psychological impact of the inner tension brought about by the sharp contrast between two parts of the poem and the transformative power of the newness created by parodying established practices and cultural associations. For Basho, his notion of the new “lay not so much in the departure from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in the reworking of established practices and conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past.”

Throughout his life, instead of

writing haiku with new kigo, Basho devoted himself to “seeking new poetic associations in traditional topics.” 16 Basho’s use of parodic allusion that brought to the reader’s mind earlier texts and reworked an old theme in a new setting has enriched Japanese haiku. His frog haiku, which tends to read one-dimensionally by most of Western haiku poets, is two-axis: on the scenic level, the horizontal axis, the poem objectively describes a natural scene, possessing no emotion, 54

but “the sound of water rising from an old pond implies a larger meditative, lonely silence;” 17 on the vertical axis, it is a parodically allusive variation, a haikai twist on the poetic associations of the frog depicted in classical Japanese poetry. As Haruo Shirane demonstrates in his book titled Traces of Dreams, Basho believed that “the poet had to work along both axes: to work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting; to work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world.” 18 Decades later after Basho’s death, Yosa Buson, who led the Basho Revival movement in the eighteenth century, wrote a response haiku: the old pond's frog is growing elderly fallen leaves 19 Buson’s poem, a parody of Basho’s, could be read as a commentary on the pitiful situations of the haiku community of his day, adding its voice to the centuries-old dialogue between Japanese poets and their predecessors. This allusive characteristic of Japanese haiku has still been absent in most of English language haiku that put great emphasis on the “haiku moment,”

which means “here and now.” Maybe it’s time for us to learn from Basho while greatly praising his haiku. After all has been said, I would like to conclude my article with a tribute poem to converse with and show my respect to masters and their works. The Ripples from a Splash: 55

A Haiku Sequence Based on Chinese Poetics 21 moonlit pondâ&#x20AC;Ś are frogs asleep tonight? flower moon -its eyes on the flowing clouds a frog this frog crouches on a lotus leaf -reciting Basho the frog shatters the moonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face... alone by the pond

(First published in Magnapoets, #7,January 2011 )

Notes: 1 See Hiroaki Sato, One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English, New York : Weatherhill, 1983. 1st ed. In the book, he presents a collection of over one hundred translations and variations of Basho’s frog haiku. 2 The Bureau of Public Secrets, “Matsuo Basho: Frog Haiku (Thirty-one Translations and One Commentary),” accessed at http://bit.ly/14LN59 3 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 15. 4 Ibid., p. 27. 5 Koji Kawamoto, “The Use and Disuse of Tradition in Basho’s Haiku and Imagist Poetry,” Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), p. 709. 6 Daniel Chandler, “Working within Genres,” “Advantages of Generic Analysis,” “ D.I.Y. Generic Analysis,” in An Introduction to Genre Theory, accessed at http://bit.ly/gw01rQ 7 See the Bureau of Public Secrets. 8 Cheryl A. Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, Boston: Brill, c2007, p. 57. 9 Haruo Shirane, “Matsuo Basho’s Oku no hosomichi and the Anxiety of Influence,”

Currents

Japanese

Culture:

Translations

and

Transformations, ed., Amy Vladeck Heinrich, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 182. 10 Makoto Ueda, compi. and trans., Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 142.

11 Koji Kawamoto, The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter, trans., Stephen Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt, University of Tokyo Press, 2000, p. 76. 12 See Shirane, p. 14. 13 See Ueda, p. 142. 14 See Crowley, p. 57. 15 See Shirane, p.5. 16 See Shirane in Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, p. 182. 17 See Shirane, p. 77. 18 Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths”, Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000), accessed at http://bit.ly/CckuN 19 See Crowley, p. 56. 20 See Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment.” 21 According to classical Chinese poetics, a poem sequence is a group of poems by one poet or perhaps even by two or more poets intended to be read together in a specific order. The integrity of a poem sequence is dependent on this prescribed order of presentation. A poem sequence by a single author is sustained throughout by a single voice and point of view, and it shows consistency in style and purpose from one poem to the next. The defining characteristic of a poem sequence is that each poem must have its own value and integrity yet contribute to the artistic wholeness of the sequence while maintaining the logical progression of events.

5 Waking from Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream -- Plagiarism or Honkadori

Michel Foucault has argued that the entire concept of artist or author as an original instigator of meaning is only a privileged moment of individualization in the history of art. -- Linda Hutcheon [Basho’s] notion of the new lay not so much in the departure from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in

the

reworking

established

practices

and

conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past. -- Haruo Shirane

A few months ago, I had long discussions with some haiku poets over the issue regarding "déjà-ku," a term invented by Michael Dylan Welch for “haiku that bear some relationship to other poems." 1 As Welch describes in his Simply Haiku article, these relationships can be good when showing a skillful use of allusion and homage, and not good in the cases of plagiarism

and “cryptomnesia (remembering someone else's poem without realizing that one is remembering rather than creating it)"

Throughout our

discussions, the recurring words or phrases were “not the first,” “similar/same,” “not original or fresh,” “has been done.” Some poets even lamented that poets who wrote déjà-ku had great difficulty in submitting them for publication. At some point, the discussions revolved around one key issue: “how similar is too similar?” [déjà-ku is not an academically recognized term but a name for a theory developed by Dylan Welch] In terms of language, structure, style, and theme, the following two haiku are the most problematic of all that we discussed for they are almost identical. Yosa Buson’s haiku: Japanese original: tsurigane ni tomarite nemuru kochoo kana English translation: On the temple bell has settled, and is fast asleep, a butterfly. Masaoka Shiki’s haiku: Japanese original:

tsurigane ni tomarite hikaru hotaru kana English translation: On the temple bell has settled, and is glittering, a firefly. 3 Read in the context of Western literary criticism, 4 Shiki’s poem either reaches the limits of allusion,

or is simply condemned as derivative.

However, read in the context of the Japanese poetic tradition, the cultural significance of kigo, and especially of honkadori, 6 a concept that is close to a loosely-defined Western equivalent of allusion, Shiki’s poem recontextualizes Buson’s so as to create new meanings and perspectives. The different evaluations of Shiki’s poem, one that was written in a later time and understood as reworking of an old image, result from the different understandings of the relationship of one’s creativity to originality/newness. In Edo culture, the ability to create the new through the old was a more preferred form of newness than the ability to be unique and individual. 7 This Japanese view of “newness” still pervades and is in sharp contrast with that of the West. Veteran haiku poet and editor Cor van den Heuvel gives an incisive explanation about these perspective differences: “If a haiku is a good one, it doesn’t matter if the subject has been used before. The writing of variations on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly 61

different ways of ‘seeing anew’ for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their ideas of uniqueness and Romantic individualism, to accept. But some of the most original voices in haiku do not hesitate to dare seeming derivative if they see a way of reworking an ‘old’ image.” 8 In his haiku, Shiki used the same techniques that Buson did, but employed a related, yet dynamically, different image of a glittering firefly (a summer kigo), which stirs the tranquility of Buson’s deeply sleeping butterﬂy (a spring kigo). This slightly different emphasis conveyed a different feeling, and would be recognized by the informed reader at once and “appreciated as much if not more than a completely new idea. The virtuoso approach to literature, and to art as well, where the artist attempts to do essentially the same thing as his predecessors but in a slightly different way, is characteristic of Japan.” 9 Shiki’s use of honkadori brought to the reader’s mind an immediate identification with an earlier poem by Buson, for it conversed with and showed respect to the master and his work. Buson’s poem provided the horizon of poetic-cultural expectations/readings: “between the bell and the butterfly there are many layers of contrast -- size, color, solidity, mobility, lifespan -- which deepen the poem's meaning; there is also suspense -- the bell may start ringing at any minute, startling the butterfly.”

Against these

expectations/readings, Shiki’s poem established its “newness” or implied difference. In doing so, poetry, as viewed by the Japanese, is communally written and shared. The concept of plagiarism is a modern one. “The brevity of the [haiku] is in fact possible because each poem is implicitly part of a massive, communally shared poem.” 11

For those who are well versed in Japanese haiku and Chinese Daoist (Wade-Giles: Taoist) literature, especially in the Zhuangzi (Wade-Giles: Chuang Tzu),

the butterfly imagery in Buson’s haiku is “not original or

fresh,” rather it belongs to a massive, communally shared Japanese butterfly haiku based on Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, a famous story recorded in the Zhuangzi: “Once [Zhuangzi] dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was [Zhuangzi.] Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable [Zhuangzi]. But he didn't know if he was [Zhuangzi] who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was [Zhuangzi.] Between [Zhuangzi] and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” 13 In the first haiku lexicon, Yama no I (Mountain Spring published in 1647), there is an explanatory passage under the entry titled Butterfly: “Butterfly. The scene of a butterfly alighting on rape blossoms, napping among flowers with no worries. Its appearance as it flutters its feathery wings, dancing like whirling snowflakes. Also the image is associated with [Zhuangzi’s] dream, suggesting that one hundred years pass as a gleam in a butterfly’s dream.”

