New to Haiku
By Sydney Solis
While living and traveling in Japan for nearly four years, I indulged myself full-steam in Japanese culture and arts. At midlife, I was looking to shift my writing focus away from the Storytime Yoga work I created, so I spent my days exploring rakugo, shodo, kamishibai, kimono dressing, chado, and attending zazen. I obsessively filled five goshuinchos with goshuins, sampled sake and tofu, marveled at sakura and more, before dutifully reporting on my adventures in my blog, SydneyinOsaka. For some reason, however, I initially was a bit reluctant to study haiku, that epitome of Japanese culture to the West.
Perhaps my insular, American-centric mind thought it cliche to study haiku. Everybody does it! It’s the first go-to for Japanese culture. I also thought of haiku as something taught beginning writers and youth, recalling memories of a 7th grade English class assignment to write a poem with the three-lined 5-7-5 syllable structure. I still remember it:
hungry fisherman
clubs a crab over the head
guts everywhere
Well, shut my mouth. It was when I attended a Writers in Kyoto event in 2017 that hosted a talk by Basho Translator and Enthusiast Jeff Robbins who runs the website Basho4Humanity, that I realized there was so much more to haiku than I ever knew. It was the beginning of going down a very long rabbit hole of discovering the depth, power, beauty, complexity, simplicity and most of all, enjoyment of reading and writing haiku. I was hooked.
Reading The Haiku Apprentice by Abigail Friedman made me realize that writing haiku was for everybody, from average citizens to samurai to monks to the Emperor. It was an enjoyable and sustaining art for everyday life to express one’s depth and unity with nature and being alive, rather than something that celebrates only famous authors.
It was also spiritually connected to Zen. As a Buddhist, it offered me a poem written in response from an intuitive flash in relationship to nature rather than from the observing intellect. It was a meditative relief for my busy mind that tends to overthink everything. It was also intertwined with more of my favorite Japanese culture and interests – washi paper, ikebana, zazen. Synchronized with shodo lessons, haiku also introduced me to Kanji and the fun of reading and translating haiku to learn Japanese via short lines and bilingual text.
Enter the Hailstone Haiku Circle. Now in its 20th year, the group founded by Stephen Henry Gill, consists mostly of Kansai-residing Japanese and foreign writers who meet regularly to write and study Eigo no Haiku, English Haiku. Living in Osaka I attended many of Gill’s monthly classes at Senri-Chuo Cultural Center, forcing me out of my 35th-floor Shinmachi abode where I could easily become agoraphobic. I enjoyed the monthly Midosuji subway ride, even if I got lost more times than my 50-year-old brain cared to admit, navigating Senri-Chuo’s convoluted complex to find the classroom. I also lamented missing them and other events when I could not be coaxed out of the apartment during summer heat to brave the sweltering, packed subway. I did make it once to the Kyoto class, but the three-hour round trip, because of my penchant for getting on wrong trains, prevented any more sessions in that beautiful city and wonderful group. (That goes for WIK events too!)
In October 2017, I bravely forged ahead on a cold, wet day, after two typhoons to make it to a kukai, poetry gathering, for the Hailstone Haiku Circle’s publication of Persimmon, an anthology collecting 60 poets’ haiku and more. Held in Kyoto at Rakushisha, or House of the Fallen Persimmons, formerly owned by Basho’s disciple Mukai Kyorai, it was then that I was introduced to such a marvelous camaraderie of language lovers. I wrote a haiku of the experience I posted in the comments of The Icebox, The Hailstone Haiku Circle’s blog.
at Rakushisha
lots of rain, one persimmon
— a book of haiku
From then on it has been an endless and exciting discovery of new vocabulary, terms and rules for writing haiku and other forms of Japanese literature, of which I had never before heard of in my life. I will not dare go into detail about them here as my brain is still digesting and learning about them, along with the Japanese culture and history intertwined with them all.
The few I can list with confidence are:
* Senryū – a short poem that tends to be about human foibles, whereas haiku is about nature.
* Renku – a popular collaborative linked verse poetry.
* Kigo – a seasonal word that must be included in traditional Japanese haiku.
* Kireji – which, depending on its location in the poem, can provide structure; closure; or a cut from a stream of thought, a pause.
Another important aspect I learned about haiku was that English haiku did not have to follow the 5-7-5 syllable constraint that traditional Japanese language haiku must. On my first visit to Japan in 2016, I was inspired to write haiku in the three-lined 5-7-5 to go with my photographs, which I made into a series of Film Haiku without knowing anything else about haiku, (and never having made a film before either. Thank you YouTube editor!)
In one of Gill’s classes, I learned that the 5-7-5 syllable constraint makes it difficult for English writers to express themselves adequately. In later classes, I learned that haiku can be on one line, or even four, a haiqua. It took me a long time to get away from three lines of 5-7-5, which I still tend to prefer as it gives my busy mind restraint! Yet, most Westerners don’t understand that and tend to think that more or fewer syllables or four lines are not haiku. I learned that Jack Kerouac wrote haiku, and insisted that English Haiku should NOT be in 5-7-5. Surprisingly, I had never read Kerouac before. Maybe it was his haiku spirit that finally led me to his books, as his Winter Park, Florida home is not far from my house, nor is Tampa where he died.
