Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku

Haiku Scenes: An Introduction

haiku scenes An Introduction The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and original moment. Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation, an ironic manner of creation, and a sense of motion, and, at the same time, a consciousness of seasonal impermanence. Haikuscenesaretrickyfusionsofemotion,ethos,andasense ofsurvivance.Theaestheticcreases,orprecise,perceptiveturns, traces,andcutofwordsinhaiku,arethestrayshadowsofnature in reverie and memory. Theoriginalmomentsinhaikuscenesarevirtual,thefugitive turns and transitions of the seasons, an interior perception of motion, and that continuous sense of presence and protean nature. Haiku was my first sense of totemic survivance in poetry, the visual and imagistic associations of nature, and of perception and experience. The metaphors in my initial haiku scenes were teases of nature and memory. The traces of my imagistic names cut to the seasons, not to mere imitation, or the cosmopolitan representations and ruminations of an image in a mirror of nature.1 Pine Islands Matsushima, by chance of the military, was my first connection with haiku images and scenes, the actual places the moon rose over those beautiful pine islands in the haibun, or prose haiku, of Matsuo Bashō. “Muchpraisehadalreadybeenlavisheduponthewondersof the islands of Matsushima,” Bashō writes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. “Yet if further praiseispossible,IwouldliketosaythathereisthemostbeautifulspotinthewholecountryofJapan ....Theislandsaresituated in a bay about three miles wide in every direction and open to thesea....Islandsarepiledaboveislands,andislandsarejoined to islands, so that they look exactly like parents caressing their children or walking with them arm in arm. The pines are of the freshest green, and their branches are curved in exquisite lines, bent by the wind constantly blowing through them.”2 Matsushima and the pine islands are forever in my memories and in the book. I was there, in that same haibun sense of presence and place, almost three centuries later in the motion [x] oftheseasons,andtriedmybesttoenvisiontheactualpresence of Bashō at Matsushima. water striders master bashō wades near shore out of reach The United States Army, by chance, sent me to serve first in a tank battalion on Hokkaido and later at a military post near Sendai in northern Japan. I was eighteen years old at the time. Haiku,inasense,inspiredmeontheroadasasoldierinanother culture and gently turned me back to the seasons, back to the traces of nature and the tease of native reason and memories. The imagistic scenes of haiku were neither exotic nor obscure tome.Naturethenandnowwasasenseofpresence,changeable and chancy, not some courtly tenure of experience, or pretense of comparative and taxonomic discovery. Haiku scenes are similar, in a sense, to the original dream songs and visionary images of the anishinaabe, the Chippewa or Ojibwe, on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. I wasinspiredbytheseimagisticliteraryconnectionsatthetime. The associations seem so natural to me now. Once, words and worldsapartintimeandplace,thesepoeticimagesofhaikuand dream songs came together more by chance than fate, and later by intuition and consideration. Many anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals , birds, and other totemic creatures in experience, visions, and in memory. The same can be said about haiku scenes, that the visions of nature are the perceptions and traces of memory. Yosa Buson wrote haiku scenes that suggested a longing for [xi] [xii] home. These poems are so “poignant that he has come to be known as ‘the poet of nostalgia’ in recent decades,” wrote MakotoUedainThePathofFloweringThorn .Buson,whowasborn some seventy years after Matsuo Bashō, traveled to the pine islands and wrote at least one poem about Matsushima. in matsushima a man gazing at the moon empty seashells There, at Matsushima, “Bashō was so overwhelmed by the moonlit scenery that he was not able to compose” observed Ueda. “The moon view in Buson’s hokku may well be Bashō, who became ‘empty’ like a pair of seashells on the shore and couldnotwrite.OrthemanmayrepresentallvisitorstoMatsushima ,Busonhimselfincluded,whoaretoodazzledbyitsscenic beauty to find words to express it. And those speechless admirers are numberless like seashells on the shore of Matsushima.”3 The poetic forms of waka, tanka, haikai no renga, hokku, and haiku are interrelated by artistic entitlement, manner, means, and practice in the literary history of Japan. Waka, for instance, a classical form of poetry, is related to tanka, a five-line poem of thirty-one sounds or syllables. The first and third lines are five syllables, and the second, fourth, and fifth lines are each seven syllables. Tanka poems were included in the Kojiki, the oldest collection of literary narratives, and in the great Man’yōshū, the oldest collection of poetry. These two anthologies were compiled...