The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor

7: Enriching Prose with Haiku Poetics

113 113 CHAP TER SE VEN ENRICHING PROSE WITH HAIKU POETICS Christina Hein After some twenty years of having written and teased the reader in the haiku genre, in Matsushima: Pine Island—his sixth volume of haiku— Gerald Vizenor presents his understanding of and approach to haiku. In the introductory essay that precedes the volume, he relates bits of the reception history of haiku in the Anglophone West, makes it clear on which elements of haiku he concentrates, and relates haiku’s generic specificities and cultural background to aspects of Anishinaabe culture. In his account of what haiku is, he relies to a great extent on standard English-language works. He quotes R. H. Blyth’s Haiku and A History of Haiku, he draws on Donald Keene’s Japanese Literature and Kenneth Yasuda’s The Japanese Haiku, and he refers to thoughts on haiku by Edward Seidensticker, Roland Barthes, and others. The context that Vizenor provides is thus one in which haiku have already been interpreted and translated culturally for reception by a Western, Eurooriented readership and authorship. Yet Vizenor goes well beyond this. In his text, he inspires haiku from his own personal and cultural background, relating it to images and ideas that have featured recurrently in his poetry and prose: “Haiku,” he writes, “is blue, tactile, musk, tribal, and a dance” (Matsushima, n.p.). In the introduction, Vizenor infuses haiku with his approach to understanding and the politics of indigeneity, thereby also personalizing it. In this essay, I argue that elements of the haiku poetics that Vizenor develops in Matsushima can be traced throughout his prose writing, whether in fiction, nonfiction, argumentative essay, short story, or any of the variously mixed guises that his pieces may assume. My argument, then, falls into line with Kimberly Blaeser’s observation that Vizenor’s early involvement with haiku form, philosophy, and methods . . . has left its mark on most of his subsequent writing. . . . Vivid nature imagery, building by suggestion, tension created by unusual christina hein 114 juxtapositions, trickster consciousness, reader engagement—all of these traits surface again and again in Vizenor’s work as methods to move beyond the written text itself. (Gerald Vizenor, 133) Here, I tentatively call these traits Vizenor’s “haiku poetics” and aim to illustrate their influence as a structural principle, or at least as recurring aspects of his writing in general. In the following, I first provide the basis for my argument by unfolding Vizenor’s indigenized version of haiku as he presents it in the introduction to Matsushima. The second part of my essay then turns to examples from both Vizenor’s theoretical essays and his literary fiction (though I accept that this classification is unsatisfactory for Vizenor’s writings ). His early experiences with haiku, I argue, supply Vizenor with strategies of presentation and amalgamation as well as drawing the reader into his texts as the taxed and challenged participant and co-creator of meaning(s). Finally, a section is dedicated to how haiku influences converge with Vizenor’s trickster approaches and his concept of crossblood identities. VIZENOR’S INDIGENIZED HAIKU POETICS A number of key ideas can be identified that Vizenor perceives as important for haiku, their creation, and for “haiku thought,” which he presents as a mongrel combination of philosophical discipline and a state of mind required for “seeing” haiku and writing them down. Both Kimberly Blaeser and Tom Lynch have convincingly illustrated how strongly Vizenor’s vision of haiku is connected to spirituality and other aspects of Anishinaabe culture. Blaeser reports that “[s]imilarities in the forms and subjects of haiku and dream songs have been recognized and commented on” since about the 1910s (Gerald Vizenor, 111), and she proceeds to illustrate how these similarities apply to Vizenor’s understanding of haiku (115–20). Relying on these observations , I point briefly to the various instances of indigenization in Vizenor’s central ideas about haiku and their application to issues with which he is generally concerned in his writing. Economy of Form and Language “Haiku strives for economy of language, economy of form, yet extension of meaning,” Jerome Downes writes in the introduction to the first edition of enriching prose with haiku poetics 115 Seventeen Chirps (qtd. in Vizenor, introduction to Matsushima, n.p.). This striving for economy of form and language becomes readily apparent in the (more or less strictly interpreted) counting of syllables and lines to which haiku poets subject...