UNIVERZITA KARLOVA V PRAZE FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
ÚSTAV ANGLOFONNÍCH LITERATUR A KULTUR
Magisterská diplomová práce
JAN ROUBÍČEK
20TH CENTURY HAIKU IN ENGLISH
ANGLICKY PSANÉ HAIKU VE 20. STOLETÍ
Vedoucí práce: doc. Justin Quinn, PhD
2009
1 Prohlašuji, že diplomovou práci jsem vypracoval samostatně a že jsem uvedl všechny využité prameny a literaturu.
V Praze, dne ......
……………………………………….. Podpis autora práce
2 CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION ...... 4 1. INTRODUCTION TO HAIKU...... 6
1.1. THE TRADITIONAL HAIKU AND HAIBUN FORMS...... 6 1.1.1. Haiku ...... 6 1.1.2. Haibun ...... 8 1.2. THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE HAIKU AND HAIBUN...... 9 1.3. ENGLISH VS.JAPANESE PROSODY ...... 11 1.4. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH-WRITTEN HAIKU AND THE AMERICAN HAIKU MOVEMENT...... 12 2. JAMES MERRILL’S “PROSE OF DEPARTURE” ...... 15
2.1. THE PLOT OF “PROSE OF DEPARTURE”:...... 15 2.2. THE FORM OF “PROSE OF DEPARTURE” AND ITS EFFECTS...... 20 2.3. PUNS AND OTHER POETIC DEVICES IN “PROSE OF DEPARTURE”:...... 24 3. PAUL MULDOON AND HIS HAIKU...... 28
3.1. INTRODUCTION TO PAUL MULDOON ...... 28 3.2. INTRODUCTION TO “HOPEWELL HAIKU” AND “90 INSTANT MESSAGES TO TOM MOORE” ...... 29 3.2.1. “Hopewell Haiku”: Form and Content ...... 29 3.2.2. “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: Form and Content...... 33 3.3 MULDOON’S HAIKU – SPONTANEOUS POETRY?...... 35 3.3.1. Can haiku be spontaneous? ...... 35 3.3.2. Are Muldoon’s haiku spontaneous?...... 37 3.4. CONCLUSION ...... 41 4: HAIKU JOURNALS: SURVEY AND COMPARISON...... 43
4.1. INTRODUCTION TO HAIKU JOURNALS ...... 43 4.2. COMPARISON OF TWO ONLINE JOURNALS, SHAMROCK AND ROADRUNNER...... 45 4.2.1. Shamrock ...... 46 4.2.2. Roadrunner...... 50 4.3. CONCLUSION ...... 53 5. CONCLUSION...... 55 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 61 ČESKÉ RESUMÉ ...... 64
3 Introduction
The history of haiku written in English is about 100 years long, beginning with the poems of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, continuing with the haiku of R. H. Blyth, Jack Kerouac and haiku criticism by Kenneth Yasuda and H. G. Henderson, and “ending” with an impressive number of haiku journals, several haiku societies, several publishing houses, haiku competitions and conferences nowadays. The original form of haiku written in Japanese vastly differs from its English counterpart, partly due to the predominantly accentual or stress-timed character of English and the syllable-timed character of Japanese1 and partly due to cultural and other differences which we will take note of in this paper. The main focus of the present paper is the American poet James Merrill and his sequence “Prose of Departure,” and the Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon and his “Hopewell Haiku” and “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore.” The choice of these two poets is motivated by: their difference in approach to the haiku form, and their different cultural backgrounds and opinions. James Merrill is frequently taken as a poet of the occult whose poems have a spiritual aura, whereas Paul Muldoon is often seen as a slightly eccentric poetic acrobat who can write excellent sestinas and other difficult forms and who can infuse every poem with a specific ironical humor. The context for the discussion of these poets is 1) the tradition of Japanese haiku, haibun and associated forms; 2) the contemporary haiku production in English, as it appears not only in published poetry collections, but also – and in greater variety – in haiku journals and similar publications: In this paper we discuss two online journals, the Ireland- based Shamrock, and the U.S.-based Roadrunner. The paper is divided into five chapters: Chapter One introduces the haiku form, its history and the prosody differences between English and Japanese. Chapter Two deals with the plot and the formal aspects of “Prose of Departure,” its resemblance with a traditional Japanese poetic diary, Merrill’s blurring the distinction and boundaries between poetry and prose, the use of poetic devices, etc. Chapter Three is focused on Paul Muldoon and his two haiku-sequences, which are both formally refined and elaborate and which, in terms of contents and overall “tone” or “mood,” differ
1 In Japanese, the syllables are mostly shorter than English ones and therefore, the classical 5-7-5 haiku pattern can be retained, but with very different effects. 4 from each other in a number of aspects. The Fourth chapter is more of a survey, introducing the journal scene and comparing Shamrock, a quarterly featuring mostly Eastern-European haiku in the translations of its editor A. A. Kudryavitsky, and Roadrunner, a more selective quarterly focusing on good quality and diversity in form, presenting the poems in a comparably neat online environment. As a part of the haiku-scene survey, we also briefly discuss several minor poets whose haiku have appeared in the issues of Shamrock. The Fifth Chapter, being the Conclusion, sums up the various approaches to writing haiku in English that have been discussed, reevaluates the importance of the Japanese tradition, and questions the prose-poem dichotomy in long haiku & haibun sequences.
5 1. Introduction to Haiku
1.1. The Traditional Haiku and Haibun Forms
1.1.1. Haiku The haiku is originally a three-verse, 5-7-5 morae (or onji)2, non-rhymed poem written in Japanese. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics puts forth, as an important characteristic, its focus on natural images that derive their potency from the Japanese literary tradition, as well as from Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoistic animism. Barbara Ungar, in the introduction to her “Haiku in English”, proposes several characteristics of the Japanese haiku: 1. brevity, 2.de- emphasis of language, 3.de-emphasis of the poet’s voice. The latter she explains as the haiku’s lack of commentary, or lack of “objectivity”. Being very brief, the poem relies merely on the suggestion of ideas (saying less and meaning more), and on leading the reader or listener to other ideas through the workings of association.3 Normally, the haiku would expose a scene, a given moment, by naming only a few “essential objects or experiences which made this moment.”4 There would be absolutely no judgment or further comment about this experience or scene. The reader would or should come to their own private experience of the moment. In the Buddhist tradition, the poem as a whole was also designed to lead the reader to some “fundamental truth about the nature of things-in- themselves.”5 This more spiritual motivation in writing haiku was evident in many of the “classics,” some of whom were practicing Buddhists for a part of their life.
2 We explain morae and onji in section 1.3. in some more detail. 3 The Greek-born Japanese scholar and haiku poet Lafcadio Hearn says: “By the use of a few chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors to do with a few strokes of the brush—to evoke an image or a mood—to revive a sensation or emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose—by poet or by picturemaker—depends altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest. [...]his object should be only to stir the imagination without satisfying it. So the term ittakkiri—meaning “all gone,” or “entirely vanished,” in the sense of “all told”—is contemptuously applied to verses in which the verse- maker has uttered his whole thought;—praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the mind the thrilling of a something unsaid.” Quoted from: Cor van der Heuvel, “Lafcadio Hearn and Haiku.” Modern Haiku 33.2 (Summer 2002) Accessed 14 Dec.2008,
Not only setting the seasonal mood, the ki-go could imply other things relating to the poet’s intimate experience. 2. The kireji: like punctuation in English, this “functional” word separates the first and second parts of a haiku. 3. The use of internal comparison: a technique whereby several words or objects are juxtaposed and this causes them to attract other meanings or ideas. An example Ungar uses is Bashō’s “crow” haiku8: On a bare branch a crow settles– autumn evening.
4. Another technique, used by Bashō and others, is one Ungar calls “fragrance”. It consists of associating two dissimilar objects (like “leeks” and “cold weather” in the following poem), through a mysterious link or quality which is not normally recognized in these two objects9:
A pile of leeks newly washed white- how cold it is!
As Ungar aptly comments, “this practice may often lead to synesthesia”10: The sea darkens- a wild duck’s call faintly white.
6 Ungar 3. 7 Bruce Ross, “The Essence of Haiku,” Modern Haiku 38.3 (Autumn 2007). Accessed 15 Nov. 2008
Independence Day. In the warm wind my scarf touches a stranger.
Ross’ comment on this haiku and the absolute metaphor it contains:
An existential quality is evident in the poem, which resonates with liberation, humanity, and joy. The holiday name demarcates a historical event of freedom that many countries celebrate. The wind is appropriately comfortable. This wind provides a natural example of what the American poet T.S. Eliot termed an objective correlative, a poetic image drawn from the real world that represents, or metaphorically connects with, internal emotion.12
7. Haiku can, and in the Zen-Buddhist and Buddhist traditions was supposed to, have a transformational effect on the reader.
1.1.2. Haibun The haibun could be described as a shorter piece of prose that is interspersed with haiku or that ends with one or more haiku. The haiku that come in a haibun can and should be, nevertheless, read alone, as complete and
11 Ungar 4. 12 Ross, “The Essence of Haiku.” For further reading on some aspects of traditional and modern haiku, I recommend Ross’ full article. 8 independent poems and the leap between the prose and the poem should be significant; the reader has to feel a change. Bashō’s haibun diaries are a good example of this technique of writing. Ungar quotes Earl Miner, who, in his Japanese Poetic Diaries, does Bashō justice, I believe, by writing: “each of the diaries … can be as well understood as a poetic whole joined by prose as a prose work interspersed with poems. The prose of the diary is not merely an excuse for the poem: but the poems are not also a mere decoration.”13 For further commentary on the poetic diaries see the following section.
1.2. The History of Japanese Haiku and Haibun
The haiku originally developed from the tanka, a five-verse poem composed of two parts: the exposition (5-7-5 morae) and the gloss (5-5 morae). In a group, the teacher usually suggested the exposition (also called hokku) and the pupils invented the gloss. In the nineteenth century, when the hokku had already become a separate poem, the name haiku appeared. Three of the “founding” poets were Sōgi (1421-1502), Moritake (1473- 1549) and Sōkan (1465-1553). Moritake: Fallen petals rise Back to the branch – I watch: Oh ... butterflies!
Sōkan: If to the moon One puts a handle – what A splendid fan!
Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644, of samurai blood, and when he was 30, he started his own school of poetry. One of his more well-known pupils was Kikaku. Kikaku: Red dragonflies! Take off their wings, And they are pepper pods.
Bashō: Red pepper pods! Add wings to them, And they are dragonflies!
13 Ungar 5. 9 Bashō’s reaction to his pupil’s haiku is complementary. In the spirit of the Buddhist outlook on reality, the object can be seen from various different perspectives; the “other” perspective comes when one lets go of one’s “conventional” view of the thing. William S. Merwin’s commentary is relevant: “Bashō’s effort to create an image that would not be static, that would be a dynamic moment, an immeasurable moment in time.”14 Narrow Roads to Oku, Bashō’s notes of a six-month pilgrimage, became one of the most famous haibun-series. Earl Miner considers it to be one of the finest Japanese poetic diaries, these having a long tradition, from the 10th century onwards, with The Tosa Diary (935) being the first major representative. Some diaries were called “tales (monogatari), collections (-shu, -kashu), records (-ki), travels (michiyuki), and yet other names.”15 Any work called a diary, that is, which is an art diary – or even works associated with it but given a different generic name – contains poems. And the conception of the diary, however dim, is the basic literary conception of prose fiction from 935 to 1370. The poems vary in number and importance with the individual work, depending in considerable part on whether it is narrative or recording diary, but it seems clear that poetry is conceived of as the most basic or purest literary form and that its presence, almost alone, is enough to change a journal of one’s life to an art diary. More than that, to a writer of the court period, prose fiction appears to have been impossible without poetry.16
Another noteworthy poet of this era is Uejima Onitsura (1661-1738), known for his ability to put the joy of life into his poems: Cherry blossoms, more And more now! Birds have two legs! Oh, horses have four!
