As most of you have likely figured out, hokku as I teach it greatly differs from the kind of verse one finds on modern haiku sites. That is because modern hokku and modern haiku — though both trace their origins in some way to the old Japanese hokku — have taken two quite different and widely divergent paths. If you look at both and see no difference, you are only looking very superficially.

I know that many people involved with modern haiku in one way or another subscribe to or read my site, and of course they are welcome here. I only hope they go deeply enough into hokku to understand why hokku as I teach it and modern haiku are in general two quite different things — and specifically, how they differ. If they do not take the time to actually see the differences, much of their time here is wasted. What each person then does with that knowledge is up to the individual.

Much of the difference lies in attitude. About eight years ago, I posted the text below, here slightly revised:

Many people first discover hokku after having been involved with other forms of short verse — even short verse that was inspired by and in an historical sense “developed out of” hokku and may even superficially look like hokku — but has taken a different path and a different name. If one begins with all that is presented as modern haiku, it is very difficult to come up with a definition that applies everywhere. Modern haiku has become very much whatever any individual in that community chooses to say it is. That means there is no practical, universal definition, though various definitions of modern haiku abound.

  Hokku, by contrast, can easily be defined.

A hokku in English is a brief, unrhymed, three-line verse expressing an experience of Nature and/or humans as a part of Nature, set within the context of a season.  It consists of two parts, a longer of two lines and a shorter of one line, with either beginning the verse.  The two parts are separated by appropriate punctuation, and the first letter of each line is capitalized, and the whole ends with an appropriate punctuation mark.  It is characterized by brevity, simplicity, concreteness (dealing with things rather than our ideas or imaginings about things) and objectivity.  It focuses on sensory experience (seeing, hearing touching, tasting, smelling) rather than abstract thought, and when dealing with states of mind such as sadness or joy, it presents them objectively.  It avoids violent topics as well as other topics that disturb the mind, such as sex and romance.  It deliberately de-emphasizes the ego, and when mentioning the writer, it does so objectively, as one would deal with a bird or a stone.

So that is hokku.  We could go deeper into the form and structure and mental attitude behind hokku, but that is enough of a definition for now.

The aesthetics of hokku are so very different from those of Western poetry that it is misleading to even think of hokku as poetry, because to do so only causes confusion.  That is why the best way to regard hokku is to see it like this:

A hokku is not a poem, and hokku is not poetry, and those who write hokku are not poets.

If you stand on a rocky shore and look out at the undulating waves of the sea, what you see is not poetry; what you see is a thing-event.  An event is something happening, and of course without a “thing” nothing happens.  So a bird flying is a thing-event; a bud on a branch is a thing-event.  The sun rising is a thing-event.  An old man sneezing is a thing-event.  A child burping is a thing-event.  Similarly, a hokku is not a poem; it is a thing-event put into simple words.

Buson wrote:

The spring sea,
Rising and falling
All day long.

Where is the poetry in that?  It is just a statement of what is happening, set in the context of a season.

Nonetheless, when we read that, we experience the sea, ceaselessly rising and falling through the day, and there is poetry in the experience, and R. H. Blyth tells us clearly and correctly why:

“There is a poetry independent of rhyme and rhythm, of onomatopoeia and poetic brevity, of cadence and parallelism, of all form whatsoever.  It is wordless and thoughtless even when expressed in words and notions, and lives a life separate from that of so-called poetry.  It is the seeing we do when a white butterfly flutters by us down the valley, never to return.” (Eastern Culture)

If we do not consider a hokku poetry, what then is it?  It is simply a thing-event — a sensory experience of Nature and the place of humans within Nature, in which we perceive an unspoken, deep significance. That “unspoken, deep significance” is very important, and is a key to writing good hokku as opposed to mediocre hokku.

Blyth tells us that “This poetry of things is not something superimposed on them, but brought out of them as the sun and rain bring the tender leaf out of the hard buds.”

In hokku that means the poetry is not something we add to a thing-event as one adds condiments to spice up a soup.  It is not a dash of metaphor, a thick slice of iambic pentameter, a pinch of alliteration, a squirt of clever comment or interpretation.  Instead, with hokku, poetry is something awakened in the reader by certain thing-events, and when we experience such a thing-event, we “automatically” perceive the poetry in it.  That is the poetical experience of hokku, and that is the entire point of hokku.  Without this poetry in a thing-event, hokku would not, could not exist.  So the poetry in a thing-event does not really exist until it is perceived as such by the experiencer.

That is why when Buson saw the sea of spring — when we read Buson’s verse that gives us only the sea of spring with nothing added — we experience that thing-event and poetry is born in us.  Yes, the poetry is in the event, but only when it is perceived by the person able to recognize and experience the poetry in it, in which case the spring sea is born in that person, the thing-event takes place, and the poetry is felt.

We can say, then, that in hokku the poetry is not in the verse but rather in the reader.  Without the reader the verse is just words on page.  But when read, the words and page disappear, and the thing-event is experienced by the reader as a sensory event, and that experience “is wordless and thoughtless even when expressed in words and notions.”  So again, the poetry is not the hokku, but it is rather the sensory experience the hokku evokes in the mind of the reader. Sensory experience is touch, taste, seeing, smelling, and hearing, either singly or in a combination of two or more senses.

If you find that confusing, just remember this and you will grasp the essence of the matter:

Hokku is an experience of the senses, a thing-event put into words, but when read, the words disappear and the thing-event takes place in the reader.  The reader may see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it, or have any combination of two or more of these senses experienced internally. That is why, when you read Buson’s verse, words and page disappear and you see and experience only

The spring sea,
Rising and falling
All day long.

And that is why Blyth tells us that we must not obscure the truth and suchness of a thing with words and thoughts — with attempts to make them into poetry.  “Things must speak to us so loudly that we cannot hear what the poets have said about them.” In hokku we avoid saying things about events; we just present the event and let it speak for itself as sensory experience.

That is why in hokku there are no poets. The writer is simply the mirror that reflects Nature. It is the job of the writer to keep the mirror wiped clean of the dust of thought and intellection and self-will. The writer of hokku does not block the speaking of Nature with his or her own voice. Instead, one simply lets Nature speak through the writer.  When we write a clear, objective hokku about the ripples in a stream, the universe as ripples in a stream is able to speak through the universe as writer.  The writer disappears, and only the ripples are heard.

This is not some kind of verbal hocus-pocus or spacey, New-Age nonsense. It is exactly how hokku works.

When we read the words of Mokudō,

The spring wind;
A sound of water running
Through the barley.

– where is the writer? Where is the reader? Both have disappeared. There is only hearing and feeling and seeing the spring wind, only the sound of water running through the barley field. The truth is revealed for all to see.  Hokku simply presents us with the thing-event “devoid of all our mental twisting and emotional coloration…” If you happen to visit or participate in modern haiku sites, carefully note and examine the verses there to see how and to what extent they diverge from these basic principles of hokku.

Because in hokku the writer gets out of the way to let Nature speak, we can say clearly and plainly, as did R. H. Blyth, what hokku is.  It is not a poem, it is not literature. Instead, “it is a way of returning to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature….”  It restores our sense that humans are not apart from, but are just a part of Nature — something that is needed now more than ever, with the world teetering on the edge of a serious climatic and environmental crisis.

David

Another hokku from a reader in Japan:

(Winter)

All night long
Against the shutters —
The western wind.

Notice that there is no “I” in this. That enables the reader to easily become the experiencer. There is also no mention of sound, but from the phrasing, we hear the continuous rattling of the shutters in the cold, dark, night wind. This verse is a good example of creating a strong sensory experience by implication, and of course hokku is all about sensory experience.

David

Be advised: today’s posting is not about hokku or poetry or literature. It is not even calm or mild. It is about something I commonly do not talk about on this site.

When I was a boy growing up in the country, summers were warm and pleasant. I used to climb up an old wooden ladder to get to the slanting roof that was overhung by the branches of a very large and venerable cherry tree. There I would lie, casually reaching up to pick off the quite large and dark, luscious, sweet cherries. I was told those cherries were “Bing.” cherries.

In elementary school, I learned a little more. Our Oregon history book told me that Bing cherries originated in the orchards of a pioneer fruit tree grower named Seth Luelling, or Lewelling as it is often found. Born in North Carolina, he eventually came to Oregon about 1850. There he joined his orchardist brother Henderson in the first nursery on the West Coast, at what is now the Portland suburb of Milwaukie.

Further, my book told me that the Bing cherry, which I found so delicious as I consumed it lazily, was named for a Chinese man — Ah Bing — who worked as a foreman for the Quaker and anti-slavery, pro-abolitionist Seth Luelling, helping in grafting and propagating, and apparently he was so respected and played a strong enough role in the development of the then new (1875) cherry variety that Seth named it the “Bing” cherry after him.

That was a pleasant story — but in my little book was as far as it went.

Many years later, I learned more. Ah Bing was very tall for an immigrant Chinese — about 6’2. He was a northern Chinese, a Manchu, and much taller than the shorter and more plentiful south Chinese immigrants from Guangdong that came to Oregon and helped in its building.

Like many immigrant Chinese, Ah Bing had family in China, and he returned there to visit in 1889. Once there, he was not able to return to the United States. Why? Because earlier the U.S. had passed the very racist, so-called Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1892 the law was extended by the so-called Geary Act.

So what this means is that the man responsible for my childhood pleasure in lying beneath the boughs of the prolific cherry tree was excluded from my country. I have to say that even in my later years, knowing this makes me very angry and sad.

No doubt my irritation is greatly increased by the current deplorable Presidential administration in Washington, which also has taken action that is appallingly racist, has trampled on and seriously violated citizens’ Constitutional rights and the rights of non-citizens, has promoted violent abduction and jailing of people, and even their removal to other countries without due process of law. It has even resulted in needless and pointless deaths.

This current Administration is corrupt to the core, and has seriously hindered not only the protection of the environment but has also not just obstructed measures to reduce climate change, but actively contributes to the increasing danger of destruction of the environment and rampant climate change simply out of greed. Adding to the already shocking actions, this openly deceiving, power-mad Administration has insulted, threatened, and alienated our international allies, and has brazenly threatened invasion and imperialistic authority over other countries. I never thought I would see the United States reduced to such a despicable and shameful level. I only hope the nation can recover from it, though even at this point the scars will remain for years and it will take much to rebuild international respect.

The President and all his fawning and compliant minions need to be removed, and a government of the People, by the People, and for the People restored to its place in Washington. May that happen as soon as possible.

Though the verse is out of season, a reader asked me how to explain Bashō’s “Old Pond” hokku to others. First, I suggested telling them to go find an old pond and jump in, but the reader no doubt wanted something a bit less direct. So here is my response, only slightly edited, to people wondering what hokku are “about.” Keep in mind that I teach primarily objective hokku, which I also call daoku for quick identification.

