Haiku

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Haiku (俳句?) listen (help·info) is a mode of Japanese poetry, the late 19th century revision by Masaoka Shiki of the older hokku (発句?), the opening verse of a linked verse form, haikai no renga. The traditional hokku consisted of a pattern of approximately 5, 7, 5 on. The Japanese word on, meaning "sound", corresponds to a mora, a phonetic unit similar but not identical to the syllable of a language such as English. (The words onji, ("sound symbol") or moji (character symbol) are also sometimes used.) A haiku contains a special season word (the kigo) representative of the season in which the renga is set, or a reference to the natural world.

Haiku usually combine two (or rarely, three) different phrases, with a distinct grammatical break (kireji) usually at the end of either the first five or second seven morae. These elements of the older hokku are considered by many to be essential to haiku as well, although they are not always included by modern writers of Japanese "free-form haiku" and of non-Japanese haiku. Japanese haiku are typically written as a single line, while English language haiku are traditionally separated into three lines.

In Japanese, nouns do not have different singular and plural forms, so 'haiku' is usually used as both a singular and plural noun in English as well.

Senryu is a similar poetry form that emphasizes humor and human foibles instead of seasons, and which may not have kigo or kireji.

Contents

[edit] Hokku or haiku?

Hokku were always written in the wider context of haikai no renga, either actually or theoretically (even when printed individually). At the end of the 19th century, Shiki separated the opening verse from the linked form and applied the term haiku to it. Because it was only after this separation that the term became popular, scholars agree that it is technically incorrect to label hokku by pre-Shiki writers "haiku", a common practice in the 20th century. The persistent confusion on the topic is exemplified by David Barnhill's anthology Bashō's Haiku (2005): in spite of the title, Barnhill admits that "the individual poems that Bashō created are, properly speaking, "hokku", and that he used the term haiku because it seemed more familiar. They were some of the most popular poems in Japan in the 16th century.

In this article, since it is intended to be accurate and objective,

  • hokku is used for verses that are written, if only theoretically, as opening verses of haikai no renga;
  • haiku is used for verses by Shiki and later writers, written in the form of hokku but independent of haikai no renga.


Haiku is one of the most important form of traditional Japanese poetry. Japanese haiku is, today, a 17-syllable verse form consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Since early days, there has been confusion between the three related terms Haiku, Hokku and Haikai. The term hokku literally means "starting verse", and was the first starting link of a much longer chain of verses known as haikai no renga. Because the hokku set the tone for the rest of the poetic chain, it enjoyed a privileged position in haikai poetry, and it was not uncommon for a poet to compose a hokku by itself without following up with the rest of the chain.

[edit] Examples

Japanese hokku and haiku are traditionally printed in one vertical line, though in handwritten form they may be in any reasonable number of lines.

  • An example of classic hokku by Bashō:
古池や蛙飛込む水の音　
Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto
Old pond
Frog jump-in
Water sound
  • Another Bashō classic:
初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也
Hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari
the first cold shower;
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw.

[At that time, Japanese rain-gear consisted of a large, round hat and a shaggy straw cloak.]

[edit] Origin and evolution

[edit] From renga to haikai

The exact origin of hokku is still subject to debate, but it is generally agreed that it originated from the classical linked verse form called renga (連歌). There are two types of renga:

  • The short renga, tanrenga, has a 5-7-5 - 7-7 structure. The first 5-7-5 of a short renga is called chōku (the longer verse), to which answers the remaining 7-7, tanku (the shorter verse).
  • The long renga, chōrenga, consists of an alternating succession of chōku and tanku, 36 to 100 verses per volume. The first verse of a long renga is a chōku (5-7-5) called hokku (発句, "the opening verse"), the second is a tanku (7-7) called waki, ... and the last is a tanku called ageku.

In the 1400s a rising middle class led to the development of a less courtly linked verse called playful linked verse (俳諧の連歌 haikai no renga?). The term haikai no renga first appears in the renga collection Tsukubashu. Haiku came into being when the opening verse of haikai no renga was made an independent poem at the end of the 19th century.

The inventors of haikai no renga (abbr. haikai) are generally considered to be Yamazaki Sokan (1465–1553) and Arakida Moritake (1473–1549). Later exponents of haikai were Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), the founder of the Teimon school, and Nishiyama Sōin (1605–1682), the founder of the Danrin school. The Teimon school's deliberate colloquialism made haikai popular, but also made it depend on wordplay. To counter this dependence, the Danrin school explored people's daily life for other sources of playfulness, but often ended up with frivolity.