Yosa Buson (1715-1783), also a well-known painter, specialized in haiga, a traditional art form composed of a brush painting and a calligraphy of a haiku poem. Compared to Bashō, Buson is often called “brilliant, witty and clever,” whereas Bashō is called “the Mystic.” Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) was appreciated for his humanity: a life full of loss and tragedy had to do with a unique touch of gentleness and compassion:
14 Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave. Bashō’s Haiku and Zen (Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003), xiii. 15 Miner 15. 16 Miner 16. 10 Oh! Don’t mistreat the fly! He wrings his hands! He wrings his feet!
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1950)17 was a reformer of haiku. He criticized Bashō as well as the haiku writers of the 19th century. He was, like many intellectuals of the time, influenced by Western culture. He admired Buson’s painting, as well as European “plein-air” painting. Shiki adopted the main features of these two styles and created his own – his haiku-painting compositions were called shasei, or “sketchings from life.” He popularized this style in newspapers and essays. He was also agnostic, and therefore separated the haiku from the influence of Buddhism; moreover, he established the term “haiku,” replacing the former “hokku.” Haiku was a compound of haikai no ku, meaning “a verse of haikai.”18 Other “modern” haiku writers include: Natsume Soseki (d.1916), the great novelist of the Meiji Era; Taneda Santoka (d.1940), the wandering and sake-drinking Zen monk, and many others.19
1.3. English vs. Japanese Prosody
In Japanese speech rhythm, the basic unit is the on, a phonetic unit identical to the mora. In language time-measurement as such, one mora is a basic unit. “In adult Japanese speakers,” says Richard Gilbert in his essay “Stalking the Wild Onji,” “there is virtually no perception of English-style syllabification of words, the difference being in syllables in English vs. morae in Japanese.”20 One English syllable may contain one or more morae. English syllables are thus much more variable in length, contain more information, and
17 More about Shiki at:
1.4. A Brief History of English-Written Haiku and the American Haiku Movement
A periodization of English-written haiku has been suggested by Barbara Ungar in her “Haiku in English”, and we will more-or-less follow her segmentation here: Period I: exotic interest and serious imitation of Japanese haiku; Period II: the Beats; Period III: serious inquiry and adaptation. Period I: Haiku in English actually “began” when the Japanese poet and translator Yone Noguchi first suggested that haiku be incorporated into the English literary world. In his “A Proposal to American Poets” published in the Reader magazine in February 1904, he gave a brief outline of the hokku, some of his own English pieces, and the proclamation: “Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!” At this time Sadakichi Hartmann was publishing English haiku, in 1914 Noguchi’s The Spirit of Japanese Poetry came out, and in 1915 Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Lyrics were published. Apart from some original and quite good attempts at imitation, the early translations of these authors transformed the Japanese forms into prose or into different free forms. Around 1910, T. E. Hulme, along with the Imagists, took interest in haiku and in 1912 it was introduced to Harvard. The main haiku theorists and poets of the second and third decades were F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,
21 Gilbert 22 One Western haiku-reader said that to read through a haiku-collection was like being pecked to death by doves. 12 J. Gould Fletcher, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. From the experimenters’ forgery came pieces like Pound’s “Liu Ch’e,” Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The Imagists valued haiku’s direct treatment of the object, its precision and sparseness of language, its avoidance of didacticism and of vagueness, its use of the snapshot image; the haiku form was nothing like the pentameter they eschewed. According to Ungar, the Imagists adopted many of haiku’s features, but they “fundamentally misunderstood the more profound motivation behind haiku.”23 It is very difficult to judge whether or not Ungar is right: for (Zen-) Buddhism, which did represent the background for traditional haiku, the important thing is the implementation of the teachings – a way of life designed to lead the practitioner to happiness, endurance, compassion, etc.; the theory is one side and the practice another. What Barbara Ungar probably means is that the Imagists knew Buddhism in theory at the most.24 Ezra Pound’s early poems and poetics paralleled haiku quite well: his concept of “super-position,” the “one idea set on top another,” which were a part of his “one image poems.” Moreover, “what Pound wishes is for the juxtaposition of the images themselves to create the emotion, and not some proclamation of sadness by the poem himself.”25 The attempts of Amy Lowell, according to Ungar, fell short of genuine haiku due to the fact that she tended to be “overly visual, or to tell too much; they miss that balance between statement and suggestion [...] She tends to write from a descriptive point of view, that is, from outside of her subject, frequently falling into exoticism.”26 Period II: The Beats. Ungar says: “Whereas in the earlier part of the century it was Japanese crafts that were admired, in the fifties it was Japanese religion and philosophy that influenced American culture.”27 The interest lay more in the motivation than in the technical and formal aspects of the poems. Kerouac’s haikus are simple, written in colloquial speech, and with a more profound feeling. “Where Lowell describes from outside her subject, Kerouac
23 Ungar 51. 24 The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, and their close observations of nature, were also an important influence in the development of English-written haiku. 25 Quinn, “Twentieth-Century Poetry,” in: Procházka et at., Lectures on American Literature. Prague: Karolinum, 2002. 165. Ezra Pound also (with the notes of Ernest Fenollosa) translated –though with mistakes– old Chinese poetry. 26 Ungar 51. 27 Ungar 21. 13 enters in completely and feels. Where Lowell generalizes and moralizes, Kerouac simply shows.”28 Since Kerouac’s time, “Haiku in English has matured to the point of leading a healthy life of its own, independent of its Japanese parent.”29 One of the scholars of Japanese culture, James Kirkup (b.1918), has – taking after the Greek-born Lafcadio Hearn – lived in Japan and written Japan-inspired poetry. His haiku are arguably the result of serious imitation together with an interest in the deeper cultural background. Period III: Ungar lists several representatives: James Hackett, for whom haiku became “a Way of living awareness, an art of Zen;”30 James Tipton, who is interested in the “possibility of finding new energy through words put together with precision and emotion.”31 For Geraldine Clinton Little, haiku has an appeal in its “world in a grain of sand” and the “here and now” philosophy. In terms of formal aspects, the haiku written in the 1970s and onwards show a variety of forms: 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables, rhymed couplets, three vertical columns (Tao Li) and completely free form. Some of the more contemporary poets writing haiku have been: Robert Spiess (1921-2002), James Merrill (1926-1995), Cor van der Heuvel (b.1931), Derek Mahon (b.1941), Michael McClintock (b.1950), Paul Muldoon (b.1951), Jim Kacian (b.1953), and younger and more recent writers include Michael Dylan Welch, Eric Amann, Randy Brooks, and many others.32 In contemporary haiku, the lowest common denominator is usually, but not always: the use of a season word or a similar feature, an approximately 5-7-5 syllable pattern, and the use of a kireji or cut – normally marked by a punctuation mark.33
28 Ungar 52. 29 Ungar 33. 30 Ungar 33. 31 Ungar 33. 32 For a complete history of the American Haiku Movement, please see Charles Trumbull’s article (which also includes useful endnotes and a substantial bibliography) at:
The poetry collection that is related to our topic is The Inner Room, and more specifically its fourth part called “Prose of Departure,” which relates Merrill’s visit to Japan, where he stayed at his friend’s house. In this chapter, we will first trace the plot-narrative of “Prose of Departure,” then we will look at the way Merrill works with the haiku form, and lastly we will speak about the various poetic devices he uses.
2.1. The Plot of “Prose of Departure”: The first section, “Imagining it,” speaks about Merrill’s friend Paul and the travellers’ departure. There is a kind of an uncertain feeling that they are leaving a friend whose health (and life) is in danger. They are not yet upset, they are still probably quite enthusiastic about the trip, but already a shadow hangs over it. The section “Afternoons at the Noh,” among others, alludes several times to the fact of Paul’s infirmity.
But the real drama is due to go on elsewhere. [...] a dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall. [...] Celestial recovery. Doctors amazed. Altogether grander and more mysterious than anything at the Noh, yet from what lesser theater did we absorb the patience and piety needed to bring the moonlight back?
The image of their friend haunts them throughout their travels and the text could be taken as an attempt to find solace or resolution of this situation. The haiku form might be one means of doing so. The traditional haiku of Japan has been used by “the local muse,” as a Merrill critic points out, “as her form of ‘conscious evasion,’ and Merrill tries to tap this form for its incantatory momentary magic.”34 The short forms of Japanese poetry are so designed that the ancient masters were able to express their flash of insight, and they could
34 Sara Lundquist, “An Aesthetics of Enclosure: James Merrill's inner rooms.” English Studies in Canada. Accessed: 22 Jan. 2009,
15 also incorporate the haiku into their diary or travel account. Earl Miner, in his Japanese Poetic Diaries, says: Everyone is familiar with the brevity of Japanese poetic forms and the ways in which what was short to begin with becomes yet shorter with the centuries. The change from tanka to haikai verses to haiku in the works included here illustrates that history. At the same time, there is an opposite process of integration of those shorter units. It can be seen functioning in the integration of tanka poems by complex methods of progression and association in anthologies and sequences; it can be found in brief units such as the “tales of poems” [...] and it can be seen in various minglings of prose and verse, whether for the theater, or indeed for the diary. What such various methods of integrating poems suggest is that the brief forms are considered less discrete than are Western poems. There is a presumption of relatedness between one poem and another, or between a poem and its situation of composition.35
Merrill, being something of an “outcast-artist,” tries to draw upon the local “Muse” and interweave poetry and prose. The plot of “Prose of Departure” is intertwined with the form. In the course of the plot, the traveler is searching for something; in the form, he has already found inspiration.
Halfway around the globe from Paul the worst keeps dawning on us. We try to conjure him up as he was only last winter: hair silvered early, the trustful, inquisitive, near-sighted face, (...) I need a form of conscious evasion, that at best permits odd moments when the subject
looking elsewhere strays into a local muse's number-benumbed gaze
--fixed there, ticking off syllables, until she blinks and the wave breaks.36
And elsewhere: Don’t worry, I’m getting my share of fast food, TV news and tearjerkers, police running toward the explosion, our sickeningly clear connections to New York, a boîte called Wet Dream, the taximeter advancing, like history itself, by lifespans: 1880 to 1950 to 2020. Yet this automated Japan tends chiefly to mirror and amplify a thousandfold the writhing vocalist in my own red boîte, whom I want gagged, unplugged, shortcircuited. If every trip is an incarnation in miniature, let this be the one in which to arrange myself like flowers.
35 Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) 52. 36 James Merrill, The Inner Room. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 57. 16 Aim at composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes. Close my borders to foreign devils. 37
The travellers admire Donald’s home, his: “bit of our planet. Two midget rooms, utilitarian alcove, no trace of clutter. What he has is what you see, and includes the resolve to get rid of things already absorbed.”38 They spend afternoons at the Noh theatre watching actors who enter “the realms of legend and artifice, to become ‘a something else thereby.’”39 What follows the theatre section is a beautifully practical and sociologically interesting experience at the bank (“Kyogen interlude: At the bank.”), where their host Donald acts very self- assuredly with a servile Japanese bank-clerk and his supervisor:
Donald: [speaking to the boss now] Good morning. My name is R___. I am a writer and journalist living in Tokyo. Allow me to give you my card.
Manners require that a card be studied by its recipient with every show of genuine interest. The supervisor beautifully clears this first hurdle. Donald resumes. During his tirade his listener’s breathing quickens, his eyes glitter. He and the red-faced clerk, side by side, are contemplating the abyss to whose brink we’ve led them. The younger man, slightly bent, hands clasped at his crotch, has braced himself like one about to be flogged.40
This section ends with the exchange:
DJ (amused in spite of himself): That story wasn’t nice. Even bank clerks have to live.
Eleanor: Darling boy, nobody has to live. It’s what I came away from Paul’s service thinking. Nobody has to live.