The whole point of hokku is a sensory experience.  Hokku do not “mean” this or that.  A hokku is like walking outside in winter and suddenly seeing snow begin to fall.  You feel a significance in it that only loses if you try to explain it.  It does not “mean” anything.  It is just the experience of standing there amid the cold and white falling snow.   If you are chilly in the evening, and you go into a warm bed, you feel the sensation of warmth.  What does it mean?  It has no meaning.  Again, hokku do not “mean.”  Instead they express sensation, which is deeper than the level of thought.  That is why it is useless to explain what a hokku “means.

A hokku is a sensory experience.  Many other kinds of poetry “mean” things — hokku just gives one the pure experience, before one adds attempted explanation or “thinking” to it.  The whole point of the “Old Pond” hokku is to experience seeing the old pond, and hearing the silence broken by the sudden “plop!” of a frog jumping into the water.  It is that feeling created in the reader that is the “point.”  One might attempt to explain it but any explanation will always fail, because it is adding useless things to the pure experience.  To look for meaning in pure experience is a mistake, and a complete misunderstanding of what hokku is and does.

That, of course, is why hokku with weak sensation tend not to be good, and hokku with strong sensation often succeed.  Sensation does not mean just something dramatic.  Sensation can often come from very simple things, as in this Spring hokku by Onitsura:

In the broken pot,
A water plantain —
Slenderly blooming.

Seeing the heaviness and earthiness of the pot — and seeing age and time in its broken state, is only enhanced by seeing the contrasting, fragile, slender, simple-flowered water plaintain growing out of it.  That too is sensation, but in this case primarily visual.  One can try to give an explanation of it, but nothing matches just seeing it, whether directly or in the mind on reading the hokku.  

One can tell if a hokku has good sensation simply by the feeling one gets on experiencing it through reading it.  If there is little to no feeling on reading it, then it fails.  If it creates a sensory sensation that holds one’s attention, then it succeeds. And of course the subject matter of hokku is Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, set in the context of a season.

David

Well, the Winter Solstice and Christmas are past, and now we are in what the Germanic people call the Rauhnächte. It means “Rough Nights” now — which rather fits the weather at this time of year — but some speculate that originally it may have meant “Smoke Nights,” the smoke being that of herbs such as mugwort, juniper and sage, etc. — used to drive out bad spirits from the house. It is like what in the U.S. is called “smudging.”

Why bad spirits? Well, this dark time of year was considered to be unusual. A kind of odd, in-between time, when spirits of all kinds are abroad. Most notably during the Rauhnächte, one must be really careful to avoid the Wilde Jagd — the “Wild Hunt.” That was when the old pre-Christian god Odin/Wotan rode wildly with his attendants and fierce spirit hounds through the air like a windstorm, hunting and gathering up souls to take into the afterlife. It was something that should not be seen, and should definitely be avoided. That is why it was thought best to keep the shutters closed during this time, to keep the house very clean, to “cense” all the rooms with pungent smoke — but not do any laundry nor leave any outside that might be stolen by the spirits in the Wild Hunt. This they might use to make shrouds for the unfortunate owners, which was not at all a good omen.

The Rauhnächte now are a good time to let go of the past and its worries, to focus attention around the home, and to turn inward for contemplation and meditation as the days very slowly begin to lengthen. These nights end traditionally on January 6th, and by the old calendar, spring and new beginnings are then not far off as we move on toward February and its unfolding with Imbolc and Candlemas.

David

Translating Chinese poetry into English is not a simple matter of equivalency. Chinese — particularly the classical Chinese of poetry, is rather like Japanese hokku in that it is written in telegraphic wording and can be vague and open to several different interpretations. Add that old Chinese poetry had rhyme, and that makes rhyming it in English while being reasonably faithful to the original nearly impossible. That is why rhyming translations of Chinese poetry are generally so abominable and not worth reading; too much distortion of meaning is required to make them rhyme. They come off sounding trite and simplistic.

Arthur Waley — a translator of Chinese poetry — knew that well, and abandoned rhyme in his translations for a less constrained transition from Chinese to English. I fully agree with him that it gives a superior result.

Even without rhyme, one can find many variations as Chinese poems are put into reasonable English.

In 2019, I posted a loose translation of this poem by Bai Juyi:

NIGHT SNOW

Awakened by the chill of quilt and pillow,
I find the window has turned bright.
Late in the night I know the snow is deep
As now and then I hear the bamboos break.

Here is a version I just finished:

Surprised my quilt and pillow are so icy,
I turn to find the window is still bright.
Late at night, I know the snow is heavy;
Hearing bamboo breaking now and then.

One could do many versions of this with variations in wording, but the essentials are still there: waking in the night, seeing the window bright from the snow outside, and knowing the snow is heavy from the sound of bamboos breaking from its weight.

To give you an idea of the brevity of the original, in Chinese the first line is literally:

Already surprised quilt pillow ice

You may recall this hokku by Buson, from another earlier posting. Blyth translated it like this:

Snow-break also
Can be heard,
This dark night.

I give a more “explanatory” translation:

A sound
Of branches breaking with snow;
The dark night.

In any case, on reading “Night Snow” by Bai Juyi, one cannot help recalling Buson’s hokku — and of course vice-versa. As many old hokku writers were well-versed (no pun intended) in Tang Dynasty Chinese poetry, it is likely that Buson had “Night Snow” in his mind when he wrote his own hokku about branches breaking from the weight of snow in the night.

David

Now rest ye merry, gentlefolk
Let nothing you dismay —
Remember that the golden sun
Is born upon this day
To bring us warmth and bring us light
To drive the dark away
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and Joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy!

In early tradition, it was believed that the old sun died in midwinter when the day was shortest and the night longest — but then it was reborn to new youth and vigor, helped along by the lighting of candles and fires — turning this dark time of year into a season of new light.

GLAD YULE!

Here is a winter hokku by Buson.

待人の足音遠き落葉哉
machibito no ashioto tooki ochiba kana
Expected-person ‘s footsteps far fallen-leaves kana

The far footsteps
Of an anticipated visitor;
Fallen leaves.

It is a rather ordinary verse telling us that the writer was waiting for the expected arrival of a visitor, and suddenly could hear the person coming far off because of the distant soft swish of fallen leaves.

In old hokku, fallen leaves (ochiba) was a season word for winter, while falling leaves were for autumn.

In this English translation, one can hear the rustle of the leaves in the repetition of “f” in “far footsteps” and “fallen.” That is of course not the case in the Japanese original.

David

One has to carefully pick and choose among the verses of Issa to find the good ones. Even then, one often has the feeling that the good ones were accidents — that he did not really understand what made the difference between good and ordinary.

Today’s winter hokku is an example. It is not hard to tell why it is a good hokku, but there is the underlying feeling that it would have been news to Issa.

Here it is:

かけがねの真赤に錆びて時雨哉
kake-gane no makka ni sabite shigure kana
latch ‘s. deep-red ni rusted winter rain kana

The latch
Has rusted deep red;
Winter rain.

We don’t know what kind of latch Issa was talking about. It could have been the iron latch on a door or window, or even on a box. The important thing is that we focus on the latch itself, covered over with deep red rust.

The rust makes us feel the passage of time — of slow aging. That, in turn, makes us feel the slow, steady monotony of the cold winter rain falling and falling.

So really, this hokku is about time and aging and impermanence. It gives one a lonely feeling.

There is a contrast too between the yang red color of the rust and the yin of the colorless, chilly winter rain.

Here is a verse with a similar feeling, this time by a reader of this site in Japan:

The paddies
In winter seclusion;
Just one crow.

One can see the rice paddies looking bleak with aging, darkening stubble left from the harvest. The presence of a single crow, with its black coloring, makes the scene feel even more bare and lonely.

David

Here is a winter hokku by Issa, this time needing no major changes:

夜の雪だまって通る人もあり
yoru no yuki damatte tôru hito mo ari
night ‘s snow silently passing people also be

A snowy night;
People pass by
In silence.

It is another Setting/Subject/Action hokku:

Setting: A snowy night
Subject: People
Action: Pass by in silence.

There is something about silence that seems to magnify the cold and makes us feel it more deeply.

David

Much of the verse of Issa is too “sentimental” for good hokku, but now and then he either comes up with a satisfactory verse or has elements in a verse that would be better in English if reworked a bit. I sometimes like to rework the latter as examples of how to write hokku.

Here is a new verse made from one of his that needed reworking:

December begins;
The frost on the window
Deepens my solitude.

It is very much a setting/subject/action verse:

Setting: December begins
Subject: The frost on the window
Action: Deepens my solitude.

As I have written many times, this setting/subject/action format can be used for writing thousands of new hokku. Keep in mind that the three elements need not always be in the same order.

Issa’s original hokku was this:

淋しさは得心しても窓の霜
Sabishisa wa tokushin shite mo mado no shimo

It reads more like:

Solitude wa confirming also window’s frost

There is some difference of opinion as to Issa’s intent with the words I render here as “confirming,” (tokushin shite) and one should also keep in mind that a window (mado) in Issa’s time and place would not have been a glass window, but something more primitive. On the whole, the original was rather unclear and comes off as excessively brief in English, so in my rewrite I rescued the “solitude” and “window frost” elements and gave them the December setting. Readers of the rewrite will of course see a “western” glass window, which works quite well because of the way it reveals frost patterns — “frost ferns.”

David

There is an old and simple hokku by Issa that I would like to adapt a bit, as a winter hokku might have been set in the United States.

A knothole;
It lets in the moon
But also the cold.

In it, we have not only the visual sense, but also the sense of touch (the cold on the skin). It gives a strong sensory perception.

The shining of the moon means the sky is likely clear, and in winter a clear sky means a very cold night.

Those of you familiar with knotholes (I hope some of you are) will know that as wood ages when exposed to weather, a knot in the wood may loosen with time and eventually fall out, leaving a little opening in the board.

The verse certainly has the “poverty” aspect of hokku. It reminds me of a cold winter night in an unpainted old wooden house with no insulation. Such a house was often heated only by a fireplace or wood stove in one room. When the fire went out late at night, the chill began to deepen in the dark. Perhaps some of you grew up that way. It has its benefits.

Cold is an important aspect of winter hokku, as is its opposite, warmth. Just as the Dao De Jing said that one would not know beauty without ugliness, one cannot know the significance of warmth without cold, and growing up in such an old wooden house quickly made one appreciate the heat of a fire and the warmth of blankets. People who have spent their entire lives in well-heated, air-conditioned homes might find it difficult to appreciate such a hokku. That is one reason why Blyth remarked that to write hokku (he used the later term “haiku”), one should live in a house with a roof that either leaks or has the potential of leaking. By that he meant a house that lets us experience Nature more closely, instead of being always cut off from it in hermetically sealed, centrally heated, air conditioned interiors. Being closer to Nature helps us to better experience Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, which is, of course, the subject matter of hokku.

We are almost at the end of the season of autumn according to the old Hokku Calendar. Halloween marks the end for us — and also the beginning of winter.

So here is one last old autumn hokku, this one by Kigin:

They have taken
The shape of the autumn wind —
Pampas grasses.