Then I learned about Hai-Pho, or Photo Haiku, that combines a photographic image with haiku. As a photographer, I loved the discovery of a new form for me to combine text and image. Photo Haiku was tricky for me at first, as it’s not ekphrastic. The poem must be “not too far but not too close” relating to the image, according to the submission guidelines for the NHK Haiku Masters Photo Haiku Contest in Kyoto, and as Gill explained during a class.
If the photograph is of snow, you can’t just include snow in the haiku, which amounted to more frustration and confundity for my mind, but another opportunity to practice Zen to free it. Several Hailstone Haiku Circle participants formed a team and created some fine Photo Haiku for the contest, that can be seen here, here and here. I helped by offering photos and voting for the best photos to use in the competition, but unfortunately I couldn’t be on the team nor at the event because I was in Tokyo at the time.
Despite an early start when I first moved to Japan involving myself in group activities, such as being the MC for WIK’s 2018 Poetry and Improv, I succumbed to many health challenges that impeded my ability to participate in more. I lamented being unable to attend hikes and composition strolls that Gill organizes, as well as the haiku composition strolls he coordinates after volunteering to do conservation work in the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest with the non-profit People Together for Mt. Oguru.
I was finally able to get it together to attend one in late 2019 which I got down and dirty helping replace bamboo fencing in the forest, earning entrance to the splendid grounds of Ōkōchi Sansō, the former home and garden of Japanese film star Denjirō Ōkōchi to stroll and write haiku. A few haiku I wrote there are published in the Hailstone Haiku Circle’s brand new book, I Wish.
One red maple leaf
in the chozubachi
Mt. Ogura
Retirement
for a samurai actor
contemplating persimmons
Little by little, my haiku skills have evolved. In 2020, I won second place in the Lafcadio Hearn English Haiku Competition sponsored by the Research Center for Japanese Cultural Structural Studies in which my haiku was made into a haiga, haiku blended with calligraphy and artwork, by Romanian Artist Ion Codrescu who judged the contest. It was featured in a 2020 Kyoto exhibition that featured a global collaboration of artists celebrating the 170th anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s birth. It has since been published in Lafcadio in Japan Code: Seeking a Lost Spiritual Tradition, a commemorative catalog of the exhibition compiled by organizer Masashi Nakamura that celebrated the Greek-Anglo-Irishman, whose influential writings about Japan have become classics.
In 2020 I also entered the Genjuan International Haibun Contest and received an honorable mention. I had never even heard of haibun until I came to Japan, which is the non-fiction combining of prose and haiku, as exemplified in Matuso Bashō’s classic The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Haibun became my favorite writing form and introduced me to the term haikai. Haikai can mean many things, but a haibun is to ideally contain, according to The 2021 Genjian International Haibun Contest submission guidelines, “…such features as the subtle linking of haiku with prose, omission prompting the reader’s imagination, humour and self-deprecation.” Got that? There is still time to submit to the 2021 contest before the January 31 deadline. Join me!
Some people like hitting golf balls; I love tapping my fingers to count syllables and find the perfect rhythm, combination of images and use of craft when composing haiku. Some people watch their wedding videos over and over and over again; I remember fondly my time in Eigo no Haiku classes with its wonderful members.
Especially because those memories and writing haiku and haibun served as medicine for me to cope with a difficult repatriation to the United States in December 2019, which was perfectly timed to coincide with a year ahead of Covid-19 quarantines, mask revolts and an insurrection of domestic terrorists. My haiku was published in the 2019 Luz Del Mes Tri-Anthology, which features haiku written by 33 authors from around the world in Greek, English and Spanish, and my Quarantine Haibun published in The Luz Del Mes Tri-Anthology 2020.
More projects are in the works, such as writing mythological haiku about Japanese God Susanoo for Nakamura, and a collaboration with Greek Artist Maria Papatzelou to combine photos and haiku. You can see her past collaboration with Nakamura and Kyoto Photographer Everett Kennedy Brown in Foretold: Stories That Draped the Body — An International Collective Art Project as well as a mythological art and haiku collaboration with Nakamura in the e-book, The Liquid Sky: When Art, Haiku and Japanese Myth Connect. And of course I will be entering something in the 6th annual WIK Writing Competition too!
There was a great sense of loss when I was unable to return to Japan for a three-month visit again in 2020. But Zen and writing haiku and haibun helped me remember that all things are impermanent and help me let go of my depression. Truly a domain perdu, I reflect on Japan and the haiku classes and events I participated in there with joy and await a time that I may return once again.
Until then, I read haiku on The Haiku Foundation website, which has many superb haiku writers featured, as well as resources for beginning haiku writers. I also read many other haibun publications, such as The Haibun Journal, where I also intend to submit. (YOU CAN TOO!!!) I read and reread Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, which has a long, fascinating chapter on Zen and Haiku.
And I write, opening myself up to each moment of awareness to catch a beautiful flash of intuition that comes from viewing nature or any other instant in my life and emblaze its memory with the timeless beauty of haiku poetry.
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