UNIVERZITA KARLOVA V PRAZE
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
ÚSTAV ANGLOFONNÍCH LITERATUR A KULTUR
Magisterská diplomová práce
JAN ROUBÍČEK
20TH CENTURY HAIKU IN ENGLISH
ANGLICKY PSANÉ HAIKU VE 20. STOLETÍ
Vedoucí práce: doc. Justin Quinn, PhD
2009
1
Prohlašuji, že diplomovou práci jsem
vypracoval samostatně a že jsem uvedl všechny
využité prameny a literaturu.
V Praze, dne ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
………………………………………..
Podpis autora práce
2
CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................................................4
1. INTRODUCTION TO HAIKU....................................................................................................................6
1.1. THE TRADITIONAL HAIKU AND HAIBUN FORMS.......................................................................................6
1.1.1. Haiku ...............................................................................................................................................6
1.1.2. Haibun .............................................................................................................................................8
1.2. THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE HAIKU AND HAIBUN .....................................................................................9
1.3. ENGLISH VS. JAPANESE PROSODY ..........................................................................................................11
1.4. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH-WRITTEN HAIKU AND THE AMERICAN HAIKU MOVEMENT ...................12
2. JAMES MERRILL’S “PROSE OF DEPARTURE” ...............................................................................15
2.1. THE PLOT OF “PROSE OF DEPARTURE”:..................................................................................................15
2.2. THE FORM OF “PROSE OF DEPARTURE” AND ITS EFFECTS ......................................................................20
2.3. PUNS AND OTHER POETIC DEVICES IN “PROSE OF DEPARTURE”: ...........................................................24
3. PAUL MULDOON AND HIS HAIKU......................................................................................................28
3.1. INTRODUCTION TO PAUL MULDOON ......................................................................................................28
3.2. INTRODUCTION TO “HOPEWELL HAIKU” AND “90 INSTANT MESSAGES TO TOM MOORE” .....................29
3.2.1. “Hopewell Haiku”: Form and Content .........................................................................................29
3.2.2. “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: Form and Content ...........................................................33
3.3 MULDOON’S HAIKU – SPONTANEOUS POETRY?........................................................................................35
3.3.1. Can haiku be spontaneous? ...........................................................................................................35
3.3.2. Are Muldoon’s haiku spontaneous?...............................................................................................37
3.4. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................................................41
4: HAIKU JOURNALS: SURVEY AND COMPARISON..........................................................................43
4.1. INTRODUCTION TO HAIKU JOURNALS .................................................................................................43
4.2. COMPARISON OF TWO ONLINE JOURNALS, SHAMROCK AND ROADRUNNER .............................................45
4.2.1. Shamrock .......................................................................................................................................46
4.2.2. Roadrunner ....................................................................................................................................50
4.3. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................................................53
5. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................................55
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................................................................61
ČESKÉ RESUMÉ ...........................................................................................................................................64
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Introduction
The history of haiku written in English is about 100 years long,
beginning with the poems of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, continuing with the
haiku of R. H. Blyth, Jack Kerouac and haiku criticism by Kenneth Yasuda and
H. G. Henderson, and “ending” with an impressive number of haiku journals,
several haiku societies, several publishing houses, haiku competitions and
conferences nowadays. The original form of haiku written in Japanese vastly
differs from its English counterpart, partly due to the predominantly accentual or
stress-timed character of English and the syllable-timed character of Japanese1
and partly due to cultural and other differences which we will take note of in this
paper.
The main focus of the present paper is the American poet James Merrill
and his sequence “Prose of Departure,” and the Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon
and his “Hopewell Haiku” and “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore.” The
choice of these two poets is motivated by: their difference in approach to the
haiku form, and their different cultural backgrounds and opinions. James Merrill
is frequently taken as a poet of the occult whose poems have a spiritual aura,
whereas Paul Muldoon is often seen as a slightly eccentric poetic acrobat who
can write excellent sestinas and other difficult forms and who can infuse every
poem with a specific ironical humor. The context for the discussion of these
poets is 1) the tradition of Japanese haiku, haibun and associated forms; 2) the
contemporary haiku production in English, as it appears not only in published
poetry collections, but also – and in greater variety – in haiku journals and
similar publications: In this paper we discuss two online journals, the Irelandbased Shamrock, and the U.S.-based Roadrunner. The paper is divided into five
chapters: Chapter One introduces the haiku form, its history and the prosody
differences between English and Japanese. Chapter Two deals with the plot and
the formal aspects of “Prose of Departure,” its resemblance with a traditional
Japanese poetic diary, Merrill’s blurring the distinction and boundaries between
poetry and prose, the use of poetic devices, etc. Chapter Three is focused on
Paul Muldoon and his two haiku-sequences, which are both formally refined and
elaborate and which, in terms of contents and overall “tone” or “mood,” differ
1
In Japanese, the syllables are mostly shorter than English ones and therefore, the classical 5-7-5
haiku pattern can be retained, but with very different effects.
4
from each other in a number of aspects. The Fourth chapter is more of a survey,
introducing the journal scene and comparing Shamrock, a quarterly featuring
mostly Eastern-European haiku in the translations of its editor A. A.
Kudryavitsky, and Roadrunner, a more selective quarterly focusing on good
quality and diversity in form, presenting the poems in a comparably neat online
environment. As a part of the haiku-scene survey, we also briefly discuss several
minor poets whose haiku have appeared in the issues of Shamrock. The Fifth
Chapter, being the Conclusion, sums up the various approaches to writing haiku
in English that have been discussed, reevaluates the importance of the Japanese
tradition, and questions the prose-poem dichotomy in long haiku & haibun
sequences.
5
1. Introduction to Haiku
1.1. The Traditional Haiku and Haibun Forms
1.1.1. Haiku
The haiku is originally a three-verse, 5-7-5 morae (or onji)2, non-rhymed
poem written in Japanese. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics puts forth, as
an important characteristic, its focus on natural images that derive their potency
from the Japanese literary tradition, as well as from Buddhism, Taoism and
Shintoistic animism. Barbara Ungar, in the introduction to her “Haiku in
English”, proposes several characteristics of the Japanese haiku: 1. brevity, 2.deemphasis of language, 3.de-emphasis of the poet’s voice. The latter she explains
as the haiku’s lack of commentary, or lack of “objectivity”. Being very brief, the
poem relies merely on the suggestion of ideas (saying less and meaning more),
and on leading the reader or listener to other ideas through the workings of
association.3
Normally, the haiku would expose a scene, a given moment, by naming
only a few “essential objects or experiences which made this moment.”4 There
would be absolutely no judgment or further comment about this experience or
scene. The reader would or should come to their own private experience of the
moment. In the Buddhist tradition, the poem as a whole was also designed to
lead the reader to some “fundamental truth about the nature of things-inthemselves.”5 This more spiritual motivation in writing haiku was evident in
many of the “classics,” some of whom were practicing Buddhists for a part of
their life.
2
We explain morae and onji in section 1.3. in some more detail.
The Greek-born Japanese scholar and haiku poet Lafcadio Hearn says: “By the use of a few
chosen words the composer of a short poem endeavors to do exactly what the painter endeavors
to do with a few strokes of the brush—to evoke an image or a mood—to revive a sensation or
emotion. And the accomplishment of this purpose—by poet or by picturemaker—depends
altogether upon capacity to suggest, and only to suggest. [...]his object should be only to stir the
imagination without satisfying it. So the term ittakkiri—meaning “all gone,” or “entirely
vanished,” in the sense of “all told”—is contemptuously applied to verses in which the versemaker has uttered his whole thought;—praise being reserved for compositions that leave in the
mind the thrilling of a something unsaid.” Quoted from: Cor van der Heuvel, “Lafcadio Hearn
and Haiku.” Modern Haiku 33.2 (Summer 2002) Accessed 14 Dec.2008,
<http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/hearnandhaiku.html>.
4
Barbara Ungar, “Haiku in English.” Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities XXI: (1978) 2.
5
Ungar 2.
3
6
There are several conventional rules of classical haiku: 1. the ki-go, or
season word, or kidai, or seasonal topic. “[...] this is a requirement that there be
a word or expression […] indicating the time of year, and so setting the mood of
the poem,”6 Ungar says. This could take the form of, for instance, a bird, flower
or a weather condition, all of which would represent one of the four seasons.
Bruce Ross comments on this aspect:
Almost always traditional haiku include a concrete image drawn from
nonhuman nature.[...] Such natural imagery has been collected by
category in poetry almanacs or saijiki. The appeal of nature's beauty
and affective content for a culture whose native religion, Shintô,
includes a form of nature worship and whose agrarian status from an
early period required constant cyclical contact with nature is not
surprising.7
Not only setting the seasonal mood, the ki-go could imply other things relating
to the poet’s intimate experience. 2. The kireji: like punctuation in English, this
“functional” word separates the first and second parts of a haiku. 3. The use of
internal comparison: a technique whereby several words or objects are
juxtaposed and this causes them to attract other meanings or ideas. An example
Ungar uses is Bashō’s “crow” haiku8:
On a bare branch
a crow settles–
autumn evening.
4. Another technique, used by Bashō and others, is one Ungar calls “fragrance”.
It consists of associating two dissimilar objects (like “leeks” and “cold weather”
in the following poem), through a mysterious link or quality which is not
normally recognized in these two objects9:
A pile of leeks
newly washed whitehow cold it is!
As Ungar aptly comments, “this practice may often lead to synesthesia”10:
The sea darkensa wild duck’s call
faintly white.
6
Ungar 3.
Bruce Ross, “The Essence of Haiku,” Modern Haiku 38.3 (Autumn 2007). Accessed 15 Nov.
2008 <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/RossEssenceHaiku.html>
8
Ungar 3.
9
Ungar 4.
10
Ungar 4.
7
7
In this poem by Bashō, the “slight whiteness” of the wild duck’s call is opposed
to the darkening sea. We can see that the poem gives a somewhat
impressionistic picture, which, in different people of different backgrounds, can
evoke different sentiments. 5. Not so much a technique as a feature, a good
haiku should rely on suggestion and should be very careful as far as the quantity
of words is concerned. Bashō’s comment on the uniquely reticent and suggestive
aspect of haiku: “The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject
is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent we never tire of.”11 6. Haiku
often makes use of the absolute metaphor, consisting of the relation between the
particular thing in nature and of the universal. Bruce Ross’ comment on this:
“Line 1, for example, might relate to the weather, and lines 2 and 3 might offer
the imagery in nature of a particular object or being. Together, the absolute
metaphor and the kireji create an affective spark joining the universal and
particular.”
Independence Day.
In the warm wind my scarf
touches a stranger.
Ross’ comment on this haiku and the absolute metaphor it contains:
An existential quality is evident in the poem, which resonates with
liberation, humanity, and joy. The holiday name demarcates a historical
event of freedom that many countries celebrate. The wind is
appropriately comfortable. This wind provides a natural example of
what the American poet T.S. Eliot termed an objective correlative, a
poetic image drawn from the real world that represents, or
metaphorically connects with, internal emotion.12
7. Haiku can, and in the Zen-Buddhist and Buddhist traditions was supposed to,
have a transformational effect on the reader.
1.1.2. Haibun
The haibun could be described as a shorter piece of prose that is
interspersed with haiku or that ends with one or more haiku. The haiku that
come in a haibun can and should be, nevertheless, read alone, as complete and
11
Ungar 4.
Ross, “The Essence of Haiku.” For further reading on some aspects of traditional and modern
haiku, I recommend Ross’ full article.
12
8
independent poems and the leap between the prose and the poem should be
significant; the reader has to feel a change. Bashō’s haibun diaries are a good
example of this technique of writing. Ungar quotes Earl Miner, who, in his
Japanese Poetic Diaries, does Bashō justice, I believe, by writing: “each of the
diaries … can be as well understood as a poetic whole joined by prose as a prose
work interspersed with poems. The prose of the diary is not merely an excuse
for the poem: but the poems are not also a mere decoration.”13 For further
commentary on the poetic diaries see the following section.
1.2. The History of Japanese Haiku and Haibun
The haiku originally developed from the tanka, a five-verse poem
composed of two parts: the exposition (5-7-5 morae) and the gloss (5-5 morae).
In a group, the teacher usually suggested the exposition (also called hokku) and
the pupils invented the gloss. In the nineteenth century, when the hokku had
already become a separate poem, the name haiku appeared.
Three of the “founding” poets were Sōgi (1421-1502), Moritake (14731549) and Sōkan (1465-1553).
Moritake: Fallen petals rise
Back to the branch – I watch:
Oh ... butterflies!
Sōkan:
If to the moon
One puts a handle – what
A splendid fan!
Matsuo Bashō was born in 1644, of samurai blood, and when he was 30, he
started his own school of poetry. One of his more well-known pupils was
Kikaku.
Kikaku:
Red dragonflies!
Take off their wings,
And they are pepper pods.
Bashō:
Red pepper pods!
Add wings to them,
And they are dragonflies!
13
Ungar 5.
9
Bashō’s reaction to his pupil’s haiku is complementary. In the spirit of the
Buddhist outlook on reality, the object can be seen from various different
perspectives; the “other” perspective comes when one lets go of one’s
“conventional” view of the thing. William S. Merwin’s commentary is relevant:
“Bashō’s effort to create an image that would not be static, that would be a
dynamic moment, an immeasurable moment in time.”14 Narrow Roads to Oku,
Bashō’s notes of a six-month pilgrimage, became one of the most famous
haibun-series. Earl Miner considers it to be one of the finest Japanese poetic
diaries, these having a long tradition, from the 10th century onwards, with The
Tosa Diary (935) being the first major representative. Some diaries were called
“tales (monogatari), collections (-shu, -kashu), records (-ki), travels (michiyuki),
and yet other names.”15
Any work called a diary, that is, which is an art diary – or even
works associated with it but given a different generic name – contains
poems. And the conception of the diary, however dim, is the basic
literary conception of prose fiction from 935 to 1370. The poems vary
in number and importance with the individual work, depending in
considerable part on whether it is narrative or recording diary, but it
seems clear that poetry is conceived of as the most basic or purest
literary form and that its presence, almost alone, is enough to change a
journal of one’s life to an art diary. More than that, to a writer of the
court period, prose fiction appears to have been impossible without
poetry.16
Another noteworthy poet of this era is Uejima Onitsura (1661-1738),
known for his ability to put the joy of life into his poems:
Cherry blossoms, more
And more now! Birds have two legs!
Oh, horses have four!
Yosa Buson (1715-1783), also a well-known painter, specialized in haiga, a
traditional art form composed of a brush painting and a calligraphy of a haiku
poem. Compared to Bashō, Buson is often called “brilliant, witty and clever,”
whereas Bashō is called “the Mystic.” Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) was
appreciated for his humanity: a life full of loss and tragedy had to do with a
unique touch of gentleness and compassion:
14
Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave. Bashō’s Haiku and Zen (Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003),
xiii.