To demonstrate how to use this butterfly imagery, the

compiler Kigin gives the following example: Scattering blossoms: 63

the dream of a butterfly – one hundred years in a gleam 15 Since then, the penetration of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream into themes and images has clearly been seen in Japanese haiku. Among these butterfly haiku, 16 the following was written by Basho and is often regarded as one of the most overtly allusive ones: You are the butterfly And I the dreaming heart Of [Zhuangzi]. 17 Basho wrote a note about this occasional poem sent o his friend named Doi: “You’re the butterfly, and I the dreaming heart of [Zhuangzi]. I don’t know if I’m Basho who dreamed with the heart-mind of [Zhuangzi] that I was a butterfly named Doi, or that winged Mr. Doi dreaming me is Basho.“ 18 While Zhuangzi played with the “transformation of things,” specifically with himself and a butterfly, Basho played with Doi, personalizing the Buddhist community (the sangha). 19 The following are two more butterfly haiku by Basho, which subtly allude to Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream: not grown to a butterfly 64

this late in autumn a caterpillar 20 At the denotative level, Basho saw a caterpillar on a late autumn day, lamenting that it has not matured into a butterfly. At the connotative level, Basho reflected on his own life, one which had not been through a transformative change. The poem echoes one of the key themes in Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream – the “transformation of things.” butterflies flit... that is all, amid the field of sunlight 21 Because of Basho’s use of the flitting butterfly imagery, some Japanese Basho interpreters, such as Nobuo Hori, think that “the poem has something of a daydream in it, …harking back to [Zhuangzi’s] dream.” 22 And the most covertly allusive and regarded butterfly haiku is also written by Basho: is that warbler her soul? there sleeps a graceful willow 23 Unlike any poet who saw “a willow hanging its branches as if in sleep and might compose a poem alluding to the butterfly in [Zhuangzi’s] dream,” 24

Basho replaced the butterfly with a warbler, subtly comparing the willow

tree to Zhuangzi, and the warbler to his butterfly. Thus, he skillfully used 65

this age-old allusion in haiku and was not used by it. This is a perfect example of showing his “haikai imagination”

creatively reworked an old

image. Oshima Ryota claims that Basho “deserves to be called the [Zhuangzi] of haikai. 26 As Koji Kawamoto emphasizes in his essay dealing with the use and disuse of tradition in Basho’s haiku, “the key to [haiku’s] unabated vigor lies in Basho’s keen awareness of the utility of the past in undertaking an avantgarde enterprise, which he summed up in his famous adage “fueki ryuko,”

which literally means “the unchanging and the ever-changing.” This haikai poetic ideal was advocated during his trip through the northern region of Japan. He stressed that “haikai must constantly change (ryuko), find the new (atarashimi), shed its own past, even as it seeks qualities that transcend time.”

However, his notion of the new “lay not so much in the departure

from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in the reworking of established practices and conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past.” 29 Through analyzing Shiki’s allusive variant on Buson’s poem, which is implicitly part of a communally shared poem based on Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, we can see the Japanese view of newness and the constant use of honkadori play a significant role in the historical depth and cultural richness of Japanese haiku, which has been highly influenced by the Chinese poetic tradition, especially by Taoist literature.

In writing this chapter, I am

reminded of Haruo Shirane’s critique of North American haiku: “the emphasis on the ‘haiku moment’ in North American haiku has meant that most of the poetry does not have another major characteristic of Japanese haikai and haiku: its allusive character, the ability of the poem to speak to other literary or poetic texts.”

I would like to add one more reason: that is

the obsession with originality. As Hiroaki Sato stresses in his introduction to 66

Basho's Narrow Road, “the extent of the annotations [342 allusions in Narrow Road to the Interior] might make Basho appear derivative, but as I have pointed out elsewhere (and as everyone knows), the ‘cult of originality’ is something new to our literary experience. A rich fabric of reference – in good hands, such as Shakespeare’s, Eliot’s or Basho’s – is an incomparable resource and a source of wonderment.” 32 After all has been said, I would like to conclude my essay with a tribute poem to converse with and show my respect to masters and their works. My Butterfly Dream: A Haiku Sequence Based on Chinese Poetics 33 thinking about Zhuangzi... a butterfly flutters its wings autumn twilight butterfly darts in and out of my shadow my dream floats the shape and size of a butterfly waking from the dream of a butterfly me in the mirror? 67

(First published in Simply Haiku, Vol. 8. No. 2, Autumn 2010)

Notes

1 Michael Dylan Welch, "An Introduction to Déjà-ku," Simply Haiku, Vol. 2, No.4 (July/August, 2004), accessed at http://bit.ly/ez70RO 2 Ibid. 3 For English translations, see Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958, p. 154. For Japanese originals, see http://bit.ly/guzx2C 4 In writing, one of the most important features of imitation that defies the charge of plagiarism is allusion. Since the 1970s, literary theorists not only viewed allusion as a "tacit reference to another literary work," but also argued that an allusion is "a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts." Here are the four modes of allusion well articulated in a typology developed by Earl Miner, who is a well-known scholar of Japanese court poetry: “i) metaphoric allusion in which an echo of the previous work imports the tenor of the previous work to the new context;

ii) imitative allusion in which a quotation of the exact language or representation of generic characteristics of the previous work creates an equivalence between the previous context of utterance and the new context; iii) parodic allusion in which a quotation of the language or representation of generic characteristics of the previous work suggests a discrepancy between the previous context of utterance and the new context; and iv) structural allusion in which repetition of structural elements (e.g., recognition and reversal) of a previous work gives form to the new work by analogy to the previous work.” For further information, see Earl Miner. "Allusion," in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. 5 There are “rules” to delineate the limits of the use of allusion. For further information, see Michael Leddy, “The Limits of Allusion,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1992, pp. 110-122. 6 Honkadori is not simply an allusion to a literary work and it may also function as quoting, which means lines are copied word for word. “[It] is true that within the Japanese cultural tradition there is a well-developed custom of quoting and borrowing… In fact, more than just a custom is involved here: various ways of quoting were themselves regarded as artistic techniques and were admired and appreciated in the same way as original works of art. It is natural to suppose that an 'art of quoting' could be appreciated by connoisseurs who share common knowledge with the artists, since quoting is quoting something that is known by those who quote and those who listen, view or read… If somebody tried to summarize the stylistic character of the 20th century 69

western art, what should he say? One thing he might say is that the 20th century was one in which each artist was expected to have his own style, and possessing this sort of uniqueness and individuality of style was the necessary condition of being considered an artist at all.” For further information, see Akiko Tsukamoto, "Modes of Quoting: Parody and Honkadori," Simply Haiku, Vol. 2, No. 4 (July/August, 2004), accessed at http://bit.ly/fN1UPx 7 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 5. 8 Cor van den Heuvel, ed., The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, p. ix-x. In fact, “Michel Foucault (1977, 115) has argued that the entire concept of artist or author as an original instigator of meaning is only a privileged moment of individualization in the history of art.” See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. p. 4. 9 Donald Keene, Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers, Grove Press, 1955, p. 15. 10 Makoto Ueda, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, c1998, p. 159. 11 See Shirane, p. 27. 12 The Zhuangzi is the second foundational text of the Daoist tradition as well as the name of the putative author of this text.” For further information, see Peipei Qiu, Basho and the Dao: the Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, pp. 3-4. 13 Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, New York: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 49. 70

14 See Qiu, p. 18. 15 Ibid. 16 Buson wrote two more butterfly haiku. The following comes from the poem text of one of his haiga: first dream of the year even though I become a butterfly I'm still cold For detailed information, see Cheryl A. Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, Boston: Brill, c2007, pp. 192-3. Here is another one: as if in a dream the fingers hold on -a butterfly For further information, see Ueda, p. 74. In Viral 7.1, Scott Metz lists the following butterfly haiku (accessed at http://bit.ly/fo51tq): butterfly what are you dreaming fanning your wings -- Chiyojo (18th c.)

The butterfly having disappeared, my spirit came back to me -- Wafū (19th c.) [trans. R. H. Blyth] a butterfly went past after seeing me as an apparition -- Yasumasa Sōda (20th c.) [trans. Gendai Haiku Kyokai] 17 Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Basho's Haiku and Zen, New York : Weatherhill, 1978, p. 125. 18 Ibid., p. 127. 19 Ibid. 20 Makoto Ueda, compi. and trans., Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 271. 21 Ibid., p. 133. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 88 24 Ibid. 25 “Haikai imagination, which took pleasure in the juxtaposition and collision of these seemingly incongruous worlds and languages, humorously inverted and recast established cultural associations and conventions, particularly the ‘poetic essence’ (honi) of classical poetic topics.” See Shirane, p. 2. 26 See Ueda, p. 88. 27 Koji Kawamoto, “The Use and Disuse of Tradition in Basho’s Haiku and Imagist Poetry,” Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), p. 709. 72

28 See Shirane, p. 294. 29 Ibid., p. 5. 30 See Qiu, pp. 1-12. 31 Haruo Shirane, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Mythsâ&#x20AC;?, Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000), accessed at http://bit.ly/CckuN 32 Hiroaki Sato, trans., Basho's Narrow Road : Spring & Autumn Passages: Two Works by Basho Matsuo, Berkeley, Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1996, p. 35. 33 According to classical Chinese poetics, a poem sequence is a group of poems by one poet or perhaps even by two or more poets intended to be read together in a specific order. The integrity of a poem sequence is dependent on this prescribed order of presentation. A poem sequence by a single author is sustained throughout by a single voice and point of view, and it shows consistency in style and purpose from one poem to the next. The defining characteristic of a poem sequence is that each poem must have its own value and integrity yet contribute to the artistic wholeness of the sequence while maintaining the logical progression of events.

6 Make Haibun New through the Chinese Poetic Past: Bashoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Transformation of Haikai Prose

Basho believed that the poet had to work along both axes. To work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting. To work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world. -- Haruo Shirane

In the narrow sense of the word, haikai, which gave birth to haiku, originally referred to the humorous poems found in the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry. It was later used to describe popular comic linked verse (haikai no renga), distinguishing itself from the more refined, classical linked verse (renga).

