Pressing Sushi
Pressing Sushi
After a while
A lonely feeling
Yosa Buson, a Japanese haiku poet and artist, wrote this “aha” moment captured in three lines. He could have been writing about a teeth-gritting Santa Ana wind in the San Fernando Valley or a Kansas summer evening after chasing fireflies. Or maybe he was talking about a sushi master smoking a cigarette in the alley behind his restaurant in October. Maybe none of those since he was born in 1716 and died in 1783. However, he does seize the universal glimpse. He was one of the great haiku masters, along with Basho, Issa and Shiki.
Haiku is a traditional Japanese verse form expressing a single emotion or idea with 17 syllables. These syllables are arranged in lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. Sometimes. Basho’s motto was “learn the rules, and then forget them.” Many languages don’t lend themselves to the metrical break of 5, 7 and 5 and some don’t work with the 17 syllables. And Japanese haiku, when translated, doesn’t maintain this form either. Traditionally, haiku should also contain a seasonal reference and imply a hidden, deeper meaning behind seemingly common words. Simple words in haiku do not convey cliches, but target an emotion or idea with new vision.
The Santohka school of haiku eliminates the 5, 7, 5 form and presents a singular image in a very short form. American haiku uses this often.
You need to see, smell, taste, touch or feel haiku. When writing haiku, use tangible images, no abstract motifs of love, lust, glory – all those unwieldy Western themes. Shun adverbs. Many haiku writers consult “kigo” lists, lists of season words. “Sajikis” or season word reference books help Japanese writers by providing thousands of entries for each season. In many ways, haiku is drawing a picture or stroking a cat with words. Feel it, don’t think it.
Issa fathered his first five children after fifty years of age. After his last child had died, he wrote:
World like a dewdrop
though it’s only a dewdrop
even so, even so
Another selection from “Osaka Asahi” published in 1929.
From infant bathtubstyle
to burial tub changing
This utter nonsense
Basho was the pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa, considered to be the finest writer of Japanese haiku during its beginning years. He was also a samurai who adopted the name Basho, “banana tree”, around 1681 after moving into a hut next to a banana tree. At his death, he was the haiku teacher to 2,000 people. His last written haiku follows.
Fallen sick on a journey
In dreams I run wildly
Over a withered moon
Two recommended books for study of haiku are The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (Essential Poets, Vol. 20), translated and published by Robert Haas, a U.S. poet laureate and Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku by William J. Higginson and William S. Higginson. Some haiku journals to consider are “Frogpond,” “Modern Haiku,” “South by Southwest” published by Red Moon Press, “Tundra,” “Black Bough,” “HWUP!,” and “Mayfly.”
In Ostuji hairon-shuu (Otsufi’s collected essays on haiku theory) edited by Toyo Yoshida, 5th edition. Tokyo: Kaede Shobo, 1947, Otsuji (Seki Osuga) writes: “If one does not grasp something – something which does not merely touch us through our senses but contacts the life within and has the dynamic form of nature – no matter how cunningly we form our words, they will give only a hollow sound. Those who compose haiku without grasping anything are merely exercising their ingenuity. The ingenious become only selectors of words and cannot create new experiences from themselves.”
If haiku seems too remote or objective, the tanka form of Japanese poetry provides a more personal or romantic vehicle. In feudal Japan, all courtiers were required to learn how to compose tanka. Haiku authority Jane Reinhold reports that “in the 9th – 12th centuries when tanka was so fashionable, poets competing in contests revived an old Chinese form by linking tanka poems together in a novel way. The poem was ‘broken’ in half so one author wrote the 5-7-5 part and another responded and finished the poem by adding his (mostly men did this though it was first done by a woman) 7 – 7 part. Instead of stoppng there, someone else wrote a new 5-7-5 poem to ‘answer’ to the previous 7-7 link and they named the genre renga – meaning linked elegance. This proved to be so much fun, poets were soon writing poems of 1,000 and even 10,000 links.”
More writers are experimenting with the tanka form now. Whether writing or experiencing any of these forms, haiku, tanka or renga, it helps to take them in directly. It is said that 90 percent of a good haiku can be understood, but it is an exceptional haiku if half of it can be understood. The last word should come from Issi.
A sudden shower falls
and naked I am riding
on a naked horse
Some of the better sites to learn more about haiku, tanka, etc. follow:
The Shiki Internet Haiku Salon
Sangeet’s Haiku and Poetry Corner
Read an interesting analysis of haiku