In the next section, “Sanctum”, the travelers finally experience some solace: “Another proscenium,” it begins: the two desperate castaways find themselves kneeling before a religious “inner room,” watching a ceremony lead by an abbot, in which he and some young priests sing a “deep and monotonous chant”: at first, the whole scene seems rather insignificant, and Merrill describes it correspondingly:
He [the abbot] faces a small gold pagoda flanked by big gold
37 Merrill 57. 38 Merrill 55. 39 Merrill 60. 40 Merrill 64. 17 lotus trees overhung by tinkling pendants of gold. Do such arrangements please a blackened image deep within? To us they look like Odette's first drawing room (before Swann takes charge of her taste) lit up for a party, or the Maison Doree he imagines as the scene of her infidelities.41
They are eventually invited to participate: to add their incense; here they somehow lose their skepticism as they begin to experience some sort of emotion:
Still, when the abbot turns, and with a gesture invites us to place incense upon the brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash, someone--myself perhaps--tries vainly
to hold back a queer sob. Inhaling the holy smoke, praying for dear
life—42
It is interesting to note how the word “life” does not purposefully fit into the haiku pattern. When reading this passage, we can feel as if the last line was something of a stumble, a strut of the rhythm. The religious experience was, it seems, after all, only a brief flash of light in the darker continuum. Thus, the observant and anxious tourism of James Merrill has gone through a small climax; nevertheless, it has not reached a resolution, the knot has not been untied: the life of a friend, and perhaps the meaning of the voyage, and of life as such for the two travelers, still carry misty question marks. The section that follows is another theatre interlude called “Bunraku”. Here Merrill finds a parallel between the state of a human being and the puppet – both are animated and manipulated by unseen forces and energies:
[...] the overruling passions, the social or genetic imperatives, that propel a given character. Seldom do we the living, for that matter, feel more “ourselves” than when spoken through, or motivated, by “invisible” forces such as these. It is especially true of, like a puppet overcome by woe, we also appear to be struggling free of them.43
41 Merrill 66. 42 Merrill 66. 43 Merrill 67. 18 The following section is the “Geiger Counter”. It begins with a series of haiku, whereby the rhythm becomes more intense, as the quarrel between the two friends reaches a climax: "You're not dying! You've been reading too much Proust, that's all! I could be dying too--have you thought of that, JM?--except that I don't happen to be sick, and neither do you. What we are suffering are sympathetic aches and pains. Guilt, if you like, over staying alive. Four friends have died since December, now Paul's back at the Clinic. You were right,"--the dying Paul, what else?--"we should have scrapped the trip as soon as we heard. But God! even if you and I were on the way out, wouldn't we still fight to live a bit first, fully and joyously?"
Such good sense. I want to bow, touch my forehead to the straw mat. Instead: "Fight? Like this morning? We can live or die without another one of those, thank you." Mutual glares.44
The last section of “Prose of Departure” is titled “In the Shop.” The first sentence helps us imagine the kind of shop we are dealing with: “Out came the most fabulous kimono of all,” and the next sentence lets us know what state Merrill’s mind is in: “To what function, dear heart, could it possibly be worn by the likes of – Hush, give me your hand.” Here, the plot-narrative stops and we are gradually led into a world of imagination, a world of colours: dyeing, Earth, crêpe de Chine, etc. This very matter-of-fact passage from plot-narrative to imagination, back and forth, is typical for Merrill’s prose: not only does it appear in “Prose of Departure,” it is also typical for The Changing Light at Sandover, and other works.
Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colours, shall we not be Earth before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric Star-puckered moral --- White, never-to-blossom buds Of the mountain laurel --- May be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night. 45
This section requires closer attention, especially its last phrases, because it arguably contains the most important or concluding message of the haibun: that
44 Merrill 69. 45 Merrill 72. 19 life or consciousness, represented by the crêpe de Chine, can finally surrender to death, having found in itself certain nodes or places of immortality, certain nooks which death (a.k.a. the hue which will stain the crêpe de Chine upon its immersion) cannot touch. The whole string of episodes, with their prolonged moments of suffering and uncertainty, has lead to this realization. But miracles do not happen, it seems to be saying; it is a skill we are looking for, an ability, a dexterity. The entire “Prose of Departure” can be seen as an elegy or “narrative- chant” on departing, on letting go; letting go of the friend back home, letting go of one’s life, leaving Japan behind, the Japan that was previously thought of as very interesting, exotic and promising; it is about surpassing the illusion of such a Japan and such a life coming to the conclusion that basically all that Japan can teach them, or other people, can be found in the significance and purpose of the religious ceremony: the monks acknowledge the ephemeral nature of human life, and take it as their task to bring their awareness to things immortal, to things permanent.
2.2. The Form of “Prose of Departure” and Its Effects
On the most basic level, the first thing the reader notices in “Prose of Departure” is the short poems, which are subsequently found to be rhymed A-B- A, with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern: dusk within the night. The high street lamp through snowy branches burns moon-bright.46
The next thing that comes to mind is of course haibun, i.e., prose interspersed with or concluded by haiku. This genre has a long tradition in classical Japanese literature, overlapping with the poetic diaries and travel accounts that were written from the 10th century A.D. onwards, and culminating in works like Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road through the Provinces. In this part of the chapter, we will at first briefly examine the haiku and then the prose sections, contrasting the prose briefly with Merrill’s autobiographical A Different Person.
46 Merrill 54. 20 Formally, the traditional ki-go in the first haiku verse is not at all strictly respected – only sometimes it appears, like in the previous quote (“snowy branches”). The many Japanese words and concepts, along with the chapter titles (“Arrival in Tokyo”, “Kyoto”, “River Trip”), give Merrill’s haibun a classical travelogue character. As such, it is indeed similar to Bashō’s Narrow Road to Oku47 – the short prose passages introducing the place and the occurrence and the haiku providing a poetic counterpart; in terms of narrative, the haiku usually but not always conclude the “story.” In terms of poetic effect, the haiku paint the scene anew, fresh, and from a different perspective – the inner aesthetics of haiku differing greatly from that of prose.
Our section of town is Roppongi, where thirty years ago I dined in W’s gloomy wooden farmhouse. [...] One group has a transistor, another makes its own music, clapping hands and singing. Their lantern faces glow in the half-dark’s black-beamed, blossom-tented
dusk within the night. The high street lamp through snowy branches burns moon-bright.48
Narrow streets, lined with pots: wistaria, clematis, bamboo. (Can that be syringa – with red blossoms?) Shrines begin. A shopkeeper says good day.49
Afternoons at the Noh.
Plays of unself. Peel off the maiden pearl-diver to find her mother’s ghost, the ghost to wake a dragon who, at the end of his dance, will attain Buddhahood. Masked as each of these in turn, the protagonist has the wattles and frame of
A middle-aged man – but time, gender, self are laws waived by his gold fan.50
47 Merrill’s verses of course lack the strong underlying sense of being at home in the Japanese countryside – one that we find in Bashō’s account – and they do not have that “lightness” and spiritual profundity of “the Mystic”. A recommendable translation of Bashō’s travelogue (also translated as “Narrow Road(s) to the Interior”) is Donald Keene’s (1996) with illustrations for each haiku done by a master of collage, Miyata Masayuki, whose artist’s note in the translation says: “Producing a picture to represent each haiku [...] was a matter of having to select one tiny “point” – a mere “dot”. One misjudgment in my reading and the picture would lose touch with the spirit of Bashō’s work.” “Haiku, Haibun and Renga of Matsuo Bashō,” Accessed: 18 Nov. 2008,
But this stormy noon we’re alone in the boat, screens of mist enfold the heights, and the famous drowned savannas, green-gold or violet-pink in travel posters, come through as dim, splitsecond exposures during which One seaweed fan waves At another just under From above the waves.52
This is a part of Merrill’s experiment in “Prose of Departure”: blurring the boundaries, suggesting that what was thought of as genuine poetry might have only been a silently agreed-upon convention of poetry. The section “Geiger Counter” begins interestingly with a series of five haiku that create a staccato of short phrases, accentuating the desperation and the feeling of what to do in a foreign land, far away from a friend in need which the two travellers are experiencing most of the time. In the part called “Donald’s Neighborhood”, like in many other sections, the haiku are clearly intended to
51 Merrill 61. 52 Merrill 63. 22 closely link up with and to continue the prose narrative; they do not disturb the slow andante – they simply underline the gloomy mood of the prose:
The program is over in just ninety minutes. What have we seen? Boy, maybe eighteen Bent over snapshots while his Cat licks itself clean.
Naked girl, leading Suitors a merry chase: she’ll Leave them stripped, bleeding – 53
The pseudo-haiku form provides a visual and rhythmical change. The narrator’s message is, due to this, carried through more effectively. At the same time, the poems – being probably the product of refining, “polishing,” and distillation – purposefully leave more of the action unconcluded, and thus leave more space for readers’ interpretation and imagination. What is also important is their function of concluding each section of the narrative: they are able to provide a sort of compression of the mood of each section; they present the core thought or feeling behind each scene. In this last feature, Merrill has arguably taken as his model the travel accounts of Matsuo Bashō and other Japanese haibun writers. In his autobiography A Different Person, James Merrill speaks in some detail about what came to pass to him and his acquaintances during their stays in Europe. It is written in prose, but the style is in a way poetic, although probably not as poetic as that of “Prose of Departure,” and the flow of the text of A Different Person is slower – the narrative is longer and it is clearly meant to be more of a “novel” than any of Merrill’s poetic sequences. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to read the autobiography as one of the several modes of Merrill’s literary expression. The title “Prose of Departure” is also perhaps significant: by “prose” Merrill might mean that it is not “poetry” of departure in the sense that the text is more prosaic – an account of a departure, without higher literary ambitions. The title of the whole book, The Inner Room, is also perhaps significant: stanza, in Italian, means “room,” and the short stanzas of the haikus are indeed like small compact dwellings into which the poet seems to be trying to condense the scenes, to condense the life, the moment. They are, arguably, the temporary
53 Merrill 55 23 inner rooms of his self, the inside hiding places where he is trying to find solace. They express a mood of longing for peace, a mood which is underlined by the general tone of the prose. In sum, “Prose of Departure” is a complex phenomenon – we hesitate to call it a “narrative” or a “haibun.” By using a “palette” containing the “colours” of lyric poetry, narrative poetry and prose, Merrill has achieved to paint in a fashion that overlaps and mixes the three “colours.” Moreover, his brushstrokes have been mostly quick, visual, arguably impressionistic or even imagistic ones, and thus the text is highly condensed.
2.3. Puns and Other Poetic Devices in “Prose of Departure”:
The variety of poetic devices Merrill uses support the tone or mood of the given sequence; naturally also, the frequent alliterations create a feeling of rhythm, of a pulsation of life the text of the poem records. For instance, in the following passage we can see how the repeating sound of “p,” “m,” and “d” give us a feeling of beat, not unlike the drum-beats accompanying a song.
“Peel off the maiden pearl-diver to find her mother’s ghost, the ghost to wake a dragon who, at the end of his dance, [...]”54
Another example is “Geiger Counter”, where we can see how the “beat” or rhythm begins in the haiku part, with “Doc,” “dark,” “cloud,” and “Knock,” and goes on in the prose section. Here, Merrill orchestrates a set of alliterations: first the “f,” then the “s” and lastly the “d.”
What’s the story, Doc?” --dark, cloud-chambered negatives held to the light. Knock,
knock. Not dinnertime already? Donald, making his ghoul face, joins us for another feast less of real food than of artfully balanced hues and textures. “I’m sick,” sighs the sunburnt maid who serves it, and whose kimono we think to please her by admiring, “sick of wrapping myself up like a dummy day after day.”55
54 Merrill 60. 55 Merrill 70. 24 The rhythm serves well to support the desperate tone and the feeling of emptiness, which is expressed by: “ghoul face” and “less of real food than of artfully balanced hues and textures.”
Another noteworthy section rich in alliteration is “Another Cemetery,” where the “f” takes the floor to acoustically remind us of the flames of a fire: last flickering shift of flame flutters off. The log’s charred forked shape is left.
