My recent attempts to put words to photographs I’d taken once again led me back to haiku, and, in particular, to Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, another of many books I’d been intending to read.

Needless to say, it doesn’t take any more of a reason than that to settle down with a book as good as this one. So far, I’ve finished a third of the book, the section on Basho. I’ve particulalry enjoyed the historical introduction to the poets. Even more so, I’ve been fascinated by the inclusion of parts of journals that incorporate haiku poems.

One of my favorite poems, with introduction, is:

Unchiky, a monk living in Kyoto, had painted what appeared to be a self portrait. It was a picture of a monk with his face turned away. Unchiku showed me the portrait and asked for a verse to go with it. Thereupon I wrote as follows–
You are over sixty and I’m nearing fifty. We are both in a world of dreams, and this portrait depicts a man in a dream. Here I add the words of another such man talking in his sleep.

You could turn this way,
I’m also lonely,
this autumn evening.

Obviously it’s difficult to pick a favorite from a selection of classics like this, but this one:

A caterpillar,
this deep in fall –
still not a butterfly.

seems particularly poignant to me at my age.

And somehow this one:

They don’t live long,
but you’d never know it –
the cicada’s cry.

reminds me of several of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

As a long admirer of Japanese haiku, I appreciate the way Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa introduces these three artists, particularly the way it tries to show how they relate to each other, both how they are similar, and, more importantly, how they are different. His introductions have certainly helped me to better understand different approaches to haiku.

For instance, Hass contends that “The religious sense in Buson’s art, if that is what it is, comes from his love of Basho’s poetry and of the Ch’an Buddhist poets and painters whome he studied and admired; it’s in his clear-mindedness and in his sense of alive of things and of their presence.”

As he also points out, Buson’s poems “are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper.”

These two observations probably help to explain why I prefer Basho to Buson, because, as I’m discovering more and more, my favorite poems generally have a spiritual element to them, especially it relates that spirituality to nature as in:

Butterfly
sleeping
on the temple bell.

On one level this is certainly a very painterly poem, it’s hard to imagine anything more “painterly” than a butterfly, especially contrasted against a monotone bell, but much of the power of the poem stems from the sense that we, like the butterfly, wait to be awakened by the bell’s knell to our true beauty.

The appeal of the next poem may well be accounted for by love of caligraphy, a form of art I practiced for years until I realized that no matter how much I loved letters and alphabets, I simply lacked the self-discipline and the determination, particularly once I was able to produce a passable work, to continue with calligraphy, especially once I discovered the Mac and Adobe Illustrator.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky
the moon seals it.

Of course, I’m also fond of the zen-like simplicity of certain Japanese and Chinese paintings, and to the extent that Buson’s captures that simplicity I admire in that art, it’s hard not to love:

Sudden shower–
a flock of sparrows
cling to the grasses.

Of course, as a long-time bird lover, Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” was, after all the first poem I ever memorized, and my favorite Dickinson poems featured robins, it’s easy to see why I would be biased towards this poem. But in one swift bushstroke Buson seemed to capture the essence of sparrows.

I imagine to readers accustomed to the serious, if not somber, tone of most haiku, Issa’s irreverent sense of humor must come as a delightful surprise. Several of the haiku that Hass offers have such a comic effect. Two of my favorite are:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes

and

No doubt about it,
the mountain cuckoo
is a crybaby.

There are others that seem to have a more serious intent, but accomplish that effect through humor:

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

Although all three sections include excerpts from prose passages, the section on Issa has more than the other sections do. As I’ve said before, I’m not too fond of prose poems, but for some reason I find the idea of ending a long prose passage with a haiku rather satisfying:

It is a commonplace of life that the greatest pleasure issues ultimately in the greatest grief. Yet why”why is it that this child of mine, who has not tasted half the pleasures that the world has to offer, who ought, by rights, to be as fresh and green as the vigorous young needles of the everlasting pine ” why must she lie here on her deathbed, swollen with blisters, caught in the loathsome clutches of the vile god of smallpox. Being, as I am, her father, I can scarcely bear to watch her withering away”a little more each day”like some pure, untainted blossom that is ravished by the sudden onslaught of mud and rain.

After two or three days, however, her blisters dried up and the scabs began to fall away ” like a hard crust of dirt that has been softened by melting snow. In our joy we made what we call a “priest in a straw robe.” We poured hot wine ceremoniously over his body, and packed him and the god of smallpox off together. Yet our hopes proved in vain. She grew weaker and weaker and finally, on the twenty-first of June, as the morning glories were just closing their flowers, she closed her eyes forever. Her mother embraced the cold body and cried bitterly. For myself, I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not, cut the binding cord of human love.

The world of dew
is the world of dew,
And yet, and yet

I doubt that I would have found this particular haiku moving if I had read it in the context of page after page of haiku, but in this context it is heart-breaking.