Japanese pampas grass is not the kind that grows in big clumps with massive plumes that we see in gardens in the United States. The Japanese form is more delicate and feathery, and there are whole fields of it. The countless bowing seed heads show the form of the wind as it passes over them.

It is very reminiscent of Chora’s verse discussed previously:

Autumn begins;
In the flowing clouds
The wind is seen.

David

This is my rather loose translation of a hokku by Ōemaru, who lived into the first five years of the 19th century.

For a moment,
Autumn seen on the hills
At sundown.

One can see the last rays of the setting sun striking the hills, suddenly illuminating their scattering of red and gold autumn colors. It is the kind of hokku one can imagine being written in a New England fall (autumn).

Life is made up of countless moments, but every now and then one may stand out particularly, as in this verse. That makes it a hokku moment. One simply has to pay attention, otherwise the moment will pass unnoticed and unappreciated.

David

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote a brief poem titled “Who Has Seen the Wind”:

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

What brought her to mind was an 18th century hokku by Chora:

Aki tatsu ya kumo wa nagarete kaze miyuru
Autumn begins ya clouds wa flowing wind seen

We can put that into English hokku form as:

Autumn begins;
In the flowing clouds
The wind is seen.

The wind can be seen as it pushes the clouds across the sky. So we can say “Who has seen the wind? Chora!”

David

It is raining on and off at present where I am, so this old autumn hokku by Taigi seems very appropriate. It is rather tricky to put into English, however, partly because the houses of 18th century Japan were so different from our residences today. Nonetheless, the verse is worth the bother of explanation.

Blyth translates it like this, but it comes off rather unbalanced in hokku form and the punctuation is a bit awkward:

The verandah is wet,
And desolate:
Autumn rain.

In Japanese (Romanized) it is:

Embana no nurete wabishi ya aki no ame

Old Japanese houses had a kind of walkway — usually with a “roof” over it — extending along the outer part of the house. It was the engawa:

The embana (enbana) was the extreme end of such an outer walkway — which Blyth translates as simply “verandah.” Here is an 18th century woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu showing a woman sitting on an embana, gazing out at snow:

American (and British) homes usually have no equivalent structure. “Porch” is the closest we can come, and that still fails in conveying what Taigi meant.

We could just use the Japanese word, now that you know what embana means, to give a rather literal understanding of the verse:

Embana no nurete wabishi ya aki no ame
Embana ‘s wet loneliness ya autumn’s rain

Or:

The embana’s wet loneliness — autumn rain.

Of course that would have to be rephrased to make a hokku in English, and even so, one needs to know what an embana is — so we can say the verse “does not travel well,” meaning it is hard to convey directly and clearly outside the original culture and time without explanation. There is also difficulty with the term wabishi, which one may render as “lonely, desolate, forsaken, dreary, forlorn, pitiable, miserable,” etc.

I like the verse nonetheless, and may translate it like this:

The loneliness
Of the wet embana;
Autumn rain.

David

This has nothing whatsoever to do with hokku or poetry in general, but is quite pertinent to the present situation in the United States:

The Trump Administration is blatantly lying about conditions in Portland, Oregon, which is said to be “war-ravaged” and “burning down.” None of that has the slightest relation to the truth. Anyone living in Portland can see it is completely false and fabricated nonsense. Portland is just having its usual quiet and pleasant autumn, with an occasional sprinkle of rain. To Portlanders on-site who can actually see the situation here daily, the lie is so obviously and patently ridiculous as to be laughable. That is why the “Portland Frog Guy” — a peaceful protestor against Trump’s Gestapo-like thugs invading our cities — has become a kind of symbol of Portland’s resistance to that kind of fascism and the flat-out lies the Trump Administration is promulgating.

There is a pleasant autumn daoku / objective hokku by Gyōdai. Blyth translates it thus:

Indian summer;
All day long the sound of the sea
Is far off.

Oddly enough, in the Japanese original “the sound of the sea” (umi no oto) comes right at the beginning. Blyth has actually improved the verse in English by moving the sound to the second line, but we could put it into the “surprise” form by leaving it for the end:

Indian Summer;
Far off all day long —
The sound of the sea.

Or we could say with a bit more alliteration:

Indian Summer;
Distantly all day long —
The sound of the sea.

David

One way to both simplify and improve your daoku (objective hokku) is the “surprise” technique. Using that method, one first presents an action or scene, and then at the end the reader is given the person or thing performing the action — the “actor” or focus of it.

To illustrate this, let’s first look at an old hokku by Shirao as translated by R. H. Blyth:

The streamlet hides
In the grasses
Of departing autumn.

First, we should try to avoid writing hokku as a sentence with no internal pause. Second, as you see, there is no “surprise.” We know right at the beginning that a streamlet is the “actor,” the focus. Remember that Blyth’s purpose in translation was not to show Westerners how to write hokku, but rather just to convey the meaning of Japanese originals.

Here it is in the “surprise” form:

Autumn’s end;
Flowing through the grasses —
A hidden stream.

The “surprise” form simply means that the reader is kept in (usually mild) suspense until the end of the verse. It is the difference between telling the solution to a mystery at the beginning or at the end of a story, and as we all know, a solution at the end is often more effective.

David

Yesterday I received a message from a diligent student of hokku in Japan.

After mentioning my version of Sōgi’s hokku …

Fading light
And streaks of rain:
The autumn window.

… she added:

“… I just want to thank you for opening my eyes to see nature as nature and not as an extension of my own personal thoughts.”

I was struck by what an excellent description of the spirit of objective hokku — of daoku — that is: to see Nature as Nature, and not as an extension of one’s personal thoughts.“

Even Shiki was able to do that at times, as in this autumn verse:

Creeeeeaak!
Goes the closing temple gate;
The autumn evening.

It is often difficult for those who have long been involved in modern haiku to adjust to the simplicity and selflessness of daoku. Often they are using haiku to express their personal emotions and opinions, and trying to make it all sound like “poetry.”

That is fine for modern haiku, but hokku — daoku — is different. It takes us away from the “self” and its constant thinking, and instead of the writer speaking about Nature, the writer simply gets out of the way and lets Nature speak.

Even a human is part of Nature, as in this autumn verse by Ryuho:

Scooping up
And spilling moonlight;
The stone basin.

The stone basin is traditionally used in Japan for a washing of the hands on entering a temple precinct or a teahouse.

Though he explained the cultural meaning after the verse, Blyth made a translation that effectively removes the basin from its cultural background, so all we see is an ordinary wash-basin. And instead of saying “moonlight” or “the reflection of the moon,” he just said

Scooping up the moon
In the wash-basin,
And spilling it.

By saying “Scooping up the moon …” he has used the attitude of a child — “Look at the moon in the wash-basin! I can pick up the moon in my hands!”

That is hokku: “Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, set in the context of the seasons.”

David

I have mentioned this very simple summer hokku in at least two previous postings, but never explained how or why it “works.” So here it is again, re-translated from Shōhaku’s Japanese.

The silence;
A chestnut leaf sinks
Through clear water.

We may see it first as a standard setting/subject/action hokku:

Setting: The silence
Subject: A chestnut leaf
Action: sinks through clear water.

The key to why it works is in the harmony of similarity between two elements: the silence and the clear water. Silence is the absence of sound; it gives us a clean and pure feeling. Clear water is the absence of anything that affects its clarity; this also gives us a clean and pure feeling. We may say that both also give us a feeling of “emptiness.”

In this silence, and through this clarity, a chestnut leaf slowly sinks.

Looked at from the point of view of much Western poetry, the reaction would be “So what?” The verse has nothing exciting, no drama, not even any trace of someone writing it — no ego. There is no commentary in it, no thinking. But there is something here — the mind of the writer (and then that of the reader) becomes the emptiness in which this very simple event happens.

This is a good example of how in the best hokku, the writer is only a clear mirror in which Nature is reflected. We can say that Nature speaks through the writer, who gets out of the way so that may happen.

Put in basic terms, the silence and the clear water provide the “emptiness” in which the chestnut leaf sinks. The sinking leaf is the one active element. When it is put that way, I hope you can see the connection between that verse and Bashō’s famous “Old Pond” hokku, which I give here in a translation that is more loose than usual but conveys the effect in English:

An old pond;
The sound of a frog
Jumping in.

In that, the old pond is the “emptiness” into which the frog leaps. There is first silence, then the momentary, watery “plop” sound, and then all returns to silence again, just as the chestnut leaf is a momentary action in the “emptiness” of the silence and the clear water.

It is important to keep in mind that Shōhaku likely did not think all of this out on composing his verse. It just happened because he felt internally the harmony of the silence and the clarity of the water, and the soundless, brief sinking of the chestnut leaf.

One cannot help but admire a culture that sees the aesthetics of such a “plain” verse. It is important in writing hokku to be able to notice deeply what others may see yet quickly move on from, thinking it of no importance.

That leads us to a basic principle of hokku — unspoken significance. We could say un-speak-able significance, because if we try to explain why there is something worthwhile in Shōhaku’s simple hokku, we will not be able to do it. We just feel it is there.

Of course there may be those who read such a verse and feel nothing, and all we can say is that apparently hokku is not for them. As I have said before, hokku is for everyone, but not everyone is for hokku.

Of course this old hokku easily qualifies as a daoku — an objective hokku in which the subjective mind of the writer is completely absent.

David

Someone asked me about firefly hokku, so here is one by Shiki (yes, I know Shiki would have called it a haiku, but it is a summer hokku in form and content):

In my hand,
The cold light
Of the firefly.

There is no “my” in the Japanese original, but it fits better in English.

David

I have looked for a suitable poem for the 4th of July this year. I examined several old examples. All the while, however, there was a very unpleasant feeling that this time the holiday is like no other. It seems no time for celebration, because it comes during a disastrous change in government in the United States that severely overturns the optimism inherent in the occasion. One can only hope this extremely unfortunate phase will end before the destruction becomes too great to mend. In the interim, many will needlessly suffer and much will be lost. What Longfellow would have called the Ship of State has become, to use the German language, a Narrenschiff — a Ship of Fools. As is often heard these days, “The inmates have taken over the asylum.”

I turn then, to a simple and objective verse (a daoku) by Shiki that I originally posted several years ago:

With everyone gone,
The darkness
After the fireworks.

May better times and wiser days come to all of us.

David

Everyone who grows older begins to feel that time speeds up. Sometimes, however, whatever our age, we do not feel a change of season strongly until it becomes clearly obvious in the weather. That is the case with today’s example.

Here is my quick translation of a Song Dynasty poem by Fan Chengda (范成大, 1126–1193). In Chinese, it is a six-character per line poem:

Plums near the window have ripened and fallen;
Bamboo shoots by the wall have turned into a grove.
In ceaseless rain, spring passed unnoticed;
As it finally clears, we are deep in summer.

