SUNDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2024

I included five haiku in Digging for Water, the collection of poetry which I self-published in June of this year: my first experience of writing this poetic form. Recently, I have entered two of these in a haiku writing competition where all of the entries are visible to everyone else. Being able to read the entries of the other contestants is fascinating, as is trying to analyse why some of them (in my opinion, of course) are more successful than others.

Haiku are a strange mix of sensuous physicality and abstract emptiness, and in this sense they remind me of a lot of Japanese and Chinese nature painting. What I mean by this is they paint a picture of a moment in time and objects within nature  (leaves, birds, lakes) in a clear and sensual manner, but they do this in a subtly different way from how the Impressionists, for example, captured their moments in nature on their canvases. There is an emptiness at the heart of a haiku, but this is not emptiness as generally understood in the west: an absence of being or perhaps even an existential angst. It is more like a potentiality, a background which exists in order that things might unfold within it, a yin that enables the yang. It is as essential to what we read or see in the poem or painting as the physical objects and images which populate it.

There is research using eye trackers which shows that people from the East tend to spend more time scanning the background of a photograph than their western counterparts and consequently less time on the objects in the foreground. In a lot of western art, nature is something we observe from outside rather than something which surrounds us and to which we belong. Thus, in many representational paintings, the background is often a kind of theatre or stage in which the foregrounded events happen, a tendency that goes back at least as far as early Christian paintings in which the stories of the Bible were the important content and the natural background was often little more than an appropriate setting.

In contrast, I feel that the background has a much more active role in a lot of eastern nature painting. Human beings become part of nature, not detached observers of it. I recognise the danger of falling into a kind of orientalism here and drawing on stereotypes of the mysterious and inscrutable East, but I don’t think I’m imagining this pregnant emptiness in Japanese and Chinese nature paintings. Basically, it’s why I like them so much and feel that I never quite grasp their essence (although paradoxically I find great pleasure in this sense of a mystery that I can’t fully comprehend).

English versions of haiku, however, even if they conjure up attractive pictures of birds or blossom or snow, rarely manage to suggest this hint of the transcendental glimpsed through the prism of the material.  When features from one culture are borrowed or appropriated from, or hybridised with, another culture (choose whichever verb you wish according to your attitude), there is always a lot of unconscious slippage. At a formal level, the 5-7-5 of a haiku is alien to the English language in a different way from, say, that of the alexandrine, but the outcome is generally the same: we struggle to achieve the effects we want when we use either of these forms and are almost bound to distort the original, just as Buddhism or Daoism were distorted when they became popular in the counterculture during the 1960s. In this essay, therefore, I am commenting only on haiku written in English: I have no knowledge of Japanese language or culture, and even if I did I doubt that it could outweigh my linguistic and cultural baggage.

I felt that one of the main problems with many of the haiku in the competition was a struggle with rhythm, a difficulty which I imagine was rooted in the unfamiliar structure of 5-7-5. The odd number of syllables in each line is probably harder to manipulate smoothly in English, with its strong bias towards iambs and therefore an even number of beats. Perhaps a greater use of anapests and dactyls would have helped build greater fluidity, for a lot of the lines had a sort of clunkiness that some poets display when they are trying to squeeze their work into rhyming or metrical patterns: too much focus on following the template and not enough on the overall flow of the words. So in the haiku submitted, short stretches of language that would have worked perfectly well in a piece of free verse or even a more traditional English metered structure sometimes landed like the thud of heavy boots, especially in the middle seven-syllable line.

Another problem was achieving the required simplicity and sense of ease. In a good haiku, there is no straining whatsoever for effect. (To be fair, this may well be true of all of the very best art and poetry － e.g. Blake － but that’s an idea for a different essay.) Perhaps the strain and lack of naturalness in some of the haiku also arose from their authors feeling a pressure to include things from nature which were also objects of obvious beauty: raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. But describing these kinds of things well requires a fineness of language which we seemed to find hard to achieve within the unfamiliar 5-7-5 structure.

One common weakness I found in many of the haiku in the competition (and I saw the same problem in my own haiku) was a tendency for each of the three lines to stay resolutely separate from each other, like three snapshots laid out sequentially which didn’t develop into any kind of progression or narrative but also failed to intertwine thematically into a satisfying coherent whole. The better examples managed to at least turn three strands into two in what I understand is a common feature of many traditional haiku, but creating a link between the two strands that was both subtle enough and yet somehow felt instinctively ‘right’ proved beyond most of us. Only the best of the haiku, in my opinion, avoided a sense of  fragmentation.

Achieving this inner coherence is far from easy. It is not as simple as just running two of the three lines together or reducing the number of images in the poem. Nor is it solely a matter of staying on a fixed path and not making a detour because this detour seems to be an essential part of a haiku and without it the form becomes too literal and lacks that glancing indirectness which hints at the noumenal beyond the phenomenal surface reality. Online I have read people talk of the ‘satori’ moment in a haiku, a point at which it lights a flame within the mind: Bashō’s famous plop. To demand this of every haiku is surely too exacting since very few poems can be expected to help us reach zen enlightenment, but in my favourite examples from the competition there was always a point at which the world of nature and the world of the human mind met, generally in the third line: a moment when the two qualities I highlighted at the beginning of this essay － the sensuous and the abstract － came together and the poem became whole.

Returning to Bashō’s plop, several of us made deliberate efforts to incorporate such a moment into our haiku, often with an onomatopoeic word, to mark the moment when the angle of the poem shifts, but I feel that on the whole we failed. There was something just a little too calculated about how we did it. An external mark of this problem was our uncertain use of punctuation to incorporate the satori moment into the poem. A dash was the most popular solution, but in such a small poem a dash at the end of a line can feel forced and obtrusive, at least to me. More generally, punctuation is crucial in an English haiku: with so few syllables, the addition or the absence of a comma or a capital letter, or the choice of a dash rather than a colon, makes a vital difference. The sheer concision of a haiku is obviously a very strict discipline and we must learn how to use punctuation almost as a free extra syllable.

I felt we also caused ourselves problems by an overly literal interpretation of the requirement that a haiku should be placed within one of the four seasons. Thus, the words ‘winter’, ‘spring’, ‘summer’ and ‘autumn’ were commonplace, but this was often telling rather than showing (to use a phrase which is more often used of fiction than poetry). The successful entries didn’t do this: they approached the subject more elliptically, and this lack of directness seems to me the very essence of the haiku and Japanese art in general. There is something simultaneously both very literal and yet also numinous in eastern paintings whereas the West tends to separate these two qualities into opposing categories (realism or naturalism as the obverse of symbolism or expressionism or abstraction).

I am aware that this is all sounding rather negative. But we western would-be haiku writers were attempting something truly difficult and shouldn’t beat ourselves up for not reaching the heights we hoped for: flip it around and imagine asking a Japanese poet writing in Japanese to use iambic pentameter while also capturing the spirit of western verse. The result is almost bound to be something that is not an authentic variation on the original, but an uneasy and clumsy hybrid. Fusion food in my opinion often fails; I suspect the same is generally true of fusion poetry. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though: so much that is good in art comes when cultures borrow, clash and hybridise.