Hello friends in Boston.
I'm Janine Beichman.
I'm so glad to be here today and so grateful to Keith Vincent for
making it possible for me to participate from such a long distance by video.
However I have to confess that I've never given a presentation by video before so
I am the tiniest bit nervous in any case let's go.
The spiritual life of an octopus, a woman back from Flower viewing and
undressing in the privacy of her bedroom,
the pale almost unearthly cries of wild ducks at twilight.
What could they possibly have in common not much one would think but
strangely enough there is room for
them all in the haiku the shortest form of poetry in the world.
Here they are.
Octopus pots--brief dreams beneath the summer moon.
I slip off my flowery kimono, uncurl rainbows of laces.
The sea grows dark, the wild ducks' cries faintly white.
Common every day things all of them but within it ethereal almost surreal quality.
The first poem is by Matsuo Bashō,
the greatest haiku poet of all--as I'm sure everyone here knows.
Octopus pots were ceramic pots that take advantage of the propensity of octopuses
for hiding in nicks and crannies.
The fishermen lower the pots to the bottom of the sea during the day and
then pull them up shortly before dawn.
In the darkness of the pot, as it rests on the floor of the sea, the octopus settles
in for the night--innocently dreaming or so the poet imagines.
At dawn when it is holed up it's brief dream for
summer nights assure it will be over.
Our life, its life is no more than a dream but
it has been touched by the moon symbol of enlightenment and eternity.
I will come back to this poem again but
for now let's move on to the second one which is by Sugita Hisajo,
one of the major haiku poets of the twentieth century, and a woman.
I slip off my flowery kimono, uncurl rainbows of laces.
Back from flower viewing the woman undoes her kimono,
which is patterned with flowers for the season.
As everyone here again probably knows, kimonos have no zippers or
buttons but are held in place by fabric cords.
Beneath the kimono itself is the under kimono, and beneath that a simple shift so
the woman in a formal kimono was all wrapped up in cords and strings and
laces of cotton and silk in a variety of colors and shapes like a package.
As she slowly unwraps herself the cords and
ties open--trail full--making a rainbow of colors.
When this poem was first published in 1919, almost one hundred years ago,
it was interpreted as a simple celebration of uniquely female
experience although there were some muttering about its so-called narcissism.
The sensuality is more unabashedly celebrated today but the courts and
laces are also read as symbols of the social restraints that bound women so
tightly when the poem was written.
To my twenty first century ears a phrase from a poem by the poet called
Sapphire describes Hisajo's poem perfectly.
"Pain pulled through the eye of beauty" Sapphire wrote.
That's exactly what this poem is.
The third poem is by Basho again.
Night is coming over the sea and the cries of the wild ducks calling back and
forth somehow seem to take on body and color,
pale against the darkness, mingling with the last left over light.
The synesthesia or the mingling of senses in this poem
appears in a number of Basho's other poems as well.
Parenthetically, let me add that the idea to use six lines in the translation
is mine not--doesn't come from Basho's original poem and of course
all the translations used here today are my own except where noted in two cases.
Haiku has other tones than the slightly surreal symbolic one of these three poems.
One that we are familiar with that we may even think of as quintessentially haiku
like is the down to earth tone of the next three poems.
Here we have Matsuo Basho again, then Yosa Buso, then Kobayashi Issa.
Autumn's nearly gone--how does my neighbor make his living?
The pleasure of crossing a summer stream sandals in hand.
Snow thawed, suddenly the village fills with children.
And then there are poems like the next two, also seemingly very simple but rather
than being about happy topics like beauty or pleasure they are about pain and death.
Kobayashi Issa, on the death of his infant daughter:
The world of dew is a world of dew and yet...
and yet...
Masaoka Shiki, on his death bed:
How much life is left to me--brief these summer nights.
Unlike the previous poems, these autobiographical poems by Issa and
Shiki are so personal, that knowing who wrote them and
a little about the circumstances adds a great deal to the poem.