15
Miner 15.
16
Miner 16.
10
Oh! Don’t mistreat
the fly! He wrings his hands!
He wrings his feet!
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1950)17 was a reformer of haiku. He criticized
Bashō as well as the haiku writers of the 19th century. He was, like many
intellectuals of the time, influenced by Western culture. He admired Buson’s
painting, as well as European “plein-air” painting. Shiki adopted the main
features of these two styles and created his own – his haiku-painting
compositions were called shasei, or “sketchings from life.” He popularized this
style in newspapers and essays. He was also agnostic, and therefore separated
the haiku from the influence of Buddhism; moreover, he established the term
“haiku,” replacing the former “hokku.” Haiku was a compound of haikai no ku,
meaning “a verse of haikai.”18 Other “modern” haiku writers include: Natsume
Soseki (d.1916), the great novelist of the Meiji Era; Taneda Santoka (d.1940),
the wandering and sake-drinking Zen monk, and many others.19
1.3. English vs. Japanese Prosody
In Japanese speech rhythm, the basic unit is the on, a phonetic unit
identical to the mora. In language time-measurement as such, one mora is a
basic unit. “In adult Japanese speakers,” says Richard Gilbert in his essay
“Stalking the Wild Onji,” “there is virtually no perception of English-style
syllabification of words, the difference being in syllables in English vs. morae in
Japanese.”20 One English syllable may contain one or more morae. English
syllables are thus much more variable in length, contain more information, and
17
More about Shiki at: <http://haiku.cc.ehime-u.ac.jp/~kim/shiki-kim/shikihaiku.html>
Haikai comes from Bashō’s time, when the term “haikai no renga” designated a whole
aesthetics, a poetic spirit of playfulness and spiritual depth; it involved the forms haiku, renku,
haiga, haibun and senryu. The style also referred to an interaction between the new and the old,
an ability to re-contextualize, to recast established poetic topics into contemporary language and
culture.
19
For more resources, please see the following web links:
<http://www.haiku.ru/frog/alexey_def.htm>, <http://users.rcn.com/jhudak.interport/haiku.html>.
A nice link about Taneda Santoka is: <http://gaku2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/AOZORA/FIRE.html>.
20
Richard Gilbert, “Stalking the Wild Onji.” Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America
XXII: Supplement (1999). Haiku Essay. Source for this paper:
<http://www.worldhaiku.net/archive/onji.pdf> accessed 12 Oct. 2008.
18
11
they are, according to Gilbert, “paradigmatically disjunctive to moraic timing in
Japanese.”21
In Japanese, the term onji is sometimes used: onji could be lexically
separated into on, designating “sound”, and ji designating “character”; the whole
could be roughly translated as “one character of sound.” When counting rhythm
in a Japanese poem, or in speech as such, we could use either term, on or ji, or
onji, or also moji, which is another term used in Japan; the more strictly correct
designation however, according to Gilbert, would be on. In spoken Japanese,
one on takes approximately the same amount of time to speak. One Japanese
haiku would then consist of 17 morae, on or ji, in the well-known pattern of 5-75, and it would take the speaker approximately two breath lengths to recite.22
1.4. A Brief History of English-Written Haiku and the American
Haiku Movement
A periodization of English-written haiku has been suggested by Barbara
Ungar in her “Haiku in English”, and we will more-or-less follow her
segmentation here: Period I: exotic interest and serious imitation of Japanese
haiku; Period II: the Beats; Period III: serious inquiry and adaptation.
Period I: Haiku in English actually “began” when the Japanese poet and
translator Yone Noguchi first suggested that haiku be incorporated into the
English literary world. In his “A Proposal to American Poets” published in the
Reader magazine in February 1904, he gave a brief outline of the hokku, some
of his own English pieces, and the proclamation: “Pray, you try Japanese
Hokku, my American poets!” At this time Sadakichi Hartmann was publishing
English haiku, in 1914 Noguchi’s The Spirit of Japanese Poetry came out, and
in 1915 Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Lyrics were published. Apart from some
original and quite good attempts at imitation, the early translations of these
authors transformed the Japanese forms into prose or into different free forms.
Around 1910, T. E. Hulme, along with the Imagists, took interest in
haiku and in 1912 it was introduced to Harvard. The main haiku theorists and
poets of the second and third decades were F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell,
21
Gilbert
One Western haiku-reader said that to read through a haiku-collection was like being pecked to death by
doves.
22
12
J. Gould Fletcher, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. From the
experimenters’ forgery came pieces like Pound’s “Liu Ch’e,” Stevens’s
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or Williams’ “The Red
Wheelbarrow.” The Imagists valued haiku’s direct treatment of the object, its
precision and sparseness of language, its avoidance of didacticism and of
vagueness, its use of the snapshot image; the haiku form was nothing like the
pentameter they eschewed. According to Ungar, the Imagists adopted many of
haiku’s features, but they “fundamentally misunderstood the more profound
motivation behind haiku.”23 It is very difficult to judge whether or not Ungar is
right: for (Zen-) Buddhism, which did represent the background for traditional
haiku, the important thing is the implementation of the teachings – a way of life
designed to lead the practitioner to happiness, endurance, compassion, etc.; the
theory is one side and the practice another. What Barbara Ungar probably means
is that the Imagists knew Buddhism in theory at the most.24
Ezra Pound’s early poems and poetics paralleled haiku quite well: his
concept of “super-position,” the “one idea set on top another,” which were a part
of his “one image poems.” Moreover, “what Pound wishes is for the
juxtaposition of the images themselves to create the emotion, and not some
proclamation of sadness by the poem himself.”25 The attempts of Amy Lowell,
according to Ungar, fell short of genuine haiku due to the fact that she tended to
be “overly visual, or to tell too much; they miss that balance between statement
and suggestion [...] She tends to write from a descriptive point of view, that is,
from outside of her subject, frequently falling into exoticism.”26
Period II: The Beats. Ungar says: “Whereas in the earlier part of the
century it was Japanese crafts that were admired, in the fifties it was Japanese
religion and philosophy that influenced American culture.”27 The interest lay
more in the motivation than in the technical and formal aspects of the poems.
Kerouac’s haikus are simple, written in colloquial speech, and with a more
profound feeling. “Where Lowell describes from outside her subject, Kerouac
23
Ungar 51.
The Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, and their close observations of nature, were also an
important influence in the development of English-written haiku.
25
Quinn, “Twentieth-Century Poetry,” in: Procházka et at., Lectures on American Literature. Prague:
Karolinum, 2002. 165. Ezra Pound also (with the notes of Ernest Fenollosa) translated –though with
mistakes– old Chinese poetry.
26
Ungar 51.
27
Ungar 21.
24
13
enters in completely and feels. Where Lowell generalizes and moralizes,
Kerouac simply shows.”28
Since Kerouac’s time, “Haiku in English has matured to the point of
leading a healthy life of its own, independent of its Japanese parent.”29 One of
the scholars of Japanese culture, James Kirkup (b.1918), has – taking after the
Greek-born Lafcadio Hearn – lived in Japan and written Japan-inspired poetry.
His haiku are arguably the result of serious imitation together with an interest in
the deeper cultural background.
Period III: Ungar lists several representatives: James Hackett, for whom
haiku became “a Way of living awareness, an art of Zen;”30 James Tipton, who
is interested in the “possibility of finding new energy through words put
together with precision and emotion.”31 For Geraldine Clinton Little, haiku has
an appeal in its “world in a grain of sand” and the “here and now” philosophy.
In terms of formal aspects, the haiku written in the 1970s and onwards show a
variety of forms: 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables, rhymed couplets, three vertical
columns (Tao Li) and completely free form.
Some of the more contemporary poets writing haiku have been: Robert
Spiess (1921-2002), James Merrill (1926-1995), Cor van der Heuvel (b.1931),
Derek Mahon (b.1941), Michael McClintock (b.1950), Paul Muldoon (b.1951),
Jim Kacian (b.1953), and younger and more recent writers include Michael
Dylan Welch, Eric Amann, Randy Brooks, and many others.32
In contemporary haiku, the lowest common denominator is usually, but
not always: the use of a season word or a similar feature, an approximately 5-7-5
syllable pattern, and the use of a kireji or cut – normally marked by a
punctuation mark.33
28
Ungar 52.
Ungar 33.
30
Ungar 33.
31
Ungar 33.
32
For a complete history of the American Haiku Movement, please see Charles Trumbull’s
article (which also includes useful endnotes and a substantial bibliography) at:
<http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/AmHaikuMovement1.html>.
33
Paralleling the Japanese “kireji” – a device (actually a word) used to divide the poem into two
parts, and thus, contrast two events or images.
29
14
2. James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure”
The poetry collection that is related to our topic is The Inner Room, and
more specifically its fourth part called “Prose of Departure,” which relates
Merrill’s visit to Japan, where he stayed at his friend’s house. In this chapter, we
will first trace the plot-narrative of “Prose of Departure,” then we will look at
the way Merrill works with the haiku form, and lastly we will speak about the
various poetic devices he uses.
2.1. The Plot of “Prose of Departure”:
The first section, “Imagining it,” speaks about Merrill’s friend Paul and
the travellers’ departure. There is a kind of an uncertain feeling that they are
leaving a friend whose health (and life) is in danger. They are not yet upset, they
are still probably quite enthusiastic about the trip, but already a shadow hangs
over it. The section “Afternoons at the Noh,” among others, alludes several
times to the fact of Paul’s infirmity.
But the real drama is due to go on elsewhere. [...] a dark thought
that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a
sucked breath, a pall. [...] Celestial recovery. Doctors amazed.
Altogether grander and more mysterious than anything at the Noh, yet
from what lesser theater did we absorb the patience and piety needed to
bring the moonlight back?
The image of their friend haunts them throughout their travels and the text could
be taken as an attempt to find solace or resolution of this situation. The haiku
form might be one means of doing so. The traditional haiku of Japan has been
used by “the local muse,” as a Merrill critic points out, “as her form of
‘conscious evasion,’ and Merrill tries to tap this form for its incantatory
momentary magic.”34 The short forms of Japanese poetry are so designed that
the ancient masters were able to express their flash of insight, and they could
34
Sara Lundquist, “An Aesthetics of Enclosure: James Merrill's inner rooms.” English Studies
in Canada. Accessed: 22 Jan. 2009, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7010/is_1_31/
ai_n28321021>.
15
also incorporate the haiku into their diary or travel account. Earl Miner, in his
Japanese Poetic Diaries, says:
Everyone is familiar with the brevity of Japanese poetic forms
and the ways in which what was short to begin with becomes yet
shorter with the centuries. The change from tanka to haikai verses
to haiku in the works included here illustrates that history. At the
same time, there is an opposite process of integration of those
shorter units. It can be seen functioning in the integration of
tanka poems by complex methods of progression and association
in anthologies and sequences; it can be found in brief units such
as the “tales of poems” [...] and it can be seen in various
minglings of prose and verse, whether for the theater, or indeed
for the diary. What such various methods of integrating poems
suggest is that the brief forms are considered less discrete than
are Western poems. There is a presumption of relatedness
between one poem and another, or between a poem and its
situation of composition.35
Merrill, being something of an “outcast-artist,” tries to draw upon the local
“Muse” and interweave poetry and prose. The plot of “Prose of Departure” is
intertwined with the form. In the course of the plot, the traveler is searching for
something; in the form, he has already found inspiration.
Halfway around the globe from Paul the worst keeps dawning on us.
We try to conjure him up as he was only last winter: hair silvered early,
the trustful, inquisitive, near-sighted face, (...) I need a form of
conscious evasion, that at best permits odd moments when the subject
looking elsewhere strays
into a local muse's
number-benumbed gaze
--fixed there, ticking off syllables, until she blinks and the wave
breaks.36
And elsewhere:
Don’t worry, I’m getting my share of fast food, TV news and
tearjerkers, police running toward the explosion, our sickeningly clear
connections to New York, a boîte called Wet Dream, the taximeter
advancing, like history itself, by lifespans: 1880 to 1950 to 2020. Yet
this automated Japan tends chiefly to mirror and amplify a
thousandfold the writhing vocalist in my own red boîte, whom I want
gagged, unplugged, shortcircuited. If every trip is an incarnation in
miniature, let this be the one in which to arrange myself like flowers.
35
36
Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) 52.
James Merrill, The Inner Room. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 57.
16
Aim at composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.
Close my borders to foreign devils. 37
The travellers admire Donald’s home, his: “bit of our planet. Two midget rooms,
utilitarian alcove, no trace of clutter. What he has is what you see, and includes
the resolve to get rid of things already absorbed.”38 They spend afternoons at the
Noh theatre watching actors who enter “the realms of legend and artifice, to
become ‘a something else thereby.’”39 What follows the theatre section is a
beautifully practical and sociologically interesting experience at the bank
(“Kyogen interlude: At the bank.”), where their host Donald acts very selfassuredly with a servile Japanese bank-clerk and his supervisor:
Donald: [speaking to the boss now] Good morning. My name is
R___. I am a writer and journalist living in Tokyo. Allow me to give
you my card.
Manners require that a card be studied by its recipient with every
show of genuine interest. The supervisor beautifully clears this first
hurdle. Donald resumes. During his tirade his listener’s breathing
quickens, his eyes glitter. He and the red-faced clerk, side by side, are
contemplating the abyss to whose brink we’ve led them. The younger
man, slightly bent, hands clasped at his crotch, has braced himself like
one about to be flogged.40
This section ends with the exchange:
DJ (amused in spite of himself): That story wasn’t nice. Even bank
clerks have to live.
Eleanor: Darling boy, nobody has to live. It’s what I came away from
Paul’s service thinking. Nobody has to live.
In the next section, “Sanctum”, the travelers finally experience some
solace: “Another proscenium,” it begins: the two desperate castaways find
themselves kneeling before a religious “inner room,” watching a ceremony lead
by an abbot, in which he and some young priests sing a “deep and monotonous
chant”: at first, the whole scene seems rather insignificant, and Merrill describes
it correspondingly:
He [the abbot] faces a small gold pagoda flanked by big gold
37
Merrill 57.
Merrill 55.
39
Merrill 60.
40
Merrill 64.