Other sections--“Bunraku” being a good example--are arguably small theatre pieces where Merrill employs drama devices: the exclamation mark, the inserted word and the short sentences help create the action: The very river has stopped during Koganosuke’s dialogue with his father. All at once—heavens!—the young man takes up a sword and plunges it into his vitals. There is no blood. He cannot die. The act will end with his convulsive efforts to.56
After the drama the spectators, with the benefit of some hindsight, recall what the night’s show actually meant for them:
“...wonderful today...!” you yawned that night. It moved me: words began to play
like a fountain deep in gloom. Did love reach out your arm then? Sorrow? Sleep?57
The “gloomy” atmosphere is in part created by the simile of the words of the play and a fountain, both “deep in gloom.” Merrill indulges in simile throughout “Prose of Departure.” For instance, in “Afternoons at the Noh,” a simile is followed by a metaphor: The drummer with a thimbled fingertap neat as a pool shot cuts short his vocalise at once resumed: a guttural growl that ends falsetto, hollow pearl balanced upon a jet of water,58
And later the poet explores hands and feet: Feet in white socks explore the stage like the palms of a blind man. (…) Hands like these will never clench or cling or stupidly dangle or
56 Merrill 67. 57 Merrill 68. 58 Merrill 60. 25 helplessly be wrung. They are princes to be served and defended with one’s life. My own hand as I write, wielding this punctilious lance of blue, belongs to a lower caste.59
Merrill plays with word meanings elsewhere as well:
(Sold up at the temple, distant cousin to both the gravestone and the “Plant-Tab” stuck in a flowerpot to release nutrients over weeks to come: the incense stick. This, brittle, narrow slab of dark green, set upright in the burner’s ash-heap and lit, will also turn to ash. But in the process, as it whitens, a hitherto unseen character appears, below it a second, slowly a third, each traced by the finest penpoint of incandescence. They cool the way ink dries. Once complete and legible, their pious formula can be scattered by a touch.[...])60
And he uses puns: (Into the Sound, Paul, we’d empty your own box, just as black, just as small.)
“Sound” here meaning either acoustic production or a body of water like a fiord or bay, and Merrill uses the expression, allowing for both sets of meaning simultaneously: 1) acoustics – Paul’s box standing for his spirit or soul, Sound standing for God or the Universe, 2) water – Paul’s ashes would be emptied into the water.
Star-puckered moral --- White, never-to-blossom buds Of the mountain laurel --- May be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.
“Read” is a homophone of “red”: 1) the buds of the laurel may be red when they emerge triumphant from the vats of night, or: 2) the buds may be interpreted as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.61
59 Merrill 61. 60 Merrill 71. 61 The mountain laurel, or Kalmia latifolia, is a shrub of the eastern US highlands, and it has several sub-varieties, the buds of which range between white and red and pink. All of its parts are poisonous. It is the state flower of Pennsylvania and Connecticut. It was brought to Europe in the 18th century, as a decoration plant, and as such it is grown. For a pink example, see for instance:
([...] Any fragrance meanwhile eludes me. Have I caught cold?)63
62 Merrill 58. 63 Merrill 71. 27 3. Paul Muldoon and his haiku
In this chapter, we will attempt to analyze two pieces of writing by Paul Muldoon, “Hopewell Haiku” (Hay, 1998) and “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore” (Horse Latitudes, 2006). Paul Muldoon has said in an interview that he often has the sense of not using the language but being used by it, meaning the feeling we get when we sit down to write something (e.g., an e-mail), “and we may have a sense of what we might want to include in the body of that text,” as Muldoon says, but we actually get the “sense that the thing has got away from us”64 (we thus try to force it, and it comes out different, or perhaps, wrong). We will, in this chapter, firstly introduce some of the formal and contentual aspects of both haiku sequences, and secondly we will try to consider the haiku as pieces of spontaneous poetry, comparing them with the haikai of the Japanese masters and of Michael McClintock.
3.1. Introduction to Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now professor at Princeton University and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Paul Muldoon is also a musician: he writes lyrics and plays guitar and percussion in the band Rackett (formed in 2004) which has been described as “Cole Porter meets Punk or Ira Gershwin Grunge.” His often difficult poetry has always been a point of discussion among critics – because of the following aspects: a) its hermetic, enigmatic nature – Muldoon uses language and knowledge in a way that often presupposes the reader’s familiarity with his life and to have a similar understanding of reality; b) its subversive nature –
64 Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript, 14 Mar. 2008, Accessed: 28 Nov. 2008,
3.2. Introduction to “Hopewell Haiku” and “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”
3.2.1. “Hopewell Haiku”: Form and Content Hay, published in 1998, is the volume which contains “Hopewell Haiku.” Clair Wills considers Hay to be a symbolical middle turning point in Muldoon’s life and career, and she takes many instances in the collection, including “Hopewell Haiku,” to be examples of this in-between time and place, a time of gathering fodder (hay) for the winter of the poet’s life. She finds Muldoon to be expressing some sort of desperation and loss – the necessary letting-go of the first part of his life. She notes how he keeps revolving around very domestic environments (kitchen, snails, backyard, etc.), and how Hay is full of gastronomical images and allusions, as well as sexual ones, and she points out a certain inclination of the poet to these more “base” pleasures, and his obvious struggle with them. Muldoon was, in 1997, forty-six years old, but “ripeness is not all”, he is “Getting Round” and quite concerned about it, she infers. Even death finds its way into his life, and he has to deal with it: his cat Pangur dies; he witnesses a funeral. Although some of the haiku or even the longer poems in Hay might be a product of “spasmic writing,” as Muldoon admits in haiku number LXII,
65 “His can be a poetry of provocation, and one where meanings are hidden seemingly just to show how they can be hidden.” Quoted from: “Paul Muldoon at the complete review”: Accessed: 31 Jan 2009,
66 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998) 199. This would be in line with Muldoon’s poetic experiments with sestinas and villanelles. 67 Wills 199. 68 Wills 199. 69 Wills says that the haikus are a result of his 1994 Japanese visit, and she also points out that among other influences apparent in Hay are the Malayan and Persian ones, the forms of the ghazal and pantoum appearing in Hay as well. 30 Suma Temple . . . I hear the unblown flute in the shade of a tree70
Another critic of Muldoon’s haiku, David Burleigh, notes in this respect that “Generally American haiku do not allude much to other kinds of poetry in English, let alone to other literary forms. There is an occasional play, or replay, of a well-known verse in Japanese, by Bashō or Issa usually, and little more.”71 Therefore, he dismisses Higginson’s review, which connects many of the “Hopewell Haiku” to their Japanese counterparts: “while attractive to the haiku devotee, [Higginson] offers only a partial and limited reading of the work, since he entirely ignores the multiple references to other texts in the “Hopewell Haiku.” These,” Burleigh goes on, “include obvious allusions to Robert Frost and Herman Melville, for example.”72 He does not, unfortunately, give an example of these allusions. Of further interest is Burleigh’s commentary of Nobuaki Tochigi’s reading of “Hopewell Haiku”: Tochigi took the sequence as one long renga, or linked verse sequence, pointing to its precedents in Japan. As Burleigh says, Tochigi: [...] while fully aware of the Irish and other literary references, sought to discover a similarity in technique in terms of the shifting associations between the moments represented by the verses. Viewed this way, the sequence of fragments becomes a string of varied moods and moments, and this too is a valid approach. It is not clear, however, whether Muldoon consciously follows an established pattern of any kind in terms of content, though there are verses that refer to love, the moon, and so on in both that sequence and the new one, as there are in renga.73
Burleigh finally points to a third reading, by Edna Longley, which has, according to him, the most merit, Longley being long familiar with Muldoon and his work: [Longley] sees it as expressing Muldoon’s adaptation to his new home in the United States, with certain wry references to pioneers. [...] The new location, far west of Ireland, but still east of the United States, provides a whole new “take” on the poet’s situation.74
70 Higginson, William J., “A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku, Vol.35.2, Summer 2004, Accessed: 31 Nov.2008,
Lastly, several of the haiku are more evidently self-reflective and they touch upon the fact of the poet’s coming of age: LXV (speaking of rust), LVIII (“ripeness is not all”), and the following two (XIX and XLII): A mare’s long white face. A blazed tree marking a trail we’ll never retrace.77
Nowadays I flush a long drawn-out cry, at most, from the underbrush.78
In lieu of a concluding remark, I would suggest to the potential reader of “Hopewell Haiku” another reading. What will follow is purely a personal reader-response to the poems – disregarding – and I would like to emphasize this – the author, his intentions, his background, the place, etc. Thus, in my view, “Hopewell Haiku” are, when read from beginning to end: depressing, discouraging and time-consuming. When jumping haphazardly from one haiku to another and when reading only a few at a time, the resulting effect was much more “positive”: they entertained me, stayed with me, I remembered parts of them like “catch phrases.” I believe all this is caused by: a) that English is not my native language, b) that I am not Irish, and do not share Muldoon’s experience, knowledge and opinions.79
75 Wills says in this respect: “for example is his second volume of poetry the relationship between his mother and father becomes emblematic of larger dualities and conflicts. He represents himself as a „mule“ or go-between in a mixed marriage between his schoolteacher mother and farming father, between the „English“ and „Irish“ elements of Northern Irish identity, between the longing for poetic transcendence and a stubborn sense of materiality.” Wills 200. 76 Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2002) 421. 77 Muldoon 423. 78 Muldoon 427. 79 This – what one might call “a reader’s mishap” – is in sum caused by a Czech reading the poetry of a very special Irishman who probably never thought about the fact that his poems would be analyzed by a Czech student of literature. 32 “90 Instant Messages for Tom Moore” are, again very subjectively, a somewhat different matter: these short poems or “instant messages” do have a recognizable “atmosphere,” they portray a landscape, a place, and although they are still not free of sentimentalism, desire and despair, they do have, seen subjectively, a stronger positive edge to them.
3.2.2. “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: Form and Content Paul Muldoon has been generally inspired in his writings, as he has admitted, by Lord Byron’s poetry, Byron’s humour in the poem’s lines and rhymes, and his ability to write shorter lyric poems that were quite touching. In “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore” (IM), we can see that he uses a wide variety of devices to enrich his poems – for instance: 1) Play with sound: I, III, LI, LII, LXVI, LXVIII; 2) Juxtaposition of things or images that come from different environments: XXIII, XXXIX, L; 3) Impressionistic enumerations: XVIII; 4) Personification of animals, or treating them as equals: XXXI, LXIX– LXXIV; 5) Humour associated with scenes in nature: LXV; 6) Exploration of private states of mind: XI; 7) Personification of certain natural phenomena: XXII; 8) Ordinary scenes with people: XVII. Though mostly based on commonplace scenes, the haiku of IM have been, once again, carefully crafted; the rhyme scheme is quite similar to that of the “Hopewell” sequence80: this time, the second line of every haiku rhymes with the 1st and 3rd lines of a haiku seven or eight “numbers” later: e.g., nos. LIV and LXI correspond; nos. LXII and LXX, nos. LXIII and LXXI, etc. David Burleigh says that poem number III expresses “the exact quality of contemporary living”81. He notes that Muldoon manages to “encapsulate,” in the short form of a haiku, quite a few things: 1) a specific location (Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda), 2) the hesitation of the speaker whether “to be formal or informal, or even rural or urban”82 (“Tweeds? Tux?”) 3) the option that the previous does not really matter, 4) a play on sound and free association (“Baloney? Abalone?”), and 5) resignation, letting go, a realization of what really life is about (“Flux, Tom. Constant flux”). The verses that follow this
80 David Burleigh, in his review of “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore,” finds a complex rhyming pattern analogical to that of “Hopewell Haiku.” Apparently, Muldoon changed the scheme from the preliminary shorter publication and in the “90” version, the rhymes appear as abovementioned. 81 Burleigh 82 Burleigh 33 haiku, namely in poem no.V, speak obliquely about Ireland, “The Big House” referring to the colonial period and the Irish houses which belonged usually to landlords residing in England (“the tenants/are the absentees”), and Muldoon can have this expression produce another meaning, namely the colonial situation of Bermuda, it still being a British possession. There might be, as Burleigh notes, a slight tinge of nostalgia for Ireland (also the name of one of the islands of Bermuda): The last of the pod of sperm whales beached on Nonsuch turns to the auld sod.83
The poet is frequently sight-seeing. Some of the poems are full of enumerations, of nouns, of souvenirs (e.g., in XI). In others, more general philosophy finds its way into the observations, as in X, where, as Burleigh notes, there is a feeling of uncertainty that is “part of the experience of travel.” At another place (LXVI) Muldoon tries to resolve the old dichotomy of bookishness vs. the desire for low-life, for closeness to the earth: Nostalgie de la Boue la boue la boue la boue: an all-Ireland fleadh.84
The “fleadh” (pronounced flah) is an Irish dancing festival, “la boue” in French meaning “life close to the soil”, “abú” in Irish means “glory” or “victory”: “nostalgie de la boue” can be either the longing for low-life, or the nostalgia of the past victory/glory. As Burleigh notes, Muldoon nicely uses the repetition of “la boue” to produce a drumbeat-like sound, one akin to the festival. The poem that corresponds to this one, two pages on (LXXIV), reads as follows: Orange overshoes make the puffin less nimble on dry land, it’s true.85
David Burleigh comments on this: “Ostensibly, this is an amusing portrait of a seabird, yet in Ireland (because of the “orange”) I might read this as a reference to the gracelessness or awkwardness of Ulster Protestants, out of their element somehow.” He goes on to say: “The whole text is fraught with such ambiguities,
83 Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) 54. 84 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 69. 85 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 71. 34 barely contained in the tightly patterned format.”86 Notwithstanding all the possibilities of interpretation, our interest will lie in comparing Muldoon’s haiku with the haiku of Bashō, Issa or others, in terms of their immediacy and spontaneity.