Broadly speaking, it is used to

â&#x20AC;&#x153;describe genres deriving from haikai or reflecting haikai spirit, such as haiku, haibun, renku, and haikai kikobun, literary travel accountâ&#x20AC;?.

During

the second half of the 17th century, there were innovative movements within Japanese haikai circles, and they had transformed haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form.

Furthermore, haiku

originated from hokku which was the opening verse of a haikai sequence. It

has flowered for four centuries and established itself not only as an autonomous genre of Japanese short verse form, but as a globalized verse form in many languages. As the putative founder of haiku, Matsuo Basho made an enormous contribution to the refinement, success, and popularization of Japanese haiku and its related genres. 3 As Koji Kawamoto emphasizes in his essay dealing with the use and disuse of tradition in Basho’s haiku, “the key to [haiku’s] unabated vigor lies in Basho’s keen awareness of the utility of the past in undertaking an avantgarde enterprise, which he summed up in his famous adage “fueki ryuko,”

However, his notion of the new “lay not so much in the departure

from or rejection of the perceived tradition as in the reworking of established practices and conventions, in creating new counterpoints to the past.”

Edo culture, the ability to create the new through the old was a more preferred form of newness than the ability to be unique and individual. 7 This Japanese view of “newness” still pervades and is in sharp contrast with that of the West . Veteran haiku poet and editor Cor van den Heuvel gives an incisive explanation about these perspective differences: “The writing of variations on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly different ways of ‘seeing anew’ for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their 75

ideas of uniqueness and Romantic individualism, to accept. But some of the most original voices in haiku do not hesitate to seem derivative if they see a way of reworking an ‘old’ image.” 8 For Japanese haikai poets, these literary associations, poetic diction, classical Japanese and Chinese texts were regarded as the source of authority as well as the contested ground for re-visioning. Haikai thus emerged from the “interaction of socially and temporally disparate worlds, from the interaction of a seemingly unchanging, idealized past (that included China) with a constantly, rapidly changing present, the centripetal force of the former serving to hold in check the centrifugal force of the latter.”

typical haikai fashion, it operates on two axes: on the horizontal axis, it captures a moment keenly perceived, a description of a scene from the contemporary world; on the vertical axis, it leads back into the poetic past, to history, to other poems.

The skilful juxtaposition of these two disparate

worlds can enrich and deepen one’s haikai. Take one of Basho’s most famous haiku as an example: summer grasses -traces of dreams of ancient warriors The haiku above is taken from a climatic episode in his most-read travel journal, The Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi). It operates on two axes. The fragment (line 1) is a scenic description from the present world, the site of a formal battlefield; the phrase (lines 2 and 3) “refers to the passage of time: the summer grasses are the ‘aftermath’ of the dreams of glory.”

Thematically speaking, this haiku resonates well with 76

the opening lines from one of Tu Fu’s poems: “The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain./ The city walls turn to spring, / grasses and trees are green.”

Furthermore, this dual vision of a former battlefield can be found

in its Chinese archetype in The True Treasury of the Ancient Style: Essay on Mourning for the Dead at an Ancient Battlefield by Li Hua, in which “ the poet gazes down at an old battlefield, imagines the terrible carnage, listens to the voices of the dead, before returning to the present to ponder the meaning of the past.” 13 In juxtaposing these disparate worlds, past and contemporary, Japanese and Chinese, the dreams in Basho’s haiku are the dreams of not only Japanese warriors, but also of those who have fought their battles. More importantly, summer grasses (natsukusa), a classical seasonal word for summer, was to be associated with “eroticism and fertility.”

Through

allusion to Tu Fu’s famous poem on the transience of civilization, Basho transformed this seasonal word into the one associated with the “ephemerality of human ambitions.” 15 As Haruo Shirane demonstrates in his groundbreaking book Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Basho believed that “the poet had to work along both axes: to work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting; to work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world.”

Viewed as a key figure

who elevated haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form, Basho had developed a set of related poetic ideals widely utilized by his disciples, fellow poets, and successive followers since the mid-1680s.

These new ideals were their sincere efforts to deal with the fundamental paradox of the late-seventeenth-century haikai, one “which looked to the past for inspiration and authority and yet rejected it, which parodied the 77

classical (and Chinese) tradition even as they sought to become part of it, and which paid homage to the ‘ancients’ and yet stressed newness.” 18 The haikai Basho envisioned was marked for its newness, for “both new perspectives and new sociolinguistic frontiers in contemporary Japan as well as in reconstructed versions of the Japanese and Chinese past.”

what follows, I will discuss how Basho re-established and refined a mixed genre of verse and prose called haibun (haikai prose), which is exemplified, through his incorporation and recontextualization of the Chinese poetic past in his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Interior. First of all, broadly speaking, haibun was developed before Basho and written in the form of short essays, prefaces or headnotes to hokku, such as Kigin’s Mountain Well (1648). Its prose style resembled that of classical prose.20 In 1671, a well-known Teimon poet Yamaoka Genrin (1631-1672) published his experimental work of haibun, entitled Takaragura (The Treasure House), and in it, he “[emulated] Zhuangzi’s gugen [(Chinese, yuyan)] 22

by revealing beauty and virtue in ordinary household apparatus.”

His work was “highly metaphorical and allegorical,”

it didn’t have great

influences on the way haikai poets at the time wrote their haibun. It was not until shortly after Basho returned from his journey to Oku that he became more focused on developing a different style of prose, which was infused with a haikai spirit. Around 1690, in a letter to Kyorai, he named this new haikai prose haibun, which was characterized by the “prominent inclusion of haikai words (haigon), particularly a combination of vernacular Japanese (zokugo) and Chinese words (kango).”

After the

publication the first anthology of the new haibun, entitled Prose Collection of Japan, Basho was recognized as “the first to create such a model [for haikai prose] and breathe elegance and life in it.” 25 78

Secondly, as Haruo Shirane stresses, Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Interior, “may best be understood as an attempt to reveal the different possibilities of haibun in the form of travel literature.”

A lot of

commentators also point out that Basho’s work is less a factual record of a travel journal account, where haiku commemorate real but isolated moments keenly perceived on the journey, than it is a highly related set of about fifty haibun structured to convey a specific literary effect. 27 For example, Basho’s travelling companion, Sora, recorded in his diary that on their visit to Nikko, they first visited the temples and shrine on the mountain and then rested at Hotoke Gozaemon’s inn on their last night. Basho rearranged this series of events – resting first and visiting later – in separate Nikko haibun in order to dramatize their stay with Hotoke Gozaemon. In doing so, he was able to compare/contrast three schools of thought: 1. Shinto (the shrine and its history); 2. Confucian (Hotoke Gozaemon reminded Basho of one important passage from The Analects of Confucius); 3. Buddhist (describing in two passages Sora’s religious preparations for the journey and their improvised Buddhist “summer purification retreat”). 28 Furthermore, it is “best considered a long prose poem, which gives vernacular and Chinese phrases the cadence and tonality of poetry.”

That

is because many commentators observe that Basho’s prose conveys poetic beauty through concise imagery, making the boundary between prose and verse disappear. 30 Therefore, there is no general agreement on exactly where the haibun breaks occur. The majority of English translations do not indicate them. As a result, most readers will look upon The Narrow Road to the Interior as a travel journal infused with haiku. 31 Nonetheless, haibun is used to divide the 79

text into subsections, indicating a “discrete passage which characteristically ends in one or more haiku.”

This is such a non-linear text, freely mixing

prose with verse in a way as to demand a relational reading. Significant meaning of a work of this sort is embedded with the interaction of text and context. 33 Thirdly, as is well known, Basho made use in his prose of the associative techniques utilized in haikai composition. “To create associations is to set up correspondence (taio)… that [novelist and literary essayist, Atsushi Mori,] sees as characterizing the work’s movement and source of energy.”

He describes taio as “something akin to fields of

tension and balance between all manner of concrete and abstract things: between words, phrases, or images, between motifs or themes, between human beings, ideas, places, poems, and most importantly between Basho’s text, the Oku no Hosomichi itself, and other literary texts of the past… States of tension and balance are achieved and then broken against a background of newly formed balances.”

According to Mori, the balance

Basho had in his mind was “balance as antithesis,” 36 a notion that is more in line with the Chinese cosmological concept of yoking yin and yang and being transformed. In his The Narrow Road to the Interior, attentive readers can see Basho’s constant employment of the interplay of opposites (yin and yang) that brings about transformation. From a structuralist perspective, Mori claims that this law of change is embodied in the following four-part pattern as a structural principle at work in The Narrow Road to the Interior: First, there is a beginning (Japanese, ki ), and it is matched with an apt response (Japanese, sho); later, ki and sho, one after the other, are matched by transformation (Japanese, ten), the newly-formed element(s), and finally all three are matched by a ending 80

(Japanese, ketsu).

This ki-sho-ten-ketsu- structure mirrors that of Chinese

short verse, jue ju. A jue ju is composed of four lines, with each line containing five or seven Chinese characters and carrying two or more parallels of content and phonetic tone. The structural function of each line is described as follows: line 1 sets the theme (Chinese, qi), line 2 develops the theme (Chinese, cheng) through expanding imagery and mood, line 3 transforms the theme (Chinese, zhuan) by comparing/contrasting with line 1, and line 4 resolves all into an ending (Chinese, he). Mori argues that the ki-sho-ten-ketsu principle shapes Basho’s work as follows: the ki part not only includes the opening passage but also extends to the Shirakawa Barrier crossing, the sho part is made up of the sections between the Shirakawa Barrier crossing and the visit with the painter Kaemon in Sendai, the ten part includes the sections describing the travelers’ passage along a portion of the road from Sedai en route to the Tsubo no Ishibumi, and finally the ketsu part corresponds with the sections portraying the often hurried walk down the Echigo-Echizen road along the Japan Sea coast and into Ogaki.

