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The
Real Thing
I.
Where We’ve Been
Almost
every decade of the last half-century has had a few truly
landmark books of North American haiku. I think of Kenneth
Yasuda’s A Pepper Pod (1947); Cor van den Heuvel’s
Sun in Skull (1961); J.W. Hackett’s Haiku
(1964); Robert Spiess’s The Heron’s Legs
(1966), John Wills’s River (1970); Michael McClintock’s
Light Run (1971); the collaboration of Jack Kerouac,
Albert Saijo, and Lew Welch in Trip Trap (1973),
Anita Virgil’s A 2nd Flake and Alan Pizzarelli’s
Karma Poems (1974); Marlene Morelock Wills’s
(now Mountain’s) The Old Tin Roof (1976); Raymond
Roseliep’s Listen to Light (1980); George Swede’s
All of Her Shadows (1982); Rod Willmot’s The
Ribs of Dragonfly and Penny Harter’s In the
Broken Curve (1984); Elizabeth Searle Lamb’s Casting
into a Cloud (1985); Nicholas A. Virgilio’s Selected
Haiku (1985, 1988); Lee Gurga’s Fresh Scent
(1998); Gary Hotham’s Breath Marks (1999). Some
of these titles, like Yasuda’s, Hackett’s, van
den Heuvel’s, and the Beat collaboration of Kerouac
et al., landed in our midst before we were ready for their
startling revelations of what a haiku in English might be;
others, like those by Spiess, Roseliep, Virgilio, Willmot,
Gurga, and Hotham, gave us at last a chance to savor the
rich accomplishment of a poet’s works we had become
familiar with over some years in the haiku magazines. Still
others arose among their peers to become agents for change
in new directions as to form, content, or attitude, such
as those by Virgil, Pizzarelli, Swede, Harter, and Lamb.
Of
course, each of us will have her or his own list of such
books. The main point is this: each of these books took
our collective haiku awareness to a new level. At the same
time, no one could deny that many of the poems therein are
“the real thing”—as much haiku as haiku truly
is or could be.
Yet,
for years now, I have had the feeling that our haiku community
was somehow steering off in one or at most two narrow directions.
On one road we have the Zen-imbued notion of the haiku as
a momentary blip on the screen of our lives. On the other,
haiku becomes a tool in the hands of the satirist, unfit
for serious composition. The yeastiness of that implicit
conversation among the formalists, the anti-formalists,
the Zennists, the nature writers, the inventors of senryu
on our continent, the haiku psychologists, and the damned-if-I-won’t-do-it-my-own-way
innovators seemed to have dried up. Book after book of same-o-same-o
haiku seemed to come pouring from the burgeoning presses
of our haiku community, as well as occasionally from some
larger press. This is not to demean the numerous collections
of fine haiku that have appeared. Just to say that there
seemed to be little coming out that was outstandingly fresh
or developing a truly world-class richness and variety in
our fledgling tradition.
At
the same time, new books on Japanese haiku should have been
broadening our view of haiku. It seemed as though Makoto
Ueda’s greatest masterpiece, Bashô and His
Interpreters (1992), and the eye-opening Chiyo-ni:
Woman Haiku Master by Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi
(1998) had fallen under bushel baskets. Where were the poets
taking heed, building into our haiku the new richness and
diversity of even older Japanese haiku that these books
revealed? The massive collections from Richard Wright and
Jack Kerouac recently put out by major publishing houses
and drawing lots of too-late and thus now unwarranted critical
attention only deepened my malaise.
Wright
might have been a beacon to us if his work had been published
in a haiku context contemporaneously with those of van den
Heuvel and Hackett and Spiess; however, its recent appearance
in book form only serves to deeply underscore the triviality
of most of his attempts at haiku, and ultimately to draw
attention away from his earlier longer poems, as raw and
insistent as his prime novel and memoir. Most of the great
haiku he managed had all dribbled out previously in places
of interest mainly to specialists in African American literature,
where they had little impact on our haiku.
The
long-overdue collection of haiku by Kerouac, with its overwhelming
number of should-have-been-buried diary jottings toward
but never quite reaching haiku, also serves mainly to affirm
our earlier impression. Yes, Kerouac was practically the
inventor of haiku for the Beat Generation,
and probably its greatest practitioner. And yes, we had
already seen the best of his work in the genre.
In
the cases of both Kerouac and Wright, we hope, someone will
be allowed to craft a selection of the hundred or so truly
fine haiku each wrote, on the one hand throughout a relatively
brief but brilliant career, on the other, in a frenzy of
what was to be the only creative work he felt he had time
to do during the last year or two of his life. Only thus
will their reputations in haiku circles be deservedly preserved.
(Historical footnote: In the mid-1980s, Cor van den Heuvel
and I did everything we could to bring the haiku of Kerouac
and Wright, respectively, into sharp focus in The Haiku
Anthology, second edition, and The Haiku Handbook.
The scholars have lately acknowledged our work, but failed
to follow our advice and put out editions of the best work,
saving the detritus for scholarly articles and monographs.)
All
of these thoughts have been with me for some time, floating
about, looking for the proper occasion on which to organize
and present them. It’s here:
II.
Where We Are (Hopefully) Going
Fay
Aoyagi’s Chrysanthemum Love heralds what will
hopefully become a new generation of America haiku masters.