Even in my loose English translation, you can see the obvious parallelism of the lines:

Plums near the window
Shoots by the wall

Ripened and fallen
Turned into a grove

Ceaseless rain
Finally clears

Spring passed
Deep summer

That is an easy way to write Chinese-style poetry in English — two lines that have the same general structure followed by two more lines that also share a general structure. One can even extend it beyond four lines if desired, adding couplet upon couplet, as long as one keeps to this couplet-matching form.

Incidentally, the very old Chinese painting shown above, titled Clear Weather in the Valley, has long been one of my favorites, ever since I first saw it used in the cover of a recording of Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) in my college days. If you want a better look at it, follow this link and click on “download.”

https://collections.mfa.org/download/28138

David

Romance is one of those tricky words with several different meanings. As used in this posting, it is, as Merriam-Webster says, “an emotional attraction or aura belonging to an especially heroic era, adventure, or activity.” The word used thus accounts for the once-famous book of the American adventurer Richard Halliburton (1900-1939), The Royal Road to Romance (1925) — once beloved of armchair travelers.

(Richard Halliburton before the Taj Mahal)

But this posting is not about Halliburton, interesting though he is. Instead, we will look at romance in a poem by one of the Georgian poets — meaning not poets from the state of Georgia or the country of Georgia, but rather a group of British poets in the reign of the British King George V — working in a period extending roughly from 1911 to 1922.

The author is Australian-born Walter James Redfern Turner (1889-1946), who moved with his widowed mother from Australia to Britain.

The best-known of his poems — though less known today — is filled with the romantic imagination of a boy who dreams of adventure and distant places to an extent that his fantasy overtakes his everyday life. It is titled, appropriately —

ROMANCE

When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

As a boy, thoughts of far-off exotic places with strange names took hold of the boy. He entered the “golden land” of fantasy, becoming obsessed with the names of the far-off Mount Chimborazo, an Ecuadoran volcano —

— and of Cotopaxi, another Ecuadorian volcano, both notable in the paintings of American artist Frederic Edwin Church.

(Cotopaxi — Detroit Institute of Arts)

My father died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.

In his real life, not only his father died, but his brother as well — but their passing was like an unreal dream, and in his fantasy life he imagined himself standing before Mount Popocatepetl, a volcano in central Mexico.

(Popocatepetl and iztaccihuatl — Jose Maria Velasco)

I dimly heard the master’s voice
And boys far-off at play,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.

At school his attention was also drawn away, the voice of the male teacher grew dim, and sounds of his playing schoolmates faded as he imagined himself in far-off strange places with exotic names.

I walked in a great golden dream
To and fro from school–
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.

Even during his walk to and from school, he lived not in the real world but in his imagination. Thoughts of Popocatepetl blotted out the dusty streets he walked in reality.

I walked home with a gold dark boy,
And never a word I’d say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech away:

In his fantasy, he walks home with a “gold dark boy,” an alluring image of a stranger from a strange land. He says nothing to him, because he is enthralled by this creation of his romantic imagination.

I gazed entranced upon his face
Fairer than any flower–
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hour:

The “gold dark boy” represents distant lands and alluring people with skin of different yet beautiful colors — all enhanced by the imagination.

The houses, people, traffic seemed
Thin fading dreams by day,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
They had stolen my soul away!

And so it went with the houses and people and passers-by, who all seemed like lifeless dreams compared to the far more colorful and captivating images in the boy’s imagination.

Well, there are people like this — those who live so much in fantasy that it colors and overwhelms their everyday lives. But really this poem represents the enchantment of exotic words on people inclined to romanticize.

This is very far from hokku, which deals with the everyday and the concrete. It is not unknown among some old writers of hokku though, such as Buson — who tended to write verses from his imagination. You may recall this excerpt from something I posted back in 2010:

A Korean ship
Passes without stopping;
The haze.

It is virtually impossible to recognize in English translation, but this verse is an example of the romantic tendency in Buson’s hokku — romantic in the sense of “evoking an idealized past or exotic adventurousness.”  When Buson wrote of a Korean ship, what he meant was a particular kind of ship that long before his day brought exotic goods from the mainland to Japan.  It is as though we were to translate the first line as  “a caravel” or “a galleon,” which in English would immediately set the verse in the past rather than the present day:

A Spanish galleon
Passes without stopping;
The haze.

So Buson was doing something romantic artists like to do, which is to create an exotic mood, and to do that, he has us see an ancient Korean vessel approaching the shore, yet continuing on into the haze of spring instead of stopping.  Essentially he is bringing the ship out of the haze of the imagination to evoke an artistic atmosphere of the “past,” then sending it back into the haze to let us know it is not a part of the “real” world.

This hokku reminds me very much of a painting I once saw of a boy reading at night in his room, and all around him — out of the haze of his imagination — appear pirates and a parrot, palm trees and all the images called forth by the reading of Stevenson’s Treasure Island in the young mind.

From my point of view this is all very well in novels and in some kinds of verse, but I do not think it should be the purpose of hokku.  Hokku should not be the artificial creations of the imagination, the world remolded nearer to the heart’s desire, but rather it should be the world seen clearly and without the coloring of the imagination — a reflection in a mirror wiped clean.

That is a fundamental difference between hokku as a contemplative path and hokku as a creative exercise of the imagination.  In the history of the form there has always been a certain kind of contradiction and conflict between these two approaches.  We find it even in the verses of Bashō, who after all was a businessman of sorts, making his living from teaching a rather complicated system of verse to the merchants and tradesmen of his day.

Now that I have more time to devote to writing here, I have noticed that the last time I discussed daoku was about four years ago! That is far too long a gap.

What is daoku? It is simply a short and convenient term for objective hokku — a three-line verse whose subject is Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature, set in the context of the seasons.

By “objective,” is meant that the writer simply states the facts of an event, without adding personal commentary or imagination or “thinking.” Thus daoku is contrasted with subjective hokku, which does include the commentary or imagination or “thinking” of the writer.

Daoku is primarily a sensory experience put into words — an experience of one or more of the senses: seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting. It is not a symbol of anything, but it is an experience that seems to have a deeper, unspoken significance that cannot be put into words.

Here is a verse by Shiki:

A standing hoe
And no one around;
The heat!

It is an event of the senses in simple words. The abandoned hoe left standing in the field makes us feel the heat of the day all the more. No explanation is necessary. That is daoku.

On the other hand, there is this verse by Bashō, rather loosely translated:

As the horse ambles,
I feel I am in a painting:
The summer fields.

That is hokku, but not daoku, because the writer intrudes his own imagination, his own commentary on his feelings as the horse carrying him slowly ambles across the warm fields.

If it were written like this:

On a horse
Slowly ambling along;
The summer fields

That would be daoku, because it presents only the experience, without any added commentary or “thinking” by the writer. We feel the slowness of the horse, the gentle rocking motion of the rider, (we become the rider) and the lazy warmth of the day.

David

Today I would like to discuss one of the “tools” of hokku — one of the forms easily used in composition. I call it the “surprise” form, because first the verse shows us the action — something happening — and then in the last line we find out what is doing or causing or influencing the action. Or to make it simple, we can say that first we have something happening, and then we see the main subject involved in that happening.

Blyth translates samidare “fifth month rain” as May; but in the old Japanese calendar, the fifth month was equivalent to our modern calendar’s June. The rainy season in Japan takes place from the end of May through June and into the middle of July, so calendar matters aside, this is a summer hokku by Bashō:

The hokku appears in two versions, the earlier and the later:

Collecting all
The rains of May,
The cool Mogami River.

He changed it to:

Collecting all
The rains of May,
The swift Mogami River.

Bashō felt he needed a three-syllable adjective (suzushi/cool, or hayashi/swift) to fill out the standard seventeen phonetic units, but really no adjective is needed in English, given that we are not bound by phonetic units or by syllables — only by brevity. We can translate it like this now:

Gathering all
The rains of June —
The Mogami River.

As you can see, first comes the action:

Gathering all
The rains of June —

And then comes the “surprise” — the “actor” is revealed:

The Mogami River.

We see the June rain falling all around, and the various little streams and rivulets swollen by it all flowing into the great river — “Gathering all the rains of June ….” We do not need to be told it is “swift” or “cool” because we sense that it is both after reading the action portion of the hokku.

This “surprise” form is amazingly useful in composing new hokku, and it can be quite effective when used properly.

We see the “surprise” form also in this rather unusual summer hokku by Ryōta:

Being chased,
It hides in the moon —
The firefly.

On being pursued, the firefly passes in front of the bright moon — and can no longer be seen as its light merges with that of the moon. Of course “hides in the moon” is a subjective view of the matter, so this is not an entirely objective or “daoku” kind of hokku.

David

Well, this it it — the Summer Solstice. I am now fully moved to my new apartment, and though it still looks like an obstacle course with all the boxes and bags, I can begin to think about resuming more regular postings here.

By chance, today was also the day on which rain returned, making the air cool and pleasant.

It is quite unlike Henry David Thoreau’s June 20th in the year 1858, when he was wandering through a forest:

“Walking in the white pine wood there, I find that my shoes and, indeed, my hat are covered with the
greenish-yellow pollen of the white pines, which is now being shed abundantly and covers like a fine meal all the plants and shrubs of the forest floor. I never noticed it in such abundance before . My shoes are green-yellow, or yellow-green, even the next day with it.“

I am sure a hokku could have been made from that, had Thoreau only known of hokku in his day.

David

Grasping a rose
To smell its fragrance —
All the petals fall.

I am not big on rose hokku. Hokku is more a “dandelion” kind of verse, but this one just happened to me a few minutes ago. As I am having to move to a small apartment and leave my garden of many years behind, I suppose there is a moral in it somewhere, though as Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland:

“She [Alice] had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.’“
“Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.
“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Well, hokku do not have morals, but they are sometimes involuntarily “found” by the human mind.

One cannot help recalling Blyth’s words in Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics:

“I dread the coming of the day when everything will smell of Zen; tongues in trees, books in the running
brooks, sermons in stones, and Zen in everything.“

Perhaps some of you have been wondering why I have posted so little in the past few months. The building where I thought I would likely spend the rest of my days is to be sold, so finding a new place to live has been not only a necessity but a long and far more difficult task than it was the last time I had to look. Everything is far more expensive, and getting into one seems to require a number of personal documents exceeded only by joining the Secret Service. That is modern life.

In any case, my time and thoughts have been occupied with all of that. I should, however, begin moving in a few days, and once that is done and I have settled in, I hope to have more time to devote to this blog. So thanks to all of you who have been so patient and faithful as readers.

David

I often say that rather than going looking for hokku, it is good to let hokku find you. That is what happened this morning while walking back from the corner grocery, my eyes on the ground before me.

(Spring)

Morning sunlight;
A shadow squirrel running
Across a shadow wire.

David

Having passed Candlemas / Imbolc, we are now in spring by the old calendar. The yin energies in Nature have begun their decline, and the yang energies — though still very weak — have begun growing.

The beginnings of spring are often hesitant and uncertain:

Returning
Through snowy rain —
The wild ducks.

That was written this spring, but Issa wrote this long ago:

Half of it
Is fluttering snowflakes;
Spring rain.