In the 1600s, two masters arose who elevated haikai and gave it a new popularity. They were Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) and Onitsura (1661–1738). Hokku was only the first verse of haikai, but its position as the opening verse made it the most important, setting the tone for the whole composition. Even though hokku sometimes appeared individually, they were understood to always be in the context of haikai, if only theoretically. Bashō and Onitsura were thus writers of haikai of which hokku was only a part, though the most important part.

[edit] The time of Bashō

Bashō's first known hokku was written when he was eighteen (scholars doubt the authenticity of a supposed earlier hokku written in honor of the Year of the Bird), but it showed little promise, and much of his early verse is little more than the kind of wordplay popular at the time. The verse generally considered to mark his turning point and departure from the Danrin school came in 1680, when he wrote of a crow perched on a bare branch. Bashō made his living as a teacher of haikai, as a founder of the Shōfu school, and wrote a number of travel journals incorporating hokku. He was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, and is said to have regretted, near the end of his life, devoting more time to haikai than to Buddhist practice.

Onitsura would be far more famous today as a haiku writer contemporary with Bashō, were it not that he, unlike Bashō, had no group of disciples to carry on his teachings. He wrote hokku of high quality and emphasized truth and sincerity in writing. Shōfu, Bashō's school of haikai, was carried on by his disciples Kikaku, Ransetsu, Kyorai, Kyoroku, Shikō, Sampū, Etsujin, Yaha, Hokushi, Jōsō and Bonchō. It became the haikai standard throughout Japan. Branches founded by his disciples Kikaku (1661-1707) and Ransetsu (1654-1707) still existed in the latter half of the 19th century.

[edit] The time of Buson

Grave of Yosa Buson
Grave of Yosa Buson

The next famous style of haikai to arise was that of Yosa Buson (1716–1783) and others such as Gyōdai, Chora, Rankō, Ryōta, Shōha, Taigi, and Kitō, called the Tenmei style after the Tenmei Era (1781–1789) in which it was created. Buson was better known in his day as a painter than as a writer of haikai, but today that is reversed. His affection for painting can be seen in the painterly style of his hokku, and in his attempt to deliberately arrange scenes in words. Hokku was not so much a serious matter for Buson as it was for Bashō. The popularity and frequency of haikai gatherings in this period led to greater numbers of verses springing from imagination rather than from actual experience.

No new popular style followed Buson. A very individualistic approach to haikai appeared, however, in the writer Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) whose miserable childhood, poverty, sad life, and devotion to the Pure Land sect of Buddhism are clearly present in his hokku.

[edit] The appearance of Shiki

After Issa, haikai entered a period of decline in which it reverted to frivolity and uninspired mediocrity. The writers of this period in the 19th century are known by the deprecatory term tsukinami, meaning "monthly", after the monthly or twice-monthly haikai gatherings of the end of the 18th century. But in regard to this period of haikai, it came to mean "trite" and "hackneyed".

This was the situation until the appearance of Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), a reformer and revisionist who marks the end of hokku in a wider context. Shiki, a prolific writer even though chronically ill during a significant part of his life, not only disliked the tsukinami writers, but also criticized Bashō. Like the Japanese intellectual world in general at that time, Shiki was strongly impressed by Western culture. He favored the painterly style of Buson and particularly the European concept of plein-air painting, which he adapted to create a style of reformed hokku as a kind of nature sketch in words, an approach called shasei, literally "sketching from life". He popularized his views by verse columns and essays in newspapers.

All hokku up to the time of Shiki were written in the context of haikai, but Shiki completely separated his new style of verse from wider contexts. Being agnostic, he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism with which hokku had very often been tinged. And finally, he discarded the term "hokku" and called his revised verse form "haiku". Shiki thus became the first haiku poet. His revisionism brought an end to haikai and hokku as well as to surviving haikai schools.

[edit] Haiga

Haiga, the combination of haiku and art, is nearly as old as haiku itself. Haiga began as haiku added to paintings, but included in Japan the calligraphic painting of haiku via brushstrokes, with the calligraphy adding to the power of the haiku. Earlier haiku poets added haiku to their paintings, but Bashō is noted for creating haiga paintings as simple as the haiku itself. Yosa Buson, a master painter, brought a more artistic approach to haiga. Haiga poet-artists followed either of these approaches.