But sometimes we don't need to add the poets name because he does it himself as
here where Issa, who always identified with the downtrodden and
oppressed, introduces himself to a small frog.
"Skinny little frog don't give in--here is Issa".
So now that I've touched on the four greats of haiku--Basho, Buson, Issa, and
Shiki--let's move on to the form itself and its origins.
What we now call haiku was not originally the independent form that it is today
it originally appeared either within works of prose like Basho's famous travel diary,
"The narrow road to the north", or as the first link in the chain of linked
verses called haikai no renga or informal linked verse.
Many of the verses that are now famous as haiku,
were originally the first link in a linked verse chain.
Yosa Buson's, "Mustard-seed flowers,
moon in the east ,sun in the West" is one example.
Here it is in its original context followed by the second verse
composed by Buson's disciple and friend Chiyoda.
Mustard-seed flowers...
moon in the east, sun in the west.
Far off at the mountain's foot ,herons fade into the mist.
Buson's poem is a description of an early spring evening and
that season sunset and moonrise coincide and almost coincide and
the bright yellow of the mustard seed flowers lights up the fields.
Buson describes the scene as though he were standing somewhere outside the field,
watching the moon rise in the east and opposite it the sunset in the West.
Chiyoda, his eyes led by a flock of herons or
perhaps one heron, extends the line of sight towards a mountain in the distance.
One modern reader, the poet and critic commented,
"Read together it is as if one's eyes were sweeping over a pastoral
landscape of the late eighteenth century in panoramic fashion".
It was Matsuo Basho and his followers who had brought in formal linked
verse to a peak of artistic perfection in the seventeenth century before Buson,
and by the late Edo period linked verse had become extremely popular.
This led paradoxically to a watering down of standards, and in general
the debasement of the art, which combined with the vogue for all things Western in
the early Meiji period threatened for a time to kill off not only linked verse,
but also that first verse haiku, which had achieved semi independence by then.
It was this dismal fate from which the passion determination and brilliance of
Matsuoka Shiki -- his birthday we are celebrating today -- saved it.
So why was Shiki so passionate about haiku?
What was it about haiku and what was it about him that brought them together for
their fateful encounter?
Shiki chronicled the beginning of his own love affair with Haiku
with disarming simplicity and humor in his sick bed diary: A Drop of Ink.
Looking back on his college days when he moved out of the dormitory to a house
where he lived alone he describes how his obsession with Haiku led
to his flunking out of school.
His desk was usually cluttered with Haiku books and novels but
when an exam loomed loomed he would neaten it up and set out his notes.
But then, as he writes: "When I sat down quietly and saw it so
bare and neat I felt a nameless pleasure.
"As soon as I felt so pleasant and cheerful a Haiku would flash into my
mind." When I opened my notebook a seven hundred syllable verse
would emerge before I could read a page." "I couldn't write it down since I had
put my poetry notebook and even my stationery away so
I would write it on the lampshade." "Verse after verse came forth,
entranced I abandoned the examination to cover the lampshade with writing."
"I was in such a state that as soon as I tried to stop writing haiku and
prepare for an examination, verses would flash through my mind in droves,
examinations came to me nothing but a flood of poetry." "Bewitched
by the goddess of haiku nothing could save me." "I failed the final
examinations of eighteen ninety two and withdrew from school once and for all".
Partly then it was the ease of writing haiku that made it attractive but
it was also the fact that for some reason haiku was a particularly congenial way for
Shiki to express his sheer pleasure at being alive.
As Shiki got more into the form he began making some rules for
himself and then teaching them to other people.
The most important one was dedicated observation of one's surroundings.
He made this into a strict discipline
the most fundamental exercise in the poet's training.
In eighteen ninety nine and his instructions to the beginning poets
under his care he wrote this: "You must not stop when
you have managed to extract one or two poems from some broad view."
"Next you must look down at your feet and write about what you see--there the grass,
the flowers in bloom." "If you write about each, you will have ten or
twenty poems without moving from where you are." "Take your materials from what
is around you--if you see a dandelion, write about that: if there is mist,
write about the mist." "The materials for poems are all about you in abundance".
