Category: Haiku and Beyond

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.

“At The Sky’s Edge,” the title poem of Bei Dao’s work, and “Sower” seem fairly representative of the poems in“Forms of Distance," the first section of At the Sky’s Edge.

Perhaps “At The Sky’s Edge” is the most representative because it contains both the sense of despair and of silent acceptance that is found throughout this section of the book:

AT THE SKY’S EDGE

love among the mountains

eternity, that patience of the earth
simplifies our human sounds
one arctic-thin cry
from deep antiquity until now

rest, weary traveler
a wounded ear’s
already laid your dignity bare
one arctic-thin cry

The startling contrast between the silent mountains that form the sky and the “artic-thin cry from deep antiquity” that seems to symbolize man’s existence emphasizes the paradox of man’s existence. For man is always seeking eternity, always trying to connect with the “patience of the earth,” while simultaneously trying to overcome this sense of despair that haunts his very existence. Why desire to live forever when life is such misery?

While “At the Sky’s Edge” seems to capture that sense of eternity that pervades much of Chinese poetry, “Sower” seems much more topical. It’s hard to read this poem and not think of what is presently happening in our society:

SOWER

a sower walks into the great hall
it’s war out there, he says
and you awash in emptiness
you’ve sworn off your duty to sound the alarm
I’ve come in the name of fields
it’s war out there

I walk out from that great hail
all four directions a boundless harvest scene
I start planning for war
performing death
and the crops I burn
send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires

but something haunts me furiously:
he’s sowing seed across marble floors

Perhaps Bush’s strategy is to outwait those who oppose war with Iraq. Congress’ approval of his invasion of Iraq seems to have passed ages ago, doesn’t it? How long can you protest before being overwhelmed by a sense of despair, “awash in emptiness?”

Considering the number of wars America has fought in the last fifty years, how many wars can you oppose before you decide that you must live your own life, must give up sounding the alarm. How many times can you cry “wolf” before others no longer believe you?

What is gained from burning crops? There’s something deeply ominous in “I start planning for war/ performing death/ and the crops I burn.” How does one “perform” death? Is it a ritual or a conscious act? Can anything good come from “sowing seed across marble floors?” Aren’t seeds spread on such infertile ground doomed to die, or are they the seeds of despair, seeds that will bear a bountiful crop? Will the “Grim Reaper” come to harvest this crop?

Although I’ve only read the first fifty pages of Bei Dao’s At The Sky’s Edge, as translated by David Hinton, his book seems to have much in common with Shinkichi Takahasi’s Triumph of the Sparrow, which I discussed a while ago. Bei Dao’s poetry seems to use many of the same kind of surrealistic images that Takahasi used.

As admitted before, my ignorance of contemporary Asian literature is truly profound. Thus, I’m uncertain whether it is pure coincidence that the two artists seem to have so much in common with Surrealism. Does the fact that the Chinese language seems more “concrete” than the English language contribute to this tendency? Perhaps it’s time for Jonathon Delacour to offer some insights into his favorite Asian poetry.

I could quite easily imagine many of Dao’s poems as surrealistic paintings. Indeed, they seem to gain much of their power from the conflicting, disparate images found within them. I must admit, though, that when I was taking art classes collages were my favorite medium, and perhaps that may explain why I like these poems so much.

One of my favorite poems is “Lament”:

LAMENT

incandescent arc welding the sky
like long-lost passions
searching for new wounds
searching for blizzards amid archives
sparks in the bellows-chamber

dreams drop with sweat
like underwater mines longing for a ship’s touch
now the sea’s gone suddenly dry
a forest of tents appears
and we wake like wounds

dignitaries speaking some other language
stroll through the refugee camp

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at a sunrise (or sunset) in quite the same where after the opening line of this poem. Anyone who has ever glanced out of the side of his at an arc welder will feel the power of this image. What do you imagine is being welded to the darkness? Is it our passion for life confronted by the abyss? What is the result of that fusion? Or, as suggested by the last line, what is being forged by these passions?

The first lines of the second stanza remind me of Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred,” dreams longing to explode, just waiting for the right target to drift by, perhaps a particularly relevant line when tied with the image of the refugee camp that ends the poem.

Most of us sitting securely at home in America very seldom think about “refugee camps,” much less what it must feel like to sit there dejectedly as “dignitaries” visit, all the time speaking a foreign language, perhaps even visiting for “publicity” rather than in an honest attempt to help the refugees.