Today, artists have combined haiku with paintings, photographs and other art media.

[edit] Haiku in the West

Although there were attempts outside Japan to imitate the old hokku in the early 1900s, there was little genuine understanding of its principles. Early Western scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and William George Aston were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value. One of the first advocates of English-language hokku was the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. In "A Proposal to American Poets," published in the Reader magazine in February 1904, Noguchi gave a brief outline of the hokku and some of his own English efforts, ending with the exhortation, "Pray, you try Japanese Hokku, my American poets!" At about the same time the poet Sadakichi Hartmann was publishing original English-language hokku, as well as other Japanese forms in both English and French. In France, hokku was introduced by Paul-Louis Couchoud around 1906. Hokku subsequently had a considerable influence on Imagists in the 1910s, but there was yet little understanding of the form and its history. One Western critic who arrived at an understanding of haiku was Roland Barthes. In his 1970 work Empire of Signs, Barthes wrote that the haiku has the simple meaning of a child pointing his finger at something and saying, "this is how it is."

[edit] Blyth, Yasuda and Henderson

After early Imagist interest in haiku the genre drew less attention in English until after World War II, with the appearance of three influential volumes about Japanese haiku.

In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume of Haiku, the four-volume work by R. H. Blyth, haiku was introduced to the post-war world. Blyth was an Englishman who lived first in Japanese-annexed Korea, then in Japan. He produced a series of works on Zen, haiku, senryu, and on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature. Those most relevant here are his Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942); his four-volume Haiku series (1949–52) dealing mostly with pre-modern hokku, though including Shiki; and his two-volume History of Haiku (1964). Today he is best known as a major interpreter of haiku to the West.

Present-day attitudes to Blyth's work vary. Many contemporary writers of haiku were introduced to the genre through his works. These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, many of whom have written haiku as well as better-known works. Many members of the international "haiku community" also got their first views of haiku from Blyth's books, including James W. Hackett, William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil and Lee Gurga. In the late twentieth century, members of that community with direct knowledge of modern Japanese haiku often noted Blyth's distaste for haiku on more modern themes, and his strong bias regarding a direct connection between haiku and Zen, a "connection" largely ignored by Japanese poets. (Bashō, in fact, felt that his devotion to haiku prevented him from realizing enlightenment[1]) Blyth also did not view haiku by Japanese women favorably, downplaying their substantial contributions to the genre, especially during the Bashō era and the twentieth century.

Alhough Blyth did not foresee the appearance of original haiku in languages other than Japanese when he began writing on the topic, and although he founded no school of verse, his works stimulated the writing of haiku in English. At the end of the second volume of his History of Haiku (1964), he remarked that "The latest development in the history of haiku is one which nobody foresaw,— the writing of haiku outside Japan, not in the Japanese language". He followed that comment with several original verses in English by the American James W. Hackett, with whom Blyth corresponded.

In 1957, the Charles E. Tuttle Co., with offices in both Japan and the U.S., published The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples by the Japanese-American scholar and translator Kenneth Yasuda. The book consists mainly of material from Yasuda's doctoral dissertation at Tokyo University (1955), and includes both translations from Japanese and original poems of his own in English which had previously appeared in his book A Pepper-Pod: Classic Japanese Poems together with Original Haiku (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). In The Japanese Haiku, Yasuda presented some Japanese critical theory about haiku, especially featuring comments by early twentieth-century poets and critics. His translations conform to a 5-7-5 syllable count in English, with the first and third lines end-rhymed. Yasuda's theory includes the concept of a "haiku moment", which he said is based in personal experience and provides the motive for writing a haiku. While the rest of his theoretical writing on haiku is not widely discussed, his notion of the haiku moment has resonated with haiku writers in North America.

The impulse to write haiku in English in North America was probably given more of a push by two books that appeared in 1958 than by Blyth's books directly. His indirect influence was felt through the Beat writers; Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums appeared in 1958, with one of its main characters, Japhy Ryder (based on Gary Snyder), writing haiku.