In these vivid and encouraging instructions Shiki
emphasizes looking at nature in quite a matter of fact way.
In a different essay however he showed that you can observe nature by listening
as well as looking simply by closing your eyes and listening intently.
In the back story for Basho's famous poem about the frog: "old pond,
a frog hops in the waters sound",
he imagined Basho alone in his cottage at a creative impasse.
Bored and dissatisfied with the poetic styles current at the time
he is brooding over how to create his own distinctive poems or as we would put
it he's trying to think about how he can find his voice as the poet.
"Lost in his thoughts" writes Shiki, "[Basho] felt as though a dense
fog had fallen, and simply sat there in a trance, neither asleep nor
awake." "At the moment when all nature was quiet and all his daydreams had faded out
he heard the sound of a frog jumping into the old pond outside his window." "
He himself did not murmur them nor did anyone speak but
the lines, 'A frog hops in: the water's sound' reached his
ears." "As though awakening from a dream he inclined his head for
a moment and then raised it and a broad smile broke out upon his face".
In other words he knew where he was going from there.
To sum up at the basis of the famous frog haiku in Shiki's view was
observation of an unusually intense sort really concentrating on
what is around you really being there in the moment not simply looking or
listening but being wholly present.
This is what we now call mindfulness and
for Shiki it was the cornerstone of haiku composition.
Shiki's signature method, the sketch from life,
Bushasei, rests upon this kind of intense observation.
When practice devotedly it led to something more than reflecting reality
it drew the practitioner into a kind of quiet creative ecstasy,
which Shiki recorded himself.
As Shiki put it in "Haiku Wastebasket": "The writer takes his raw
materials from nature, then refines them and makes them part of his own
imagination." "In this sense one may call him a second Creator".
In his diary, "A Sixfoot Sickbed", Shiki recorded a moment when he actually
came to feel that he knew what it was like to be the creator of the world,
the medium is visual not verbal but the idea is the same: "I had
a flowering branch placed beside my pillow." "As I faithfully sketch it,
I feel I'm gradually coming to understand the secrets of Creation..." "One
of the joys of sketching from life lies in pondering how to obtain a slightly darker
red or a rather more yellowish one." "When the gods first dyed the flowers
did they too lose themselves in musings like this?".
So haiku brought Shiki happiness more than any other activity did
because in it he used first mindful observation, and
second his imagination, and at times he achieved moments of ecstasy.
Mindfulness and imagination were linked not separate.
How does this apply to other poets specifically to Shiki's views of
Yosa Buson, who was rediscovered by Shiki?
Shiki pointed to two things especially in Buson: one was Buson's gift for
precise observation and the other was his use of imagination.
In such poems as these,
Buson observed small precise details of natural flora and fauna.
"The peonies petals scatter pile of two then three." "Struck by a raindrop,
snail closes up." "Some sandals walked on flowers,
I see-- That morning lazybones!".
As for poems of imagination these were two examples: "Harvest
Moon-- a rabbit crossing Suwa Lake." "Give me lodging he cries,
flinging down his sword--what a blizzard!".
In "Harvest Moon", one needs to think about the light of a full moon and
how it would make the lake look, the white wavelets that would be there and
which could look like a white rabbit cross hopping across Lake.
The White Rabbit who of course is the rabbit in the moon come down to earth.
"Give me lodging", is like a line in a story:
a samurai comes rushing in from a frigid snowy night begging for
lodging, throwing down his sword to show he has no intention to harm anyone.
As for Basho, Shiki revered Basho for qualities opposite to those for
which he admired Buson.
The most important was Basho's mastery of the tone of "sublimity and grandeur" to
use Shiki's words, the macroscopic scale of some of his poems as in
this famous poem "Stormy seas--stretching over to Sado the Milky Way".
Shiki thought this was a realistic description of looking out from the coast
of Niigata to the island of Sado said home of so many medieval exiles,
but many years after Shiki died, the diary of Bahso's travel companion Sora
was discovered and there was found that Sora had recorded that on the night
of the poem it was actually raining and Sado was invisible because of the clouds.