The poems are crafted, richly felt, and tactile as the first
rain after a drought. Moreover, it seems to me that these
seventy-five to eighty haiku present an incredible variety
of tone and theme while taking dead aim at the core of what
“American haiku” can and should mean.
In
her brief introduction, Aoyagi says:
If
you believe haiku must be about nature, you may be disappointed
with my work. There is a lot of “me” in my haiku.
I write very subjectively. I am not interested in Zen
and the oriental flavors to which some Western haiku/tanka
poets are attracted. I love the shortness and evocativeness
of haiku.
I
don’t write haiku to report the weather.
I
write to tell my stories.
Others
might make an utter mess of such a manifesto, but from Aoyagi’s
pen, we have crisp, clear speech that floats lightly over
or plunges deeply into the bright and dark patches of her
everyday life—and ours.
Consider
the delicacy of these seemingly simple “word pictures:”
magnolias—
he folds and unfolds
a handkerchief
intact
zero fighter
at the Smithsonian—
cherry blossom rain
The
second of these includes the translation of a Japanese season
word referring to a soft spring rain falling through cherry
blossoms, carrying some of the petals gently down with it.
How many of those small “Jap Zero” fighter planes
went down toward the end of the Pacific war, carrying their
newly commissioned teenaged pilots with them. As the general
on The West Wing war-crimes episode said, “War is a
crime.” This poem is not about anger and war, however.
Rather, it is about the tender, flimsy lives we all lead,
we and our contraptions, not fundamentally different from
those of Mother Nature, after all. Similarly, whether in
the showy blossoms of a magnolia tree or in the flickering
shadows of fingers not really busy with a handkerchief,
an essential pointlessness lurks in some of these instructive
poems. I hear the last words of William Carlos Williams’s
English grandmother whistling in the breeze.
As
the undercurrents of human emotion lurking here suggest,
Aoyagi feels the life swirling around her, and brings it
relentlessly into her poems. She does not hesitate to respond
as who and where she is to history, public or private:
Nagasaki
anniversary—
I push
the mute button
ocean
fog—
I can’t recall the name
of my first lover
No
one, least of all a newly minted Japanese-American, can
deny the horror of that August day decades ago in Nagasaki.
But even she has the right to shut what she can of it out
of her hearing now, and at the same time to cry “No!”
to the glib words of commentators going on about this most
soulless, soulful event. We cry with Lorca, “No, I
will not see it!” and try to go on with our own tortured
lives. Just as some memories cut into day after day, others
skip away lightly as untethered balloons, rising into a
realm we can barely apprehend.
Lest
I give the impression that Chrysanthemum Love is all about
history and loss and the failures of humanity, let me share
also some of its beautiful lightheartedness:
this
soap bubble
I control the world
for just a second
as
though they were
Miss America contestants
the cockscombs
Of
course, the irony never completely disappears, but that’s
life. In the meantime, we can become totally absorbed in
the play of light on the microscopically thin surface of
a soap bubble, or note the human folly that seems to come
up in the garden. These cockscombs were one of Shiki’s
favorite haiku topics; he wrote fifty haiku about them,
among which this: “Cockscombs— / all of them knocked
flat / in the autumn storm” (Burton Watson’s translation).
Surely, Shiki would have grinned at Aoyagi’s treatment
of the subject.
Anger
also puts in an appearance here and there:
ironing
a white handkerchief
and my ancestral guilt
unexpected
pregnancy
she spits out
watermelon seeds
A
woman strokes and strokes with the hot iron, or spits out
as seeds the words she must not utter.
Aoyagi
also writes mysterious poems that take us to places we never
knew were there:
for
the rabbits
on the misty moon
. . . fado
cold
rain—
my application
to become a crab
How
do the rabbits in the moon of Chinese legend connect with
fado, those heart-wrenchingly plaintive Portuguese folk
songs? Perhaps the mists of spring have something to do
with it. As for applying to become a crab as the cold rain
falls, why not? To the émigrée, applying to
be some one, some thing else, seems only natural. Aoyagi’s
bestial aspiration for a shell to ward off the rain brings
to mind Bashô’s anthropomorphism: “first
winter shower— / the monkey also seems to want / a
small raincoat” (Ueda’s translation).
For
each of these few categories, several more poems could do
as well as examples, but the wonder of Aoyagi’s book
is that more categories abound. Here are haiku of love and
the loss of love, of offerings and rejections, of blessed
assurance and withering despair. Still others question our
responses to the history (or histrionics) of the moment,
and our desires to escape from it.
Keiko
Matsumoto’s piquant illustrations that thoughtfully
play off Aoyagi’s haiku throughout Chrysanthemum Love
also should not be overlooked. Initially, the dry pen and
ink drawings seem light and airy as the seemingly pointless
decorations that show up here and there in the New Yorker
or The New York Times Book Review. Matsumoto has
carefully read the poems in this book, however, not merely
glanced at it here and there. The grace-notes of her plain
style that walks a line between comic and fine art aptly
complement the poems individually and the book as a whole.
In
this one book, Fay Aoyagi has lassoed and galloped beyond
most of what we have learned about how to write American
haiku in five decades, and opened the way to a new century.
Chrysanthemum Love is a stunningly original book
and a whole collection of “my favorite haiku”—I
hope you’ll make it one of yours. I guarantee, it’s
the real thing.
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