Also in 1958, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson, came from the American publisher Doubleday Anchor Books. This was a careful revision of Henderson's earlier book The Bamboo Broom (Houghton Mifflin, 1934), which apparently drew little notice as the world spiralled into militarist dictatorships before World War II. (After the war, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their mutual appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two, even as they collaborated on communications between their respective employers.[2])

Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhymed tercet (a-b-a), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme. Unlike Yasuda, however, he recognized that seventeen syllables in English are generally longer than the seventeen morae of a traditional Japanese haiku. Since the normal modes of English poetry depend on accentual metre rather than on syllabics, Henderson chose to emphasize the order of events and images in the originals, rather than counting syllables.

Henderson also welcomed correspondence, and when North Americans began publishing magazines devoted to haiku in English, he encouraged them. Not as dogmatic as Blyth, Henderson insisted only that haiku must be poems, and that the development of haiku in English would be determined by the poets.

[edit] The budding of American haiku

Precisely who qualifies as the first American haiku poet depends on one's definition of haiku. Individualistic "haiku-like" verses by the innovative Buddhist poet and artist Paul Reps (1895-1990) appeared in print as early as 1939 (More Power to You - Poems Everyone Can Make, Preview Publications, Montrose CA.). Other Westerners inspired by Blyth's translations attempted original haiku in English, though again generally failing to understand the principles behind the verse form, which in Blyth is predominantly the more challenging hokku rather than the later and more free-form haiku. The resulting verses, including those of the Beat period, were often little more than the brevity of the haiku form combined with current ideas of poetic content, or uninformed attempts at "Zen" poetry.

Nonetheless, these experimental verses expanded the popularity of haiku in English. While never making much of an impact on the literary world, haiku in America has proven very popular as a system for introducing students to poetry in elementary schools and as a hobby for numerous amateur writers who continue the innovation and experimentation that is the legacy of Shiki's reforms. However, the literary achievement of leading English-language haiku writers should not be underestimated. The Haiku Society of America was founded in 1968 to promote haiku, and other organizations have arisen. In 1991, the biennial Haiku North America conference was first held in California, and it continues to be the primary meeting ground for leading haiku poets, scholars, and translators on the continent. Poets Gerald Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Jr and Kimberley Blaeser, meanwhile, have connected the haiku form to the tradition of the Native American/First Nations Peoples of the Anishinaabe tribe, stressing the essential interconnectedness of human and natural "worlds".

Today haiku is written in many languages, but the number of writers is still concentrated primarily in Japan and secondarily in English-speaking countries.

[edit] Contemporary English-language haiku

While traditional hokku focused on nature and the place of humans in nature, modern haiku poets often consider any subject matter suitable, whether related to nature, an urban setting, or even a technological context. While old hokku avoided some topics such as romance, sex, and overt violence, contemporary haiku often deals specifically with such themes.

Traditional hokku required a long period of learning and maturing, but contemporary haiku is often regarded as an "instant" form of brief verse that can be written by anyone from schoolchildren to professionals. Though conservative writers of modern haiku stay faithful to the standards of old hokku, many contemporary writers have dropped such standards, emphasizing personal freedom and pursuing ongoing exploration in both form and subject matter.

Due to the various views and practices today, it is impossible to single out any current style or format or subject matter as definitive "haiku". Nonetheless, some of the more common practices in English are:

  • Use of three (or fewer) lines of no more than 17 syllables in total;
  • Use of metrical feet rather than syllables. A haiku then becomes three lines of 2, 3, and 2 metrical feet, with a pause after the second or fifth;
  • Use of a caesura to implicitly contrast and compare two events or situations.

The poet-critic Bob Grumman,[3] applies the word haiku to his own brief, mathematical "poems," ("mathemaku") and to visual poetry by Scott Helms. This stretching of the definition of haiku is considered by others to be excessive, but Grumman defends his position by pointing to what he perceives, with absolutely no evidence but his own assertions, to be a similar blurring of definitional boundaries in Japan. In short, with no knowledge of Japanese, or access to current Japanese journals, Bob Grummen attempts to justify the misapplication of the word haiku by positing evidence that does not exist.

At the start of the 21st century, there is a thriving community of haiku poets worldwide, mainly communicating through national societies and journals in English-speaking countries (Blithe Spirit, Presence, Modern Haiku, Snapshots, Frogpond, Heron's Nest, Yellow Moon, Shamrock and many more), in Japan, in Northern Europe (mainly Sweden, Germany, France and The Netherlands), in the Balkans (mainly Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania), and in Russia.