Shiki was wrong in thinking that this was a poem of natural observations yet
it still fulfills his own dictum that observation and
imagination should go hand in hand.
How did this interplay of mindfulness and imagination play out in these own poetry?
For an idea let's look at Shiki's famous poem on the coxcombs in his garden.
"Coxcomb flowers coxcomb flowers must be fourteen maybe fifteen".
Coxcomb flowers are bright red, rather tall and their petals are very thick.
Shiki titled the poem looking out at the garden--on first
reading it seems no more than a casual comment to himself or
to someone sitting nearby as he lies on his sick bed looking outside.
But if one visualizes the mortally ill person that he was speaking the poem in
a quiet voice to someone very nearby and intimate it suddenly expands.
Now the flowers with their magnificent powerful red and
strong thick forms impress him with their vitality but
at the same time there are they are his own opposite emphasizing his own decay.
In Haiku we may say the reader, having imagined this,
possesses the power of life and death over the poem.
I have always thought that this was one of the few possible interpretations possible
but recently thanks to Keith Vincent who introduced it in his Shiki series
I learnt that Ogama Koto had proposed a completely different interpretation.
Shiki argues Oka is remembering a time from the year before
when a typhoon destroyed the flowers.
Before the storm there had been fourteen or fifteen of them and
he misses them now but only Joshi of all the people of the poem party on that day,
the day Shiki wrote the poem had also been there when the typhoon struck, so
the poem was a sort of quiet memory shared with
with Kyoshi-- a remark that expressed his feeling of friendship and love.
Based on this interpretation Keith offers a totally different translation
big red coxcombs' stalks fourteen or fifteen of them, do you remember?
The question is do we have to choose one or the other of the two interpretations?
I would say no.
I want to plot it like a fan with the poem itself as the pivot.
And different interpretations radiating from there like spokes on the fan and
of course each interpretation has in turn at least one possible translation.
The Coxcomb poem is an extreme example of how much
the interpretation of a haiku can vary depending on what the reader brings to it.
In terms of mindfulness and imagination you could say that Shiki has
supplied the mindfulness, the intense observation of the flower, but the reader
supplies most of the imagination, aided by the headnote and in Oka and
Keith's interpretation-translation by Shiki's prose essays about the coxcombs.
That's about it for imagination and observation or
mindfulness and I want to move on now to the second
pair that I spoke of in my abstract to lightness and stickiness.
First lightness by which I mean a certain casual in a certain light heartedness
a kind of brightness.
Lightness is inherent in haikai linked verse, the first session on record took
place in 1206 as a way for some poets to relax and kick up their heels
by composing informal linked verse after a strenuous court walk a session.
Even after haiku became its own independent form it kept that lightness
but at the same time it acquired something I call stickiness.
By this I mean something about the poem that hangs on and
doesn't let you go so that you keep coming back to it in your mind.
Other people might call this profundity but I use stickiness to emphasize the feel
of it how it sticks to your mind even your body is not an intellectual thing but
a whole body thing as the poem inscribed to self in your mind and
body maybe even burrows into your life.
In his poem "Japan",
Billy Collins former poet laureate of the United States, riffs on a haiku by
Buson in a way that evokes this strange combination of lightness and stickiness.
Here is the haiku by Buson: "Perched on a temple bell, asleep-- a butterfly".
And here is the translation, that there is convincing evidence Collins used,
on the one, or the convincing evidence that Collins knew the poem: "On
the one-ton temple bell a moon-moth, folded into sleep, sits still.".
This of course is by ex Jake Kennedy not by me.
In either translation as in the original, we have a tiny insect on a large bell.
This is a light subject--there's something sweet in charming about this innocent
creature resting on the huge bell which could begin to ring at any minute and
the same time there is a sense of suspense.
When will the bell ring and upset the delicate balance of this moment?
Will the butterfly leave before then or not?