So the arrival of spring is not sudden, but rather a back and forth reaction between the forces of cold and warmth — yin and yang.

There is an old early spring verse by Ransetsu, which I call his “thermometer” hokku:

A plum blossom —
One blossom’s worth
Of warmth.

It expresses how spring comes gradually.

A reader in Japan shared a new verse that is somewhat similar in feeling. It expresses well the unhurried pace of change as the cold begins to retreat and warmth advances:

A slow spring;
Yesterday one, today two
Plum blossoms.

David

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice — the beginning of Yule. It is the time when day is shortest and night longest — but it is also the time from which the Yang element in Nature begins to increase. The ancients thought that at this time the sun, after long growing weak, was reborn with new strength.

You will recall that in hokku, winter is in keeping with very old age and death in human life. In the 24 hour cycle, it corresponds to night. It is comforting to know that already in this darkest time of the year, there is a spark of Yang being born that will slowly grow into spring.

Winter hokku often express the very Yin (cold, passive) character of the season. One may use either harmony of contrast — something warm (Yang) contrasted with something cold (Yin) — or harmony of similarity — combining things that have a Yin nature.

When composing a hokku, new students sometimes find it hard to come across enough suitable material in daily experience to keep them busy and learning. That often leads to writing hokku that are about very ordinary things, but not seen in a new or different way, and frequently that means mediocre hokku.

Nonetheless, there is nothing wrong in looking for “practice” subjects to help in learning how to compose hokku. The best circumstance is when hokku happen to you, instead of you looking for a hokku event. Nonetheless, while learning hokku, one may also look to other and longer forms of verse to see if one can extract a hokku from them. One must, of course, keep in mind that hokku has a different spirit than most other kinds of verse, so in making a hokku from longer verse forms, one must be careful to give the new verse characteristics of hokku — simplicity and directness, using few words while still maintaining good English.

One of the things the student of hokku must learn is how to take the essence from an experience, leaving out unnecessary things but keeping essentials. This process of composition is often done in the mind, but one may do it on paper as well.

To show you how that works, here is one process of taking elements from an old Japanese waka — a more “elegant” and slightly more lengthy verse than hokku (being 5/7/5/7/7 phonetic units in Japanese), and making it into hokku.

The waka used here and its translation are to be found on this site:

https://www.wakapoetry.net/tag/winter/

Here is the verse:

ふゆくれば雪ふりつもる高きみね立つ白雲に見えまがふかな

One might begin the process of hokku composition like this:

With winter come,
The high peaks piled with snow
Become one with white clouds.

Then we begin to cut it down:

With winter,
The snow covered peaks
Are one with the white clouds.

We can rephrase as we try out variations to simplify further:

With winter,
Snowy peaks and white clouds
Become one.

And finally, we arrive at one possibility for expressing the essence of the experience in the waka, making it more immediate and specific, removing unnecessary words, simplifying the verse into what is now no longer waka, but hokku:

Winter snow;
Tall peaks and white clouds
Become one.

Keep in mind that writing such hokku from other kinds of poetry is only a method of practice to help the hokku student in learning how to compose hokku from actual personal experiences of Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature. It offers experience in rephrasing and simplification. Such practice work is primarily for those hokku students who are always enthusiastically looking for practice material, and for that other kinds of suitable poetry and even excerpts from literature may be used, as long as one gives them the aesthetics and characteristics of hokku. Never forget, however, that the ultimate goal is to write your own hokku from your own experiences.

Glad Yule, everyone!

David

Here is an autumn hokku kindly shared by a reader in Japan:

In a moment,
It no longer is —
The rainbow.

When we look at English poetry, it is common to ask the meaning — “What does this poem mean?” It is a mistake to ask that in hokku. We can say that hokku have no meaning — no intellectual meaning, that is. In hokku, meaning is not something we can explain in words, because the hokku equivalent of meaning is sensation — an experience of one or more of the five senses: taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smelling. So it would likely be more direct and clear to say that whereas traditional poems in English literature have meaning, that place in hokku is instead filled by sensation.

A hokku is not symbolic. It does not “mean something else.” Of course, on reading a hokku, we first experience the sensation, which is its primary purpose. In the case of some hokku, however, we may feel unspoken connections to other things in life. Those connections may differ from person to person.

Do you recall Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken?”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Though Frost did not intend this meaning in writing the poem, countless numbers of people have interpreted

“I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference”

to mean one has taken or should take a path in life many other people would not choose. There is nothing wrong with adding such a meaning — in fact it may give the poem a depth unintended by Frost.

Similarly readers of today’s hokku —

In a moment,
It no longer is —
The rainbow.

might, after experiencing the sensation of the verse, also feel that it applies to many things in life that seem there for a moment, then suddenly are gone. Do not forget, however, that such an interpretation is something added to the hokku, and is not part of the original meaning, which is simply just what it says — seeing a rainbow, then suddenly it is gone. A hokku says what it means and means what it says, and that meaning is sensory experience, in this case sight.

This hokku also shows us the effectiveness of using absence in hokku — the felt, unspoken significance of something that was there but is so no longer. Remember that in hokku, absence can be just as effective as presence.

David

A reader just called to my mind something I posted near Halloween way back in 2012. It was an excerpt from a now out-of-print book I wrote with Hok-Pang Tang, my Chinese-American friend, a physician now deceased, titled A Time of Ghosts. It is his biography.

If you would like to read that portion of it, here is the link:
https://hokku.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/something-for-halloween/

I just read that excerpt again for the first time in a long while, and it brought strongly back the eeriness and sadness of that time in Chinese history, and made me feel again the heart-rending difficulties my friend endured in his earlier life in Maoist China.

Perhaps some of you might like to read another selection from that book, again appropriate in its strangeness to Halloween. It is an incident that happened earlier than the posting mentioned above, in the chapter titled:

THE BLACK STRANGER

Life became even more depressing. Years passed in frustrating sameness. I went on to college, then medical school. My education was nearly finished.

In youth I had absorbed the basic arts necessary to a traditional Chinese scholar, as well as a bit of herbal medicine from the Herb Doctor, and even became quite proficient in martial arts, which I learned from an excellent if severe master found by my father. Then came the Communists and indoctrination. Now I was a medical intern near graduation.

At this time a great cholera epidemic broke out in China. It was particularly bad in the countryside. As medical students, we were assigned to alert people to the problem and teach them how to fight its spread. Soon a request was made for volunteers to go into the stricken areas to treat the ill. We were not yet officially doctors, but there was a shortage of medical workers and we were pushed into full service early. As enticement they offered more rice and cooking oil, as well as ten to twelve dollars a month. We were aware of the dangers involved, because during a previous outbreak of meningitis several senior students died. So no one was enthusiastically offering to volunteer.

The lack of takers moved the provincial Communist Party secretary to come to the university and give a motivational speech. He said simply, “The government has spent much money on your education. You have been nurtured on the blood and sweat of the workers. Now it is time to go and rescue them. It is your duty.”

People began volunteering after that — not from being inspired by his speech, but because those who refused to sign up could expect a harassing series of thought reform meetings criticizing them for not going, and accusing them of having a wrong political attitude toward the working class. Added to that were threats of denial of a diploma and medical license. It worked. We volunteered.

I signed my name, grabbed my backpack, and got on a very old bus rolling off through the countryside to a village in the south of China called Sam Sui, “Three Waters,” because there three streams united into one.

In spite of the gloom ahead, the trip was made pleasant by a group of naïve and pretty nursing school students who sang and giggled as though on their way to a vacation. They had no idea what lay ahead, and I allowed myself to forget it for a time as I relaxed in their warm atmosphere.

As we neared the epidemic area I noticed that each bus stop had armed guards and medical workers checking all vehicles. Our bus had a yellow flag in front that gave it free passage. I saw people at some stations crying and screaming because they had to give up all food. Transporting it into Canton was forbidden due to the possibility of contamination. It was very hard on farmers bringing produce or livestock to the city to sell — they had to simply abandon it. We heard there was a good market for such things because supplies were short in town, so farmers were willing to take risks for increased returns.

After a long time we arrived at a station not far from our town of assignment, and I saw some workers from my medical school there. They seemed happy enough, laughing and talking. They invited us to dinner. It had been a long and wearing journey and we were tired, hungry, and happy to accept their invitation to eat in the quarantine workers’ station. We did not expect much on the table, given the circumstances.

When the food was served I was taken aback. The table was loaded with pork, frog legs, fish, chicken, and I realized that this great abundance was all quarantined victuals taken from the farmers. According to the regulations it should have been buried with quicklime to avoid contagion. Instead the students served it up in great quantities.

I could not imagine what had gotten into them. Either they lacked medical knowledge or they were so hungry that their good sense was overwhelmed. I did not want to touch it. Turning to the senior doctor, I whispered, “Aren’t you worried about the food being contaminated?” He laughed it off with a nonsensical statement about big germs eating small germs, and joined in the feast.

After the meal we continued our journey deeper into the cholera-stricken region. We saw farmers carrying produce on their shoulders along the roadside. They were smugglers on their way to take advantage of high city prices — so the bus driver said.

We arrived in Sam Sui after dark, and were taken to the empty classrooms of the local school to spend the night. The accommodations were very awkward. The townspeople showed up with porridge for us to eat, but we had been warned to touch no local food, rather to survive on our own special rations, sent along after us. Those rations, however, did not arrive, so we went to bed hungry. “Bed” was actually a couple of desks shoved together for each of us, on which we could spread our thin and inadequate blankets.

I was in the school office with some other fellows. Outside it had turned into a terrible night. Rain pelted down and there was constant rolling thunder. But in spite of the thin blankets and the cold, I was soon fast asleep.

A loud thunderclap and a bright flash woke me. Lightning had struck the school wiring, and the switch box in the wall above my head had exploded in a shower of sparks. Screams came from the women’s area. They were terrified by the storm and by the darkness. We found ourselves in murky, strange rooms lit only by candles or kerosene. It had not helped that during the last leg of the journey the girls had been telling ghost stories for entertainment.

We woke after a night of poor sleep and reported to the clinic for work. It was very discouraging. The clinic was so small there was no room for beds, so patients would just stay home. We immediately asked if there was not some local building in which we could set up a properly-operating clinic. “No, no place at all,” we were told.

Now it happened that on the road to the clinic I had seen just the sort of building required, and it was obviously vacant. It was a very large house set up on the side of a hill. “Why don’t we set up a clinic in the old house on the hillside?” I suggested. It should have been no problem. We had authorization to use anything we could find during the epidemic. And it was an ideal place — set aside from the town itself, away from other houses, the perfect spot in which to isolate cholera patients, and it was a much finer structure than the other buildings in the area. When I suggested it, the local cadres just looked at each other oddly and did not answer. Their silence made me think that perhaps some local officer had designs on it as a luxury residence and did not want to give it up. Obviously something was wrong.

Eventually they hesitantly replied, “If you dare to go up there, it is no problem. It has been vacant a long time.”