38
17
lotus trees overhung by tinkling pendants of gold. Do such
arrangements please a blackened image deep within? To us
they look like Odette's first drawing room (before Swann takes
charge of her taste) lit up for a party, or the Maison Doree he
imagines as the scene of her infidelities.41
They are eventually invited to participate: to add their incense; here they
somehow lose their skepticism as they begin to experience some sort of
emotion:
Still, when the abbot turns, and with a gesture invites us to
place incense upon the brazier already full of warm, fragrant
ash, someone--myself perhaps--tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear
life—42
It is interesting to note how the word “life” does not purposefully fit into
the haiku pattern. When reading this passage, we can feel as if the last line was
something of a stumble, a strut of the rhythm. The religious experience was, it
seems, after all, only a brief flash of light in the darker continuum. Thus, the
observant and anxious tourism of James Merrill has gone through a small
climax; nevertheless, it has not reached a resolution, the knot has not been
untied: the life of a friend, and perhaps the meaning of the voyage, and of life as
such for the two travelers, still carry misty question marks.
The section that follows is another theatre interlude called “Bunraku”.
Here Merrill finds a parallel between the state of a human being and the puppet
– both are animated and manipulated by unseen forces and energies:
[...] the overruling passions, the social or genetic imperatives,
that propel a given character. Seldom do we the living, for that
matter, feel more “ourselves” than when spoken through, or
motivated, by “invisible” forces such as these. It is especially true
of, like a puppet overcome by woe, we also appear to be
struggling free of them.43
41
Merrill 66.
Merrill 66.
43
Merrill 67.
42
18
The following section is the “Geiger Counter”. It begins with a series of
haiku, whereby the rhythm becomes more intense, as the quarrel between the
two friends reaches a climax:
"You're not dying! You've been reading too much Proust, that's
all! I could be dying too--have you thought of that, JM?--except
that I don't happen to be sick, and neither do you. What
we are suffering are sympathetic aches and pains. Guilt, if you
like, over staying alive. Four friends have died since December,
now Paul's back at the Clinic. You were right,"--the dying Paul,
what else?--"we should have scrapped the trip as soon as we
heard. But God! even if you and I were on the way out, wouldn't
we still fight to live a bit first, fully and joyously?"
Such good sense. I want to bow, touch my forehead to the
straw mat. Instead: "Fight? Like this morning? We can live or
die without another one of those, thank you." Mutual glares.44
The last section of “Prose of Departure” is titled “In the Shop.” The first
sentence helps us imagine the kind of shop we are dealing with: “Out came the
most fabulous kimono of all,” and the next sentence lets us know what state
Merrill’s mind is in: “To what function, dear heart, could it possibly be worn by
the likes of – Hush, give me your hand.” Here, the plot-narrative stops and we
are gradually led into a world of imagination, a world of colours: dyeing, Earth,
crêpe de Chine, etc. This very matter-of-fact passage from plot-narrative to
imagination, back and forth, is typical for Merrill’s prose: not only does it
appear in “Prose of Departure,” it is also typical for The Changing Light at
Sandover, and other works.
Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s
colours, shall we not be Earth before we know it? Venerated therefore
is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length
of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that
one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the
fable’s whole eccentric
Star-puckered moral --White, never-to-blossom buds
Of the mountain laurel --May be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night. 45
This section requires closer attention, especially its last phrases, because it
arguably contains the most important or concluding message of the haibun: that
44
45
Merrill 69.
Merrill 72.
19
life or consciousness, represented by the crêpe de Chine, can finally surrender to
death, having found in itself certain nodes or places of immortality, certain
nooks which death (a.k.a. the hue which will stain the crêpe de Chine upon its
immersion) cannot touch. The whole string of episodes, with their prolonged
moments of suffering and uncertainty, has lead to this realization. But miracles
do not happen, it seems to be saying; it is a skill we are looking for, an ability, a
dexterity. The entire “Prose of Departure” can be seen as an elegy or “narrativechant” on departing, on letting go; letting go of the friend back home, letting go
of one’s life, leaving Japan behind, the Japan that was previously thought of as
very interesting, exotic and promising; it is about surpassing the illusion of such
a Japan and such a life coming to the conclusion that basically all that Japan can
teach them, or other people, can be found in the significance and purpose of the
religious ceremony: the monks acknowledge the ephemeral nature of human
life, and take it as their task to bring their awareness to things immortal, to
things permanent.
2.2. The Form of “Prose of Departure” and Its Effects
On the most basic level, the first thing the reader notices in “Prose of
Departure” is the short poems, which are subsequently found to be rhymed A-BA, with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern:
dusk within the night.
The high street lamp through snowy
46
branches burns moon-bright.
The next thing that comes to mind is of course haibun, i.e., prose
interspersed with or concluded by haiku. This genre has a long tradition in
classical Japanese literature, overlapping with the poetic diaries and travel
accounts that were written from the 10th century A.D. onwards, and culminating
in works like Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road through the Provinces. In this
part of the chapter, we will at first briefly examine the haiku and then the prose
sections, contrasting the prose briefly with Merrill’s autobiographical A
Different Person.
46
Merrill 54.
20
Formally, the traditional ki-go in the first haiku verse is not at all strictly
respected – only sometimes it appears, like in the previous quote (“snowy
branches”). The many Japanese words and concepts, along with the chapter
titles (“Arrival in Tokyo”, “Kyoto”, “River Trip”), give Merrill’s haibun a
classical travelogue character. As such, it is indeed similar to Bashō’s Narrow
Road to Oku47
– the short prose passages introducing the place and the
occurrence and the haiku providing a poetic counterpart; in terms of narrative,
the haiku usually but not always conclude the “story.” In terms of poetic effect,
the haiku paint the scene anew, fresh, and from a different perspective – the
inner aesthetics of haiku differing greatly from that of prose.
Our section of town is Roppongi, where thirty years ago I dined in
W’s gloomy wooden farmhouse. [...] One group has a transistor,
another makes its own music, clapping hands and singing. Their lantern
faces glow in the half-dark’s black-beamed, blossom-tented
dusk within the night.
The high street lamp through snowy
48
branches burns moon-bright.
Narrow streets, lined with pots: wistaria, clematis, bamboo. (Can that
be syringa – with red blossoms?) Shrines begin. A shopkeeper says
good day.49
Afternoons at the Noh.
Plays of unself. Peel off the maiden pearl-diver to find her mother’s
ghost, the ghost to wake a dragon who, at the end of his dance, will
attain Buddhahood. Masked as each of these in turn, the protagonist has
the wattles and frame of
A middle-aged man –
but time, gender, self are laws
waived by his gold fan.50
47
Merrill’s verses of course lack the strong underlying sense of being at home in the Japanese
countryside – one that we find in Bashō’s account – and they do not have that “lightness” and
spiritual profundity of “the Mystic”. A recommendable translation of Bashō’s travelogue (also
translated as “Narrow Road(s) to the Interior”) is Donald Keene’s (1996) with illustrations for
each haiku done by a master of collage, Miyata Masayuki, whose artist’s note in the translation
says: “Producing a picture to represent each haiku [...] was a matter of having to select one tiny
“point” – a mere “dot”. One misjudgment in my reading and the picture would lose touch with
the spirit of Bashō’s work.” “Haiku, Haibun and Renga of Matsuo Bashō,” Accessed: 18 Nov.
2008, <http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/poets/basho.htm#narrow.keene>
48
Merrill 54.
49
Merrill 55.
50
Merrill 60.
21
Interestingly, the haiku could also be read as independent units – they could
stand by themselves; at the same time, as can be seen in the above quotes, the
continuity is there.
The effect can be first of all visual: the haiku work as an “attractor” of
attention, a small unit breaking the visual monotony of the prose; secondly, each
haiku can be taken as a little song, or a quote from another work – with a
multivocal or ambivalent effect; alternatively, it could be a signpost or marker
inserted to divide the prose into sensibly short rhythmical units, so that the
actors of the small drama can come out in their full colours, without the reader
being anxious. For further support of this opinion, I would quote Merrill: “The
music has no purpose, Professor Shimura insists, but to mark time for the
actors.”51
The other effect the inserted poems can have is to blur the traditional
distinction between poetry and prose. Upon discovering that the next piece of
text is going to be a poem, the reader subconsciously slows down and becomes
more wary – poetry tends to be condensed and more difficult to understand. The
passage I wish to quote now nicely shows how prose can be very poetic, and
vice versa, how a poem can be very narratorial:
But this stormy noon we’re alone in the boat, screens of mist enfold the
heights, and the famous drowned savannas, green-gold or violet-pink in
travel posters, come through as dim, splitsecond exposures during
which
One seaweed fan waves
At another just under
From above the waves.52
This is a part of Merrill’s experiment in “Prose of Departure”: blurring the
boundaries, suggesting that what was thought of as genuine poetry might have
only been a silently agreed-upon convention of poetry.
The section “Geiger Counter” begins interestingly with a series of five
haiku that create a staccato of short phrases, accentuating the desperation and
the feeling of what to do in a foreign land, far away from a friend in need which
the two travellers are experiencing most of the time. In the part called “Donald’s
Neighborhood”, like in many other sections, the haiku are clearly intended to
51
52
Merrill 61.
Merrill 63.
22
closely link up with and to continue the prose narrative; they do not disturb the
slow andante – they simply underline the gloomy mood of the prose:
The program is over in just ninety minutes. What have we seen?
Boy, maybe eighteen
Bent over snapshots while his
Cat licks itself clean.
Naked girl, leading
Suitors a merry chase: she’ll
Leave them stripped, bleeding – 53
The pseudo-haiku form provides a visual and rhythmical change. The narrator’s
message is, due to this, carried through more effectively. At the same time, the
poems – being probably the product of refining, “polishing,” and distillation –
purposefully leave more of the action unconcluded, and thus leave more space
for readers’ interpretation and imagination. What is also important is their
function of concluding each section of the narrative: they are able to provide a
sort of compression of the mood of each section; they present the core thought or
feeling behind each scene. In this last feature, Merrill has arguably taken as his
model the travel accounts of Matsuo Bashō and other Japanese haibun writers.
In his autobiography A Different Person, James Merrill speaks in some
detail about what came to pass to him and his acquaintances during their stays in
Europe. It is written in prose, but the style is in a way poetic, although probably
not as poetic as that of “Prose of Departure,” and the flow of the text of A
Different Person is slower – the narrative is longer and it is clearly meant to be
more of a “novel” than any of Merrill’s poetic sequences. Nevertheless, it can be
interesting to read the autobiography as one of the several modes of Merrill’s
literary expression.
The title “Prose of Departure” is also perhaps significant: by “prose”
Merrill might mean that it is not “poetry” of departure in the sense that the text
is more prosaic – an account of a departure, without higher literary ambitions.
The title of the whole book, The Inner Room, is also perhaps significant: stanza,
in Italian, means “room,” and the short stanzas of the haikus are indeed like
small compact dwellings into which the poet seems to be trying to condense the
scenes, to condense the life, the moment. They are, arguably, the temporary
53
Merrill 55
23
inner rooms of his self, the inside hiding places where he is trying to find solace.
They express a mood of longing for peace, a mood which is underlined by the
general tone of the prose.
In sum, “Prose of Departure” is a complex phenomenon – we hesitate to
call it a “narrative” or a “haibun.” By using a “palette” containing the “colours”
of lyric poetry, narrative poetry and prose, Merrill has achieved to paint in a
fashion that overlaps and mixes the three “colours.” Moreover, his brushstrokes
have been mostly quick, visual, arguably impressionistic or even imagistic ones,
and thus the text is highly condensed.
2.3. Puns and Other Poetic Devices in “Prose of Departure”:
The variety of poetic devices Merrill uses support the tone or mood of
the given sequence; naturally also, the frequent alliterations create a feeling of
rhythm, of a pulsation of life the text of the poem records. For instance, in the
following passage we can see how the repeating sound of “p,” “m,” and “d” give
us a feeling of beat, not unlike the drum-beats accompanying a song.
“Peel off the maiden pearl-diver to find her mother’s ghost, the ghost to
wake a dragon who, at the end of his dance, [...]”54
Another example is “Geiger Counter”, where we can see how the “beat” or
rhythm begins in the haiku part, with “Doc,” “dark,” “cloud,” and “Knock,” and
goes on in the prose section. Here, Merrill orchestrates a set of alliterations: first
the “f,” then the “s” and lastly the “d.”
What’s the story, Doc?”
--dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light. Knock,
knock. Not dinnertime already? Donald, making his ghoul face, joins
us for another feast less of real food than of artfully balanced hues and
textures. “I’m sick,” sighs the sunburnt maid who serves it, and whose
kimono we think to please her by admiring, “sick of wrapping myself
up like a dummy day after day.”55
54
55
Merrill 60.
Merrill 70.
24
The rhythm serves well to support the desperate tone and the feeling of
emptiness, which is expressed by: “ghoul face” and “less of real food than of
artfully balanced hues and textures.”
Another noteworthy section rich in alliteration is “Another Cemetery,” where
the “f” takes the floor to acoustically remind us of the flames of a fire:
last flickering shift
of flame flutters off. The log’s
charred forked shape is left.
Other sections--“Bunraku” being a good example--are arguably small theatre
pieces where Merrill employs drama devices: the exclamation mark, the inserted
word and the short sentences help create the action:
The very river has stopped during Koganosuke’s dialogue with his
father. All at once—heavens!—the young man takes up a sword and
plunges it into his vitals. There is no blood. He cannot die. The act will
end with his convulsive efforts to.56
After the drama the spectators, with the benefit of some hindsight, recall what
the night’s show actually meant for them:
“...wonderful today...!”
you yawned that night. It moved me:
words began to play
like a fountain deep
in gloom. Did love reach out your
arm then? Sorrow? Sleep?57
The “gloomy” atmosphere is in part created by the simile of the words of the
play and a fountain, both “deep in gloom.” Merrill indulges in simile throughout
“Prose of Departure.” For instance, in “Afternoons at the Noh,” a simile is
followed by a metaphor:
The drummer with a thimbled fingertap neat as a pool shot cuts short
his vocalise at once resumed: a guttural growl that ends falsetto,
hollow pearl balanced upon a jet of water,58
And later the poet explores hands and feet:
Feet in white socks explore the stage like the palms of a blind man.
(…) Hands like these will never clench or cling or stupidly dangle or
56
Merrill 67.
Merrill 68.
58
Merrill 60.
57
25
helplessly be wrung. They are princes to be served and defended with
one’s life. My own hand as I write, wielding this punctilious lance of
blue, belongs to a lower caste.59
Merrill plays with word meanings elsewhere as well:
(Sold up at the temple, distant cousin to both the gravestone and the
“Plant-Tab” stuck in a flowerpot to release nutrients over weeks to
come: the incense stick. This, brittle, narrow slab of dark green, set
upright in the burner’s ash-heap and lit, will also turn to ash. But in the
process, as it whitens, a hitherto unseen character appears, below it a
second, slowly a third, each traced by the finest penpoint of
incandescence. They cool the way ink dries. Once complete and
legible, their pious formula can be scattered by a touch.[...])60
And he uses puns:
(Into the Sound, Paul,
we’d empty your own box, just
as black, just as small.)