So what seems a casual observation actually
catches a fragile moment of stillness between two actions.
Collins describes himself walking through the House saying the haiku's quote a few
words over and over like eating the same small perfect grape again and again.
But the haiku's images keep expanding in his mind as he recites it
by the time you get to the last stanzas of his longish poem there is nothing small or
perfect about the original haiku.
The bell is the world, the moth is life--that moment of balance between two
actions has been magnified a million times.
These are the last stanzas of his poem: "when I say it at the window the bell
is the world and I am the mall resting there." "When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell and the moth is life with its papery wings." "And later
when I say to you in the dark, you are the bell ,and I am the tongue of the bell
ringing you." "And the moth has flown,
from its line, and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed".
I think Collins explains stickiness about as well as anyone could.
Now we come to generosity and why I want to call the haiku a generous form.
Let me explain, the multiple readings that
Collins describes of Buson's poem are not confusing, they are enriching.
Like a plume of Suzuki grass swaying in the wind he does not waver but
simply moves to and fro choosing now one now another.
Haiku allows this freedom,
in fact encourages it, largely because of its minimalism.
I stress the minimalism part here because I don't want to be too wonky but
haiku's close relationship to classical literature is another reason for
its poly polyvocalism.
Haiku's suggestiveness and elusiveness, it's permissiveness
if we may call it that, have an effect on readers and writers of haiku.
The plenitude of possible interpretations none of which cancel each other out makes
one feel for a time anyway that, dare I say it, the universe itself is generous.
Even if Shiki did not practice the kind of close readings that we do
I think he felt this quality in haiku.
In line with my emphasis on multi interpretations I want to leave you with
one more reading of the octopus poem, the first poem I talked about.
Here it is again.
"Octopus pots--brief dreams beneath the summer moon.".
When I was a child living on the shores of a small harbor in Connecticut,
lobstermen used to set their traps in the waters off our house and
in return for letting us for letting them use our driveway to park their truck
they would give us the lobsters that were missing claws, which they could not sell.
Many years later when I first read Basho's poem about the octopus's,
I imagine the octopus pot, which I had never seen as a lobster pot, and
every time I read the poem I thought of a place where I had grown up.
The poem's lightness is in the unsteady comparison of human beings to the octopus,
which is slightly ridiculous.
But its stickiness is there too,
that comparison that you can't get out of your mind and it never goes away.
Somehow your mind going back and forth to and
fro between the octopus drifting in its underwater pot,
the moon that shines down for the bright brief night on the dreams within the pot
and shines down too on our own lives, which are also dreams.
How are we any different from the octopus?
We aren't in but in Basho's poem we meet the octopus and it is us.
Basho's haiku on the octopus can survive my double exposure reading,
in fact thrives on it, becomes for me at least a bigger poem a more memorable one.
Just because the octopus in my imagination mingle with the actual lobsters I saw and
sometimes ate as a child my early reading or misreading,
if that's what it was, is folded into my later reading of the poem.
Effortlessly the poem expands to include: me and my childhood home,
to include Basho,
to include that octopus in the inland sea hundreds of years ago,
not to mention the moon, enlightenment, eternity.
That too, all these things together, is what I mean and
all these things able to exist together is what I mean by the generosity.
Having come this far in my thoughts I suddenly remembered a line
from Walt Whitman in his magisterial poem, "Song with Myself",
which seemed to express what the goddess of haiku could say if she could
speak: "Do I contradict myself--very well then I
contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.".
I began with three very different subjects
all of whom fit surprisingly enough into the same haiku world.
I end here with two unlikely creatures,
Walt Whitman and the Goddess of haiku, walking side by side.
Who would have thought the good old Walt with his long lines in Promethean poems
could have anything in common with the minimalist haiku but he does he does.
And if we listen well to both Walt and the Goddess I think we may even hear,
to quote J.C. Varia the power of our diversity.
Thank you everyone for listening and
I hope that these rather scattered remarks will become fodder for
some of the discussions that will go on later in the symposium.