3.3 Muldoon’s haiku – spontaneous poetry?
3.3.1. Can haiku be spontaneous? Haiku are written from the perspective of the poet – the observer of things – thus, we are dealing with a case of dramatic monologue, where the poet is outside and is addressing the audience, presenting the reader with his or her perspective. The success of a haiku can depend for instance on: 1) how accurately the poet uses language to describe the moment (i.e., a moment that is, obviously, seen only from one perspective), which actually means: how “spontaneously” he or she writes; “spontaneously” here referring to a mastery of the craft of poetry-writing, where the poet, like the professional figure-skater, does things so effortlessly that the ordinary spectator does not realize the effort that has gone into the preparation. Thus, the words that appear in the resulting poem “fit” into it quite naturally. 2) the poetic sketch should not stay superficial – it should touch upon the relationship of the scene to other layers of life/reality, bringing in intuition/spiritual insight. In Japan, usually the base for this kind of depth was the spiritual tradition which the poets strongly embraced. 3) The feeling of surprise, connected to both of the abovementioned points. A haiku can, I believe, be labelled spontaneous in the sense that the words comprising it are the end-products of an original impression or feeling, given that the author has the ability to put into words that impression or feeling, and considers this putting of something non-verbal and non-intellectual into language as a valid and relevant act. Thus, the author, having enough self- confidence with verbalization, can write a haiku very quickly; on the other hand, it can be the product of a long process of adjustment and refining. It is a question whether the second “method”, the long refining and “distillation”, does not take away from the haiku a feeling of spontaneity and immediacy, an aspect which the Japanese masters valued a lot during their composition sessions. Arguably, the products of much alteration and change would be artifacts that
86 Burleigh 35 would speak about the process – the trouble of striving for perfection, the poet’s many attempts at finding the best word, phrase or form – rather than being a testimonial of the given moment in the poet’s life, of the momentary flash of inspiration, etc. Language is usually the greatest obstacle when attempting to write spontaneously and naturally; writers use various means to overcome its limitations, never succeeding completely, albeit being completely aware of the problem. Paul Muldoon says that the risk that we undergo when we give ourselves to the structure of language – when we decide to write something using language – is not such a big risk, because: a) we can easily be aware of this giving-ourselves away. There is, as Muldoon says, a “sense of humility and openness before the structure and before the language that means that we are actually involved in a business over which we have no control and we do not know what we're doing.”87 b) The artificiality of our creation will not be “bad” because it is artificial; it will simply be artificial like so many things in this world of human creativity. “We're all engaged in artifice from day to day,”88 Muldoon adds. Thus, the actual limitations of language (which we will not go into here) should not baffle the writer, nor should the process of writing, due to the fact that the ways of dealing with words are not entirely under the user’s control89, and thus the user cannot make any fatal mistakes if (s)he is merely aware of the problem of language. Awareness of the limitations, humility, and the will to take it through could be the precursors of successful writing. Finally, allow me to quote a relevant comment of Michael McClintock on haiku and its quality: if a haiku is too vague, then it invites to be figured out by the intellect rather than fulfilled by the undivided mind. Figuring out a thing and fulfilling it are two distinct processes. The former demands that the reader construct a harmony out of chaos (which would seem more properly the poet’s work) while the latter demands that he complete the harmony that is already constructed or established (the poet’s work being done).90
87 Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript, 14 Mar. 2008, 28 Nov. 2008,
3.3.2. Are Muldoon’s haiku spontaneous? Which of the categories do Paul Muldoon’s haiku belong to? Immediate or crafted? Vague or too explicit? Do they surprise? Are they spiritually profound? And does the poet technically “know the ropes” to the extent that we as readers do not notice the artist and his skill behind his work? Ignoring the abovementioned categories at first, I would like to divide Muldoon’s haiku into “quicker” and “slower”. By “quicker” I mean that the amount of time required to read, understand and “digest” the poem is comparably shorter than in the case of the “slower” ones. This “speed” quality is, I believe, caused by 1) the complexity of the syntax (the “slower” ones might be composed of several sentences), 2) the amount of allusions and rare vocabulary. The slower ones can be quite far from classical haiku. Some “quicker” ones:
A slap on the ass from Hurricane Fabian as he made a pass
A barracuda is eating a small nurse-shark. Each is smiling like Buddha.
Good Friday We fly a kite over Bermuda Our cross in the sky.91
Some “slower” ones:
It seems from this sheer clapboard, fungus-flanged, that walls do indeed have ears.
A giant puffball. The swelled, head-hunted, swelled head of a king of Gaul.92
Saturday night. Soap. Ametas and Thestylis
91 Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 58 (XXII), 56 (XIV), 54 (IV). 92 Both (XXXVIII and XLIII): Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 427. 37 still making hay ropes.93
Old boiler room floods. Old apple trees lagged with moss. Live coals in the mud.94
As can be seen, all of the “quicker” ones come from “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”, whereas the “slower” ones from “Hopewell Haiku.” Correspondingly, instant text messages come and go quite quickly, we read them in an instant and then reply. It seems that is not really necessary to dwell upon each one, they seem to be there, as a part of Horse Latitudes, to provide a set of tiny impressionistic sketches, often mere glimpses of the land, its inhabitants, of the thoughts that it inspires. Some of Muldoon’s haiku are doubtless surprising and funny; some are quite down-to-earth and blunt in their subject-matter treatment. Some are linguistically and thematically elaborate, very much packed with meaning and extra-textual allusions – like the “Ametas and Thestylis” haiku quoted above. To see whether his haiku tell/show too much or too little, I would compare the above quoted “Good Friday” piece, or indeed many others, with some Michael McClintock and Masaoka Shiki pieces:
McClintock: VIETNAM: POEMS (1973) A fly boom comes to taste ... go the guns, his wound bowels
VIETNAM: FIVE POEMS tonight ... wishing the lightning were lightning the thunder, thunder
Masaoka Shiki: summer storm my hometown white paper on the desk many cousins- all flies away peach blossoms
a fancy-free cat is about to catch a quail
93 Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 429. 94 Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 431. 38 Muldoon, “Hopewell Haiku”: A Saharan boil. Oscar stretched under a hide by the toilet bowl. (XLIV)
In a slow puddle two dragonflies, Oxford blues, rest on their paddles. (LI)
Compared to McClintock and Shiki, Muldoon is clearly much more complicated, and he strives to do more in the tiny poem: he would show the scene and amuse the reader with some wordplay or extra-textual allusion. To be noted is also Muldoon’s frequent use of prepositions of place and time, which the translators of Japanese haiku use less often. In the Japanese haiku tradition, there is one famous exception to the simplicity of haiku: Yosa Buson (1716- 1784), who filled the short form with more meaning than the others:
Rain falls on the grass filling the ruts left by the festival cart.
Goodbye. I will go alone down Kiso road old as autumn
These lazy spring days continue but how far away those times called Long Ago!
Buson is certainly a rewarding poet for the haiku reader who wishes to indulge in multiple-meanings and word-play, interweaved with a Buddhist outlook on life. It seems that how the poet will use the short form of the haiku really depends on their personality, their unique mindset. If, for example, we compare Muldoon’s “nature haiku” with Issa’s, Bashō’s, or other Japanese haiku author’s, we can find interesting differences. Cherry blossoms, more and more now! Birds have two legs! Oh, horses have four! (Onitsura, 1660-1738)
Blooms on the plum, redder and redder and still redder they come! (Izen, 1646-1711)
What a red moon! And whose is it, children? (Issa, 1762-1826)
39 Not even a hat-- and cold rain falling on me? Tut-tut! Think of that! (Bashō)
In Muldoon, we here find, for instance: 1. An absence of genuine cries, of shouts of enthusiasm about the beauty of nature, the paradoxes of life, etc. 2. A striving for some kind of complexity or ingenuity, for creating parable and allegory, for creating a complex mytho-poetic world. This interest was shared with Louis MacNiece, who influenced especially “Why Brownlee Left.” With exceptions like Buson, classical haiku are an easy first read, although the whole meaning may not be perceived in a lifetime. For one who knows the cultural and spiritual background of the writer, they become a small painting, with profound meaning for the reader who will stop and reflect. In Muldoon, the reader often has to know the literary references, the rare vocabulary, the Irish/Bermuda background, but, interestingly enough, also Muldoon’s private world. This brings me back to Clair Wills’s commentary in her “Introduction” to Reading Paul Muldoon: “The poems affect a kind of take it or leave it attitude – what one unsympathetic critic has called a ‘cliquish nonchalance’ – a cocky assurance that we’ll follow Muldoon down whatever densely private avenues he chooses to lead us.”95 3. We further can find, contrasting Muldoon’s haiku with other haiku, arguably a slight feeling of weakness or exhaustion. Clair Wills, writing about “Sleeve Notes,” an autobiographical lyrical sequence, points out that perhaps “this [Muldoon’s word-play on root-radical, which seems to suggest that being radical is not a matter of advanced technique but of finding the right way of moving on, even if this involves an apparent return to roots] is a pre- emptive strike on Muldoon’s part: an attempt to forestall the suggestion that, with his new American pastoral simplicity [in Hay], his middle-aged slobbery, his poetry has lost its vital spark.”96 In Muldoon’s case it is also possible that – haiku not being the central “hub” of his (poetic) life (unlike Bashō’s) – the “juice” and the “vital spark” are spread out more evenly amongst all of his poems. Generally speaking, if compared with the haiku of most Japanese masters, Muldoon’s would be probably slower, less spontaneous, and telling/showing much more – not in the sense of “overdoing it,” but rather in the
95 Wills 12. 96 Wills 196. 40 sense of offering the reader a solid ground for multiple interpretation97; if compared with, for instance, James Merrill’s haiku (which should not be isolated this way, of course, from the rest of the text) in “Prose of Departure”, Muldoon’s would perhaps, though this is a very imprecise generalization, pass as more straightforward and generally easier-to-digest poetry. If we compared Muldoon’s haiku with, e.g., Michael McClintock’s tanka and haiku, there would be a vast difference in the approach to the material and to the form and tradition, rendering the two almost incomparable; McClintock’s tanka collected in Meals at Midnight, for instance, have been described as “[...] natural and vivid [...] animistic tanka”, as “poems to eat”, as “keen insights into the human nature”: one at a time I step on stones and cross the stream— when I’m across, the stones go back to what they were doing98
3.4. Conclusion Paul Muldoon is comparably more of an urban poet who embraces the life of civilized man (perhaps this is due to the relaxation he may have experienced when he moved to the relatively tranquil United States from the fairly turbulent Ireland); he is more of a complicated and intellectualizing poet than most Japanese haiku poets and most of the modern English-writing haiku poets; he is also a poet that pushes formal mastery to the utmost. Muldoon can, in his haiku, thus be enjoyed on several levels: a) the level of basic meaning is one – the reader can muse with Muldoon at what is happening, and he will be treated with a smile at the absurdity or mere funniness of the situation; b) the level of “broader” meaning – the reader, having done the research on Ireland, etc., understands the allusions, can enjoy the multiplicity of meaning in such a small poem; c) the level of linguistic artifice – as David Burleigh puts it, referring to “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: “there being quite enough to enjoy simply from the use of language, the sound patterns and unusual words, the jokes and lewd asides. Despite the Joycean rigors of the pattern, which is as intricate and demanding as Ulysses, the tone throughout is conversational. [...] But it seems to me that what the word-play foregrounds is language itself, in all
98 Michael McClintock, Meals at Midnight. Press Release, 7 Dec. 2008, Accessed: 20 Jan 2009,
The haiku of Paul Muldoon, far from the cries of joy, sorrow, enthusiasm, inspiration, desperation, etc. of the Japanese haiku masters, are poems that can startle by their formal and textual ingenuity and interconnectedness; on the other hand, they can pull the rug from under the reader in terms of knowledge (this can be, when done too often, discouraging). Japanese haiku “catch us” with their unexpected simplicity and sincerity – almost no knowledge is necessary; they have the common denominator of being human, of having the ability to feel. With Muldoon, the reader must be generally a very patient one, do some research, and allow the author to lead. In reward, Muldoon will open a window, a window of his own, that leads to his private backyard, to his place. He is not afraid of revealing this: in fact, he lets himself go, from one haiku to another, and this sequence does become a true sequence, a stream-of-thought/perception, not connected only by the logical/intelligent thread, but by the impulses or throbbing of life itself; as it “happened” to the author. Similarly, both sequences are windows into Muldoon’s mind: a psychoanalyst would perhaps find useful material on how the poet often hides behind his sharp intellect, only to leave subtle “footprints” in his poems of longing, unfulfilled desire, etc. But these might be psychological speculations which we do not wish to enter here. Muldoon the man of obscure meaning and incredible artifice as if slightly contradicts himself: not in the meaning of what he’s saying, but in the fact of using language and poetry for communication. It seems that – by frequently making the poems quite obscure – he is not sure whether he wants us to read the poems closely and sincerely or not. And (a personal comment) perhaps naturally so: you can never be sure who will read your confessions, and how they will take them, how quickly they will be done with them, how narrowly they will interpret them, or how much the internet “bio” of the author will interest them instead.
