In reply to HB's question (and thanks much for the kind words), I think they are both clearly haiku. It is a common misunderstanding that haiku are "about" nature and senryu are "about" people. In fact, neither can avoid being about the human race. The difference is in the imagery and treatment. The most important are some aesthetic principles that have pervaded haiku for several centuries. (More on these below.) Senryu is dominated by wit, wordplay, irony, and a certain cruel glee in the shortcomings of others.
The lazy way for me to comment on haiku asethetics is to quote a bit on it from my book, Haiku: A Poet's Guide. (Not here to sell books--all the money goes to Modern Haiku anyway.) The poems quoted will show what haiku at its bes is not as well as what it is. Lee
Here goes (from the section "From Bashô to Barthes"):
Is there some preferred aesthetic for haiku, or is haiku pliable enough to serve as a vehicle for any cultural value system?
Before the time of Bashô, haiku was a kind of light verse that depended in large part on fancy, wit, and wordplay for its effect. The most famous poem of that era is surely Moritake’s:
a fallen blossom
returning to the branch?
Oh, a butterfly!
While this poem is not without merit, its effect is based upon a conceit rather than on insight. Bashô’s great revelation was to show that poetry of great depth and resonance could be realized within the brief form of haiku. Contrast the previous verse with this one by Bashô:
cooling cooling
feet treading the wall—
a midday nap trans. William J. Higginson
This is a poem of pure sensation, in which we can feel the heat of summer and the poet’s real joy in the simple pleasures of life. While some might find Moritake’s hokku more “poetic” than Bashô’s, his is a poem of the head, while Bashô’s is of the heart—and feet! Moritake’s cleverness seems rather forced in comparison.
By the seventeenth century a number of aesthetic principles had infused literature in Japan, and the application of these principles to haiku were a significant part of the “Bashô revolution” that continue to make haiku a viable literary form today. Among them are concepts associated with Zen arts, such as wabi, the aesthetic appreciation of loneliness, poverty, and simplicity, and sabi, the appreciation of the subdued elegance and loneliness of old, worn things.
Another important principle associated with classical Japanese haiku is hosomi (“slenderness”). Slenderness allows the poet to paint the scene, then disappear. Shibumi (“astringency”) gives haiku its tang—the flavor of persimmons rather than peaches. Haruo Shirane (Traces of Dreams, Stanford, 1998) names other aesthetic principles that lay at the heart of Bashô’s poetics: kôgo kizoku (“awakening to the high, returning to the low”), fûga no makoto (“poetic truth”), zôka zuijun (“following the creative”), butsuga ichinyo (“object and self as one”), fueki ryûkô (“the unchanging and changing”), and karumi (“lightness”). Haiku has also borrowed the aesthetic principles of aware (pronounced ah-wa-ray, a feeling of deep compassion or pathos) and yugen (graceful beauty suffused with aesthetic principles of mono no aware (“deep sensitivity to things”) and yugen (“ineffable mystery’) from classical Japanese poetry
Wabi, sabi, hosomi, and karumi are probably the principles that have had the most impact on making haiku what it is today. The wabi ideal of loneliness and poverty and of standing apart from the crowd, and the sabi appreciation for what is undervalued and time-worn have made it possible for haiku to be seen by some as a way of life or spiritual quest, the “way of haiku.” It is partly as a result of the application of these that haiku has come to be a “poetry of the overlooked.” Hosomi and karumi have helped mold haiku into a genre of poetry that is capable of great depth, but is at the same time capable of the restraint necessary to achieve this without overwhelming the reader. As Shirane points out, hosomi refers to a slenderness of mind as well as a slenderness of expression. It helps the poet approach an object with a delicacy that permits an egoless interpenetration with the object, allowing one to perceive its essence. Pure perception allied with restrained expression are the ideals upon which haiku is founded.
Since Bashô’s time, haiku has had its ups and downs. Perhaps the lowest point came in the mid-nineteenth century, when Bashô was worshiped as a god—literally—and haiku imitated the form but not the spirit of his work.
Shiki helped to revive haiku by criticizing Bashô in print—something that shocked the poetic establishment of the time. Shiki’s critical work, combined with the introduction of Western aesthetic theories and the Western concept of individualism, has considerably expanded the range of modern Japanese haiku. It has at the same time, unfortunately, led contemporary Japanese haiku away from the aesthetic depths that Bashô achieved. Today once again, wit is sometimes prized over insight, with haiku in danger of being supplanted by pseudohaiku or zappai. Contemporary Japanese haiku master Akito Arima has lamented that we now live “in the age of zappai.” In America we have the same dilemma: zappai is what is called “haiku” in most mass-market publications, from USA Today’s “daily haiku”—seventeen syllable witticisms—to The New Yorker’s “honku”—seventeen-syllable poems about honking car horns.
From traffic noise to Zen—this is the space filled by haiku today. R.H. Blyth as much as says that Zen is haiku and haiku is Zen. He understood that haiku at its best is more than a form and demands a unique artistic discipline to be understood and practiced. Whatever its status as literature, haiku requires a special state of mind, not necessarily Zen satori, but a mindset that impels poets to go outside of themselves to achieve an understanding of the “suchness” or essence of things.
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