Mori’s reading of Basho’s work is heavily

dependent on his conception of taio, and in his view, the most numerous correspondences are those between verses: between waka and Chinese verses, for instance, of the type discussed in the Kurobane passage or between two hokku in the same, or in contiguous, or in widely separate haibun.” 39 Fourthly, in terms of writing style, The Narrow Road to the Interior is characterized by a “highly elliptical, rhythmic, Chinese style of parallel words (tsuigo) and parallel phrases (tsuiku).”

Unlike classical Japanese

prose which was based on an alternating 5/7 syllabic rhythm, Basho’s haibun was accorded with “Chinese prose models,

particularly Six 81

Dynasties parallel prose (p’ien-wen)

-- which used four- and six-word

parallel phrases, emphasized verbal parallelism, and stressed tonal euphony and allusion -- and the Ancient Style (ku-wen), which emerged in the Tang period in reaction to the p’ien-wen style and which

often generated a

rhythm based on the four-character line.” 41 Chinese parallel prose is marked for its parallel phrases, tending toward rhyming and frequent allusion. Part of the reason is because of the monosyllabic structure of its language “represented by discrete symbols of uniform size and vocally expressed through a phonological structure capable of sophisticated rhyming.”

Due to linguistic differences, literary Japanese

is not disposed to tonal parallelism. However, a kind of parallelism, such as syntactical and semantic ones, is possible through stressing paired words or phrases, parallel syntax, parallels of content or theme. Take the passage on the Tsubo Stone Inscription for example: Mountains disappear, rivers flow, roads change; rocks are buried, hidden in dirt, trees age, saplings replace them; the virtues of travel the joys of existence forgetting the labors of travel I shed only tears 43 The skilful use of parallel syntax and contrastive words, – such as mountain and river, rock and tree, and travel and life – generates a “folksong type of rhythm and a Chinese poetic pattern.” 44 82

This renewed haibun style was widely adopted by haibun writers, such as Yokoi Yayu, one of the most famous literary triad in the second half of the eighteenth century, an era praised for the revival of haiku and haibun. 45

From the open line of the haibun on tobacco in Yayu’s well-known haibun

collection entitled Uzuragoromo, we can see a striking example of syntactical parallelism: You may get drowsy journeying along a road at night, but you cannot dangle a teapot from your waist to refresh yourself. You may awake forlorn one autumn day, but you cannot feed yourself when you cannot reach the rice-cakes on the shelf. 46 This passage is almost immediately followed by, It may well be that Tsai Yu looked for a firebrand in the kitchen stove so that he might light up after his afternoon nap, and that Kojiju craned her neck toward the lamp to light her tobacco as she waited through the night for her love. 47 In addition to syntactical parallelism, an attentive reader can notice a semantic parallel: “’stove’ in the first line is complemented by ‘lamp’ in the second, and ‘(day) nap’s eye-opener’ by ‘nightwaiting.’ 48

Besides parallelism, the frequent use of allusion is prominent in Chinese parallel prose; it can also be found in The Narrow Road to the Interior. As Shirane demonstrates in Traces of Dreams, Basho’s prose and poetry is highly allusive.

For example, the opening passage is the most

important section of the work that determines the theme, tone, movement, and goals.

It also describes multiple departures -- “the hermit-poet’s

philosophical departure from a particular way of life and his actual physical departure from the hermitage, a symbol of life he abandons“

-- and it is a

haibun written in a Li-esque style. In his book, Mori discusses the complexity and richness of Basho’s allusion to Li Po’s poem and his skilful use of parallelism. 52 There has been a steady stream of collections of essays by major Japanese scholars on Basho’s relationships to earlier literary traditions. Jiro Hirota’s multiple studies on Basho and his Chinese and Japanese classical connections since 1968 began a new era of Basho scholarship. He first researched on Chinese Taoist, then Neo-Confucian and later Buddhist influences.

Beacuse he “examines the primary and secondary sources to

which Basho could have had access (popular poetic handbooks, collections, and commentaries, for instance) and documents possible Japanese and Chinese sources in each of the genres in which Basho and his disciples worked… his studies have become, among other things, one of the most reliable sources (reference works, really) on the process by which Basho mixed a variety of languages.” 54 Finally, in addition to modelling on Chinese parallel prose, Basho adopted his haikai approach to the Chinese fu, a dominant genre of Han Dynasty literature.

It was a kind of rhymed prose poetry based on the

ornate and extravagant style of Chu ci (Chu lyrics). The prose provides the 84

necessary exposition written in the form of questions and answers for exploration of an object or natural phenomenon, and the verse its rhapsodic language. It employs complex rhyme patterns and balanced parallel phrases. Take one of Bashoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s haibun on Matsushima for example: Well, it has been said many times, but Matsushima is the most beautiful place in all of Japan. First of all, it can hold its head up to Tung-tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ing Lake or West Lake. Letting in the sea from the southeast, it fills the bay, three leagues wide, with the tide of Che-chiang. Matsushima has gathered countless islands: the high islands point their fingers to heaven, those lying down crawl over the waves. Some are piled two deep, some three deep. To the left, the islands are separated from each other, but to the right they are linked. Some islands seem to be carrying islands on their backs, others to be embracing them, like someone caressing a child. The green of the pine is dark and dense, the branches and leaves bent by the salty sea breeze -- it seems as if the branches have been deliberately twisted. The landscape creates a tranquil, soft feeling, like a beautiful lady powdering her face. Did the god of the mountain create this long ago, in the age of the gods? Is this the work of the Creator? What words could a human being use to describe this? 56 The language of the passage above is highly figurative and allusive. In the opening lines, Basho tried to elevate the beauty of Matsushima to an 85

iconic status through comparison with and allusion to one of the Great Four Lakes of China, Tung-t’ing Lake, and the famous tidal bore on the Chientang River in Che-chiang province, two iconic scenes portrayed by numerous classical Chinese poems.

Later, he employed the parallel,

contrastive phrases -- such as the high islands point their fingers to heaven, those lying down crawl over the waves -- that resemble “the couplet structure of the Chinese fu while possessing haikai humor.”

At the end of

the passage, he stirred emotions about and reflection upon the status of Matsushima in the reader through a series of heartfelt questions, which is another technique utilized in the Chinese fu. In the classical Japanese poetic tradition, Matsushima was used to be associated with hovels, beach shelters, boats of the fisherfolk, and Ojima island,

and it was now transformed into

the most beautiful place in Japan through Basho’s fu-esque haibun. The same techniques were also utilized in his description of Kisagata, a “notable example of Chinese-Japanese hybrid style, interweaving Chinese, fu-esque motifs with classical Japanese prose.” 59 In The Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho explored a variety of prose styles by combining conventions of classical Japanese travel literature with Chinese prose models infused with socio-historic-literary references, opening up the diverse possibilities of haibun composition. Unlike the majority of the haibun we have read in the English language haiku-related and haibun journals that place an unbalanced emphasis on the principles of shasei (“sketch from life”) and the here-and-now, Basho’s haibun are allusive, figurative, and infused with parallels phrases and contrastive words, all of which are used to enhance literary effects and add aesthetic-historical depth to the poems. In my view, maybe it is time for anyone who is interested in writing haibun to re-think Basho’s poetic ideal of

“the 86

unchanging and the ever-changing” situated in one’s own socio-historiccultural contexts, and to make haibun anew through the poetic past of one’s own literary legacy and shared ones from the rest of the world.

(First published in Simply Haiku, Vol.8. No. 1, Summer 2010)

Notes

1 Peipei Qiu, Basho and the Dao: the Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005, p. 200. 2 Ibid., pp. 1-12. 3 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams : Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 1-29. 4 Koji Kawamoto, “The Use and Disuse of Tradition in Basho’s Haiku and Imagist Poetry,” Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), p. 709. 5 See Shirane, p. 294. 6. Ibid., p. 5. 7 Ibid. 8 Cor van den Heuvel, The Haiku Anthology : Haiku and Senryu in English, New York : W.W. Norton, 1999, p. ix-x. 9 See Shirane, pp. 4-5.