“Sound” here meaning either acoustic production or a body of water like a fiord
or bay, and Merrill uses the expression, allowing for both sets of meaning
simultaneously: 1) acoustics – Paul’s box standing for his spirit or soul, Sound
standing for God or the Universe, 2) water – Paul’s ashes would be emptied into
the water.
Star-puckered moral --White, never-to-blossom buds
Of the mountain laurel --May be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.
“Read” is a homophone of “red”: 1) the buds of the laurel may be red when
they emerge triumphant from the vats of night, or: 2) the buds may be
interpreted as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.61
59
Merrill 61.
Merrill 71.
61
The mountain laurel, or Kalmia latifolia, is a shrub of the eastern US highlands, and it has
several sub-varieties, the buds of which range between white and red and pink. All of its parts
are poisonous. It is the state flower of Pennsylvania and Connecticut. It was brought to Europe
in the 18th century, as a decoration plant, and as such it is grown. For a pink example, see for
instance: <http://www.bigtimbercreek.org/Mountain_Laurel1.jpg>
60
26
To briefly conclude this chapter, let us try to see “Prose of Departure”
from a more “objective” or a more anthropological viewpoint: James Merrill the
intellectual, the master of words, is trying to find his voice in the midst of
Japanese culture, is trying to “be at home” in it. I daresay he does not succeed,
he does not “arrive home” in Japan (the causes being multiple: the friend Paul, a
western sensibility, etc.), and this small failure is discernible throughout. One
result of this Merrill’s state of “incompleteness” or “searching” is, I believe, the
following: a definite undertone of irony, sarcasm and self-irony in the haikus
and in the whole. “How can words,” Merrill seems to be quietly asking between
the lines, “speak about life, time, etc.? They are so insufficient.” In a tone of
self-irony, Merrill seems to be laughing at his poor attempts at haiku and
haibun; at his poor imitations. He is deeply troubled by problems of a personal
nature, and at the same time, he is trying to take after the best minds of Japan’s
literary tradition in a form that is natural for Japanese but not as much for
English. This self-irony is discernible when one is somewhat acquainted with
the haikus of the Japanese poets: in a nutshell, their haiku are very “sharp” and
concise, unrhymed, relatively simple to understand (a good exception to this
would be, e.g., the more verbally elaborate haiku of Yosa Buson), and, like the
arrow of the Zen-archer, they aim at gently “piercing” the reader’s heart. Along
with Merrill’s self-irony, there is even a tone of sarcastic mockery or
deprecation of the local culture; a tone that, again, has to do with the travelers’
experiencing of their self-imposed exile:
Temple pond --- work of the mad priest who thought he was a beaver?
In the foreground roots scrawl their plea for clemency upon a golden
velvet scroll. Granted, breathe the myriad starlets of moss, the dwarf’s
maple’s inch-wide asterisks. “To die without assurance of a cult was
the supreme calamity.” (L. Hearn)62
([...] Any fragrance meanwhile eludes me. Have I caught cold?)63
62
63
Merrill 58.
Merrill 71.
27
3. Paul Muldoon and his haiku
In this chapter, we will attempt to analyze two pieces of writing by Paul
Muldoon, “Hopewell Haiku” (Hay, 1998) and “90 Instant Messages to Tom
Moore” (Horse Latitudes, 2006).
Paul Muldoon has said in an interview that he often has the sense of not
using the language but being used by it, meaning the feeling we get when we sit
down to write something (e.g., an e-mail), “and we may have a sense of what we
might want to include in the body of that text,” as Muldoon says, but we actually
get the “sense that the thing has got away from us”64 (we thus try to force it, and
it comes out different, or perhaps, wrong). We will, in this chapter, firstly
introduce some of the formal and contentual aspects of both haiku sequences,
and secondly we will try to consider the haiku as pieces of spontaneous poetry,
comparing them with the haikai of the Japanese masters and of Michael
McClintock.
3.1. Introduction to Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland,
and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to
1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since
1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now professor at Princeton
University and Chair of the University Center for the Creative and Performing
Arts. Paul Muldoon is also a musician: he writes lyrics and plays guitar and
percussion in the band Rackett (formed in 2004) which has been described as
“Cole Porter meets Punk or Ira Gershwin Grunge.” His often difficult poetry has
always been a point of discussion among critics – because of the following
aspects: a) its hermetic, enigmatic nature – Muldoon uses language and
knowledge in a way that often presupposes the reader’s familiarity with his life
and to have a similar understanding of reality; b) its subversive nature –
64
Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript, 14
Mar. 2008, Accessed: 28 Nov. 2008, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/
2183300.htm>.
28
Muldoon tends to subvert language in terms of conventional meaning and wordassociation; he also subverts the reverence of art as such; c) its “ludic” nature –
Muldoon fools around a lot with words and meanings; he likes to be cheeky with
the reader, the reader who often loses the thread in the puzzle very quickly;65 d)
its slightly sentimental undertone – Muldoon, although on the surface very selfconfident in his treatment of the poetic material (be it the theme or the form), is
actually, according to some critics, hiding a discernible sentimentality, one that
is not always the trademark of excellent poetry; e) The frequent forcefulness of
the rhymes and the forms into which he forges his poems. Notwithstanding
some of the previous drawbacks, most critics agree that Muldoon’s poetry is
interesting and innovative.
3.2. Introduction to “Hopewell Haiku” and “90 Instant Messages
to Tom Moore”
3.2.1. “Hopewell Haiku”: Form and Content
Hay, published in 1998, is the volume which contains “Hopewell
Haiku.” Clair Wills considers Hay to be a symbolical middle turning point in
Muldoon’s life and career, and she takes many instances in the collection,
including “Hopewell Haiku,” to be examples of this in-between time and place,
a time of gathering fodder (hay) for the winter of the poet’s life. She finds
Muldoon to be expressing some sort of desperation and loss – the necessary
letting-go of the first part of his life. She notes how he keeps revolving around
very domestic environments (kitchen, snails, backyard, etc.), and how Hay is
full of gastronomical images and allusions, as well as sexual ones, and she
points out a certain inclination of the poet to these more “base” pleasures, and
his obvious struggle with them. Muldoon was, in 1997, forty-six years old, but
“ripeness is not all”, he is “Getting Round” and quite concerned about it, she
infers. Even death finds its way into his life, and he has to deal with it: his cat
Pangur dies; he witnesses a funeral.
Although some of the haiku or even the longer poems in Hay might
be a product of “spasmic writing,” as Muldoon admits in haiku number LXII,
65
“His can be a poetry of provocation, and one where meanings are hidden seemingly just to
show how they can be hidden.” Quoted from: “Paul Muldoon at the complete review”: Accessed:
31 Jan 2009, <http://www.complete-review.com/authors/muldoonp.htm>
29
formally at least the haiku are very refined and intricate pieces: their first and
third lines rhyme, and, as Clair Wills points out, “the middle word of each haiku
provides the rhyme word for the haiku five poems later. What is more, the
middle line of the last haiku returns us to the beginning, completes the chain, by
rhyming with the first and third of the fifth haiku.”66 Although formally quite
“high-tech,” otherwise these “pleasing vignettes,” as Wills calls them, are –
compared with Muldoon’s longer poems – the beacons of simplicity and
availability. Wills adds: “Many of the lyrics are perhaps deceptively mild and
modest offerings.” Perhaps another test of deftness and skill, Wills asks whether
Muldoon’s formal manipulation of the traditionally spontaneous and free form
of the haiku does not result in some unnecessary poetic sacrifice; she however
concludes that Muldoon seems to be experimenting with ways in which “severe
constraint, cutting back, can lead to a new kind of freedom.”67
In my view, “Hopewell Haiku” has the following characteristics:
Muldoon is being purposefully rough, sexual, male, and he is trying to sound
“definite” and uncompromisingly blunt and sincere: he uses “masculine” images
(fire imagery – LXX, LXXIII, LXXXVIII; large game imagery – LXXII,
LXXVIII; heroic – LXXIII, LXXVII); he is funny – LXVIII (here the humour is
also arguably “masculine”), LXXXI, LXXVII; he is open in his choice of topics,
be it mouse excrement, the farting of a horse, a monstrance, a piece of bird
dung, his daily meals, etc. The influence of Seamus Heaney and more distantly
of Patrick Kavanagh can be seen here. All three poets have their roots in the
border country, Heaney having shown Muldoon “how poetry could be made
from the inconspicuous everyday details of a rural farming life.”68
Apart from this strand, Muldoon does not omit Japan as his source of
poetic inspiration69: XVII (reference to the “obi, or waistpiece”), XXVII (Zeami,
the Noh theatre playwright), LXXVIII and LXXXIX (the images and tone are
similar to what appears in many classical haiku), LXVII – this haiku about sumo
fighting, the bullfrog, and Suma, refers – according to William J. Higginson – to
Bashō’s haiku:
66
Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998) 199. This
would be in line with Muldoon’s poetic experiments with sestinas and villanelles.
67
Wills 199.
68
Wills 199.
69
Wills says that the haikus are a result of his 1994 Japanese visit, and she also points out that
among other influences apparent in Hay are the Malayan and Persian ones, the forms of the
ghazal and pantoum appearing in Hay as well.
30
Suma Temple . . .
I hear the unblown flute
in the shade of a tree70
Another critic of Muldoon’s haiku, David Burleigh, notes in this respect that
“Generally American haiku do not allude much to other kinds of poetry in
English, let alone to other literary forms. There is an occasional play, or replay,
of a well-known verse in Japanese, by Bashō or Issa usually, and little more.”71
Therefore, he dismisses Higginson’s review, which connects many of the
“Hopewell Haiku” to their Japanese counterparts: “while attractive to the haiku
devotee, [Higginson] offers only a partial and limited reading of the work, since
he entirely ignores the multiple references to other texts in the “Hopewell
Haiku.” These,” Burleigh goes on, “include obvious allusions to Robert Frost
and Herman Melville, for example.”72 He does not, unfortunately, give an
example of these allusions. Of further interest is Burleigh’s commentary of
Nobuaki Tochigi’s reading of “Hopewell Haiku”: Tochigi took the sequence as
one long renga, or linked verse sequence, pointing to its precedents in Japan. As
Burleigh says, Tochigi:
[...] while fully aware of the Irish and other literary references, sought
to discover a similarity in technique in terms of the shifting
associations between the moments represented by the verses. Viewed
this way, the sequence of fragments becomes a string of varied moods
and moments, and this too is a valid approach. It is not clear, however,
whether Muldoon consciously follows an established pattern of any
kind in terms of content, though there are verses that refer to love, the
moon, and so on in both that sequence and the new one, as there are in
renga.73
Burleigh finally points to a third reading, by Edna Longley, which has,
according to him, the most merit, Longley being long familiar with Muldoon
and his work:
[Longley] sees it as expressing Muldoon’s adaptation to his new home
in the United States, with certain wry references to pioneers. [...] The
new location, far west of Ireland, but still east of the United States,
provides a whole new “take” on the poet’s situation.74
70
Higginson, William J., “A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku, Vol.35.2, Summer
2004, Accessed: 31 Nov.2008, <www.modernhaiku.org/essays/PaulMuldoon.html>
71
David Burleigh, “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore by Paul Muldoon.” Modern Haiku,
Vol.36.2, Summer 2005, Accessed: 31 Nov.2008, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/
Muldoon2005.html>
72
Burleigh
73
Burleigh
74
Burleigh
31
An important aspect of Muldoon’s poetry is the slight “mythologization” of
elements and episodes of his private life75, his cat Pangur (VI, XXXVII), his
food (XII, XXXII), animals around his home (XIV, XXII, XXVIII, XXXIII, and
many more), his belongings:
I tamped it with hay,
the boot that began to leak
Thursday or Friday.76
Lastly, several of the haiku are more evidently self-reflective and they touch
upon the fact of the poet’s coming of age: LXV (speaking of rust), LVIII
(“ripeness is not all”), and the following two (XIX and XLII):
A mare’s long white face.
A blazed tree marking a trail
we’ll never retrace.77
Nowadays I flush
a long drawn-out cry, at most,
from the underbrush.78
In lieu of a concluding remark, I would suggest to the potential reader of
“Hopewell Haiku” another reading. What will follow is purely a personal
reader-response to the poems – disregarding – and I would like to emphasize
this – the author, his intentions, his background, the place, etc. Thus, in my view,
“Hopewell Haiku” are, when read from beginning to end: depressing,
discouraging and time-consuming. When jumping haphazardly from one haiku
to another and when reading only a few at a time, the resulting effect was much
more “positive”: they entertained me, stayed with me, I remembered parts of
them like “catch phrases.” I believe all this is caused by: a) that English is not
my native language, b) that I am not Irish, and do not share Muldoon’s
experience, knowledge and opinions.79
75
Wills says in this respect: “for example is his second volume of poetry the relationship
between his mother and father becomes emblematic of larger dualities and conflicts. He
represents himself as a „mule“ or go-between in a mixed marriage between his schoolteacher
mother and farming father, between the „English“ and „Irish“ elements of Northern Irish
identity, between the longing for poetic transcendence and a stubborn sense of materiality.”
Wills 200.
76
Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2002) 421.
77
Muldoon 423.
78
Muldoon 427.
79
This – what one might call “a reader’s mishap” – is in sum caused by a Czech reading the poetry of a very
special Irishman who probably never thought about the fact that his poems would be analyzed by a Czech
student of literature.
32
“90 Instant Messages for Tom Moore” are, again very subjectively, a
somewhat different matter: these short poems or “instant messages” do have a
recognizable “atmosphere,” they portray a landscape, a place, and although they
are still not free of sentimentalism, desire and despair, they do have, seen
subjectively, a stronger positive edge to them.
3.2.2. “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: Form and Content
Paul Muldoon has been generally inspired in his writings, as he has
admitted, by Lord Byron’s poetry, Byron’s humour in the poem’s lines and
rhymes, and his ability to write shorter lyric poems that were quite touching. In
“90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore” (IM), we can see that he uses a wide
variety of devices to enrich his poems – for instance: 1) Play with sound: I, III,
LI, LII, LXVI, LXVIII; 2) Juxtaposition of things or images that come from
different environments: XXIII, XXXIX, L; 3) Impressionistic enumerations:
XVIII; 4) Personification of animals, or treating them as equals: XXXI, LXIX–
LXXIV; 5) Humour associated with scenes in nature: LXV; 6) Exploration of
private states of mind: XI; 7) Personification of certain natural phenomena:
XXII; 8) Ordinary scenes with people: XVII. Though mostly based on
commonplace scenes, the haiku of IM have been, once again, carefully crafted;
the rhyme scheme is quite similar to that of the “Hopewell” sequence80: this
time, the second line of every haiku rhymes with the 1st and 3rd lines of a haiku
seven or eight “numbers” later: e.g., nos. LIV and LXI correspond; nos. LXII
and LXX, nos. LXIII and LXXI, etc.
