The Heart of Haiku

by Jane Hirshfield

“But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.”

Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveller’s attention.

Bashō’s haiku, taken as a whole, conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said and known by image. When the space between poet and object disappears, Bashō taught, the object itself can begin to be fully perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence is made larger. “Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote. The statement foreshadows by three centuries T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.

“investigation into what can be said and known by image”

One magnet is the paradox of haiku’s scale and speed. In the moment of haiku perception, something outer is seen, heard, tasted, felt, emplaced in a scene or context. That new perception then seeds an inner response beyond paraphrase, name, or any other form of containment.

To read a haiku is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life.

Paths mattered to Bashō,

hokku or “presenting verse.”

These hokku eventually evolved into the three-line haiku.

poverty, for Bashō, was neither accidental nor incidental. It was a honing stone for the sharpening of awareness.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Poetry can be thought of in much the same way, and the recognition of impermanence, ceaseless alteration, and interdependence—the connection of each person, creature, event, and object with every other—need not be “Buddhist.”

A sharp Zen spirit glints from his poems, in their compassion, insights, and humor, and in the quietly Buddhist stance of poet and object as “not one, not two.”

The fidelity of Zen is to this world, and to how we see and taste it in our lives and our lives in it.

how admirable— a man seeing lightning and not satori*

Shinto, Japan’s other major spiritual tradition, saturates Bashō’s poems as well, most noticeably in the importance given to place and the way that particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes. Shinto’s kami spirits live not in generality, abstraction, or paradise but embedded in the earthly, visitable, and local—shrines, mountains, islands, fields, and trees. Bashō’s lifelong practice of poetry pilgrimage joined Zen non-attachment with Shinto’s deep-seated spirits of place. *

a hangover? who cares, while there are blossoms

In Japanese poetry, allusion to the moon is always, first, the moon itself, actual in the night sky. But the image holds almost always some additional meaning—often a Buddhist reference to awakened understanding.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

When he began to take poetry writing seriously, Bashō was influenced by the rapidly changing aesthetics and schools of poetry of the time.

In Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as sabi—a quality at the heart of much of Bashō’s mature writing.

sabishi

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did “infinity in the palm of your hand”—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.

karazake

An idea often linked to sabi, and equally important to Bashō’s work, wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

wabi-sabi,

Where Basho got his name

transparency of boundary is one of haiku’s most basic devices and instructions,

in rented rooms signing my name: “cold winter rains”

don’t copy me, like the second half of a cut melon!

“Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.”

Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, “If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don’t worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.”

Good advice for all poets. All writers, really.

karumi: “lightness.”

write “the way a clear, shallow river runs over a sandy bed.”

this autumn, why do I grow old? a bird entering clouds

on a journey, ill, dreams scouring on through exhausted fields

His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer.

Bashō’s poems also instruct in an alternative possibility of being. One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

the cicada’s singing does not show its body is already dying

Under this world’s long rains, here passes poetry’s makeshift shelter.

Written in his hat