99 Burleigh 42 4: Haiku Journals: Survey and Comparison
In this chapter, after an introduction to the main U.S. and Canadian haiku journals and the situation of journals as such, we wish to compare two online haiku journals, Shamrock and Roadrunner, in terms of their form and contents.
4.1. Introduction to Haiku Journals
In his exhaustive article called “The American Haiku Movement”, Charles Trumbull, updating the material compiled by Elisabeth Searle Lamb in her “A History of Western Haiku” published in four parts in the 1979-80 Cicada issues, writes (in the section “Journals”): “Even in the Internet age, the haiku journals are where the “action” is and remain the mode of record and, hence, the most important bellwether of the movement.”100 I would add that the “action” is also in the on-line haiku journals and discussion forums. Trumbull goes on to say that the U.S. haiku scene, which “has also been enriched by a succession of smaller, often ephemeral journals that have explored various dimensions of the vital American haiku movement,” has been dominated by two principal journals, Modern Haiku, founded in the winter of 1969-1970, and Frogpond, originally called HSA Frogpond, first published in 1978, being also the official journal of the Haiku Society of America. Trumbull comments on Modern Haiku as follows:
Over the years, Modern Haiku provided a forum for all views on the evolving aesthetics and craft of English-language haiku, featured the finest essays, consistently reviewed the haiku literature, introduced hundreds of new poets, and kept a finger on the pulse of haiku in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere.101
The second mainstream journal, Frogpond, has had the largest circulation among all English-language haiku journals:
100 Trumbull, Charles, “The American Haiku Movement, Part II: American Haiku, The Internet and World Haiku,” Modern Haiku, Vol.37.1, Spring 2006, accessed 23 Feb. 2009,
Currently, as can be seen in its online version, Modern Haiku is a journal that publishes: haiku, senryu, haibun and other short forms related to haiku; haiku contests, including for example the high-school Kay Titus Mormino Memorial Scholarship (since 1987) with a top prize of $500, or the Robert Spiess Memorial (since 2003); book reviews and featured essays; pieces of cover art. It is published on a bi-annual basis. The associated Modern Haiku Press also publishes books related to haiku, like Paul Muldoon’s Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore (2005), Lee Gurga’s Haiku: A Poet’s Guide (2003), or quite a few books by the deceased haiku poet and specialist Robert Spiess. Every volume of Modern Haiku, since the Summer 2001 issue, is also partly available on-line for free, in the form of a shorter sample including: the cover art, announcements for haiku awards and contests, the featured essay, several sample haiku and other short poems, and a haibun. In the past, Modern Haiku has published haiku by writers such as Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Paul Muldoon103.
Charles Trumbull lists a number of other American haiku journals, of which we will mention only four, directing the reader to the resources for more information: 1) the Canadian Cicada, appearing first in 1977 and edited by Eric Amann, whose name is often associated with Zen-haiku; ending however in
102 Trumbull 103 The following information is by the courtesy of Charles Trumbull: Collins in 33:3 (autumn 2002), 34:1 (winter-spring 2003), 34:2 (summer 2003), 34:3 (autumn 2003), 35:1 (winter-spring 2004), 35:2 (summer 2004), 36:1 (winter-spring 2005), 36:2 (summer 2005), and 36:3 (autumn 2005); Olds in 34:2 (summer 2003), 34:3 (autumn 2003), and 35:2 (summer 2004); Ferlinghetti in 34:2 (summer 2003); McClure’s sequence “Maui” in 34:1 (winter-spring 2003); Snyder in 33:3 (autumn 2002). Muldoon: Modern Haiku 35:2 (summer 2004). Muldoon’s book of haiku, Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore, was published by Modern Haiku Press in 2005. It is excerpted in Modern Haiku 35:3 (autumn 2004), 74, and 36:1 (winter-spring 2005), 24, and reviewed by David Burleigh in Modern Haiku 36:2 (summer 2005), 75. 44 1981, and being renewed as a Japanese-based continuation in 1984 under the name New Cicada. 2) Dragonfly, the successor of the important Haiku Highlights (founded as early as 1965). Dragonfly tried to bridge the Pacific by featuring articles by Yagi Kometaro, a Japanese haiku scholar, and by printing Richard Tice’s translations from Japanese. The magazine ran under the editorship of Richard Tice and Jack Lyon from 1984 until 1992. 3) Acorn, “a small biannual journal dedicated to publishing the best of contemporary English-language haiku. In particular, it showcases the individual poem and the ability of haiku to reveal the extraordinary moments found in everyday life.”104 And last but not least, 4) High/Coo and its successor, Mayfly, another one of the “highly selective journals,” as Trumbull calls them, published by Randy and Shirley Brooks in Indiana, “a minisized haiku magazine that has showcased 14- 16 carefully selected verses.”105 The Brooks have an internet portal that presents not only books but also a newly produced movie by Tazuo Yamaguchi called Haiku: The Art of the Short Poem, a result of Yamaguchi’s filming at the Haiku North America conference in August 2007.106 A complete guide to haiku journals in the United States and elsewhere is available, by courtesy of the Haiku Society of America, on-line at:
4.2. Comparison of Two Online Journals, Shamrock and Roadrunner
In this chapter, we will not compare the two main journals, the internet access to them being limited and their scope being, generally speaking, very broad. Instead, we will focus on two online journals: the quarterly Roadrunnner and the international web-journal of the Irish Haiku Society Shamrock. We have chosen these two because they are quite different in a) their visual presentation, b) their criteria of selection, c) their overall scope and “tone”.
104 Trumbull 105 Trumbull 106 See:
Shamrock is a relatively new journal, with the latest issue being the ninth and the first appearing in the spring of 2007. The editors claim the journal to be an “international quarterly online journal of the Irish Haiku Society,”107 the last eight issues having “showcased works by two hundred and seventy-two poets who represented thirty-eight countries.”108 Haiku journals usually have an “editor’s choice” or a “best of issue” haiku. Shamrock has this selection done on an annual basis, the 2008 winner being Graham Nunn (Australia) with:
lookout point the stones share our silence
The best one-line haiku published in Shamrock in 2008 was Sergey Biryukov’s:
out of the empty sleeve steam
The ninth issue focuses on Poland, there being an essay about the history of Polish haiku, and a number of haiku by Poles (about 50, by about 20 authors). Apart from these, there is a correspondingly long section of other haiku, mostly by authors of the Commonwealth (mainly Australia), the United Kingdom and the U.S., but also by an author from Ghana, Bangladesh and the Philippines. At the end, there is a one-page haibun, and a longer book review on Walden by Haiku, a book of haiku inspired by Thoreau’s Walden. The overall design and layout of the journal is what I would call transparent and fairly ordinary, with a probably unwanted Google ad at the top. The only design “specialty” is that the page has the visual form of a book, and makes the viewer feel that they are about to flip through a volume. What I find very useful about the design is the “Authors Index” and the many links the page provides to other haiku and poetry web pages. The colours are light pink for the background, and catchy colourful headings for each country. Looking closer at the haiku that appear in the Issue 9 of Shamrock, let us see whether they have something more specific in common. First, we will look at some authors from the “mixed-international” section, and afterwards, several from the “focus-on-one-country” section.
107
Regent’s park--- the geese wild
And Buckingham’s haiku in Shamrock? One is political (St.Patrick’s day - / expats form / a snake); another almost purely nature-oriented, about spring and a bird trying out its whistle in preparation for nest-building; another about travelling an old road full of potholes; another mixes and blends the urban and the natural (Boxing Day / a fork-lift truck / laden with mist). From these we can start deducing Buckingham’s interest in juxtaposing environmental occurrences such as the rainbow, the winter mist, the heat and cold of the seasons, with urban or more precisely human situations and objects, like the truck, potholes, the summer graduation, St. Patrick’s day, etc. In some of her haiku (May Day / at the flower show... / 4x4s in heat), she uses irony in a way that suggests a similarity of human creations and nature’s: the 4x4s are like bulls in heat; the rainbow is like “the arc of his serve” at Wimbledon; the line of the expats is like a snake. Alternatively to these juxtapositions, Buckingham merely records what she sees and the free associations this sight produces: dad’s bread… another grey hair in the mix
109
Old road the sky as full of potholes
As far as the scope of Buckingham’s haiku is concerned, Shamrock does not seem to be selective in any specific way. Buckingham’s haiku are surely English and “Western”, with St.Patrick’s day, Boxing Day, expats, 4x4s, etc. They best contrast when placed beside the haiku of e.g. Croatians, Byelorussians or of other developing countries: the latter have a very different attitude towards life, nature, politics. They seem to lack that subtle irony that Buckingham can afford to use living in a First World country with a certain “higher” lifestyle, etc. The Eastern European haiku are more humble – precisely because the people are happy for small things, small achievements, even simple sights in nature.
Let us now look at the haiku of a poet from Canada, Rose Hunter. She writes short and longer prose and shorter poetry. 111 Her haiku have appeared in Shamrock Issues no.3, 4, and 8. Two examples from Shamrock:
supermarket: undecided next to the pickles
mid-morning sun turning our chairs bit by bit
The tone of the haiku somehow correlates with the tone of her short prose – very blunt (almost “raw”), sincere, saying what is on her mind, no extra explanations, etc. Again, Shamrock has selected haiku that are representative of a poet that lives in a Western, First World country, where for instance supermarkets are quite common. The haiku are simple and speak clearly to the reader who comes from a similar background. Kateřina Rudčenková is from the Czech Republic. Her haiku appeared in Shamrock Issue number 3, where the focus was on “Europe Off-Centre”112:
111 Hunter’s poetry and prose can be accessed at her blogspot:
On the night train – two sober gentlemen playing checkers
Glasses clinking and clinking – seeping through, a squeaky laugh113
Here we can notice a more “gloomy” outlook on Czech Republic, with drunkards, stray dogs and squeaky laughs, and compared to the other haiku in the Issue, which resemble Issa, Bashō and other (for reasons of simplicity) “nature-haiku-poets,” these are indeed “darker” and more naturalistic.