David Burleigh says that poem number III expresses “the exact quality of
contemporary living”81. He notes that Muldoon manages to “encapsulate,” in the
short form of a haiku, quite a few things: 1) a specific location (Hamilton, the
capital of Bermuda), 2) the hesitation of the speaker whether “to be formal or
informal, or even rural or urban”82 (“Tweeds? Tux?”) 3) the option that the
previous does not really matter, 4) a play on sound and free association
(“Baloney? Abalone?”), and 5) resignation, letting go, a realization of what
really life is about (“Flux, Tom. Constant flux”). The verses that follow this
80
David Burleigh, in his review of “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore,” finds a complex
rhyming pattern analogical to that of “Hopewell Haiku.” Apparently, Muldoon changed the
scheme from the preliminary shorter publication and in the “90” version, the rhymes appear as
abovementioned.
81
Burleigh
82
Burleigh
33
haiku, namely in poem no.V, speak obliquely about Ireland, “The Big House”
referring to the colonial period and the Irish houses which belonged usually to
landlords residing in England (“the tenants/are the absentees”), and Muldoon
can have this expression produce another meaning, namely the colonial situation
of Bermuda, it still being a British possession. There might be, as Burleigh
notes, a slight tinge of nostalgia for Ireland (also the name of one of the islands
of Bermuda):
The last of the pod
of sperm whales beached on Nonsuch
turns to the auld sod.83
The poet is frequently sight-seeing. Some of the poems are full of
enumerations, of nouns, of souvenirs (e.g., in XI). In others, more general
philosophy finds its way into the observations, as in X, where, as Burleigh notes,
there is a feeling of uncertainty that is “part of the experience of travel.” At
another place (LXVI) Muldoon tries to resolve the old dichotomy of
bookishness vs. the desire for low-life, for closeness to the earth:
Nostalgie de la
Boue la boue la boue la boue:
an all-Ireland fleadh.84
The “fleadh” (pronounced flah) is an Irish dancing festival, “la boue” in French
meaning “life close to the soil”, “abú” in Irish means “glory” or “victory”:
“nostalgie de la boue” can be either the longing for low-life, or the nostalgia of
the past victory/glory. As Burleigh notes, Muldoon nicely uses the repetition of
“la boue” to produce a drumbeat-like sound, one akin to the festival. The poem
that corresponds to this one, two pages on (LXXIV), reads as follows:
Orange overshoes
make the puffin less nimble
on dry land, it’s true.85
David Burleigh comments on this: “Ostensibly, this is an amusing portrait of a
seabird, yet in Ireland (because of the “orange”) I might read this as a reference
to the gracelessness or awkwardness of Ulster Protestants, out of their element
somehow.” He goes on to say: “The whole text is fraught with such ambiguities,
83
Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) 54.
Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 69.
85
Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 71.
84
34
barely contained in the tightly patterned format.”86 Notwithstanding all the
possibilities of interpretation, our interest will lie in comparing Muldoon’s haiku
with the haiku of Bashō, Issa or others, in terms of their immediacy and
spontaneity.
3.3 Muldoon’s haiku – spontaneous poetry?
3.3.1. Can haiku be spontaneous?
Haiku are written from the perspective of the poet – the observer of
things – thus, we are dealing with a case of dramatic monologue, where the poet
is outside and is addressing the audience, presenting the reader with his or her
perspective. The success of a haiku can depend for instance on: 1) how
accurately the poet uses language to describe the moment (i.e., a moment that is,
obviously, seen only from one perspective), which actually means: how
“spontaneously” he or she writes; “spontaneously” here referring to a mastery of
the craft of poetry-writing, where the poet, like the professional figure-skater,
does things so effortlessly that the ordinary spectator does not realize the effort
that has gone into the preparation. Thus, the words that appear in the resulting
poem “fit” into it quite naturally. 2) the poetic sketch should not stay superficial
– it should touch upon the relationship of the scene to other layers of life/reality,
bringing in intuition/spiritual insight. In Japan, usually the base for this kind of
depth was the spiritual tradition which the poets strongly embraced. 3) The
feeling of surprise, connected to both of the abovementioned points.
A haiku can, I believe, be labelled spontaneous in the sense that the
words comprising it are the end-products of an original impression or feeling,
given that the author has the ability to put into words that impression or feeling,
and considers this putting of something non-verbal and non-intellectual into
language as a valid and relevant act. Thus, the author, having enough selfconfidence with verbalization, can write a haiku very quickly; on the other hand,
it can be the product of a long process of adjustment and refining. It is a
question whether the second “method”, the long refining and “distillation”, does
not take away from the haiku a feeling of spontaneity and immediacy, an aspect
which the Japanese masters valued a lot during their composition sessions.
Arguably, the products of much alteration and change would be artifacts that
86
Burleigh
35
would speak about the process – the trouble of striving for perfection, the poet’s
many attempts at finding the best word, phrase or form – rather than being a
testimonial of the given moment in the poet’s life, of the momentary flash of
inspiration, etc.
Language is usually the greatest obstacle when attempting to write
spontaneously and naturally; writers use various means to overcome its
limitations, never succeeding completely, albeit being completely aware of the
problem. Paul Muldoon says that the risk that we undergo when we give
ourselves to the structure of language – when we decide to write something
using language – is not such a big risk, because: a) we can easily be aware of
this giving-ourselves away. There is, as Muldoon says, a “sense of humility and
openness before the structure and before the language that means that we are
actually involved in a business over which we have no control and we do not
know what we're doing.”87 b) The artificiality of our creation will not be “bad”
because it is artificial; it will simply be artificial like so many things in this
world of human creativity. “We're all engaged in artifice from day to day,”88
Muldoon adds. Thus, the actual limitations of language (which we will not go
into here) should not baffle the writer, nor should the process of writing, due to
the fact that the ways of dealing with words are not entirely under the user’s
control89, and thus the user cannot make any fatal mistakes if (s)he is merely
aware of the problem of language. Awareness of the limitations, humility, and
the will to take it through could be the precursors of successful writing.
Finally, allow me to quote a relevant comment of Michael McClintock
on haiku and its quality: if a haiku is too vague,
then it invites to be figured out by the intellect rather than fulfilled by
the undivided mind. Figuring out a thing and fulfilling it are two
distinct processes. The former demands that the reader construct a
harmony out of chaos (which would seem more properly the poet’s
work) while the latter demands that he complete the harmony that is
already constructed or established (the poet’s work being done).90
87
Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript, 14 Mar. 2008,
28 Nov. 2008, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/ 2183300.htm>.
88
Koval
89
Control and loss of control over the narrative is the topic of many modern works of literature.
90
Michael McClintock, “Statement and Suggestion in Haiku,” Quoted in: Ungar, B., “Haiku in
English.” (California: Stanford, 1978) 46.
36
I would like to emphasize the undivided mind and the construction of harmony
out of chaos. Thus, a balance between vagueness and telling too much should be
found.
3.3.2. Are Muldoon’s haiku spontaneous?
Which of the categories do Paul Muldoon’s haiku belong to? Immediate
or crafted? Vague or too explicit? Do they surprise? Are they spiritually
profound? And does the poet technically “know the ropes” to the extent that we
as readers do not notice the artist and his skill behind his work?
Ignoring the abovementioned categories at first, I would like to divide
Muldoon’s haiku into “quicker” and “slower”. By “quicker” I mean that the
amount of time required to read, understand and “digest” the poem is
comparably shorter than in the case of the “slower” ones. This “speed” quality
is, I believe, caused by 1) the complexity of the syntax (the “slower” ones might
be composed of several sentences), 2) the amount of allusions and rare
vocabulary. The slower ones can be quite far from classical haiku. Some
“quicker” ones:
A slap on the ass
from Hurricane Fabian
as he made a pass
A barracuda
is eating a small nurse-shark.
Each is smiling like Buddha.
Good Friday
We fly a kite over Bermuda
Our cross in the sky.91
Some “slower” ones:
It seems from this sheer
clapboard, fungus-flanged, that walls
do indeed have ears.
A giant puffball.
The swelled, head-hunted, swelled head
of a king of Gaul.92
Saturday night. Soap.
Ametas and Thestylis
91
92
Muldoon, Horse Latitudes 58 (XXII), 56 (XIV), 54 (IV).
Both (XXXVIII and XLIII): Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 427.
37
still making hay ropes.93
Old boiler room floods.
Old apple trees lagged with moss.
Live coals in the mud.94
As can be seen, all of the “quicker” ones come from “90 Instant Messages to
Tom Moore”, whereas the “slower” ones from “Hopewell Haiku.”
Correspondingly, instant text messages come and go quite quickly, we read
them in an instant and then reply. It seems that is not really necessary to dwell
upon each one, they seem to be there, as a part of Horse Latitudes, to provide a
set of tiny impressionistic sketches, often mere glimpses of the land, its
inhabitants, of the thoughts that it inspires.
Some of Muldoon’s haiku are doubtless surprising and funny; some are
quite down-to-earth and blunt in their subject-matter treatment. Some are
linguistically and thematically elaborate, very much packed with meaning and
extra-textual allusions – like the “Ametas and Thestylis” haiku quoted above. To
see whether his haiku tell/show too much or too little, I would compare the
above quoted “Good Friday” piece, or indeed many others, with some Michael
McClintock and Masaoka Shiki pieces:
McClintock: VIETNAM: POEMS (1973)
A fly
comes to taste ...
his wound
boom
go the guns,
bowels
VIETNAM: FIVE POEMS
tonight ... wishing
the lightning were lightning
the thunder, thunder
Masaoka Shiki: summer storm
white paper on the desk
all flies away
a fancy-free cat
is about to catch
a quail
93
94
Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 429.
Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998 431.
38
my hometown
many cousinspeach blossoms
Muldoon, “Hopewell Haiku”:
A Saharan boil.
Oscar stretched under a hide
by the toilet bowl. (XLIV)
In a slow puddle
two dragonflies, Oxford blues,
rest on their paddles. (LI)
Compared to McClintock and Shiki, Muldoon is clearly much more
complicated, and he strives to do more in the tiny poem: he would show the
scene and amuse the reader with some wordplay or extra-textual allusion. To be
noted is also Muldoon’s frequent use of prepositions of place and time, which
the translators of Japanese haiku use less often. In the Japanese haiku tradition,
there is one famous exception to the simplicity of haiku: Yosa Buson (17161784), who filled the short form with more meaning than the others:
Rain falls on the grass
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart.
Goodbye. I will go
alone down Kiso road
old as autumn
These lazy spring days
continue but how far away
those times called Long Ago!
Buson is certainly a rewarding poet for the haiku reader who wishes to indulge
in multiple-meanings and word-play, interweaved with a Buddhist outlook on
life. It seems that how the poet will use the short form of the haiku really
depends on their personality, their unique mindset. If, for example, we compare
Muldoon’s “nature haiku” with Issa’s, Bashō’s, or other Japanese haiku
author’s, we can find interesting differences.
Cherry blossoms, more
and more now! Birds have two legs!
Oh, horses have four! (Onitsura, 1660-1738)
Blooms on the plum,
redder and redder and still
redder they come! (Izen, 1646-1711)
What a red moon!
And whose is it,
children? (Issa, 1762-1826)
39
Not even a hat-and cold rain falling on me?
Tut-tut! Think of that! (Bashō)
In Muldoon, we here find, for instance: 1. An absence of genuine cries, of
shouts of enthusiasm about the beauty of nature, the paradoxes of life, etc. 2. A
striving for some kind of complexity or ingenuity, for creating parable and
allegory, for creating a complex mytho-poetic world. This interest was shared
with Louis MacNiece, who influenced especially “Why Brownlee Left.” With
exceptions like Buson, classical haiku are an easy first read, although the whole
meaning may not be perceived in a lifetime. For one who knows the cultural and
spiritual background of the writer, they become a small painting, with profound
meaning for the reader who will stop and reflect. In Muldoon, the reader often
has to know the literary references, the rare vocabulary, the Irish/Bermuda
background, but, interestingly enough, also Muldoon’s private world. This
brings me back to Clair Wills’s commentary in her “Introduction” to Reading
Paul Muldoon: “The poems affect a kind of take it or leave it attitude – what one
unsympathetic critic has called a ‘cliquish nonchalance’ – a cocky assurance that
we’ll follow Muldoon down whatever densely private avenues he chooses to
lead us.”95 3. We further can find, contrasting Muldoon’s haiku with other
haiku, arguably a slight feeling of weakness or exhaustion. Clair Wills, writing
about “Sleeve Notes,” an autobiographical lyrical sequence, points out that
perhaps “this [Muldoon’s word-play on root-radical, which seems to suggest
that being radical is not a matter of advanced technique but of finding the right
way of moving on, even if this involves an apparent return to roots] is a preemptive strike on Muldoon’s part: an attempt to forestall the suggestion that,
with his new American pastoral simplicity [in Hay], his middle-aged slobbery,
his poetry has lost its vital spark.”96 In Muldoon’s case it is also possible that –
haiku not being the central “hub” of his (poetic) life (unlike Bashō’s) – the
“juice” and the “vital spark” are spread out more evenly amongst all of his
poems.
Generally speaking, if compared with the haiku of most Japanese
masters, Muldoon’s would be probably slower, less spontaneous, and
telling/showing much more – not in the sense of “overdoing it,” but rather in the
95
96
Wills 12.
Wills 196.
40
sense of offering the reader a solid ground for multiple interpretation97; if
compared with, for instance, James Merrill’s haiku (which should not be
isolated this way, of course, from the rest of the text) in “Prose of Departure”,
Muldoon’s would perhaps, though this is a very imprecise generalization, pass
as more straightforward and generally easier-to-digest poetry. If we compared
Muldoon’s haiku with, e.g., Michael McClintock’s tanka and haiku, there would
be a vast difference in the approach to the material and to the form and tradition,
rendering the two almost incomparable; McClintock’s tanka collected in Meals
at Midnight, for instance, have been described as “[...] natural and vivid [...]
animistic tanka”, as “poems to eat”, as “keen insights into the human nature”:
one at a time
I step on stones
and cross the stream—
when I’m across, the stones
go back to what they were doing98
3.4. Conclusion
Paul Muldoon is comparably more of an urban poet who embraces the
life of civilized man (perhaps this is due to the relaxation he may have
experienced when he moved to the relatively tranquil United States from the
fairly turbulent Ireland); he is more of a complicated and intellectualizing poet
than most Japanese haiku poets and most of the modern English-writing haiku
poets; he is also a poet that pushes formal mastery to the utmost. Muldoon can,
in his haiku, thus be enjoyed on several levels: a) the level of basic meaning is
one – the reader can muse with Muldoon at what is happening, and he will be
treated with a smile at the absurdity or mere funniness of the situation; b) the
level of “broader” meaning – the reader, having done the research on Ireland,
etc., understands the allusions, can enjoy the multiplicity of meaning in such a
small poem; c) the level of linguistic artifice – as David Burleigh puts it,
referring to “90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore”: “there being quite enough to
enjoy simply from the use of language, the sound patterns and unusual words,
the jokes and lewd asides. Despite the Joycean rigors of the pattern, which is as
intricate and demanding as Ulysses, the tone throughout is conversational. [...]