[edit] Modern media

[edit] Internet

Both haiku and hokku writers and verses, as well as huge volumes of pseudo-haiku, can be found online. A search will lead to many forums where both new and experienced poets learn, share, discuss and freely criticize.

In the early days of the Internet, much of the development of haiku on-line stemmed from the Shiki Internet Haiku Salon. This site began an email list for haiku poets in 1994, which continues to operate in 2006. This development enabled haiku poets from across the world to communicate more easily, an important development for those haijin who are geographically isolated from like-minded poets. In 1995, the scifaiku (science fiction haiku) form was invented by Tom Brinck. In early 1998, Salon.com published the results of a haiku contest on the topic of computer error messages. The winning verses (senryu to be precise) were:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
--David Dixon
Everything is gone;
Your life's work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
--David Carlson

There are online computerized systems for generating random haiku-like verse; there are "Spamku," (verses about SPAM - a brand of tinned meat) as well as many other clever variations on the brevity of the haiku form.

On the Macromedia Flash cartoon website, Homestar Runner, for Halloween 2004, the character of Strong Sad was featured at a booth reciting such haiku as:

Rapping at the door
Fills up agéd pillowcase
So sick of Smarties

Many social networking sites on the internet allow their users to express themselves creatively in many forms including haiku poetry. A good example of such would be the following 5-7-5 'haiku' submitted to Threadless.

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

[edit] Television

Witty haiku-like (or rather senryu-like) poems, often satirizing the form itself, have appeared in popular TV programs such as Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park and Charmed.

[edit] Novels

Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon opens with a haiku narrated by Bobby Shaftoe, one of the main characters:

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down.
From it, warring songs.

Throughout the course of the novel, Bobby Shaftoe writes many haiku describing his experiences in World War II.

In Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club the unnamed protagonist utilizes haiku poems to illustrate his beliefs on modern consumerism and his own zen-ness which he disseminates to his co-workers through the use of inter office e-mails.

Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The queen is their slave.

[edit] Video games

In 1996, a group of Quake players started writing "Quaiku" poetry, often evoking various ideas from a Quake player's life. [1]

The character Bowser in the game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, for the Super Nintendo, had his own Haiku.

Like the moon over
the day, my genius and brawn
are lost on these fools. ~haiku (Bowser)

Haiku (or, more appropriately, satires thereof) also play a large role in the online adventure game Kingdom of Loathing. There is a Haiku Dungeon in which all adventures are written in haiku, and an in-game chat channel in which everyone must speak in haiku.

In addition, the characters in one level of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, for PlayStation, speak exclusively in freestyle haiku.

[edit] Famous writers

[edit] Pre-Shiki period (hokku)

[edit] Shiki and later (haiku)

[edit] Non-Japanese poets

Although all of the poets below have some haiku in print, only Hackett and Virgilio are known primarily for haiku. Richard Wright, known for his novel "Native Son", wrote some 4000 haiku in the last eighteen months of his life. Although few were published during his lifetime, in 1998 HAIKU: This Other World was published with the 817 haiku that he preferred. Amiri Baraka recently authored a collection of what he calls "low coup," his own variant of the haiku form. Poet Sonia Sanchez is also known for her unconventional blending of haiku and the blues musical genre.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ As documented in Makoto Ueda's Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Press of Western Reserve U., 1967).
  2. ^ Some of which is documented in A Haiku Path: The Haiku Society of America 1968-1988, published by the Society in 1994.
  3. ^ Modern Haiku (“A Divergery of Haiku, ToxanAtomyzd,”) 34:2, 2003, 20-26

[edit] References

  • Blyth, R. H. A History of Haiku. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings up to Issa. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1963. ISBN 0-89346-066-4

[edit] External links

[edit] Haiku

[edit] Hokku

[edit] Haiku journals

  • World Haiku Review
  • Modern Haiku magazine
  • The Heron's Nest - A well-regarded online journal of contemporary English-language haiku
  • Simply Haiku: - An online literary journal showcasing Japanese short form poetry
  • tinywords - An online English-language haiku journal, founded in 2000, that publishes one haiku per day
  • Roadrunner Haiku Journal - An international online English-language haiku journal, founded in 2004, which includes a Southwestern Haijin Spotlight and The Scorpion Prize.
  • Frogpond - Frogpond, the Journal of the Haiku Society of America

[edit] Pseudo-haiku

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