10 Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths”, Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000), accessed at http://bit.ly/CckuN 11 See Shirane, p. 238. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 239. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 See Shirane, Modern Haiku. 17 See Shirane, pp. 254-78. 18 Ibid., p. 28. 19 Ibid., p. 8. 20 Ibid., p. 213. 21 Gugen is a literary device functioning like allegory or parable. In the Zhuangzi, it often refers to the words spoken through the mouths of historical or fictional figures to make them more compelling. Genrin took it as the essence of the Zhuangzi. 22 See Qiu, p. 6. 23 Ibid., p. 20. 24 See Shirane, p. 213, 215. 25 Ibid., p. 215. 26 Ibid., p. 212. 27 Christine Murasaki Millett, “’Bush Clover and Moon.’ A Relational Reading of Oku no Hosomichi,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 327. 28 Eleanor Kerkham, “And Us Too Enclosed in Mori Atsushi’s Ware Mo Mata, Oku no Hosomichi,” in Matsuo Basho’s Poetic Spaces : Exploring 88

Haikai Intersections, Eleanor Kerkham, ed., New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 196. 29 See Shirane, p. 216. 30 Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970, p. 112. 31 See Millett, p. 330-1. 32 Ibid., p. 328. 33 Ibid., p. 327. 34 See Kerkham, p. 176. 35 Ibid., pp. 175-6. 36 Ibid., p. 176. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., pp. 177-80. 39 Ibid., p186. For further discussion on this issue, see pp. 186-8. 40 See Shirane, p. 217. 41 Ibid., p. 327. 42 Lawrence Rogers, “Rags and Tatters. The Uzuragoromo of Yokoi Yayu,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 281 43 See Shirane, p. 218. 44 Ibid. 45 See Rogers, p. 279. 46 Ibid., pp. 281-2. 47 Ibid., pp. 282. 48 Ibid. 49, Ibid., p. 22-3. 50 See Kerkham, p. 188. 51 Ibid. 89

52 Ibid., pp. 188-95. 53 Eleanor Kerkham, “Reviewed work(s): Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho by Haruo Shirane,” The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Apr., 2000), pp. 107-8. 54 Ibid., pp.107-8. 55 See Shirane, pp. 220-3. 56 See Shirane, p. 220. 57 Ibid., p. 221. 58 Ibid., p. 220. 59 Ibid., p. 221-3.

7 Reviving Japanese Haikai through Chinese Classics: Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival

Despite the fact haikai was a native Japanese poetic genre, it was closely linked with the world of sinophile intellectuals that flourished in [the eighteenth century], and the Basho Revival owned much to the ideas and notions that circulated within it. -- Cheryl A. Crowley Bason’s cultural make-up was essentially bi-national, the Chinese and native Japanese elements woven together in a seamless fabric. -- John Rosenfield

Written in the Japanese tradition of honkadori,

Yosa Buson’s frog

hokku opens up a window into the lamentable situation of the eighteenth century haikau community. Soo no ku o osoite Inheriting one of our ancestor’s verses

furu ike no

the old pond's

kawazu oiyuku

frog is growing elderly

ochiba kana

fallen leaves 2

First of all, semantically speaking, the above poem is made up of two parts that are separated by a kireji (cutting word), kana. The first part is that in the old pond there is an aging frog, whose honi (poetic essence) is “suggestive of spring,… [implying] vigor and youth.”

The second part

introduces the reader to the scene fallen leaves, whose honi refers to winter. 4

Secondly, technically speaking, Buson employs the puzzle-solving technique to hold the reader in suspense in the first part of the poem (a supposedly youthful and energetic frog is getting old), and he solves the puzzle in the second part through shifting the scene to a winter setting where the seemingly disparate elements of the poem suddenly make sense: the frog is approaching old age, hibernating under fallen leaves that cover the ice in an old pond. 5 Thirdly, according to the headnote that mentions “one of our ancestor’s verses,” Buson makes a honkadori to Basho’s most memorable hokku. Furu ike ya

the old pond

kawazu tobikomu

a frog jumps in

mizu no oto

the sound of water 6

By using Basho’s old poem as raw material and the device of alluding, Buson re-shapes the old poem and makes the intention and 92

technique of re-shaping itself the object of appreciation. 7 In doing so, Buson creates a startling twist on the accepted meaning of the old poem, which is the skillfully Basho-esque use of “haikai imagination” described in Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams.

Connotatively speaking, Buson laments that

Basho’s frog, which is suggestive of spring, has no strength to jump into the old pond, and just grows old, buried by the fallen leaves that are associated with winter. 9 Finally, read with the knowledge that Buson’s hokku is a parody of Basho’s, it is reasonable to read Buson’s poem as commentary on the pitiful situations of the haikai genre of his day: “That is, a statement of frustration and dissatisfaction with the popular neglect of Basho’s teachings. In other words, a once energetic and youthful animal -- Basho’s poetic legacy -- is now dormant and aging in the frozen barrenness of the contemporary haikai community.”

Due to the scope and main focus of this chapter and for readers who are interested in the East Asian poetic traditions, I will discuss the root causes of this “frozen barrenness of the contemporary haikai community” and the Chinese influences, especially the ideal of the bunjin (Chinese: wenren, which means scholar-amateur), on Buson, the leading figure in the Basho Revival moment. 11 Although literary historians have often talked about three successive major schools of haikai -- the Teimon, Danrin, and Shomon (the Basho school) – in the later half of the seventeenth century and “have identified the Genroku period (1688--1704) with the ‘Basho style’.”

However, recent

studies have showed that even at the summit of his career, Basho was just one of several prominent haikai masters, and was far from having the largest number of followers or having formed the most influential school.

After 93

his death in 1694, his disciples had varied views on writing haikai, emphasizing different aspects of the “Basho style,” and eventually formed their own followings. Within years, Basho’s school faded quickly, and his disciples and their followers used his name and legacy to form individual factions, fighting fiercely with each other to expand their local base of poetic influence. Over years of grouping and regrouping among Basho’s disciples and their followers, there were two major factions: the rural Shomon, which was divided into two sub-factions, the Mino and Ise factions, and the urban Shomon. The division was related to the different periods of the Basho style during which he made stylistic changes exemplified in various anthologies published by his supporters. 14 Rural Shmon poets looked to the style with which Basho experimented in the last years of his life, the karumi (lightness) style. This style “emphasized simplicity and ordinary language and situations,”

and

the verse anthology, Charcoal Sack, was considered by the followers as the “epitome of good haikai.”

Urban Shomon poets closely followed the style

of Basho’s developed in the Tenna period (1681--84), the kanshibuncho or Chinese style. “[It] was a literary, elevated style that drew on kanshi (poetry in Chinese) for its model,” 17 and the verse anthology, Empty Chestnuts, was regarded as the “‘quintessential expression of Basho’s kanshibuncho period.” 18 During the first four decades of the eighteenth century, most of Basho’s first generation disciples passed away. The internal fighting became worse, and haikai lost the elegance and beauty that Basho had imparted to the form. “The ‘grandchildren disciples’ of Basho either reverted to the superficial humor of the Teitoku and Danrin schools, or else wrote verses of 94

such utter simplicity and insignificance that they hardly merit the name of poetry.” 19 Even worse was the rise and great influence of a highly commercialized form of haikai -- tentori (point-scoring) haikai. During Buson’s day, there was a group of professional verse-markers (tenja) who mainly relied on their literary talents to make a living. Through the aid of a go-between, the verse-marker set the verse, the haikai practitioners responded to it with their verses, and then the verse-marker graded them with points (ten). The verse-marker and the go-between were paid for their service, and the practitioners got their points and competed with each other to see who earned the most points. This type of haikai has helped popularize the genre and also been highly successful in the early eighteenth century. 20 However, there were a lot of downsides to this popular trend. The verse-markers were mainly driven by commercial rather than educational goals: the more the practitioners, the greater their income. As for the practitioners who indulged themselves in this type of haikai, “it no longer was necessary to display depth of feeling or even a knowledge of tradition provided one was clever enough to twist the seventeen syllables into an amusing comment.”

One of the poetic characteristics the haikai masters

had advocated was to create a haikai twist, and its creation was dependent on the poet’s “skillful balancing of the conventional meaning, i.e., the honi, of a topic with whatever new and startling insight [he/she was] able to add to it, typically creating a clash between the worlds of ga [the elegant and refined] and zoku [the mundane or commonplace].”

The tentori practitioners were

less versed in waka and renga, learned little from their commercially-minded verse-markers, and thus concerned themselves with the craft of haiaki less than with writing some seemingly dazzling poems to score high points and 95

to impress their fellow practitioners. When writing haikai, they favored the zoku over the ga to score points, failing to create a haikai twist on the honi of a topic. 23 The most obvious and harmful result of this trend was that haikai became a commodity. The verse-markers didn’t help cultivate literary taste and knowledge of haikai, but rather they focused on producing points for the haikai practitioners who showed little interest in the craft of haikai, only in accumulating the points needed to impress each other. This pitiful situation did not improve until a group of Edo poets published the anthology, Ink of Five Colors, in 1731, emphasizing the skillful use of literary devices, such as word plays and similes. 24 This publication stimulated some aspiring poets to advocate the “Back to Basho” movement that openly expressed its opposition to the prevailing tentori haikai. It took almost a decade to let the haikai revival proper begin. In 1743, the fiftieth anniversary of Basho’s death, a memorial anthology was published by his followers, firmly indicating their intention to spread his poetic ideals. Furthermore, some dedicated poets followed Basho’s journey to the north of Japan, building memorial sites along the way. 25 The central figure in the Basho Revival movement was Yosa Buson (1716--83), who is often regarded as the second greatest of the haikai poets. 26

Historically and culturally speaking, Buson was born into an era in which

there was a surge of interest in Chinese culture, especially Chinese poetry and painting.

The Tokugawa governments had established Chinese

learning as the foundation of their educational policies.

During his

formative years when staying in Edo, he received a good and solid education in Confucian studies, poetry, painting, calligraphy, and music. Among Buson’s outstanding teachers, Hayano Hajin (1677?--1742) and Hattori 96

Nankaku (1683--1759) were the most influential in shaping his view of poetry and his relationships to Chinese classics. 29 Haijin was a haikai master with whom Buson lived for years. He studied his craft with Enomoto Kikaku (1661--1707) and Hattori Ransetsu (1654--1707), both of whom were urban Shomon poets, but he rejected his teachers’ “lively, witty style of hakai that appealed to Edo townmen.”

devoted himself to promoting Basho’s rural stryle. Buson “adopted an outlook between those two extremes.”

