Beyond the Haiku Moment:
Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku myths
by Haruo Shirane
Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature, Columbia University
[Modern Haiku, XXXI:1 (winter-spring 2000)]
What does North American haiku look like when observed from Japan? What kind of advice might haiku masters such as Basho and Buson give to English haiku poets? What would Basho and Buson say if they were alive today and could read English and could read haiku done by North American poets?
I think that they would be delighted to find that haiku had managed to cross the Pacific and thrive so far from its place of origin. They would be impressed with the wide variety of haiku composed by North American haiku poets and find their work most innovative. At the same time, however, they would also be struck, as I have been, by the narrow definitions of haiku found in haiku handbooks, magazines, and anthologies. I was once told that Ezra Pound's famous metro poem first published in 1913, was not haiku.
The apparition
of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough .
If I remember correctly, the reason for disqualification was that the metro poem was not about nature as we know it and that the poem was fictional or imaginary. Pound's poem may also have been ruled out since it uses an obvious metaphor: the petals are a metaphor for the apparition of the faces, or vice versa. This view of the metro poem was based on the three key definitions of haiku - haiku is about direct observation, haiku eschews metaphor, and haiku is about nature - which poets such as Basho and Buson would have seriously disputed.
Haiku as Direct Personal Experience or Observation
One of the widespread beliefs in North America is that haiku should be based upon one's own direct experience, that it must derive from one's own observations, particularly of nature. But it is important to remember that this is basically a modern view of haiku, the result, in part, of nineteenth century European realism, which had an impact on modern Japanese haiku and then was re-imported back to the West as something very Japanese. Basho, who wrote in the seventeenth century, would have not made such a distinction between direct personal experience and the imaginary, nor would he have placed higher value on fact over fiction.
Basho was first and foremost a master of haikai, or comic linked poetry. In haikai lined verse, the seventeen syllable hokku, or opening verse, is followed by a 14 syllable wakiku, or added verse, which in turn is followed by the seventeen syllable third verse, and so forth. Except for the first verse, which stood alone, each additional verse was read together with the previous verse and pushed away from the penultimate verse, or the verse prior to the previous verse. Thus, the first and second verse, the second and third verse, third and fourth verse formed independent units, each of which pushed off from the previous unit.
The joy and pleasure of haikai was that it was imaginary literature, that the poets who participated in linked verse moved from one world to the next, across time, and across space. The basic idea of linked verse was to create a new and unexpected world out of the world of the previous verse. Once could compose about one's daily life, about being an official in China, about being a warrior in the medieval period, or an aristocrat in the ancient period. The other participants in the haikai sequence joined you in that imaginary world or took you to places that you could reach on with your imagination.
One of the reasons that linked verse became so popular in the late medieval period, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it first blossomed as a genre, was because it was a form of escape from the terrible wars that ravaged the country at the time. For samurai in the era of constant war, linked verse was like the tea ceremony; it allowed one to escape, if only for a brief time, from the world at large, from all the bloodshed. The joy of it was that one could do that in the close company of friends and companions. When the verse sequence was over, one came back to earth, to reality. The same occurred in the tea ceremony as developed by Sen no Rikyu. The tea hut took one away from the cares of this world, together with one's friends and companions.
