Lee,
The questions I’ve been contemplating were answered in part by your discussion of the aesthetics of haiku but have been stimulated further by some of the posted examples.
I suppose I’m also driven by my own experiences with haiku. Many times in the past, I’ve come upon “haiku” and have been extremely bored by what I’ve read. A few of your examples, however, have opened my eyes to the sort of haiku I like to read; for example:
<dir>Chemotherapy
in a comfortable chair
two hours of winter BANNED POSTBANNED POST(Kiyoko Tokutomi)</dir>
My enjoyment of this haiku is a direct result of the choice to pair “chemotherapy” with “winter.” When thinking of winter, I think of snow and the slow dying off of vegetation; chemotherapy brings to mind the slow accumulation of chemicals within the body to kill off cancer. (Plus, there’s the unmentioned but correlative “radiation therapy” that has me thinking of the radiation “snow” from an atomic blast.) This pairing carries most of the force of the poem, for me, even if “in a comfortable chair”—a waiting—pairs with the passage of time in “two hours.” This haiku, then, uses each item to expand on the other; they create a sort of rift or time/space singularity between them.
Several haiku I’ve recently read follow this pattern and have inspired an experiment I’ve posted at The Deep End; the first stanza:
<dir>War over Iraq—
Fallujah, where brothers stack
sandbags for cover</dir>
I’m not sure that “brothers” is working in this example...but my impulse was to compare the phrase “war over Iraq” with “sandbags for
cover.” I’ve reversed the order, in comparison with Tokutomi’s haiku, in that Tokutomi begins with a two-line image/event and ends with the broad abstract “winter,” and I’ve begun with the abstract “war over Iraq” and ended with a two-line image. I don’t think the order is formalized one way over the other...?
Many of the “haiku” I dislike appear to follow another route. You have mentioned the necessity of making sure that the images are not too distant from one another; but this brings up my first question, since I think we might agree that a creative (or, optimistic) reader could find similarity between
any two images although that “similarity” might be peculiar to that reader.
<dir>
Question #1: To what degree are haiku related to Imagist Symbolism, or even Surrealist Imagism—or what separates them?</dir>
I think this question is important for two reasons. First, many “haiku” (?) appear to rely on three lines composed of three different images that might be related in time/space simply because they are located together in a single setting. Ex.: 1) golden grain, 2) mole, 3) setting sun. These three might be handled well, per the Tokutomi example; consider that a “mole” burrows downward into the earth like the sun (appears to do) when it is setting. A reader might need to work out how the golden grain is related to those two; maybe all three have the same color at that time of day, or the sun and grain are similarly colored but the mole is darker like the unmentioned earth over which both sun and grain tower. So we have:
<dir>golden grain
mole
setting sun</dir>
--which seems to me to be rather simplistic, too easy, even if another “association” might be imagined: when the mole has burrowed completely down, the “golden grain” is invisible to it like the setting sun and its golden waves are out of our sight once
it has “burrowed” down “into” the earth. Imagine another:
<dir>yellow bulldozer
mole
setting sun</dir>
In a very real way, for me, the associations are not concrete, but symbolic, since each image stands for a quality or qualities and we are really comparing those qualities. The problem, then, in the haiku I’ve read but disliked, is their tendency to dissolve the images or distill the images into qualities—so that one haiku may be hardly distinguishable from another but for the largely stochastic image choice. At some point, the concrete items represented by the images don’t matter; rather, the process of association is on the forefront. So I might get an
Aha!, but that feeling of satisfaction and/or feeling of achieved insight is the very same from one “haiku” to another. The “problem haiku,” for me, blur together after I’ve read enough (after I've read only a
few of them, sometimes).
<dir>
Question #2: You have mentioned the idea that final lines shouldn’t name or summarize the haiku; yet, the final image often does just that by setting the parameters of the association. Using the Tokutomi example, we might say that the third line “renames” or summarizes the first two lines; it is a kind of association via the “=” sign. In fact, the
cut you’ve mentioned tends to operate as an equals sign—
These are the same—because it forces us to find the similarity. I wonder to what degree summarization must play a significant role in haiku. I suspect that a back-to-forth associative process is required for successful haiku, the poem doesn’t flow only one way and end at the final summarization; however, since Tokutomi’s final line utilizes a broad abstract—winter—after a narrowly defined & 2-lined image, that final line tends to encompass, and summarize, the preceding lines. (I suppose I’m speaking of dominant images as summarizations. For that matter, what role do dominant/subordinate image relations play in haiku?)</dir>
<dir>
Question #3: A quick question, related to the above. I’ve been thinking of sonnets during this discussion of haiku, mostly because the “cut” in haiku seems intimately related to the “volta” of sonnets: in each case, an associative field is created between each side of the cut/volta, as the first side is “renamed” in the second, or the first side is put into other words and expanded in the second. (Ideally, in either case a back-and-forth associative process will be present.) There are of course some differences. Do you see a significant similarity; and, care to postulate how useful any similarity would be to the Westernization of haiku or the Easternization of sonnets?
This might be of my own peculiar fancy, I know.
[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited May 05, 2004).]