Nankaku was a student of one of

the most important Confucian scholars, Ogyu Sorai (1666--1728), who emphasized an unmediated understanding of Chinese classics, and whose thoughts had highly influenced the leading painters of nanga (also known as bunjinga, which literally means literati painting). Nanga was a school of Japanese painting modeled on the Chinese Southern school of painting, to which Buson belonged. Nankaku specialized in Chinese classics, and one of his greatest achievements was the Toshisen, a Japanese edition of one the most influential Chinese verse anthologies, Tang Selected Poems. The Toshisen had long served as one of the foundational texts for the bunjin movement. 32 As John Rosenfield emphasizes in Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks, “Bason’s cultural make-up was essentially bi-national, the Chinese and native Japanese elements woven together in a seamless fabric.”

The

Shomon haikai helped Buson establish his primary identity as a Japanese poet; his other artistic interest, nanga, and his perception of being an artist were highly influenced by the Chinese ideal of the wenren (Japanese: bunjin). The Japanese term "bunjin" has a centuries-old history beginning in the Heian period (794--1185) known for its poetry and highly influenced by 97

Chinese Tang culture. Its original meaning was “a literate person serving in a civil capacity” as opposed to bujin, who is in military service).”

some

scholars stress that it was not until the eighteenth century that there was the “emergence of a more specific bunjin phenomenon,…presented as follows: discontent among the educated and a concurrent upswing in the study of Chinese philosophy, literature and art, stimulated some intellectuals to take the image of the Chinese [scholar-amateur] (the wenren)…as their model.” 35

The concept of “wenren” is highly related to that of “renwen” (wenren written inversely in Chinese). It can be found in the Yi Jing, also known as the Book of Changes, which is one of the oldest of Chinese classics.

Renwen can roughly be translated as meaning the "arts of humanity," one component of the three-fold Chinese universe: heaven, earth, and humanity. It "embodies all that is of the highest value to the society, and interacts with the other two: the spiritual and philosophical (tianwen) and the environmental and ecological (diwen).

A person cultivated in renwen was

originally called wenren. However, the meaning of wenren has changed over time. In its most idealized form, wenren referred to “scholar-officials who – either through misfortune or because of some political conviction – withdrew from circles of power, and spent their time writing poetry, practicing calligraphy and painting, and enjoying the company of likeminded friends. Wenren did not sell their work, but used it as a means of contemplation and self-cultivation.”

Generally speaking, these wenren

embodied a finely cultivated artistic sensibility They were dedicated to the “amateur ideal” and therefore denounced the commercialization of art. John Rosenfield once summarized the ethos of this learned gentry as follows:

“Scholar-Amateurs… practiced calligraphy, poetry, and painting with more or less equal facility; they played musical instruments, collected antiques, carved seals, and engaged in literary scholarship. No matter how adept they might become in these avocations, they refused to think themselves as professionals. ‘if you fall into the demon world of the professional painter, ‘ wrote the [Chinese] theorist Dong Qichang (1555 – 1636), ‘there is no medicine that can save you.’ In their concerns for selfexpression they refused to work for unsympathetic patrons or for the marketplace.”

For example, in 1751 the Kyoto poet Mootsu published an excellent verse anthology that he hoped would revive interest in the haikai of the past masters, especially that of Basho, and he invited Buson to write a preface.

At age thirty-five, Buson was a struggling painter with a good reputation in Edo who had a sharp eye for the socio-poetic development of the haikai, strongly criticizing the mainstream tentori haikai in the preface: “Nowadays those who are prominent in haikai have different approaches to the various styles, castigating this one and scorning that one, and they thrust out their elbows and puff out their cheeks, proclaiming themselves haikai masters They will flatter the rich, and cause the small-minded [i.e., tentori poets] to run wild, and compile anthologies that list numerous unpolished verses.

Those who really know haikai frown and throw them away.” 41 Buson’s discontent with a highly commercialized form of haikai was an “inextricable part of the image of the [bunjin]” of his day.

In fact,

historically and educationally speaking, point scoring was not in itself an evil tool, but rather an educational means widely used by the masters of waka and renga for centuries.

Buson also used it to inspire his disciples to

achieve the highest possible standard of haikai: “mediocre verses received no points, but better verses merited scores of seven, ten, twenty, and twentyfive points depending on their quality… and [he] used special seals to mark the verses that used phrases that made allusions to famous Basho’s hokku.” 44

For example, the verses that made skillful allusions to Basho’s frog hokku

merited twenty points. commercializing

haikai

It was the cheapening effects of popularizing and that

made

Buson

hostile

towards

tentori

practitioners. The only thing on the minds of those practitioners was to write seemingly more dazzling, zoku-favored poem in order to score more points. But, for Buson and his fellow Basho Revival poets who embraced the bunjin ideal, “how to balance zoku and ga in haikai was a perennial question.” 46 As Cheryl Crowley emphasizes in her well-researched book, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, ideologically speaking, there were “two points of intersection between the bunjin ideal and the Basho Revival.” 47

The first point was that reading and writing poetry was not only a joyful

pleasure, but also the “cultivation of the spirit.”

The second was the

genuine, deep-rooted contempt for any form of commercialized art.

Furthermore, in order to assert their options of choosing patrons, many

100

scholar-amateurs “declined to work even for the imperial count when they believed it to be corrupt and debased in taste.” 50 In Buson’s day, a lot of serious-minded haikai poets were closely associated with the sinophile intellectuals who helped give rise to the idealization of bunjin, particularly those poets who wrote kanshi

Among

his fellow poets and friends, Miyake Shozan ( 1718--1081) and Kuroyanagi Shoha (1727--71) exerted great influences on him in broadening and deepening his knowledge of Chinese literature.

Shozan was known for

publishing kanshi anthologies, and one of his most important works was his 1763 Haikai Selected Old Verses, an influential Basho Revival collection of verses that was modeled on one of the most greatest Chinese verse anthologies, Tang Selected Poems.

Buson’s frequent use of imagery

alluding to Chinese literature was in part due to Shozan’s influence. 54 Shoha studied Chinese classics first in the school founded by Ito Jinsai (1627--1705), a fundamental parts of whose teachings was to “organize and recapture the classics of the past,”

and later he studied with

Nankaku, with whom Buson also studied. Shoha wrote a lot of kanshi in his early life, and came to learn haikai later with Buson. Of his students, Shoha was among “those with the strongest ties to the literate, sinophilic culture that engendered the ideal of the bunjin.”

His conversations with Buson on

haikai later became the key component of the preface Buson wrote for the Shundei Verse Anthology, and this preface was one of the most influential texts for the Basho Revival, revealing that Buson’s view of the poetics of haikai was shaped by Chinese influences.

(Due to its significance on how

to write good haiai, I quote the following lengthy passages from Crowley’s translation):

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I went to visit Shundei-sha Sh么ha at his second house in the west of Kyoto. Sh么ha asked me a question about haikai. I answered, "Haikai is that which has as its ideal the use of zokugo (ordinary language), yet transcends zoku (the mundane). To transcend zoku yet make use of zoku, the principle of rizoku, is most difficult. It is the thing that So-and-So Zen master spoke of: 'Listen to the sound of the Single Hand,' in other words haikai zen, the principle of rizoku (transcending the mundane)." Through this, Sh么ha understood immediately. He then continued his questions. "Although the essence of your teaching must be profound, is there not some method of thought that I could put into use, by which one might seek this by oneself? Indeed, is there not some shortcut, by which one might, without making a distinction between Other and Self, identify with nature and transcend zoku?" I answered, "Yes, the study of Chinese poetry. You have been studying Chinese poetry for years. Do not seek for another way." Doubtful, Sh么ha made so bold as to ask, "But Chinese poetry and haikai are different in tenor. Setting aside haikai, and studying Chinese poetry instead, is that not more like a detour?" I answered, "Painters have the theory of 'Avoiding zoku:' 'To avoid the zoku in painting, there is no other way but to read many texts, that is to say, both books and scrolls, 102

which causes the qi to rise, as commercialism and vulgarity cause qi to fall. The student should be careful about this.' To avoid zoku in painting as well, they caused their students to put down the brush and read books. Less possible still is it to differentiate Chinese poetry and haikai." With that, Shôha understood. 58 In the passages above, Buson clearly tells Shoha that 1) the key point of writing good haikai is to make good use of the ordinary language and yet transcend the mundane world, and that 2) the direct route to achieve this goal is to study Chinese poetry. Buson’s theory of “avoiding zoku” basically paraphrases the one that is articulated in Mustard and Garden Manual of Painting compiled by Chinese artist Wang Gai (1645-- 1707), a book with which many renowned Chinese painters began their drawing lessons, and which was particularly influential among Japanese nanga artists.

As Cheryl Crowley stresses,

“despite the fact haikai was a native Japanese poetic genre, it was closely linked with the world of sinophile intellectuals that flourished in [the eighteenth century], and the Basho Revival owned much to the ideas and notions that circulated within it.”

We can see this clearly in the poetic

career of Buson, the central figure in the Basho Revival movement who is often regarded as the second greatest of the haikai poets.