I was not sure what they meant by “if you dare,” but suggested that we all go and take a look. So the officers and health workers went in a group to check it out.

It had clearly been a wealthy residence at one time, but so long empty that grass and weeds were high about its walls. As I stepped through the doorway, I felt an odd chill. The rooms were dusty and silent, but seemed in relatively good condition except for numerous holes in the walls that might have been the result of someone looking for something hidden in them. In the weak light of morning one could see the dark forms of bats hanging here and there in the shadowy rafters. Some field rats scurried silently across the floor.

It did seem the perfect place for a clinic, but there was something unaccountably strange about the old residence. Walking about for a closer look, I noticed some burned-down sticks of incense stuck in the ground by the front door. I could not seem to get rid of that chilly feeling, and noticed a faint, unplaceable smell in the rooms. I also noticed that in spite of the dust, there were some areas of the home that were perfectly clean, with not a speck of dust — odd in view of its long abandonment. For some reason, while walking through the rooms, I felt moved to avoid those clean areas, and I noticed that others did the same. Still there was nothing that changed our minds about tidying the place and converting it into a clinic, so we left to find some workers to clean up, fix broken panes in the windows, and repair the walls.

We were confident that on hearing the old residence was to be converted into a clinic for their welfare, the townspeople would be glad to volunteer. It did not happen. We could not get anyone to work there, not even when we offered wages, nor even when we added food coupons to that as further incentive. Usually people would be lining up and fighting over such an offer. We kept trying, but with no result other than a peculiar rumor we heard through a relative of a patient — that no one in town wanted to send relatives to that house for care and treatment. We pressed people for a solution to the mystery, but none would talk.

Meanwhile, I and some other men had moved from the school into the house of an old lady. She was happy to have our company, because our rations had finally arrived. She found our imported city food enticing and delicious, and we were happy to share with her. She was so pleased and grateful that after we had been there a few days, she told us one evening, “You should stay out of that house. It was owned by the old former landlord of this district. They killed him during Land Reform. His poor wife hanged herself. His married son killed their children by feeding them DDT, then hanged himself. The son’s wife was raped by the Land Reform people, and committed suicide by taking poison. You should stay out of that house.”

We pressed her for more information, and she continued, “After those horrible events the Land Ownership Reform team moved into the house themselves. But one after another they became ill, and were finally forced to move out. They offered the house to various local families, but no one would accept it. Word got up to the county government, and that got them very bothered because it was an affront to Socialism — you know, ‘no ghosts, no gods’ — so to kill the rumors they sent a group of militia to stay in the house. They too became ill for no apparent reason. So word went all the way up to the provincial government. They decided that some anti-revolutionaries must be stirring up trouble behind the scenes at the house, so they sent investigators. They didn’t find a thing. Eventually they stationed members of the People’s Liberation Army in the old place to find out who was causing the trouble. Nothing happened the first day. On the second day a young soldier accidentally killed himself while cleaning his gun. The soldiers all moved out, and the house has been vacant ever since. No one would interfere with it.” She looked down and was silent a moment, then said quietly, “You know, sometimes at night there are lights inside that house, and sometimes there are strange sounds.”

I did not know what to think of the old lady’s revelations. Later, near midnight, I walked up the hillside and watched the place from outside. In the darkness I could see what seemed to be bright spots of light through the windows, but could not tell what they were — perhaps just a reflection of some kind, an optical illusion.

The whole matter brought back my childhood memories of our old house before the Herb Doctor had purified it. I had been through a lot since then. I was an adult now, with years of medical training behind me, and many years of school indoctrination in Communist atheism. I had forgotten my experiences of ghosts. But now, in this distant, disease-stricken region, that strange, chilly feeling from my childhood returned. In spite of the Communist teaching that there were no ghosts, years of hearing the experiences of others made me wonder. So many people had committed suicide under Communism — so many were violently executed, so many had lost their minds. Such things could not happen without leaving some trace behind, call it what you will.

I recalled weird tales of people who could see ghosts. I even met some of them. It was said they had “Yin eyes.” Yang and Yin are the two components of the universe. Yang is bright, active, warm. Yin is dark, passive, silent and cold. The world of the living is the Yang world. The world of the dead is the Yin world. Those with “Yin eyes” could see the spirit world that to most of us is usually invisible. They could see ghosts and other strange things that ordinary people cannot see. When I met such individuals, I just assumed they had an eyesight problem or were imagining things.

But then there were people close to death. It was commonplace in hospitals and among the populace that those getting close to dying would often see members of the past generation who had died long before. They would speak of grandmothers, grandfathers, and deceased loved ones standing near and welcoming them into the other world. As doctors we knew that in such cases the prognosis was very bad. Still, I told myself that such people must just be confused mentally by the physiological effects of approaching death.

There were also the mediums. The bereaved went to consult them about the state of their dear departed in the afterlife. They told them what they wanted to know. They could say how they died, what they did in life, how many children they had, and other such things. It was said that such mediums used to carry the bone of a child on their person, because dead children, being so active, could act as messengers between this world and the next. Most mediums were women. They could enter a haunted house and say where the ghosts within it had come from, why they were there, and could give their names. That occupation had nearly disappeared under the Communists, who outlawed it, but some still practiced in secret.

I remembered the odd, contradictory attitude of my mother toward such things. On the one hand she would tell me flatly, “There are no such things as ghosts.” However at other times she would say, “You know, there are good ghosts and bad ghosts. Good ghosts will help you. They are just traveling spirits that you meet. You should be friendly and fair to them. But even if you encounter a bad ghost, remember, they are afraid of you. Yang people have more power than Yin people. It is only when your energy weakens, or your heart is guilty over some wrong you have done, that such spirits have a chance to get in and harm you. As long as you are firm, sincere, and honest, they cannot hurt you. If you see some strange movement or strange form appear, do not be afraid. Do not turn and run. You have to stare at it steadily, standing firm, and it will disappear.”

Ambivalent as her attitude was, her words helped me a lot. I grew up unafraid of ghosts or darkness. But out here in this disease-ridden area things were different. So many had already died, and were dying around me, that I too was afraid of dying. We were overworked, our nutrition was no longer adequate, and the job was exhausting. Not being able to find laborers to repair the old house only added to our troubles.

Eventually we succeeded in bringing in workers from another county to repair the old house on the hill. One of them promptly fell and broke his ankle, and that put a stop to the renovation. But even though the work was not completed, we decided to move the patients in, though they were unwilling, and I went up to the old house for a final, pre-opening check. It was as deathly silent as before. There was that same chill in the air, and the same faint, odd, unidentifiable smell.

When we returned to the old lady’s house I felt very much in need of a bath. We were each given just one bucket of water for personal hygiene, and it was not adequate. I felt so sticky with perspiration in that humid climate that I could no longer stand it. I walked to an irrigation canal I knew was nearby in order to bathe there. I reached its banks about sunset, and was just about to take off my clothes to jump in when I felt that same, strange chill.

I looked about to make sure no one was nearby, and about thirty yards away there was a man standing, all dressed in black. He was the only person in sight, and since there were no women about, I decided to proceed. I quickly stripped my clothes off and bent over to pick them up and hang them on a branch. Again that same chill hit me, as though something was hindering me from entering the water. I looked up, and the man had unaccountably disappeared. In his place was a black dog walking slowly away from me. It gave me quite a shock, because the fields about the canal were empty and there was no place for the man to go that quickly. One moment there was a man in black standing there, and the next moment there was a black dog. It gave me the most uncanny feeling, and I hurriedly put on my clothes and left without a bath. To this day I have no explanation for the man who seemed to transform into a black dog.

My experience at the canal so unnerved me that I became suspicious of moving into the house. I decided I would stay there only during the working day, and would not remain beyond twilight.

After we opened the clinic, strange things happened. If I was alone in a room, I always had the feeling that someone was watching me, that someone was constantly behind me. I noticed that not only I, but also the nurses and other workers, would always avoid certain areas in the rambling old house, and would not pass through them. Patients placed in those areas for any time would be found mumbling nonsense, like mental cases. We found one very ill patient wandering outside the house. That caused us to tighten our security, and we placed a lock on the door. Nonetheless workers soon found another patient wandering about outside the clinic in the darkness, though no one could find an explanation for how he got out.

Then I became ill. That really frightened me. It began with diarrhea, a symptom of cholera. I immediately sent a specimen off for analysis, and to my relief the result was negative. Nonetheless my diarrhea continued, in spite of the medicines I took. The old lady with whom I stayed looked worried. She scanned my haggard face and said, “You must have a ghost haunting you. You have lost so much weight and are so skinny, and your face has a dark color. You must have interfered with the ghost’s quiet life.” She asked me to give her a little money to buy incense and some Hell money to burn for those in the afterlife, as well as certain kinds of food. She said she would take them to the house and ask forgiveness, and I would improve.

I was skeptical, but I appreciated her care and concern and gave her the money. After her trip to the old house, the team leader of the women brought me two white-skinned sweet potatoes, and told me to eat them as a folk remedy for my illness along with some soup she had prepared. Something seemed to work. The diarrhea stopped.

In the midst of all these strange events, there was a tiny bud of romance. The lab technician at the clinic brought me food and fresh water every day that I was ill. She even sacrificed her own dinner for me, which she could ill afford because she was undernourished, and her legs had begun swelling from malnutrition. She sat beside me and cared for me gently, feeding me and giving me boiled water to drink, reading me stories, and softly singing to relax me. I was very touched, and my defenses were down due to my weakened condition. I knew that if things continued like this we would fall in love. My heart ached whenever I saw her walking on her painful legs, carrying water from the well for me or going off on some errand to help me further. But as I slowly got better, my reason gained the upper hand. Amid all the sick and dying people in the epidemic I could see only gloom in the future, and decided to put a stop to things. I wanted her to find me unappreciative and uncaring and forgetful of her many kindnesses, so I began refusing to drink the water she offered and refusing to eat the food she brought.

It did not work. She insisted on catering to me, and it made me feel very guilty to spurn her help. So finally I decided to end the little romance by moving to another treatment station in a different town. I wanted to get away from the girl and I wanted to get away from the haunted house.

One morning I got out of bed, pretending to be very angry. I took the water she brought me and dumped it into the yard. Then I walked up to headquarters and asked for sick leave. They knew I was ill, so they transferred me to another station.

So I was out of the troubles in Sam Sui. I resumed my tasks at the other station in the other town. After a couple of weeks passed, we were all notified at work that we were to attend a special meeting. In it the speaker praised us for all the good work we were doing and said that in such times sacrifices were often made. As an illustration, he mentioned the name of a doctor in Sam Sui. I recognized it as the name of a class friend of mine, the very fellow who took my place in the clinic in the old house on the hillside in Sam Sui when I left. The speaker went on to say that the doctor had died of cholera.

*

(Copyright David Coomler and Ruby Tang)

An autumn hokku attributed to Bashō:

Akebono ya kiri ni uzumaku kane no koe
Dawn ya fog in billowing bell ‘s voice

Dawn;
Billowing through the fog —
The sound of the bell.