Anatoly A. Kudryavitsky, the founder and editor of Shamrock, was born in Moscow in 1954 of a Polish father and a half-Irish mother and is currently living in Dublin as an Irish citizen. He has edited two anthologies of Russian literature, and has published numerous volumes of his poetry in Russian and English. His poems have been translated to many languages, and his haiku have appeared in the main journals. He has translated all the non-English haiku in Shamrock. An example of his own haiku:
surfacing at low tide, a shopping trolley dripping with sunshine
narrow cave – a wave rushes in, the shape of its howl
The featured countries in Shamrock have so far covered Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary), South-Eastern Europe (Romania, Croatia114, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro), North-Eastern Europe (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Western Europe (Denmark, France, England, Ireland), the USA, Canada, Australia, and some parts of East Asia as well as an
we showcase authors from the states that don't have formal national haiku associations,” the introductory note to the issue says. 113
4.2.2. Roadrunner
Roadrunner is a different matter, although not altogether. The design of the page is more sparse: black and white only, “Times New Roman” font, no side-columns or sub-headings. What is interesting are the instructions for readers: “Mouse over the area below each group of poems to reveal the authors or click here to reveal all authors.” The idea to put the poems on the page without authorial labels is a good one, I believe, because it does not disturb the reading: one does not start thinking about the pre-conditions of the writer being from Croatia, for instance, or being a male or female, having an “exotic” name, etc. At the bottom of the page, there is a logo of the roadrunner bird, and the copyright, and that is all. The menu on the top of the page reads: “current issue”, “submissions”, “email”, “archive”, and “about roadrunner”. In the “archive”, we can find 3 complete years, 4 issues each year, plus the “Premiere Issue” of 2004. The “current issue” is the February 2009 Issue IX:1. In “about roadrunner” we read: “Roadrunner is a quarterly online journal seeking to publish the best and most diverse in English-language haiku (including senryu, zappai and short
50 poetry inspired by haiku).” The founding editor was Jason Sanford Brown, the current editor is Scott Metz.115 Apart from haiku, senryu and other short poetry, Roadrunner features: an occasional interview (Robert Hass, issue VII:4); Hiroaki Sato’s translations of Gendai haiku (21st century); a serial commentary on “The Flying Pope”, which is a haiku-project by Ban’ya Natsuishi, published in 2008, consisting of an ongoing series of haiku with the central theme of the Pope taking to the air – an image that came to Natsuishi in a dream, upon which he decided to figure out its real meaning by writing a “never-ending” series of haiku116; “The Scorpion Prize” for best haiku/senryu of a given issue, with a paragraph of critical commentary on some of the best ones; articles about haiku poets (Hackett); haiku “found” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Whitman’s and Thoreau’s poems. Almost every issue brings one or more of these “extras”. Some winners of the Scorpion Prize have included: Patrick Sweeney running for nothing rainy headed boys
Peter Yovu
in a seed I don't know the answer
Paul Pfleuger, Jr.
Capturing a butterfly the American in me
John Martone
a fossil 3 mushrooms one stone turned my color reached out to face you to you
The commentary, by Paul Muldoon, of John Martone’s haiku, reads as follows:
The poems by John Martone are exceptional in their capacity to meet the brief of the senryu, the wonderful doubly whammy of brevity combined with bite. The "fossil" is exposed less than the self-regard of the speaker. That same speaker is impervious to the fact that his positioning of himself with the "3 mushrooms" is emblematic of his own immanence. The Human Resources and Development Office
115 See also:
An example of “embedded” haiku, found in the last part of Shakespeare’s Sonnet no.97:
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away, the very birds are mute; Or, if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer, That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.118
In general, the haiku and related poems found in Roadrunner are more diverse, precisely because of the associated poem-types: one-line haiku, senryu, four-line haiku, etc. Some examples of one-line haiku from the November 2008 Issue:
May your voice be the ropes I am lowered on
haiku of my photograph photograph of my haiku
two-dimensional wise men across the pulp mill roof119
These extremely short forms appeal, I believe, to the contemporary reader, because of their daring brevity, usually with no punctuation marks. They still have the aura of an experimental form, nonetheless they “feel” at home in the small compactness of the one line in the midst of blank space. They do not offer, unlike the sonnet, the sestina, etc., the broad space of words that gives the reader the feeling of security – the security that if the meaning is not discerned in the first words, we will definitely catch up later – the poem is so long. Not here: if you do not understand from the start, you simply do not understand. But the poems are so simple and straightforward that, with a dictionary, a non-native English speaker will certainly get the main point. On top of the short reading-
117 Roadrunner Haiku Journal, Issue VII:1, Accessed: 3 Apr. 2009,
4.3. Conclusion
We have done this research in online haiku journals because we believe that the Internet is a strong medium where nearly all forms of literature can appear, published as a whole or in part. In the case of haiku, the Internet indeed appears to be a very potent means of publicity, partly owing to the brevity of the poems, and partly, I have found, owing to the “up-to-date” mentality of most haiku authors. What is also worth mentioning, although it stands to reason, is that there are many authors worldwide and hence new poems appear very often; the Internet also “makes it fresh”. To compare the two abovementioned journals is to match two very different “eggs”; one is run by a cosmopolitan Russian expatriate fluent in many languages, the other by a young American who has spent three years living and working in Japan. One is more political in the sense of speaking for the “remote” Eastern European poet; the other is “especially interested in publishing new and underexplored directions in haiku, with an eye on genuineness (heart), voice and artistry.”121 We should, therefore, use a different yard-stick for measuring the merits of each. Roadrunner seems to offer a greater variety of forms than Shamrock, a rich selection that is more carefully done and that is more resourceful. The variety of forms, the space-sensitive page-arrangement of the poems, the playful
120 It has been interesting to read an article in the August 2007 Issue VII:3 of Roadrunner about a translation of Jim Kacian’s English haiku into Japanese by a team of five translators, most of them native Japanese. The author, Richard Gilbert, a linguist specializing on Japanese, draws attention to the fact of the season word, or kigo: “What functions as kigo in Japanese is only image in English—we can say “moon” and not automatically assume it to be the harvest moon. This is a function of the English haiku trying to speak more directly to experience, and less to convention, in part because the convention is not our own.” Richard Gilbert, “Clearing the Brush, Finding our Way – The Bilingual Publication of Presents of Mind, by Jim Kacian,” Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University, Japan, Accessed: 29 Mar. 2009,
121
54 5. Conclusion
For a reader or author residing in the West, the haiku journal scene is, owing to the Internet and to the many published printed journals, abundantly rich, and from the research we have done, we see that there is also a large number of authors in the English-speaking world who submit to these journals. The Internet also offers the option of blogspots, which some authors make use of; scholarly articles on haiku are readily accessible through journals and through other web pages. This situation allows for a dialogue, where the judgment about a haiku’s quality is never simple. In the conclusion to this paper, we will sum up what we consider to be the important features of haiku, and we will discuss the prose-poetry dichotomy, as it seems to have relevance for haiku.
The Japanese tradition still plays a crucial role in shaping modern haiku, as can be seen in the issues of Shamrock and elsewhere; there is a clear awareness, in the haiku community, that English is a different medium, with its rhythm and sound specifics, and that the same applies for other languages. In the case of James Merrill we have seen that haiku and haibun can serve as resourceful and inspiring platforms for English-language poetry. The patterns were not followed precisely; nevertheless, a text of great merit and interest was produced. Paul Muldoon has taken the haiku and transformed its simple classical poetics into something new; his sequences are very “Muldoonesque,” providing for inspiring and very entertaining reading. Other writers of the English-speaking world, like Helen Buckingham, Bruce Ross, Rose Hunter, Michael McClintock, etc., have each taken the classical haiku and adapted it not only to English prosody, but also to their personal needs and approaches. Nowadays, we have not only three-line haiku, but also two- and one-line haiku, three-line senryu, five-line tanka, haiku or tanka as a part of a photograph, drawing or painting, creating a haiga or taiga respectively, and some other forms as well. We have haiku that use repetition, paradox, puns or rhyme; haiku with a tone of longing, sober matter-of-factness, mystery, observant tranquility, etc.
55 Literary critics have also taken a variety of approaches to haiku et al.: “the geometry of haiku” – haiku and Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry;122 the spirit of longing in haiku – the haiku poet as pilgrim and physical or spiritual pilgrimage as an essential feature;123 the transformational effects of haiku; the incompleteness and the “emergent” nature of haiku; the flow of time and haiku; etc. Haiku is, nevertheless – as Bruce Ross says in his article “The Essence of Haiku,” – basically a form of poetry, and, like Western poetry, even traditional Japanese haiku “occasionally contains figurative language, such as exaggeration, simile, and metaphor, exactly as used in lyric poetry elsewhere.”124 The specialty of traditional haiku is, however, that it uses culturally well understood topoi which, in a condensed small space, provide for “an allegory that universalizes the natural world and its cycles.” This is the kigo or season word, or kidai – seasonal topic. In effect, the figurative language, as Ross adds, tends to “overburden such a small poem at the expense of the haiku values of spareness, resonance, and mystery.”125 We can thus conclude that haiku should, above all, be rather a “pleasing vignette” than a tiring word-game; a modestly beautiful gem that only begins to shine inside the prepared reader, rather than a gem that advertises itself beforehand;126 rather a “poem to eat” than a “poem to fight an intellectual battle with”; rather simple and sincere (with a more subtle “tail-flavour” coming later) than quite complex and interesting. As Ross says, drawing on Edmund Husserl: “He suggested a ‘bracketing’ of experience to determine its essence,” and further: “[haiku] brackets or, rather, experiences a moment in time while particularizing the components of that moment.”127 This way, using the particulars to show the nature of the moment, haiku potentially shows the nature of all moments. A more detailed analysis of Japanese haiku would show that one could distinguish other peculiar “hues” of aesthetic value: 1. “the pathos of things”
122 Dru Philippou, “Haiku Geometry,” Modern Haiku, vol.38.1, Spring 2007, Accessed: 10 Mar. 2009,
Contemporary haiku have many facets; there are numerous poets, styles, etc. In this paper we have shown only a small part of the whole spectrum. One author I believe worthwhile is Michael McClintock: his haiku could be said to “encompass” several aspects of life: 1. beauty, 2. ugliness, 3. sensuality, erotics. The first are not of that much interest, because the haiku scene offers a great number of beautiful poems. The second, the “ugly” haiku, are more interesting, although McClintock is not a pioneer in this strand either – Kerouac and other poets have done the same, drawing small pictures of ugly, uncomfortable, death- related scenes from life. The third direction of McClintock’s haiku is probably the most interesting: let us quote and comment three haiku in each of which the sensuality and sexuality are present to a different degree: She leaves– warm pillow scent remaining
128 Robert Spiess is the one who preferred to use this distinction when speaking about haiku: feeling – being aware, and simultaneously perceiving with the senses the environment; emotion – strong subjective feeling having connection with the non-rational part of the psyche, one that could interfere with a haiku moment. 129 Ross 57 This one has a nice warm feeling about it, a sleepy warm feeling of staying in bed, after she has left. The sensuality is, I would say, relatively very weak, almost absent.
letting my tongue deeper into the cool ripe tomato
This one is much more sensual and erotic: as we read it, line by line, we are intrigued to imagine erotic scenes, and each subsequent line slightly thwarts our expectations, although – and this is what the haiku’s best quality is probably – it does not throw us off track, it remains ambivalent. In fact, it is satisfactory in a way: the first line opens the “door” to the erotic chamber, the second supports the strongly erotic charge of oral sex, and the third concludes it, and at the same time ambiguously re-directs it from a sexual to a gastronomical affair. We are, on the whole, nicely made aware of our susceptibility, of the Eros inside us and the power it has over our imagination. Compare it to this last one:
while we wait to do it again, the rains of spring
This has a very different tone and feeling. It plays with simplicity and matter-of- factness of pure feeling, of being in the moment, and nothing more. They were waiting, resting, and looking out the window. McClintock seems to suggest that this does not need any more commentary: the reader will relate the sexual occurrence to his or her own experience anyway, so there is no need that the poet force his own conception of love-making, etc. The only thing that is “offered” to the reader is that spring is a good time for love-making, and that when it is raining outside, it is a good time as well. And the other message this haiku seems to be forwarding is that sex is completely natural. I do not want to advertise certain types of haiku writing as opposed to others, which are less valuable, etc. I only perhaps wanted to point out that the time of imitation of traditional Japanese haiku has passed and that we are now in a period of newer and more original creativity. Merrill’s “Prose of Departure” still has elements of what Barbara Ungar has called “serious imitation.” Paul Muldoon’s haiku are, on the other hand, testimonies of a very recent past, where
58 the artist adapts the form and the main features, while creating a thematically innovative poem. More or less the same applies for Michael McClintock, Helen Buckingham, Rose Hunter, and many others, which we could not quote here The question is, as usual in literary criticism, whether their haiku will stand the test of time. That of course depends not only on the poems, but also on the readership: on their dedication to reading poetry, on their ability to see through their personal limitations, etc.