(Published in Haijinx, Vol. IV No. 1, March 2011) 103

Notes

1 Honkadori is not simply an allusion to a literary work and it may also function as quoting, which means lines are copied word for word. “[It] is true that within the Japanese cultural tradition there is a well-developed custom of quoting and borrowing… In fact, more than just a custom is involved here: various ways of quoting were themselves regarded as artistic techniques and were admired and appreciated in the same way as original works of art. It is natural to suppose that an 'art of quoting' could be appreciated by connoisseurs who share common knowledge with the artists, since quoting is quoting something that is known by those who quote and those who listen, view or read.” For further information, see Akiko Tsukamoto, "Modes of Quoting: Parody and Honkadori," Simply Haiku, Vol. 2, No. 4 (July/August, 2004), accessed at http://bit.ly/fN1UPx 2 Cheryl A. Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, Boston: Brill, c2007, p. 55. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 56. 7 See Tsukamoto. 8 Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 2-10. 9 Ibid., p. 34. 10 See Crowley, pp. 57-8.

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11 The Basho Revival moment began in 1743, the fiftieth anniversary of Basho’s death: a memorial anthology was published by his followers. It “came to the fore in the 1760s and climaxed during 1770s – 1780s… [and was] led first by Taigi (1709 – 71) and then by Buson (1716 – 83).” For further information, see Shirane, pp. 33-7. 12 See Shirane, p. 30. 13 Ibid. 14 See Crowley, p. 27. 15 Ibid., p. 23. 16 Ibid., p. 28. 17 Ibid., p. 23. 18 Ibid. 19 Donald Keene, World within Walls: Japanese Literature of the PreModern Era, 1600-1867, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976, p. 337. 20 Cheryl Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular: Tentori Haikai and the Bashô Revival,” Japan Studies Review, Vol., 9, 2005, p. 5. In this well thought-out essay, Crowley “[discusses] the characteristics of haikai that made it a part of popular culture…then [examines] the circumstances of the historical development of haikai that led to the rise of tentori (point-scoring) haikai, and …[shows] how the Revival poets' efforts to counteract what they saw as the cheapening effect of popularization as a defense not only for the dignity of haikai, but of their own as well.” It was reprinted in the Spring 2006 issue of Simply Haiku, and can be accessed at http://bit.ly/hMSQfC 21 see Keene, pp. 337-8. 22 See Crowley, p. 54. 23 See Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular,” p. 5. 105

24 See Keene, p. 341. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 See Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular,” p. 8. 28 John M. Rosenfield, Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson, University of Kansas, Seattle, Washington, 2003, p. 8. For further information on the historical and educational contexts, see Marleen Kassel’s Tokugawa Confucian Education: The Kangien Academy of Hirose Tansō (1782-1856), a book that “presents the world of Hirose Tanso, a late Tokugawa period (1603-1868) educator whose goal was to train men of talent in practical learning for the benefit of the country.” 29 Ibid., p. 4. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 1. 34Anna Beeren, Friends, Acquaintances, Pupils and Patrons : Japanese Intellectual Life in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Prosopographical Approach, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2006, p. 23. 35 Ibid., pp. 24-5. 36 Kwok Siu Tong and Chan Sin-wai, ed., Culture and Humanity in the New Millennium: The Future of Human Values, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002, p. 18. 37 Ibid. 38 Crowley, pp. 14-5. 39 See Rosenfield, pp. 8-9. 40 See Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular,” p. 4. 106

41 Ibid. 42 See Beeren, p. 25. 43 See Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular,” p. 5. 44 See Crowley, p. 97 45 Ibid. 46 See Crowley, “Depopularizing the Popular,” p. 5. 47 See Crowley, p.17 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 See Rosenfield, p. 9. 51 Ibid., p. 9. 52 Cheryl Crowley, “Kanagaki no shi: Yosa Buson's Haishi,” presented at Asia Reconstructed: Proceedings of the 16th Biennial Conference of the ASAA, University of Wollongong, Australia, 2006, p. 4, accessed at http://bit.ly/bieuwf 53 See Crowley, pp. 16-7. 54 Ibid., p. 74. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 48. 57 Ibid., pp. 47-8. 58 See Crowley, “Kanagaki no shi: Yosa Buson's Haishi,” p. 5. The complete translation of this preface can be found in Rosenfield, pp. 66-7, and in Crowley, Haikai Poet Yosa Buson and the Basho Revival, pp. 275-7. 59 See Crowley, p. 49. 60 Ibid., p. 47.

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Section Two: Featured Haiku

autumn dusk red leaves fall into a poem in memory of Peggy Willis Lyles (September 17, 1939 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; September 3, 2010), who helped me publish my first English language haiku and in response to one of her one-line haiku: into the afterlife red leaves

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1 Award-Winning Haiku

her face in my whisky the moon floats Grand Prix, 2010 Klostar Ivanic Haiku Contest (in English) Croatian translation by Marinko Spanovic njeno lice u mom viskiju plovi mjesec published in Klostar Ivanic 2010 Haiku Miscellany Judge's comment: I would like to put down some thoughts about the haiku which I gave the Grand Prix. This haiku is very formative and dimensional; one can build the WHOLE WORLD upon it. One can read it and listen to it from all sides and experience it in countless ways without using up any of the TRUE BEAUTY AND LOVE...

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autumn dusk… I stir my coffee anticlockwise

特選(Prize Winner), 12th HIA Haiku Contest (2010) Japanese Translation by Hidenori Hiruta

秋の夕暮れ・・・コーヒーをかき回す時計と反対で回りで

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cherry petals falling on cherry petals . . . I dust your photo Sakura Award, 2010 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational

cherry blossoms the moon and I face each other Honorable Mention, 2010 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational

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fork in the road... standing still to hear the leaves Honorable Mention, 2010 Winter Moon Awards for Haiku

Judge's Comment: I could make this symbolic: what do the trees tell me, which direction should I take; but I choose to imagine myself standing at the fork, closing my eyes, just listening to the sound of leaves before I move on. I like that the poem is larger than itself.

Pacific shore... my poem is folded into a boat Honorable Mention, 2010 Winter Moon Awards for Haiku

Judge's Comment: What will the poet do next? Leave the poem to the sea to be collected by a wave? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m invited to wonder. To decide for myself.

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I love you... that hazy moon in Rashomon Honorable Mention, the 14th Mainichi Haiku Contest (2010)

a dried lotus leaf in Tibetan Book of the Dead... winter dusk

Third Place, 2010 World Haiku Competition

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Silent Night drifting in from the neighbors -I relearn Chinese Second Place, 2011 North Carolina Poetry Society Lyman Haiku Award; forthcoming in Pinesong

Judgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Comment: This haiku contrasts two images: hazy holiday relaxation and the study of a difficult language. Perhaps relearning Chinese is a resolution for the New Year or perhaps not. A good haiku leaves something to the reader's imagination. Reading aloud the poem reveals the subtle link between its first two words and its last. The mixture of auditory and visual images makes this a prize-winning haiku.

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2 Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Choice Haiku

beach bonfire... nothing left between the moon and me May / June 2010 haiku thread of Sketchbook

peeling my pear in a thin, unbroken spiral... hometown memories First Choice Winner, July/August 2010 haiku thread of Sketchbook

job hunting... a yellow leaf drifts from branch to branch First Choice Winner, Sep./Oct. 2010 haiku thread of Sketchbook

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an African man holds out his handsâ&#x20AC;Ś snowflakes November /December 2010 haiku thread of Sketchbook

her faraway lookâ&#x20AC;Ś balloon hearts flutter in the spring breeze January / February 2011 haiku thread of Sketchbook

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butterflies wing over cherry petals -shadows embracing Berry Blue Haiku, #1, June 2010

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Comment: 1 Michele Pizarro Harman: We love this haiku for so many reasons. First, we admire the use of â&#x20AC;&#x153;wingâ&#x20AC;? as a verb, since the actual butterfly wing, a noun, and its shape are essential to the themes and imagery of the poem: the shape of the wing and its shadow and of the petal and its shadow are shown by the poet to be so similar, akin, as the shadows meet under the cherry tree in a sweet embrace. And, in the same way that the shadows match and embrace, so, too, the letters and sounds of the poem do in an aural and visual alliteration. The relationship between things and their shadows becomes an interchangeable simile for letters and their sounds: the r's and s's in all three lines, and the ing's and long o's in lines two and three. Of course, the theme of the essential one-ness of all things is another layer in the poem, the plant and insect here shown by the poet as one in that fleeting moment in which their identities cannot be separated, in that moment when the two merge on the broad face of Spring's renewed earth.

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on maple leaves glittering raindrops gather -floating worlds Berry Blue Haiku, #1, June 2010

Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Comment: 2 Gisele LeBlanc: We were all enchanted by the imagery of this haiku. The idea of mini floating worlds sent our imaginations soaring. Upon reading it, I visualize the calm moment after rain has subsided, with sunshine reflecting off raindrops which have gathered on leaves. At first I imagined this as a summer haiku, with the leaves still in the trees, but the floating worlds could also be interpreted to mean the leaves are falling gently to the ground, or perhaps the raindrops are gathering on the newly-fallen leaves. Autumn colors also add vibrancy to the image. An outstanding haiku."

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grassy fields... nothing stands between me and the sun Third Choice Winner, Haiku Reality, #5 Portuguese Translation by Henrique Pimenta verdinho o campo nadinha entre mim e o sol Serbian Translation by Saša Važić travnata polja... ničega između mene i sunca

Editors' Comments: 3 Both an'ya and I [Jasminka Nadaškić-Đorđević] agreed on this haiku by Chen-ou Liu for our Third Favorite. Here is one simple picture, everybody can imagine, or remember, or feel it. This is one great moment when man, as the only one in the world, can feel only nature around him and inside.