It is a temple bell, one of those large and heavy bronze bells hanging from a support and struck by a swinging beam. Such bells have a deep tone that vibrates out in waves. That is what the writer hears — the waves of sound from the struck bell billowing out of the fog.

The pulsing sound (active/yang) of the bell is in harmony with the light (growing yang) of the dawn. The fog is a yin element — so we are seeing yang in the dawn and in the bell sound beginning to overcome the silent, passive dampness (yin) of the fog. In this, it is akin to Onitsura’s spring hokku:

Dawn;
On the tips of the barley leaves,
Spring frost.

By the way, R. H. Blyth uses another, related meaning of uzumaku in his translation of the first hokku above:

The voice of the bell
Eddies through the mist,
In the morning twilight.

That gives the impression that the sound of the bell is somehow swirling out of the fog, but I do not think that quite as effective or in keeping with the nature of the bell’s sound as “billowing.”

David

An autumn hokku by Karō:

Evening sunlight;
The faint wing shadows
Of the dragonfly.

It is a very visual hokku, but deeper than a mere picture.

Everything in this verse makes us feel the weakening energy (declining yin) of the autumn season. The sun is near going down, and the faint shadows cast by the dragonfly’s wings add to that sense of the growing weakness of the waning sunlight and the shortening autumn days. Because of that, we can say that this verse has “harmony of similarity,” elements that go well together because they share a common feeling.

This too is an example of finding hokku in very simple and often overlooked things. The brevity is also good — only nine words and 15 syllables.

David

Here is an autumn hokku from a reader in Japan:

In heavy rain,
The unchanging pace
Of the snail.

Nine words, twelve syllables — no more was needed.

It is particularly good because it shows us something that could easily have been overlooked. The subject is very simple, not at all grandiose, yet we can hear and feel the heavy pouring of the rain and see, by contrast, the unaffected, unhurried slow movement of the wet snail following its nature.

There is no effort to make it “poetic,” no commentary to tell us how to react, no opinion expressed about the event. It is “just the facts.” That is what hokku should be.

As I have written before, a hokku should not be thought of as poetry, but rather as a seed that when planted in the mind of the reader bursts into a reaction that is poetry at its most basic — an experience of the senses that we feel somehow has a significance that cannot be expressed in words.

David

Following the posting about syllables, I would like to talk a bit about keeping commentary out of hokku. As you know (I hope), a hokku should be an experience of the senses, not of the intellect. That means in objective hokku we give “just the facts,” and do not add our opinions.

Shiki — the fellow who notoriously began calling hokku “haiku” around the beginning of the 20th century — wrote this:

Hito ni nite tsukiyo no kakashi aware nari
Man like moon-night ‘s scarecrow sad is

Blyth translated it thus:

On a moonlight night
The scarecrows look like men,
So pitiful.

Shiki’s addition of “so pitiful” makes it more like Western poetry, which loves commentary and thinking. But as hokku, the verse would be better like this:

In the moonlight,
The scarecrows look
like men.

Now you may think that “look like men” is a commentary in itself, but there is a difference here. Written like that, the hokku simply conveys the sensory impression that the scarecrows look like men. There is no analysis of that fact, no “how sad,” or “how pitiful.” Writing the hokku without that added commentary means that the reader will have his or her own impression of the effect of the scarecrows looking like men in the moonlight. That is as it should be.

When we write hokku, we should avoid telling the reader how to react to the hokku event, how to feel. The event itself should create the appropriate feeling in the reader, without the writer adding any commentary.

I hope you noticed it only took 10 syllables.

David

A reader asked me to talk about syllables in relation to hokku.

First, let’s look at a typical old Japanese hokku. This one is by Boshō (no, not Bashō):

Ochi guri ya mushi no nakiyamu kusa no naka

As you see, in English terms it has 17 syllables:
o-chi-gu-ri-ya mu-shi-no-na-ki-ya-mu ku-sa-no-na-ka

However, that example is somewhat misleading. The traditional Japanese language did not count “syllables” as we know them. Instead, it counted phonetic units, which we can conveniently determine based on how many hiragana characters are used in writing a word. You may recall that old Japanese hokku commonly used a mixture of kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) and hiragana (rather rounded phonetic symbols).

For example, in kanji the word for the Japanese language — Nihongo — is written 日本語 — Ni-hon-go. Three syllables in English. However, written in hiragana — which is how we count phonetic units in old hokku — it is にほんご –Ni-ho-n-go. As you see, what in English would be three syllables becomes in “hokku counting” four phonetic units, because it takes four hiragana characters to write it.

So now you know. To say old Japanese hokku had seventeen syllables is not technically accurate, because English syllables and Japanese phonetic units do not equate.

Now as you can imagine, when hokku began to be introduced to the English-speaking West, there was a lot of misunderstanding about this matter of phonetic units versus syllables, and so the mistaken notion arose that a hokku (which people often anachronistically termed “haiku”) consisted of 17 syllables. And the mistaken conclusion then drawn from that was that to write “haiku” in English, one needed a verse with seventeen syllables, divided into lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. As you now know, that was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between English and Japanese.

Modern hokku does not make that mistake. It does not try to squeeze every verse into 17 syllables, and of course there is no point in trying to apply Japanese phonetic units to English to determine how many syllables should be used in an English-language hokku.

The simple solution, then, is just to keep hokku brief when one is composing. Usually a verse with 17 syllables OR OFTEN LESS is quite enough in English to say what needs to be said, and if more are required then it is better not to attempt to write it as a hokku, but rather to use a larger verse format.

Now let’s return to the Japanese hokku given above:
Ochi guri ya mushi no nakiyamu kusa no naka
Falls chestnut ya insect ‘s cry-ends grass ‘s in

Blyth translated it thus:

A chestnut falls:
The insects cease their crying,
Among the grasses.

I would do it more like this:

A chestnut falls;
The insects go silent
In the grass.

Blyth used 15 syllables, more than enough. I used 12.

To try to put that verse into the ridiculously inappropriate “17 syllable” format would require it to be padded unnecessarily, and in hokku, which aims for simplicity and directness, that would lead us astray. It must be admitted that even old Japanese writers — to reach the standard 17 phonetic units, often used the slightly emphatic word kana to fill out the number, which became so conventional that it added little or nothing to the sense of the verse. Shiki was particularly prone to overuse of kana. And keep in mind that not all old hokku were strictly 17 phonetic units.

Now what does all this mean for writing hokku in English today? It simply means to use no more words than necessary to convey the hokku event, presented in good English. Though there is no strict syllable count in modern hokku, generally a verse should not exceed seventeen syllables, and usually a hokku should require less.

As you can see from my translation of the Japanese hokku, a modern hokku in English has a longer and a shorter part, separated by appropriate punctuation. The longer part consists of two lines, the shorter of one. The short line may come at the beginning or at the end.

What generally happens then, is that naturally the second line becomes a little longer than the other two (as in the above example), though that is not always the case. There is no strict rule about this. The important thing is to keep to brevity and simplicity and directness.

David

Yesterday I mentioned that to write a good hokku, one needs a strong or interesting experience of the senses. That does not necessarily mean a large or conventionally “important” subject — just one that stimulates the senses and allows us to feel, through the hokku, the unspoken meaning of a season.

The subject can often be one thought too simple to mention, but if it is interesting, it is still worthwhile as a topic for hokku.

Here is a hokku by Kakei:

Tsuta no ha ya nokorazu ugoku aki no kaze

Ivy ‘s leaves ya all move — autumn ‘s wind

First, it is important in this verse to know what Kakei means by tsuta — “ivy.” Living as I do in an area where English ivy has literally taken over some of the forests and has become a noxious weed, the first thing likely to come to mind is English ivy — but that is not what Kakei sees.

He is talking about the plant known as Japanese Creeper, Japanese Ivy, and Boston Ivy, though the latter name exists only because the plant was brought from Japan to Massachusetts. It is not even what we ordinarily think of as ivy, but rather a member of the grape family, and the leaves look somewhat like small grape leaves. Its scientific name is Parthenocissus tricuspidata.

To convey the meaning in English, we must be more specific, perhaps like this:

Japanese ivy;
Every leaf is moving
In the autumn wind.

It is also important to know that Japanese ivy — ordinarily green, turns a deep red to reddish-purple in autumn, and it can climb and cover walls.

We see it in this 18th century work by Ogata Kenzan:

Blyth says of this hokku:

“This is at once the easiest and the most difficult verse to appreciate. The poetic feeling is slight but profound.“

It is an interesting verse not only because it evokes the visual image of Japanese ivy in its autumn “red” stage, but also because in the moving of every leaf, we feel the nature of the autumn wind — and in all of this together we feel the unspoken significance of the season of autumn.

So don’t think you need a grand subject for hokku. Usually it is just the opposite. But to have such a hokku find you, you must be close enough to Nature to notice things often overlooked. That is why I said in a much earlier posting, “It is not seeing what others see that makes a poet, but rather seeing the significance in what others see and think of no importance.”

That unspoken significance is at the heart of hokku.

It always surprises me that some people find hokku so difficult to understand and compose. I attribute much of the problem to mental baggage they have picked up from the modern haiku community, or at least from the confusing of the nature of hokku with that of Western poetry and notions of poets in general. I often say that it is best, when writing hokku, not to think of it as poetry; rather to think of it as an experience of the senses.

Hokku is so simple. Its subject matter is Nature and the place of humans within and as a part of Nature. It is written in three short lines consisting of a longer part and a shorter part, and a pause indicated by punctuation between them.

A hokku gives a strong sensory impression, meaning it stimulates one or more of the senses — hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling.

It uses simple, minimal words, with no frills or interpretation by the writer.

It is set in the context of any one of the four seasons, written in that season and (except for educational purposes) meant to be read in the same season. In English a hokku therefore has a seasonal heading in parentheses.

Here is an autumn hokku by Chora:

Arashi fuku kusa no naka yori kyō no tsuki

Literally, it is:
Gale blow grass ‘s in from today ‘s moon

If we put it into ordered, simple English, it is:

Rising
From the windblown grasses —
Tonight’s moon.

It needs only eleven syllables, yet it gives a strong impression of the bright evening moon rising out of the windblown grasses.

There is a strong contrast between the dark grasses blown wildly to and fro by the wind, and the slow rising of the silent moon.

Whether a hokku is mediocre or strong depends heavily on the elements included — here the windblown grasses and the moon rising out of them. That is why to write a good hokku, one needs a strong or interesting experience of the senses. The best way for that to happen is for the hokku to find you — an experience that catches your attention for some inexplicable reason. Such experiences, we feel, have a meaning that cannot be put into words. Hokku is not intended to express that meaning — it is intended to convey the sensory experience that makes the reader feel that unspoken significance.