Prose and poetry are, according to Octavio Paz, different means of creation. Poetry, he says, does not violate the word, its material. It lets the word retain its multiple meanings, its ambivalence, its potentiality. Prose, on the other hand, is a tool by which sense and meaning are arrived at. Therefore, the authors of prose have to stick to this: keep the meaning “rolling,” keep the words “clear,” not ambivalent. Paz uses the comparison with a staircase, a sculpture, and the building material for both, stone. The stone, in the staircase, is subdued, it is mute. In the case of a sculpture, the stone is alive and speaks; it is allowed to manifest its energy. The same applies, Paz conjectures, with prose and poetry, and the “building material,” words.130 James Merrill, as we have seen, has blurred the boundary between poetry and prose: he has written poetic prose and narrative poetry as a part of one whole, intertwining both. He is not the only poet to have done this. His case is good, however, in that it illustrates what imagination, language and poetry can do together, when given a relative freedom from convention. Paul Muldoon has written haiku sequences which are lyrical and narrative poetry: each little rhyming “vignette” is about an idea, and/or it describes an animal, recounts an occurrence, etc. One after another, these short pieces perhaps (although this may be a far-fetched conclusion) constitute a loose narrative – although without a plot, but with a time-line, with a chronology measured by the seasons and by the individual occurrences. Of course, this last aspect is not one of the keys to interpret Muldoon’s poetry. We only want to comment on it here because it offers vague proof that haiku poems tend to be written in sequences, or as part of a larger narrative. This has not been the rule, but it certainly has been a frequent thing in the haiku-
130 Paz, Octavio, Luk a lyra. Praha: Odeon, 1992.
59 writing community. Earl Miner has a lot to say about poetry and diaries being intimately linked in old Japan, and other critical studies of traditional haiku would probably confirm that this type of brief poetry was a poetry of sequences, of longer units. The haiku journals that we have looked into in Chapter 4 have both proved and disproved this assertion: 1. they offer mostly individual poems which can supposedly stand alone, but 2. these poems are arranged so that when you’re finished reading one, you can instantly jump to the next, there being enough in the journal to suffice for an hour’s quick reading. There is only one online journal we have come across that does not offer this option at all: Tinywords gives its readers a “package” of one selected haiku daily, and nothing more. We wish to leave this discussion with a series of open questions: Are not haiku poems so short that they, in the contemporary world, need to be arranged into sequences? Sequences that would make it worthwhile to sit down and read poetry – to sit down and, ideally, be present to the ambivalent and mutable reality of the “building material” – words; sequences that would hopefully (from the impatient reader’s perspective) provide some meaningful context when read from beginning to end? Does not the modern sensibility require that these tiny forms be fit into a larger narrative, so that the reader is not forced to stop? Leaving these, hopefully not too militant, questions open, we would like to direct the inquisitive reader in the direction of broader and more scholarly philosophical essays about literature.
60 Bibliography
Printed Sources:
Aitken, Robert, A Zen Wave. Bashō’s Haiku and Zen. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003.
Blasing, Mutlu Konig, Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
International Haiku Convention 2002. Ehime, Japan: Ehime Culture Foundation, 2003.
Kirkup, James, Paper Windows. Poems from Japan. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1968.
Flétna a meč – Harmonie a napětí v japonské kultuře. Zvláštní číslo časopisu Kokoro, Jaro 2005, Praha: Česko-japonská společnost, 2005.
McClintock, Michael, “Statement and Suggestion in Haiku,” p.11. In: Ungar, B., “Haiku in English.” California: Stanford, 1978. (p.46)
Merrill, James, The Inner Room. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1988.
Merrill, James, Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996.
Miner, Earl, Japanese Poetic Diaries. (selected & transl., introd.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Muldoon, Paul, Poems 1968-1998. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Muldoon, Paul, Horse Latitudes. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Paz, Octavio, Luk a lyra. Praha: Odeon, 1992.
Ungar, Barbara, “Haiku in English.” Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, Number XXI, Stanford, California, 1978.
Vendler, Helen, The Music of What Happens. Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Wills, Clair, Reading Paul Muldoon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998.
Yenser, Stephen, The Consuming Myth. The Work of James Merrill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
61 Online Sources:
Richard Gilbert, “Stalking the Wild Onji.” Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America, XXII: Supplement (1999). Haiku Essay. 12 Oct. 2008. Source for this paper:
Sara Lundquist "An aesthetics of enclosure: James Merrill's inner rooms". English Studies in Canada. Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2005, Ed. Peter Schwenger, 22 Jan. 2009,
Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript, 14 Mar. 2008, 28 Nov. 2008,
Cotter, Patrick, “Paul Muldoon.” Ireland – Poetry International Web. 14 Feb. 2007, 28 Nov. 2008,
Higginson, William J., “A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku, Vol.35.2, Summer 2004, 31 Nov.2008,
Burleigh, David, “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore by Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku, Vol.36.2, Summer 2005, 31 Nov.2008,
Jen Bervin, “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” Roadrunner, May 2008 Issue VIII:2, 23 Mar. 2009,
Richard Gilbert, “Clearing the Brush, Finding our Way – The Bilingual Publication of Presents of Mind, by Jim Kacian,” Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University, Japan, 29 Mar. 2009,
Dru Philippou, “Haiku Geometry,” Modern Haiku, vol.38.1, Spring 2007, 10 Mar. 2009,
Marjorie Buettner, “The Return Message: A Pilgrim’s Way of Longing,” Modern Haiku, vol.40.1, Winter 2009, 23 Mar.2009,
Van der Heuvel, Cor, “Lafcadio Hearn and Haiku,” Modern Haiku, Vol.33.2, Summer 2002, 22 Feb. 2008,
McClintock, Michael, Meals at Midnight. Press release, Dec.7, 2008, 20 Jan. 2009,
Trumbull, Charles, “The American Haiku Movement, Part I: Haiku in English,” Modern Haiku, Vol.36.3, Autumn 2005, featured essay, 23 Feb. 2009,
62 Trumbull, Charles, “The American Haiku Movement, Part II: American Haiku, The Internet and World Haiku,” Modern Haiku, Vol.37.1, Spring 2006, featured essay, 23 Feb. 2009,
Shamrock Haiku Journal, 10 Feb. – 28 Mar. 2009,
Roadrunner Haiku Journal, 10 Feb. – 28 Mar. 2009,
Simply Haiku Journal, 20 Mar.2009,
63 České resumé
Tato práce pojednává o haiku spisovatelů anglosaské provenience. Zaměřuje se především na haiku Jamese Merrilla a Paula Muldoona, a také na anglicky psanou tvorbu publikovanou v on-line žurnálech Shamrock a Roadrunner. Je rozdělena na úvod a pět kapitol, včetně závěru.
První kapitola je úvodem do problematiky haiku, obsahujícím nejprve stručný popis forem haiku a haibun s jejich formálními a obsahovými náležitostmi a specifiky; dále průřez dějin japonského haiku od jeho počátků ve formě tanka, přes dílo Matsua Bashóa, včetně jeho poetického deníku, až do svého vyčlenění a novodobého pojetí v díle Masaoky Shikiho; dále stručné vysvětlení prozodických rozdílů mezi angličtinou a japonštinou; nakonec uvádíme poněkud obsáhlejší oddíl týkající se dějin anglicky psaného haiku, zejména na území USA: prvním obdobím bylo období zájmu o exotično japonské poezie a také snahy o nápodobu haiku v dílech Imagistů; druhým pak období Beatniků, kdy došlo k hlubšímu pochopení duchovní tradice, která s haiku souvisí; třetím je pak období přizpůsobení, zdomácnění a vážnějšího zájmu o celou tradici haiku a souvisejících forem, které trvá dodnes. Ve druhé kapitole se zabýváme poetickým cestovním deníkem Jamese Merrilla nazvaným „Prose of Departure,“ v němž se díky Merrilovu básnickému stylu stírá klasicky chápaný rozdíl mezi poezií a prózou. Zabýváme se nejprve dějovou stránkou „Prose of Departure“ a jejími různými epizodami. Z formálního hlediska se toto dílko nápadně podobá poetickým deníkům Bashóova Japonska, zmiňujeme se tedy také o problematice cestovního deníku a rozebíráme různé funkce vloženého haiku a funkce prózy, která je obklopuje. Nakonec se velmi stručně zabýváme aliterací, slovními hříčkami a jinými básnickými prostředky, kterými Merrill svou „prózu“ vyšperkoval. Třetí kapitola je zaměřená na dvě haiku-sekvence Paula Muldoona, irského rodáka žijícího v USA. „Hopewell Haiku“ a „90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore“ jsou od sebe časově vzdáleny osm let, a ačkoli se formálně velmi podobají, jsou tyto dvě sekvence dokladem básníkova vývoje. Náš rozbor se opět týká jejich formální a obsahové stránky; jistá kritika se týká jejich hravosti
64 a zároveň jejich určité složitosti a čtenářské obtížnosti – zejména v porovnání s klasickým, ale i současným haiku autorů jako je kupříkladu Michael McClintock. V této souvislosti se zde také pokoušíme určit, zda jsou Muldoonovy haiku „spontánni“ či nikoliv, zda jsou výtvorem umělce, který perfektně ovládá své řemeslo a který si může dovolit dát volný průchod momentální inspiraci, atp. Závěrem konstatujeme již několikrát zmiňovaný fakt, že Muldoonova poezie je formálně dokonalá, obsahově velmi rozmanitá až rozkošatělá, a čtenářsky poměrně dost náročná. Čtvrtá kapitola otevírá téma anglicky psaného „magazínu“ haiku, neboli měsíčníků, čtvrtletníků a jiných pravidelně vydávaných publikací s touto tematikou, kterých je v současném anglicky mluvící světě velké množství. Cílem je ukázat a porovnat dva poměrně odlišné přístupy k vydávání on-line čtvrtletníku: irský Shamrock vydává ruský rodák Anatolij A. Kudryavitsky a zaměřuje se nejen na publikování překladů autorů ze zemí, kde haiku ještě není „zavedeným“ fenoménem; oproti tomu americký Roadrunner, vydávající kvalitní a inovativní haiku a spřízněné formy, je žurnálem mnohem více selektivním. V závěru práce se zamýšlíme nad současnými trendy v psaní haiku a nad tím, jaká je esence či podstata této krátké a velmi populární básnické formy. Japonské haiku bylo tradičně spjato se specifickým emocionálně nabitým vnímáním reality, což souviselo s hluboce zakořeněnou tradicí šintoismu a s vlivem buddhismu. Tyto vlivy daly vzniknout formě, která je překvapivá svou jednoduchostí a hloubkou. V anglicky psaném „pojetí“ se z ní stalo něco poněkud odlišného, avšak neméně zajímavého. Například už samotný pokus vměstnat do několika mála slov paradoxnost skutečného prožitku, či pokus evokovat několika „tahy štětce“ scénu odehrávající se před zraky básníka, jsou v anglosaské poezii něčím poměrně novým a odvážným. Jak je zřejmé, každý kraj má svou kulturně danou hierarchii estetických hodnot, a jazyk imaginace a poezie je natolik plastický, že se tomu dokáže přizpůsobovat.
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