But it seems to me that what the word-play foregrounds is language itself, in all
98
Michael McClintock, Meals at Midnight. Press Release, 7 Dec. 2008, Accessed: 20 Jan 2009,
<http://tankanews.com/ 2008/12/07/meals-at-midnight-poems-by-michael-mcclintockpublished-by-met-press.aspx>.
41
of its uncertainty and strangeness. Surely, words, as much as objects, form the
texture of our living in the world today?”99 The third level connects Muldoon
with James Joyce, although he does not seem to find such firm ground in new
word coinings and word-play like Joyce did.
The haiku of Paul Muldoon, far from the cries of joy, sorrow,
enthusiasm, inspiration, desperation, etc. of the Japanese haiku masters, are
poems that can startle by their formal and textual ingenuity and
interconnectedness; on the other hand, they can pull the rug from under the
reader in terms of knowledge (this can be, when done too often, discouraging).
Japanese haiku “catch us” with their unexpected simplicity and sincerity –
almost no knowledge is necessary; they have the common denominator of being
human, of having the ability to feel. With Muldoon, the reader must be generally
a very patient one, do some research, and allow the author to lead. In reward,
Muldoon will open a window, a window of his own, that leads to his private
backyard, to his place. He is not afraid of revealing this: in fact, he lets himself
go, from one haiku to another, and this sequence does become a true sequence, a
stream-of-thought/perception, not connected only by the logical/intelligent
thread, but by the impulses or throbbing of life itself; as it “happened” to the
author. Similarly, both sequences are windows into Muldoon’s mind: a
psychoanalyst would perhaps find useful material on how the poet often hides
behind his sharp intellect, only to leave subtle “footprints” in his poems of
longing, unfulfilled desire, etc. But these might be psychological speculations
which we do not wish to enter here.
Muldoon the man of obscure meaning and incredible artifice as if
slightly contradicts himself: not in the meaning of what he’s saying, but in the
fact of using language and poetry for communication. It seems that – by
frequently making the poems quite obscure – he is not sure whether he wants us
to read the poems closely and sincerely or not. And (a personal comment)
perhaps naturally so: you can never be sure who will read your confessions, and
how they will take them, how quickly they will be done with them, how
narrowly they will interpret them, or how much the internet “bio” of the author
will interest them instead.
99
Burleigh
42
4: Haiku Journals: Survey and Comparison
In this chapter, after an introduction to the main U.S. and Canadian haiku
journals and the situation of journals as such, we wish to compare two online
haiku journals, Shamrock and Roadrunner, in terms of their form and contents.
4.1. Introduction to Haiku Journals
In his exhaustive article called “The American Haiku Movement”, Charles
Trumbull, updating the material compiled by Elisabeth Searle Lamb in her “A
History of Western Haiku” published in four parts in the 1979-80 Cicada issues,
writes (in the section “Journals”): “Even in the Internet age, the haiku journals
are where the “action” is and remain the mode of record and, hence, the most
important bellwether of the movement.”100 I would add that the “action” is also
in the on-line haiku journals and discussion forums. Trumbull goes on to say
that the U.S. haiku scene, which “has also been enriched by a succession of
smaller, often ephemeral journals that have explored various dimensions of the
vital American haiku movement,” has been dominated by two principal journals,
Modern Haiku, founded in the winter of 1969-1970, and Frogpond, originally
called HSA Frogpond, first published in 1978, being also the official journal of
the Haiku Society of America. Trumbull comments on Modern Haiku as
follows:
Over the years, Modern Haiku provided a forum for all views on the
evolving aesthetics and craft of English-language haiku, featured
the finest essays, consistently reviewed the haiku literature, introduced
hundreds of new poets, and kept a finger on the pulse of haiku in Japan,
Europe, and elsewhere.101
The second mainstream journal, Frogpond, has had the largest circulation
among all English-language haiku journals:
100
Trumbull, Charles, “The American Haiku Movement, Part II: American Haiku, The Internet
and World Haiku,” Modern Haiku, Vol.37.1, Spring 2006, accessed 23 Feb. 2009,
<http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/AmHaikuMovement2.html>
101
Trumbull
43
The editors originally intended to publish all haiku submitted by
HSA subscriber/members, but this policy was almost at once
found to be infeasible, and the magazine welcomed haiku,
senryu, linked verse, essays, and reviews by members and
nonmembers alike. Frogpond began as a quarterly and remained
so, with a few deviations, through the end of 1995, after which
time it went to three issues a year. The several editors have
brought various interests and skills to the journal, and over the
years Frogpond has been in the vanguard of presenting linked
forms and haiku sequences, tanka, and haibun as well as highquality essays and reviews.102
Currently, as can be seen in its online version, Modern Haiku is a journal that
publishes: haiku, senryu, haibun and other short forms related to haiku; haiku
contests, including for example the high-school Kay Titus Mormino Memorial
Scholarship (since 1987) with a top prize of $500, or the Robert Spiess
Memorial (since 2003); book reviews and featured essays; pieces of cover art. It
is published on a bi-annual basis. The associated Modern Haiku Press also
publishes books related to haiku, like Paul Muldoon’s Sixty Instant Messages to
Tom Moore (2005), Lee Gurga’s Haiku: A Poet’s Guide (2003), or quite a few
books by the deceased haiku poet and specialist Robert Spiess. Every volume of
Modern Haiku, since the Summer 2001 issue, is also partly available on-line for
free, in the form of a shorter sample including: the cover art, announcements for
haiku awards and contests, the featured essay, several sample haiku and other
short poems, and a haibun. In the past, Modern Haiku has published haiku by
writers such as Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Paul Muldoon103.
Charles Trumbull lists a number of other American haiku journals, of
which we will mention only four, directing the reader to the resources for more
information: 1) the Canadian Cicada, appearing first in 1977 and edited by Eric
Amann, whose name is often associated with Zen-haiku; ending however in
102
Trumbull
The following information is by the courtesy of Charles Trumbull: Collins in 33:3 (autumn
2002), 34:1 (winter-spring 2003), 34:2 (summer 2003), 34:3 (autumn 2003), 35:1 (winter-spring
2004), 35:2 (summer 2004), 36:1 (winter-spring 2005), 36:2 (summer 2005), and 36:3 (autumn
2005); Olds in 34:2 (summer 2003), 34:3 (autumn 2003), and 35:2 (summer 2004); Ferlinghetti
in 34:2 (summer 2003); McClure’s sequence “Maui” in 34:1 (winter-spring 2003); Snyder in
33:3 (autumn 2002). Muldoon: Modern Haiku 35:2 (summer 2004). Muldoon’s book of haiku,
Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore, was published by Modern Haiku Press in 2005. It is
excerpted in Modern Haiku 35:3 (autumn 2004), 74, and 36:1 (winter-spring 2005), 24, and
reviewed by David Burleigh in Modern Haiku 36:2 (summer 2005), 75.
103
44
1981, and being renewed as a Japanese-based continuation in 1984 under the
name New Cicada. 2) Dragonfly, the successor of the important Haiku
Highlights (founded as early as 1965). Dragonfly tried to bridge the Pacific by
featuring articles by Yagi Kometaro, a Japanese haiku scholar, and by printing
Richard Tice’s translations from Japanese. The magazine ran under the
editorship of Richard Tice and Jack Lyon from 1984 until 1992. 3) Acorn, “a
small biannual journal dedicated to publishing the best of contemporary
English-language haiku. In particular, it showcases the individual poem and the
ability of haiku to reveal the extraordinary moments found in everyday life.”104
And last but not least, 4) High/Coo and its successor, Mayfly, another one of the
“highly selective journals,” as Trumbull calls them, published by Randy and
Shirley Brooks in Indiana, “a minisized haiku magazine that has showcased 1416 carefully selected verses.”105 The Brooks have an internet portal that presents
not only books but also a newly produced movie by Tazuo Yamaguchi called
Haiku: The Art of the Short Poem, a result of Yamaguchi’s filming at the Haiku
North America conference in August 2007.106
A complete guide to haiku journals in the United States and elsewhere is
available, by courtesy of the Haiku Society of America, on-line at:
<http://www.hsa-haiku.org/archives/ann-pubs.htm#top>
and
an
interesting
survey of the many extant journals, conducted by Charles Trumbull, is at
<http://www.haikuworld.org/survey/>.
4.2. Comparison of Two Online Journals, Shamrock and
Roadrunner
In this chapter, we will not compare the two main journals, the internet
access to them being limited and their scope being, generally speaking, very
broad. Instead, we will focus on two online journals: the quarterly Roadrunnner
and the international web-journal of the Irish Haiku Society Shamrock. We have
chosen these two because they are quite different in a) their visual presentation,
b) their criteria of selection, c) their overall scope and “tone”.
104
Trumbull
Trumbull
106
See: <http://www.brooksbookshaiku.com/haikufilm/HaikuFilm-Taz.html>
105
45
4.2.1. Shamrock
Shamrock is a relatively new journal, with the latest issue being the ninth
and the first appearing in the spring of 2007. The editors claim the journal to be
an “international quarterly online journal of the Irish Haiku Society,”107 the last
eight issues having “showcased works by two hundred and seventy-two poets
who represented thirty-eight countries.”108 Haiku journals usually have an
“editor’s choice” or a “best of issue” haiku. Shamrock has this selection done on
an annual basis, the 2008 winner being Graham Nunn (Australia) with:
lookout point
the stones
share our silence
The best one-line haiku published in Shamrock in 2008 was Sergey Biryukov’s:
out of the empty sleeve steam
The ninth issue focuses on Poland, there being an essay about the history of
Polish haiku, and a number of haiku by Poles (about 50, by about 20 authors).
Apart from these, there is a correspondingly long section of other haiku, mostly
by authors of the Commonwealth (mainly Australia), the United Kingdom and
the U.S., but also by an author from Ghana, Bangladesh and the Philippines. At
the end, there is a one-page haibun, and a longer book review on Walden by
Haiku, a book of haiku inspired by Thoreau’s Walden. The overall design and
layout of the journal is what I would call transparent and fairly ordinary, with a
probably unwanted Google ad at the top. The only design “specialty” is that the
page has the visual form of a book, and makes the viewer feel that they are
about to flip through a volume. What I find very useful about the design is the
“Authors Index” and the many links the page provides to other haiku and poetry
web pages. The colours are light pink for the background, and catchy colourful
headings for each country.
Looking closer at the haiku that appear in the Issue 9 of Shamrock, let us
see whether they have something more specific in common. First, we will look
at some authors from the “mixed-international” section, and afterwards, several
from the “focus-on-one-country” section.
107
108
<http://www.hsa-haiku.org/archives/ann-pubs.htm#shamrock>
<http://www.shamrockhaiku.webs.com/currentissue.htm>
46
The first author we will consider is Helen Buckingham from England.
Upon googling “Helen Buckingham AND haiku”, the first result that appears,
<http://tinywords.com/haiku/2008/05/08/>, introduces a short bio of the author,
born 1960 in London, saying that her works have appeared in many web-based
journals and printed ones as well – e.g., in “A New Resonance 5: Emerging
Voices in English-Language Haiku” (Red Moon Press), and that her work has
been placed in a number of competitions. The next interesting link is that of
Waterloo Press109, where we learn more: far from being only a haiku poet, she
writes sonnets and free verse, humorous and darker. Another two links110 show
three extracts from Buckingham’s non-haiku poetry, and some more of her
haiku:
rainbow
over Wimbledon
the arc of his serve
Regent’s park--the geese
wild
And Buckingham’s haiku in Shamrock? One is political (St.Patrick’s day - /
expats form / a snake); another almost purely nature-oriented, about spring and a
bird trying out its whistle in preparation for nest-building; another about
travelling an old road full of potholes; another mixes and blends the urban and
the natural (Boxing Day / a fork-lift truck / laden with mist). From these we can
start deducing Buckingham’s interest in juxtaposing environmental occurrences
such as the rainbow, the winter mist, the heat and cold of the seasons, with
urban or more precisely human situations and objects, like the truck, potholes,
the summer graduation, St. Patrick’s day, etc. In some of her haiku (May Day /
at the flower show... / 4x4s in heat), she uses irony in a way that suggests a
similarity of human creations and nature’s: the 4x4s are like bulls in heat; the
rainbow is like “the arc of his serve” at Wimbledon; the line of the expats is like
a snake. Alternatively to these juxtapositions, Buckingham merely records what
she sees and the free associations this sight produces:
dad’s bread…
another grey hair
in the mix
109
<http://www.waterloopresshove.co.uk/pages/authors/helen-buckingham.php>
<http://www.riverbedhaiku.com/Summer2008.html#Buckingham> and
<http://members.aon.at/ bregen/chrysantenum/chrys2/haikudeutsch.htm>.
110
47
New Year’s Day –
lifting the lid
on another jigsaw
Old road
the sky as full
of potholes
As far as the scope of Buckingham’s haiku is concerned, Shamrock does not
seem to be selective in any specific way. Buckingham’s haiku are surely English
and “Western”, with St.Patrick’s day, Boxing Day, expats, 4x4s, etc. They best
contrast when placed beside the haiku of e.g. Croatians, Byelorussians or of
other developing countries: the latter have a very different attitude towards life,
nature, politics. They seem to lack that subtle irony that Buckingham can afford
to use living in a First World country with a certain “higher” lifestyle, etc. The
Eastern European haiku are more humble – precisely because the people are
happy for small things, small achievements, even simple sights in nature.
Let us now look at the haiku of a poet from Canada, Rose Hunter. She
writes short and longer prose and shorter poetry. 111 Her haiku have appeared in
Shamrock Issues no.3, 4, and 8. Two examples from Shamrock:
supermarket:
undecided
next to the pickles
mid-morning sun
turning our chairs
bit by bit
The tone of the haiku somehow correlates with the tone of her short prose – very
blunt (almost “raw”), sincere, saying what is on her mind, no extra explanations,
etc. Again, Shamrock has selected haiku that are representative of a poet that
lives in a Western, First World country, where for instance supermarkets are
quite common. The haiku are simple and speak clearly to the reader who comes
from a similar background.