David

I have said before that R.H. Blyth, in translating hokku for publication, did not intend to teach readers how to write them.  His purpose, rather, was to explain their meaning in a Japanese cultural context to the West, as well as to make clear that their significance was not only Japanese, but universal.  That is why his translations are sometimes more interpretive than literal.  One has to admit that he did quite a good job of this.

Today we will look at an autumn hokku by Kikaku.  In Japanese it is telegraphic in its use of words, though I hesitate to use that adjective now that so many no longer are familiar with telegrams and their use of extreme brevity:

Tombō ya  kurui shizumaru  mikka no tsuki
Dragonfly ya madness calms  three-day ‘s moon

In rendering it into English, Blyth broke the usual pause pattern found in hokku, making it into a run-on sentence, which I do not advise using in composing hokku in English.  But as said previously, Blyth’s purpose in translation was not to teach how to write hokku, but rather to convey their sometimes rather vague meaning in Japanese in clearer English phrasing.  His result was:

The dragon-flies
Cease their mad flight
As the crescent moon rises.

In the Japanese original, Tombō could signify a single dragonfly or more than one.  Kikaku says nothing about “flight,” just mentioning that the craziness of the dragonfly/dragonflies calms down.  And literally in Japanese, the crescent moon is a “three-day moon,” meaning it is the moon on the third day of the lunar month, or as we would say, a three-day-old moon.  But that, of course, is a thin, sharp-edged crescent moon.  Kikaku also says nothing about the moon rising, so Blyth has added that here.

If one were to translate the hokku more closely, it would be something like:

The dragonfly;
Its madness calms down;
The crescent moon.

Or to be a bit more free,

The dragonfly —
Its mad flight calms;
The crescent moon.

I think, however, that in this case Blyth was correct in making the dragonflies multiple.  That gives us a stronger sense of several dragonflies darting erratically here and there, which makes the calming of their flight more significant.

Then there is the matter of the rising moon.  Kikaku, as mentioned earlier, says nothing about the crescent moon rising.  Blyth, however, poetically sensed the harmony of contrast between the yang mad flight of the dragonflies and the very slow rising of the crescent moon.  We also feel a visual connection between the sharp, angular flights of the dragonflies and the thin sharpness of the crescent moon.

Blyth uses the rising, cool crescent moon to show the yin of evening calming the yang of the mad flight of the dragonflies.  As the yang activity of day diminishes, the yin stillness of night grows.

So all in all, even though Blyth’s translation is  loose and interpretive, it brings out the meaning of the original quite well.

If we were to write it anew, it might be better to let the reader visualize the moon, instead of specifying “crescent.”

Dragonflies;
Their mad flight calms
At moonrise.

David

Those of you who are old readers here will recall my fondness for these words from Natalie Babbitt’s bittersweet children’s book Tuck Everlasting:

“August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn.“

Chora has a very simple hokku for the season:

Meshidoki ya toguchi ni aki no irihi kage
Meal-time ya door-opening at autumn ‘s evening-sun shade

Blyth translates this loosely:

At meal-time, in autumn:
Through the open door,
The Evening sun.

I would render it a bit more literally:

Mealtime;
In the open doorway,
Evening sun shadows.

Knowing this is an autumn hokku, we can see that the mealtime is the end of the day. The door is open, and through the opening come shadows cast by the setting sun. Now as you know (I hope), in the day, late afternoon-early evening corresponds to the season of autumn, and in human life both correspond to the beginning and deepening of old age. That does not mean symbolism, it just means that these things have a similar feeling: all are declining yang and growing yin — the weakening of the energies of life and heat. So because this is an autumn hokku, we feel that decline of the active energies in sitting down for the last meal of the day, and we see it in the evening sun (declining yang) and in the shadows it casts (growing yin).

The whole has an atmosphere rather like the beginning of Hans Bethge’s rendering of the beginning of a very old Chinese poem by Meng Haoran :

Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge.
In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.

“The sun departs behind the mountains;
In all valleys evening descends,
With its shadows filled with coolness.”

So with the first of August, the year, having reached its peak, begins to decline into autumn and winter.  It begins the time of harvesting and storing away.  In about a month, the effects of the change will become even more obvious in Nature. Autumn is also the time when transience is most deeply felt, as Nature begins to fade and wither, the days shorten ever more and cool, and the birds migrate southward.  Because transience is such an important element in hokku, autumn is a particularly appropriate time in which to express this in your hokku.

David

On hot summer days, there are endless ways in hokku of expressing the discomfort of the heat.  Here is how Gomei did it:

Matsuyani no   nadare te atsushi  eda no ore
Pine-resin ‘s.  sliding        hot        branch ‘s break

This is difficult to translate into English very literally, so again I will do it loosely:

The oozing
Of the pine resin is hot;
A broken branch.

We feel the opressive heat of the day even more on seeing  the very slow-moving, extremely sticky, sun-like amber color of the resin oozing down out of the broken pine branch.  Pine resin also has a very strong, piney odor.

David

A summer hokku by Sogan:

Tsurigane ni yoko-bi no nokoru atsusa kana
Temple bell on sideways-sun ‘s remaining heat kana

It is rather tricky to put into English directly, so I would translate it loosely as:

On the temple bell,
The lingering heat
Of the setting sun.

It makes for an interesting combination of the declining (yin) heat (yang) of the setting sun, and the retention of the late heat of the day by the massive, dark (yin) bronze bell.

One might also place the emphasis differently:

On the temple bell,
The setting sun shines;
Lingering heat.

In that case one has the yin feeling of the declining sun combined with the yang of the remaining heat of the day. It is the same technique, but opposite in its elements to the early spring hokku of Onitsura:

Dawn;
On the tip of the barley leaf,
Spring frost.

In that we have the growing yang of spring and the sunrise, but the lingering yin of the frost.

For those who do not know, traditional Japanese temple bells are rung not by an internal metal clapper, but by swinging a large pole, hanging from ropes or chains, against the side of the bell.

If you would like to see and hear an example, click on this link:

Perhaps this hokku calls to mind another that I previously posted here:

David

Blyth translated a summer verse by Shikō — a student of Bashō –that is actually better than it first appears in his translation:

Samidare ya.  hibari naku hodo.  harete mata
Summer rain ya   larks cry extent clearing again

He renders it as:

Summer rain:
Clearing up enough for the larks to sing,
Then again ….

Though he explains the verse in his commentary, “then again” makes it open to misinterpretation without his explanation.  I think it is better translated a bit more loosely, like this:

Summer rain;
Clearing enough for larks to sing,
It begins again.

Unfortunately there is no summer rain today where I am — just very hot and dry temperatures that have already lasted several days and will continue even more.  Summers were not previously this hot here.  It is global warming, which scientists warned about decades ago, yet little was done.  It makes the coming election in the United States all the more important — to elect an administration that follows science, and is concerned about the environment, not one that denies climate change, exacerbates it, and moves the planet even closer to disaster, along with the loss of democracy.

David

The Chinese poet Du Fu (712-770) wrote a poem often quoted in Chinese schools:  The most memorable lines from it come at the beginning:

國破山河在                guó pò shān hé zài

城春草木深                chéng chūn cǎo mù shēn

The country is ruined; mountains and rivers remain.
The city spring grasses and trees are deep.

To paraphrase that:

The country has fallen to ruin; only mountains and rivers remain.
The city is deep in spring grass and trees.

It reminds me of a documentary I once saw that depicted what would happen to cities if humans were to disappear.  It was exactly this — once-great, now empty cities overgrown with grass, weeds, and trees.

I talk about this today not just because it seems like we are in a time of great crisis in the United States when the foundations of democracy are under siege by right-wing radicals — but because Bashō had in mind those lines, which he varied loosely,  in his travel journal Oku no Hosomichi — “The Narrow Road to the Interior,” under Station 23:  Hiraizumi.  It is worth taking a moment to read in context (you will find the whole work here:  https://matsuobashohaiku.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/21981-text-basho.pdf).

“It was here that the glory of three generations of the Fujiwara family passed away like a snatch of empty dream. The ruins of the main gate greeted my eyes a mile before I came upon Lord Hidehira’s mansion, which had been utterly reduced to rice‐paddies.
Mount Kinkei alone retained its original shape. As I climbed one of the foothills called Takadate, where Lord Yoshitsune met his death, I saw the River
Kitakami running through the plains of Nambu in its full force, and its tributary, Koromogawa, winding along the site of the Izumigashiro castle and pouring
into the big river directly below my eyes. The ruined house of Lord Yasuhira was located to the north of the barrier‐gate of Koromogaseki, thus blocking the entrance from the Nambu area and forming a protection against barbarous intruders from the north. Indeed, many a feat of chivalrous valor was repeated here during the short span of the three generations, but both the actors and the deeds have long been dead and passed into oblivion.

When a country is defeated,
There remain only mountains and rivers;
And on a ruined castle in spring
only grasses thrive.

I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I
almost forgot time.”

And here Basho interposes a hokku:

natsu-gusa ya         tsuwamono-domo-ga       yume no ato
夏.      草.     や         兵              ども    が       夢       の.  跡

It is generally translated much like this:

Summer grasses —
The remains of
Warrior’s dreams.

The article “A Dream of Warriors” at Nippon.com called to my attention by a reader, however, has a different interpretation:

In it, Fukasawa Shinji proposes that what Bashō intended was not “warriors’ dreams” but rather “a dream of warriors.”  He holds that Bashō dreamed of warriors at that historic place, and that moved him to write the hokku.  In support, he asserts that yume — “dream” in Basho’s day “did not signify hopes or wishes, but only the phenomenon that takes place while we are sleeping.”  Whether intended literally or as a literary device, it was Bashō dreaming of warriors, not warriors’s dreams that resulted in the hokku.

I would like to suggest another option.  In the light of the lines borrowed from Du Fu that precede the hokku, my view is that what Bashō intended is the notion of all human life as a dream — not a dream as “hopes or wishes,” but simply that all our lives are dreams — illusions.  This is a very important part of both Chinese and Japanese culture, and it goes back to Buddhism and Daoism.

In chapter 32 of the Diamond Sutra, we find this describing human existence in our transient world:

“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

And of course there is the old Chinese tale of a man who experienced his life over many years, and then suddenly awoke to find it was only a dream he had during the time it took a pot of rice to cook.

I think this interpretation of Bashō’s hokku is quite in keeping with the whole tenor of the Hiraizumi segment, which is filled with the deep sense of transience that is not only fundamental to hokku but to all of traditional Japanese aesthetics.  That sense of our dream-like existence — of the transience of human life — is what moved Bashō to tears.  It is the same concept we find at the beginning of Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki:

“The river flows ceaselessly, but its waters are never the same.  In pools the bubbles appear and are gone, pausing not a moment.   So it is with humans and their dwellings in this world.”

So I would suggest that “warriors’ dreams” in the hokku are the lives of warriors as dreams in the Buddhist sense — the dream of existence, all too brief, as in Bashō’s hokku:

Octopus pots;
Brief dreams beneath
The summer moon.

As for the overall experience of Bashō, we might recall too the famous poem by Carl Sandburg about the aftermath of war:

GRASS