The Heart of Haiku Quotes

“Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“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.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Bashō wrote, “The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“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. ”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly. Matsuo Bashō, Journal of a Travel-Worn Satchel (tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa)”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“However strong his opinions and theories, Bashō’s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. 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.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“I know I shouldn’t be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I’ve thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I’m captivated by the mountain stream’s interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“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.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Some haiku seem reports of internal awareness, some seem to point at the external, but Bashō’s work as a whole awakens us to the necessary permeability of all to all. Awareness of the mind’s movements makes clear that it is the mind’s nature to move. Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all. First comes the sight of a block of sea slugs frozen while still alive, then the sharp, kinesthetic comprehension of the inseparability of the suffering of one from the suffering of all. First comes hearing the sound of one bird singing, then the recognition that solitude can carry its own form of beauty, able to turn pain into depth.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“over 19,000 haiku about Spam—“Spamku”—have to this date been posted online.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.” However strong his opinions and theories, Bashō’s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. 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.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“A poem, he said, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku

“Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote.”
― Jane Hirshfield, The Heart of Haiku