Kateřina Rudčenková is from the Czech Republic. Her haiku appeared in
Shamrock Issue number 3, where the focus was on “Europe Off-Centre”112:
111
Hunter’s poetry and prose can be accessed at her blogspot:
<http://rosehunterblog.blogspot.com>
112
“As for this particular issue, it presents a selection of haiku from several European countries
where haiku scenes are far from satisfactory. Furthering our study of European haiku geography,
48
Evening nearing –
a stray dog runs to meet me,
a bone in his jaws
On the night train –
two sober gentlemen
playing checkers
Glasses clinking
and clinking – seeping through,
a squeaky laugh113
Here we can notice a more “gloomy” outlook on Czech Republic, with
drunkards, stray dogs and squeaky laughs, and compared to the other haiku in
the Issue, which resemble Issa, Bashō and other (for reasons of simplicity)
“nature-haiku-poets,” these are indeed “darker” and more naturalistic.
Anatoly A. Kudryavitsky, the founder and editor of Shamrock, was born
in Moscow in 1954 of a Polish father and a half-Irish mother and is currently
living in Dublin as an Irish citizen. He has edited two anthologies of Russian
literature, and has published numerous volumes of his poetry in Russian and
English. His poems have been translated to many languages, and his haiku have
appeared in the main journals. He has translated all the non-English haiku in
Shamrock. An example of his own haiku:
surfacing at low tide,
a shopping trolley
dripping with sunshine
narrow cave –
a wave rushes in,
the shape of its howl
The featured countries in Shamrock have so far covered Eastern Europe (Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary), South-Eastern Europe (Romania,
Croatia114, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro), North-Eastern Europe
(Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Western Europe (Denmark, France, England,
Ireland), the USA, Canada, Australia, and some parts of East Asia as well as an
we showcase authors from the states that don't have formal national haiku associations,” the
introductory note to the issue says.
113
<http://shamrockhaiku.webs.com/shamrockno3.htm> (transl. to English by A. A.
Kudryavitsky)
114
There is even a Croatian haiku poets association, with part of its web-page in English:
<http://karolina-rijecka.com/> I am listing this here just to illustrate how haiku writing is diffuse.
49
occasional poet from elsewhere (Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, and others). The
haiku from most of the non-Western countries – apart from bringing beautiful
images and offering the “good-quality-haiku glimpse of the moment” where
more is implied than said – are fairly traditional: the use of kigo or season word
(or directly stating the season) is frequent, the setting is the countryside, the
composition follows the golden rule of 1.exposition, where we see what the poet
sees, 2.dramatical jump or “césure”, 3. the “dénouement”, where the poem
introduces something that we perhaps do not expect, but that is completely
natural to the moment or to the beholder; the actors are usually animals, plants,
people, etc. (the cricket, mushrooms, water drops, fly, hens, mulberries, bees,
puddles, grass, boy and girl, fireflies, ants, girl and apple, stump, etc.).
Naturally, they are scenes from the lives of the people of the given country, and
we find the haiku ordinary or even boring because there have been so many of
them, especially in the classical haiku era of Japan. It would be, perhaps, more
interesting for Shamrock to be more selective here, and not to include more than,
e.g., five pieces from the given country, if they do not show a greater variety of
approach.
4.2.2. Roadrunner
Roadrunner is a different matter, although not altogether. The design of
the page is more sparse: black and white only, “Times New Roman” font, no
side-columns or sub-headings. What is interesting are the instructions for
readers: “Mouse over the area below each group of poems to reveal the authors
or click here to reveal all authors.” The idea to put the poems on the page
without authorial labels is a good one, I believe, because it does not disturb the
reading: one does not start thinking about the pre-conditions of the writer being
from Croatia, for instance, or being a male or female, having an “exotic” name,
etc. At the bottom of the page, there is a logo of the roadrunner bird, and the
copyright, and that is all. The menu on the top of the page reads: “current issue”,
“submissions”, “email”, “archive”, and “about roadrunner”. In the “archive”, we
can find 3 complete years, 4 issues each year, plus the “Premiere Issue” of 2004.
The “current issue” is the February 2009 Issue IX:1. In “about roadrunner” we
read: “Roadrunner is a quarterly online journal seeking to publish the best and
most diverse in English-language haiku (including senryu, zappai and short
50
poetry inspired by haiku).” The founding editor was Jason Sanford Brown, the
current editor is Scott Metz.115
Apart from haiku, senryu and other short poetry, Roadrunner features: an
occasional interview (Robert Hass, issue VII:4); Hiroaki Sato’s translations of
Gendai haiku (21st century); a serial commentary on “The Flying Pope”, which
is a haiku-project by Ban’ya Natsuishi, published in 2008, consisting of an
ongoing series of haiku with the central theme of the Pope taking to the air – an
image that came to Natsuishi in a dream, upon which he decided to figure out its
real meaning by writing a “never-ending” series of haiku116; “The Scorpion
Prize” for best haiku/senryu of a given issue, with a paragraph of critical
commentary on some of the best ones; articles about haiku poets (Hackett);
haiku “found” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Whitman’s and Thoreau’s poems.
Almost every issue brings one or more of these “extras”. Some winners of the
Scorpion Prize have included:
Patrick Sweeney
running
for nothing
rainy headed boys
Peter Yovu
in a seed I don't know the answer
Paul Pfleuger, Jr.
Capturing a butterfly the American in me
John Martone
a fossil
turned
to face you
3 mushrooms
my color
one stone
reached out
to you
The commentary, by Paul Muldoon, of John Martone’s haiku, reads as follows:
The poems by John Martone are exceptional in their capacity to meet
the brief of the senryu, the wonderful doubly whammy of brevity
combined with bite. The "fossil" is exposed less than the self-regard of
the speaker. That same speaker is impervious to the fact that his
positioning of himself with the "3 mushrooms" is emblematic of his
own immanence. The Human Resources and Development Office
115
See also: <http://www.theskippingstones.net> and
<http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n1/haiku/ Scott_Metz.html>
116
<http://www.cyberwit.net/flying.htm> (Natsuishi comments that the whole may be a
caricature of Christianity, but basically, the interpretation of his haiku is very open.)
51
cliché -- "reached out" -- brilliantly reveals the threat in what looks like
a treat.117
An example of “embedded” haiku, found in the last part of Shakespeare’s
Sonnet no.97:
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.118
In general, the haiku and related poems found in Roadrunner are more
diverse, precisely because of the associated poem-types: one-line haiku, senryu,
four-line haiku, etc. Some examples of one-line haiku from the November 2008
Issue:
May your voice be the ropes I am lowered on
haiku of my photograph photograph of my haiku
two-dimensional wise men across the pulp mill roof119
These extremely short forms appeal, I believe, to the contemporary reader,
because of their daring brevity, usually with no punctuation marks. They still
have the aura of an experimental form, nonetheless they “feel” at home in the
small compactness of the one line in the midst of blank space. They do not offer,
unlike the sonnet, the sestina, etc., the broad space of words that gives the reader
the feeling of security – the security that if the meaning is not discerned in the
first words, we will definitely catch up later – the poem is so long. Not here: if
you do not understand from the start, you simply do not understand. But the
poems are so simple and straightforward that, with a dictionary, a non-native
English speaker will certainly get the main point. On top of the short reading117
Roadrunner Haiku Journal, Issue VII:1, Accessed: 3 Apr. 2009,
<http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/index71.htm>
118
Jen Bervin, “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” Roadrunner, May 2008 Issue VIII:2,
Accessed: 23 Mar. 2009, <http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/index82.htm>.
119
Roadrunner Haiku Journal, Issue VIII:4, Nov. 2008, Accessed: 24 Feb. 2009,
<http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages84/haiku84.htm>
52
understanding time, one-line haiku reward the reader instantly with a witty
paradox, a romantic image, an everlasting truth, etc. The future of haiku lies, I
believe, also in these one-line poems.120
4.3. Conclusion
We have done this research in online haiku journals because we believe
that the Internet is a strong medium where nearly all forms of literature can
appear, published as a whole or in part. In the case of haiku, the Internet indeed
appears to be a very potent means of publicity, partly owing to the brevity of the
poems, and partly, I have found, owing to the “up-to-date” mentality of most
haiku authors. What is also worth mentioning, although it stands to reason, is
that there are many authors worldwide and hence new poems appear very often;
the Internet also “makes it fresh”.
To compare the two abovementioned journals is to match two very
different “eggs”; one is run by a cosmopolitan Russian expatriate fluent in many
languages, the other by a young American who has spent three years living and
working in Japan. One is more political in the sense of speaking for the
“remote” Eastern European poet; the other is “especially interested in publishing
new and underexplored directions in haiku, with an eye on genuineness (heart),
voice and artistry.”121 We should, therefore, use a different yard-stick for
measuring the merits of each.
Roadrunner seems to offer a greater variety of forms than Shamrock, a
rich selection that is more carefully done and that is more resourceful. The
variety of forms, the space-sensitive page-arrangement of the poems, the playful
120
It has been interesting to read an article in the August 2007 Issue VII:3 of Roadrunner about
a translation of Jim Kacian’s English haiku into Japanese by a team of five translators, most of
them native Japanese. The author, Richard Gilbert, a linguist specializing on Japanese, draws
attention to the fact of the season word, or kigo: “What functions as kigo in Japanese is only
image in English—we can say “moon” and not automatically assume it to be the harvest moon.
This is a function of the English haiku trying to speak more directly to experience, and less to
convention, in part because the convention is not our own.” Richard Gilbert, “Clearing the
Brush, Finding our Way – The Bilingual Publication of Presents of Mind, by Jim Kacian,”
Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University, Japan, Accessed: 29 Mar. 2009,
<http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages73/reads73.htm>.
121
<http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages_all/submissions.htm>
53
uncovering of authors’ names – these are small but interesting features of a
journal that cannot be held in the hand; the reader looking for good haiku will, I
believe, appreciate these. In the case of Shamrock, one ought to appreciate the
international scope of this journal, which (being Ireland-based, i.e., in fact a
“Western” journal), through the editor’s numerous translations, gives a voice to
authors from countries like Lithuania, Slovenia, Croatia, Russia, Slovakia,
Montenegro, Ghana, the Philippines, and others, which is an important
enterprise of spreading haiku-awareness.
54
5. Conclusion
For a reader or author residing in the West, the haiku journal scene is,
owing to the Internet and to the many published printed journals, abundantly
rich, and from the research we have done, we see that there is also a large
number of authors in the English-speaking world who submit to these journals.
The Internet also offers the option of blogspots, which some authors make use
of; scholarly articles on haiku are readily accessible through journals and
through other web pages. This situation allows for a dialogue, where the
judgment about a haiku’s quality is never simple. In the conclusion to this paper,
we will sum up what we consider to be the important features of haiku, and we
will discuss the prose-poetry dichotomy, as it seems to have relevance for haiku.
The Japanese tradition still plays a crucial role in shaping modern haiku,
as can be seen in the issues of Shamrock and elsewhere; there is a clear
awareness, in the haiku community, that English is a different medium, with its
rhythm and sound specifics, and that the same applies for other languages.
In the case of James Merrill we have seen that haiku and haibun can
serve as resourceful and inspiring platforms for English-language poetry. The
patterns were not followed precisely; nevertheless, a text of great merit and
interest was produced. Paul Muldoon has taken the haiku and transformed its
simple classical poetics into something new; his sequences are very
“Muldoonesque,” providing for inspiring and very entertaining reading.
Other writers of the English-speaking world, like Helen Buckingham,
Bruce Ross, Rose Hunter, Michael McClintock, etc., have each taken the
classical haiku and adapted it not only to English prosody, but also to their
personal needs and approaches. Nowadays, we have not only three-line haiku,
but also two- and one-line haiku, three-line senryu, five-line tanka, haiku or
tanka as a part of a photograph, drawing or painting, creating a haiga or taiga
respectively, and some other forms as well. We have haiku that use repetition,
paradox, puns or rhyme; haiku with a tone of longing, sober matter-of-factness,
mystery, observant tranquility, etc.
55
Literary critics have also taken a variety of approaches to haiku et al.:
“the geometry of haiku” – haiku and Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry;122
the spirit of longing in haiku – the haiku poet as pilgrim and physical or spiritual
pilgrimage as an essential feature;123 the transformational effects of haiku; the
incompleteness and the “emergent” nature of haiku; the flow of time and haiku;
etc.
Haiku is, nevertheless – as Bruce Ross says in his article “The Essence
of Haiku,” – basically a form of poetry, and, like Western poetry, even
traditional Japanese haiku “occasionally contains figurative language, such as
exaggeration, simile, and metaphor, exactly as used in lyric poetry
elsewhere.”124 The specialty of traditional haiku is, however, that it uses
culturally well understood topoi which, in a condensed small space, provide for
“an allegory that universalizes the natural world and its cycles.” This is the kigo
or season word, or kidai – seasonal topic. In effect, the figurative language, as
Ross adds, tends to “overburden such a small poem at the expense of the haiku
values of spareness, resonance, and mystery.”125 We can thus conclude that
haiku should, above all, be rather a “pleasing vignette” than a tiring word-game;
a modestly beautiful gem that only begins to shine inside the prepared reader,
rather than a gem that advertises itself beforehand;126 rather a “poem to eat” than
a “poem to fight an intellectual battle with”; rather simple and sincere (with a
more subtle “tail-flavour” coming later) than quite complex and interesting. As
Ross says, drawing on Edmund Husserl: “He suggested a ‘bracketing’ of
experience to determine its essence,” and further: “[haiku] brackets or, rather,
experiences a moment in time while particularizing the components of that
moment.”127 This way, using the particulars to show the nature of the moment,
haiku potentially shows the nature of all moments.
A more detailed analysis of Japanese haiku would show that one could
distinguish other peculiar “hues” of aesthetic value: 1. “the pathos of things”
122
Dru Philippou, “Haiku Geometry,” Modern Haiku, vol.38.1, Spring 2007, Accessed: 10 Mar.
2009, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/HaikuGeometry.html>.
123
Marjorie Buettner, “The Return Message: A Pilgrim’s Way of Longing,” Modern Haiku,
vol.40.1, Winter 2009, Accessed: 23 Mar.2009, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/BuettnerPilgrimsWay.html>.
124
Ross
125
Ross
126
Eric Amann, one of the so-called “Zen-haiku poets,” calls it a “wordless poem”. For an
interesting discussion of Zen, silence, haiku, etc., plus numerous illustrative examples, please
see <http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n1/features/Angelee_Deodhar.html>.