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an empty chair at the Nobel ceremony ... thoughts of Tank Man Haiku of Merit, World Haiku Review, January 2011 (note: The Tank Man is the nickname given by the international media of an young man who stood in front of a column of Chinese tanks on the morning of June 5, 1989.)

Christmas snow can angels dance on a pinhead? Honorable Mention, World Haiku Review, January 2011

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wordless in my borrowed tongue plum blossoms December 2010 issue of The Heron's Nest voted one of Popular Poems of the Year (The Heron's Nest Readers Choice Award, Volume XII, 2010)

his smile . . . the salmon showing its teeth lies motionless 2010 Haiku Society of America Members' Anthology

blizzardâ&#x20AC;Ś reciting Basho in a world of one color 2011 Haiku Canada Membersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Anthology

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Notes

1 Gisele LeBlanc and Michele Pizarro Harman, "Our June 2010 Haiku Picks," Berry Blue Haiku, accessed at http://bit.ly/hlsfH6 2 Ibid. 3 An'ya and Jasminka Nadaškić-Đorđević, "Selected Haiku," Haiku Reality, #5, accessed at http://bit.ly/h4Ud6n

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3 An Evaluation and Introspective Look at the Haiku of Chen-ou Liu by Robert D. Wilson

moonlight no wine, reading Li po

Anyone familiar with Tang dynasty poetry knows of Li Po. China, when it colonized the archipelago now called Japan, introduced to its people religious beliefs, writing, mathematics, medicine, a system of politics, and other things indigenous to the formation of a civilized society. Even today, China's contributions to the formation of Japan as a society are deeply engrained into the people's cultural memory. Matsuo Basho was conversant and literate in Chinese as was any serious poet of his day. His poetry, both overtly and covertly, sometimes includes references, legends, quotes, and religious beliefs held by Chinese poets during the Tang dynasty. He was an avid reader and obviously had access to ancient Chinese scrolls. Basho also relied on the oral transmission of Chinese poetry because public libraries were non-existent in Imperial Japan, as written scrolls were reserved for the elite to read and study. Matsuo Basho most likely copied some of the poems written in these scrolls for

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future reading, study, and reflection; and like most people in Japan do today, committed much poetry to memory. Says Chen-ou: As an individual, Li Po was free-spirited. He took an unusual path in life and career. Well-traveled at a young age, he didn’t bother to take the Chinese civil service examination which was viewed as the only way to elevate one’s social status and guarantee their prosperity. He dared to challenge authority, and loved a good bottle of wine and making friends. His nonconformist personality characteristics continue to stand as a model for me to emulate. As a poet, Li Po is one of the most loved Chinese poets and his poems are widely taught in schools, memorized by children, and constantly recited on all sorts of occasions. The first poem I ever memorized was his “Thoughts in Night Quiet,” the best known of all Chinese poems, especially among Chinese living overseas: Seeing moonlight here at my bed, and thinking it's frost on the ground, I look up, gaze at the mountain moon, then back, dreaming of my old home. 124

-- translated by David Hinton When I was six, my father recited this poem to me with watery eyes. At that time, he hadn’t seen his family for two decades since he came to Taiwan in 1949, with the defeated Chinese Nationalist Army. I memorized the poem and didn’t fully reflect upon its meaning in my heart and mind. Little was understood about the suffering endured by my father and his generation due to the Chinese Civil War. It was not until the seventh year since I emigrated to Canada that I’d experienced this pang of nostalgic longing explored in Li’s poem through the moon imagery – a symbol of distance and family reunion – portrayed in simple and evocative language. Since then, every time when I thought of my parents, my family, and my hometown, I recited “Thoughts in Night Quiet,” which is not only Li’s poem but also mine. More importantly, some of the recurring themes in Li’s poems

appeal

greatly

me,

such

dreams,

solitude/loneliness, and the passage of time, and they become the key motifs of my work. His skillful use of language, his great sensibility toward imagery, and his deep insights into the human condition through a Taoist lens capture nuanced human experience, which is the main goal I want to achieve in my writing. 125

Regardless of the language a haiku is written in, be it English, Rumanian, or another, it's imperative to understand the perspective of the cultural memories one's poetry emanates from. Poets build bridges to carry us across the chasm of morning fog. The chasms below are filled with the ashes and petrified feces of pseudo ideologies the insecure sculpt to build mirrors that tell the witch in Snow White what she wants to hear and bullies the weak and naive to believe. Chen-ou is an avid learner desirous to learn from whatever source of knowledge he can glean from, regardless of geographical origin, aware that truth is international and interpretative. seeing Fitzcarraldo... I go around for hours wearing the actor's face Learning today is not limited to books. Fitzcarraldo is a German movie based upon the true life story of an Irishman named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald portrayed in a 1982 film. Wanting to be a rubber baron, Fitzgerald, an Irishman known as Carlos Fitzcarraldo in Peru, had to pull a steamship over a steep hill in order to access a rich rubber territory to obtain his dream of becoming a wealthy rubber baron. One of the joys of reading good literature is the mental ability of a reader to enter another dimension, to become, momentarily, the person he is reading about... a metaphysical journey into what the reader perceives is the mindset of another.

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Regardless of where a poet travels and studies, he or she cannot escape one's roots and the influences that paint illusions from their upbringing. Chen-ou, when introduced to haiku, felt a bond that shared common philosophical and spiritual belief systems indigenous to China and Japan. Li Po and poets like Basho had beliefs in common. One day, Chen-ou's name appeared nowhere in English language haiku circles; then like a rabbit pulled out of a magician's top hat, the Taiwanese writer, through study and dedication, developed a unique, fresh haiku voice that only now is getting the recognition it deserves. The timing is also right. People in the world want to see, feel, and understand Japanese poetry from perspectives other than those propagated by the West. In the Greek language, for example, there is a greater variation in word definitions. In Vietnamese, definitions are often determined by musical tone; and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that cultures vary in their understandings of words and actions. Haiku is a Japanese genre that is not dependent upon Western interpretation to earn a wider international audience. It is a genre, as Chen-ou wisely understands, that requires practice, study, and a deeper understanding. The following poem by Chen-ou reminds me of Basho's famous haiku about the frog jumping into the sound of water. It's been said the poet's job is to write a poem and the reader's job is to interpret it. This is one reader's well thought out interpretation. one by one frogs make holes in the pond... starry night 127

Chen-ou is not one to follow formulas or subject himself to the narrowness of only one master's teaching. Here he makes use of European surrealism Chinese/Japanese yugen: my mind between crescent moons... mother's scent Composing a quality haiku, which necessitates a minimum of words, is a great challenge. The use of yugen (depth and mystery), ma (dreaming room), the unsaid, and other aesthetic tools are aides to help the poet work within the limitations of a short form poem, giving what western painters call 'white space,' a voice that says more with less. It is this white space, the room to ruminate the poet's hints, to evaluate light and illusion that separate the poor from the good in haiku. my mind between crescent moons... As an experiment, write your own third line: ... Poetry is the world's conscience, a collectivity of emotions that refuses to be silent as evident in Chen-ou's poems about Tiananmen Square. his gun... 128

fascinated with snowflakes Chen-ou told me, I was glued to the TV, watching the events unfold… first shocked, angry, then anxious over the lives and safety of the protesting students, later turned to frustration and helpless feelings. The following day (June 5), when seeing a young man, then known as Tank Man as well as Unknown Rebel, stop the advance of a column of tanks... he stared down tanks – eyes opened for Beijing Olympics I just cried out loud for minutes. Later, I turned off the TV and sat quietly in the living room. A sense of calmness emerged. This image, which embodied the demonstration of Confucius’ ideal of courage (“Looking back at oneself, if one is upright, one advances even against thousands upon ten thousands of men!”), has since been etched on my mind. cherry petals fall upon cherry petals shadows apart 129

Offers Chen-ou, As one who is an English learner as well as a struggling poet, I feel that writing poetry is to experiment with being -- functioning with relative freedom in an unfamiliar world of the alphabet to strike out toward the unknown, to make myself up from moment to moment. Most of the time, I feel I fail in creating a new personality through fresh language and evocative imagery. For me now, being a poet means being voluntarily mad and struggling alone with voices whispering, 'we all know youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a failed poet. Good Friday deep inside his mouth no more "why?" Writing is a Jobian struggle against noises -- and silence.

(First published in Simply Haiku, Vol. 8. No. 2, Autumn 2010)

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Author: Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen-ou Liu was a college teacher, essayist, editor, and two-time winner of the national Best Book Review Radio Program Award. In 2002, he emigrated to Canada and settled in Ajax, a suburb of Toronto, where he continues to struggle with a life in transition and translation. He is a contributing writer for Rust+Moth and the World Kigo Database, on which his personal webpage is called “Confessions of a Germanophile”

(http://europasaijiki.blogspot.com/2011/02/chen-ou-

liu.html). Chen-ou Liu is the author of the forthcoming book entitled Broken/Breaking English: Selected Short Poems of Chen-ou Liu. His poems have been published and anthologized worldwide. His tanka and haiku have been honored with 12 awards, including Grand Prix in the 2010 Klostar Ivanic Haiku Contest in English,

特選 (Prize Winner) in the 12th Haiku

International Association Haiku Contest, Second Place in the North Carolina Poetry Society Lyman Haiku Award, and Tanka Third Place in the 2009 San Francisco International Haiku, Senryu, Tanka, and Rengay Competition. Read more of his poems on his poetry blog, Poetry in the Moment (http://chenouliu.blogspot.com/).

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