127
Ross
56
(mono no aware in Japanese) meaning how one is affected by things, what
feeling (not to be confused with emotion, appearing, e.g., in tanka and
originating more on the level of the ego)128 they cause; 2. “metaphysical
loneliness” (sabi); 3. mystery (yûgen); etc. “In each case,” Ross says, “the poet
was being moved by something in the world in what John Ruskin has
pejoratively dubbed the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ ascribing feeling to things. Contrary
to Western poetics (aside from Romanticism), for example, Oriental poetry and
poetics was centered upon such states of affective feeling.”129 This is a crucial
point to understanding traditional haiku: Oriental poetry embraced affective
feeling in connection with nature and from this some of its main aesthetic values
come. This feeling was, in reality, naturally influenced by the internal emotional
world of the poet – the calmer and more quiet it was, the more chance for a
receptive feeling which was valued. The personal “I” was best put aside when
writing haiku, so that one could “learn how to listen, as things speak for
themselves,” as Bashō said. Ross calls the haiku moment “basically an
epiphany.”
Contemporary haiku have many facets; there are numerous poets, styles,
etc. In this paper we have shown only a small part of the whole spectrum. One
author I believe worthwhile is Michael McClintock: his haiku could be said to
“encompass” several aspects of life: 1. beauty, 2. ugliness, 3. sensuality, erotics.
The first are not of that much interest, because the haiku scene offers a great
number of beautiful poems. The second, the “ugly” haiku, are more interesting,
although McClintock is not a pioneer in this strand either – Kerouac and other
poets have done the same, drawing small pictures of ugly, uncomfortable, deathrelated scenes from life. The third direction of McClintock’s haiku is probably
the most interesting: let us quote and comment three haiku in each of which the
sensuality and sexuality are present to a different degree:
She leaves–
warm pillow scent
remaining
128
Robert Spiess is the one who preferred to use this distinction when speaking about haiku:
feeling – being aware, and simultaneously perceiving with the senses the environment; emotion
– strong subjective feeling having connection with the non-rational part of the psyche, one that
could interfere with a haiku moment.
129
Ross
57
This one has a nice warm feeling about it, a sleepy warm feeling of staying in
bed, after she has left. The sensuality is, I would say, relatively very weak,
almost absent.
letting my tongue
deeper into the cool
ripe tomato
This one is much more sensual and erotic: as we read it, line by line, we are
intrigued to imagine erotic scenes, and each subsequent line slightly thwarts our
expectations, although – and this is what the haiku’s best quality is probably – it
does not throw us off track, it remains ambivalent. In fact, it is satisfactory in a
way: the first line opens the “door” to the erotic chamber, the second supports
the strongly erotic charge of oral sex, and the third concludes it, and at the same
time ambiguously re-directs it from a sexual to a gastronomical affair. We are,
on the whole, nicely made aware of our susceptibility, of the Eros inside us and
the power it has over our imagination.
Compare it to this last one:
while we wait
to do it again,
the rains of spring
This has a very different tone and feeling. It plays with simplicity and matter-offactness of pure feeling, of being in the moment, and nothing more. They were
waiting, resting, and looking out the window. McClintock seems to suggest that
this does not need any more commentary: the reader will relate the sexual
occurrence to his or her own experience anyway, so there is no need that the
poet force his own conception of love-making, etc. The only thing that is
“offered” to the reader is that spring is a good time for love-making, and that
when it is raining outside, it is a good time as well. And the other message this
haiku seems to be forwarding is that sex is completely natural.
I do not want to advertise certain types of haiku writing as opposed to
others, which are less valuable, etc. I only perhaps wanted to point out that the
time of imitation of traditional Japanese haiku has passed and that we are now in
a period of newer and more original creativity. Merrill’s “Prose of Departure”
still has elements of what Barbara Ungar has called “serious imitation.” Paul
Muldoon’s haiku are, on the other hand, testimonies of a very recent past, where
58
the artist adapts the form and the main features, while creating a thematically
innovative poem. More or less the same applies for Michael McClintock, Helen
Buckingham, Rose Hunter, and many others, which we could not quote here The
question is, as usual in literary criticism, whether their haiku will stand the test
of time. That of course depends not only on the poems, but also on the
readership: on their dedication to reading poetry, on their ability to see through
their personal limitations, etc.
Prose and poetry are, according to Octavio Paz, different means of
creation. Poetry, he says, does not violate the word, its material. It lets the word
retain its multiple meanings, its ambivalence, its potentiality. Prose, on the other
hand, is a tool by which sense and meaning are arrived at. Therefore, the authors
of prose have to stick to this: keep the meaning “rolling,” keep the words
“clear,” not ambivalent. Paz uses the comparison with a staircase, a sculpture,
and the building material for both, stone. The stone, in the staircase, is subdued,
it is mute. In the case of a sculpture, the stone is alive and speaks; it is allowed
to manifest its energy. The same applies, Paz conjectures, with prose and poetry,
and the “building material,” words.130 James Merrill, as we have seen, has
blurred the boundary between poetry and prose: he has written poetic prose and
narrative poetry as a part of one whole, intertwining both. He is not the only
poet to have done this. His case is good, however, in that it illustrates what
imagination, language and poetry can do together, when given a relative
freedom from convention. Paul Muldoon has written haiku sequences which are
lyrical and narrative poetry: each little rhyming “vignette” is about an idea,
and/or it describes an animal, recounts an occurrence, etc. One after another,
these short pieces perhaps (although this may be a far-fetched conclusion)
constitute a loose narrative – although without a plot, but with a time-line, with
a chronology measured by the seasons and by the individual occurrences.
Of course, this last aspect is not one of the keys to interpret Muldoon’s
poetry. We only want to comment on it here because it offers vague proof that
haiku poems tend to be written in sequences, or as part of a larger narrative. This
has not been the rule, but it certainly has been a frequent thing in the haiku130
Paz, Octavio, Luk a lyra. Praha: Odeon, 1992.
59
writing community. Earl Miner has a lot to say about poetry and diaries being
intimately linked in old Japan, and other critical studies of traditional haiku
would probably confirm that this type of brief poetry was a poetry of sequences,
of longer units. The haiku journals that we have looked into in Chapter 4 have
both proved and disproved this assertion: 1. they offer mostly individual poems
which can supposedly stand alone, but 2. these poems are arranged so that when
you’re finished reading one, you can instantly jump to the next, there being
enough in the journal to suffice for an hour’s quick reading. There is only one
online journal we have come across that does not offer this option at all:
Tinywords gives its readers a “package” of one selected haiku daily, and nothing
more.
We wish to leave this discussion with a series of open questions: Are not
haiku poems so short that they, in the contemporary world, need to be arranged
into sequences? Sequences that would make it worthwhile to sit down and read
poetry – to sit down and, ideally, be present to the ambivalent and mutable
reality of the “building material” – words; sequences that would hopefully (from
the impatient reader’s perspective) provide some meaningful context when read
from beginning to end? Does not the modern sensibility require that these tiny
forms be fit into a larger narrative, so that the reader is not forced to stop?
Leaving these, hopefully not too militant, questions open, we would like to
direct the inquisitive reader in the direction of broader and more scholarly
philosophical essays about literature.
60
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English.” California: Stanford, 1978. (p.46)
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Muldoon, Paul, Horse Latitudes. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Paz, Octavio, Luk a lyra. Praha: Odeon, 1992.
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University Press, 1988.
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Yenser, Stephen, The Consuming Myth. The Work of James Merrill. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987.
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Online Sources:
Richard Gilbert, “Stalking the Wild Onji.” Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of
America, XXII: Supplement (1999). Haiku Essay. 12 Oct. 2008. Source for this
paper: <http://www.worldhaiku.net/archive/onji.pdf>
Sara Lundquist "An aesthetics of enclosure: James Merrill's inner rooms". English Studies
in Canada. Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2005, Ed. Peter Schwenger, 22 Jan. 2009,
<http://muse.uq.edu.au/journals/esc_english_studies_in_canada/toc/esc31.1.html>.
Koval, Ramona, Muldoon, Paul, “Paul Muldoon” at The Book Show. Interview transcript,
14 Mar. 2008, 28 Nov. 2008, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/
2183300.htm>.
Cotter, Patrick, “Paul Muldoon.” Ireland – Poetry International Web. 14 Feb. 2007, 28 Nov.
2008, <http://ireland.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/
index.php?obj_id=8656&x=1>
Higginson, William J., “A Poet’s Haiku: Paul Muldoon,” Modern Haiku, Vol.35.2,
Summer 2004, 31 Nov.2008, <www.modernhaiku.org/essays/PaulMuldoon.html>.
Burleigh, David, “Sixty Instant Messages to Tom Moore by Paul Muldoon,” Modern
Haiku, Vol.36.2, Summer 2005, 31 Nov.2008,
<http://www.modernhaiku.org/bookreviews/ Muldoon2005.html>.
Jen Bervin, “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” Roadrunner, May 2008 Issue VIII:2,
23 Mar. 2009, <http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/index82.htm>.
Richard Gilbert, “Clearing the Brush, Finding our Way – The Bilingual Publication of
Presents of Mind, by Jim Kacian,” Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University, Japan,
29 Mar. 2009, <http://www.roadrunnerjournal.net/pages73/reads73.htm>.
Dru Philippou, “Haiku Geometry,” Modern Haiku, vol.38.1, Spring 2007, 10 Mar. 2009,
<http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/ HaikuGeometry.html>.
Marjorie Buettner, “The Return Message: A Pilgrim’s Way of Longing,” Modern Haiku,
vol.40.1, Winter 2009, 23 Mar.2009, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/BuettnerPilgrimsWay.html>.
Van der Heuvel, Cor, “Lafcadio Hearn and Haiku,” Modern Haiku, Vol.33.2, Summer
2002, 22 Feb. 2008, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/hearnandhaiku.html>.
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<http://tankanews.com/2008/12/07/meals-at-midnight-poems-by-michael-mcclintockpublished-by-met-press.aspx>.
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62
Trumbull, Charles, “The American Haiku Movement, Part II: American Haiku, The
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Feb. 2009, <http://www.modernhaiku.org/essays/AmHaikuMovement2.html>.
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currentissue.htm>
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<http://uk.geocities.com/akudryavitsky/>
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České resumé
Tato práce pojednává o haiku spisovatelů anglosaské provenience.
Zaměřuje se především na haiku Jamese Merrilla a Paula Muldoona, a také na
anglicky psanou tvorbu publikovanou v on-line žurnálech Shamrock a
Roadrunner. Je rozdělena na úvod a pět kapitol, včetně závěru.
První kapitola je úvodem do problematiky haiku, obsahujícím nejprve
stručný popis forem haiku a haibun s jejich formálními a obsahovými
náležitostmi a specifiky; dále průřez dějin japonského haiku od jeho počátků ve
formě tanka, přes dílo Matsua Bashóa, včetně jeho poetického deníku, až do
svého vyčlenění a novodobého pojetí v díle Masaoky Shikiho; dále stručné
vysvětlení prozodických rozdílů mezi angličtinou a japonštinou; nakonec
uvádíme poněkud obsáhlejší oddíl týkající se dějin anglicky psaného haiku,
zejména na území USA: prvním obdobím bylo období zájmu o exotično
japonské poezie a také snahy o nápodobu haiku v dílech Imagistů; druhým pak
období Beatniků, kdy došlo k hlubšímu pochopení duchovní tradice, která
s haiku souvisí; třetím je pak období přizpůsobení, zdomácnění a vážnějšího
zájmu o celou tradici haiku a souvisejících forem, které trvá dodnes.
Ve druhé kapitole se zabýváme poetickým cestovním deníkem Jamese
Merrilla nazvaným „Prose of Departure,“ v němž se díky Merrilovu básnickému
stylu stírá klasicky chápaný rozdíl mezi poezií a prózou. Zabýváme se nejprve
dějovou stránkou „Prose of Departure“ a jejími různými epizodami.
Z formálního hlediska se toto dílko nápadně podobá poetickým deníkům
Bashóova Japonska, zmiňujeme se tedy také o problematice cestovního deníku a
rozebíráme různé funkce vloženého haiku a funkce prózy, která je obklopuje.
Nakonec se velmi stručně zabýváme aliterací, slovními hříčkami a jinými
básnickými prostředky, kterými Merrill svou „prózu“ vyšperkoval.
Třetí kapitola je zaměřená na dvě haiku-sekvence Paula Muldoona,
irského rodáka žijícího v USA. „Hopewell Haiku“ a „90 Instant Messages to
Tom Moore“ jsou od sebe časově vzdáleny osm let, a ačkoli se formálně velmi
podobají, jsou tyto dvě sekvence dokladem básníkova vývoje. Náš rozbor se
opět týká jejich formální a obsahové stránky; jistá kritika se týká jejich hravosti
64
a zároveň jejich určité složitosti a čtenářské obtížnosti – zejména v porovnání
s klasickým, ale i současným haiku autorů jako je kupříkladu Michael
McClintock. V této souvislosti se zde také pokoušíme určit, zda jsou
Muldoonovy haiku „spontánni“ či nikoliv, zda jsou výtvorem umělce, který
perfektně ovládá své řemeslo a který si může dovolit dát volný průchod
momentální inspiraci, atp. Závěrem konstatujeme již několikrát zmiňovaný fakt,
že Muldoonova poezie je formálně dokonalá, obsahově velmi rozmanitá až
rozkošatělá, a čtenářsky poměrně dost náročná.
Čtvrtá kapitola otevírá téma anglicky psaného „magazínu“ haiku, neboli
měsíčníků, čtvrtletníků a jiných pravidelně vydávaných publikací s touto
tematikou, kterých je v současném anglicky mluvící světě velké množství.
Cílem je ukázat a porovnat dva poměrně odlišné přístupy k vydávání on-line
čtvrtletníku: irský Shamrock vydává ruský rodák Anatolij A. Kudryavitsky a
zaměřuje se nejen na publikování překladů autorů ze zemí, kde haiku ještě není
„zavedeným“ fenoménem; oproti tomu americký Roadrunner, vydávající
kvalitní a inovativní haiku a spřízněné formy, je žurnálem mnohem více
selektivním.
V závěru práce se zamýšlíme nad současnými trendy v psaní haiku a nad
tím, jaká je esence či podstata této krátké a velmi populární básnické formy.
Japonské haiku bylo tradičně spjato se specifickým emocionálně nabitým
vnímáním reality, což souviselo s hluboce zakořeněnou tradicí šintoismu a s
vlivem buddhismu. Tyto vlivy daly vzniknout formě, která je překvapivá svou
jednoduchostí a hloubkou. V anglicky psaném „pojetí“ se z ní stalo něco
poněkud odlišného, avšak neméně zajímavého. Například už samotný pokus
vměstnat do několika mála slov paradoxnost skutečného prožitku, či pokus
evokovat několika „tahy štětce“ scénu odehrávající se před zraky básníka, jsou
v anglosaské poezii něčím poměrně novým a odvážným. Jak je zřejmé, každý
kraj má svou kulturně danou hierarchii estetických hodnot, a jazyk imaginace a
poezie je natolik plastický, že se tomu dokáže přizpůsobovat.
65