I
was from a proud, somewhat educated farming and working
family. After finishing college I went back to work. I went
into the National Forests to be an isolated fire lookout
living in a tiny cabin on the top of a peak. I worked as
a summertime firefighter and wilderness ranger, and then
spent winters in San Francisco to be closer to a community
of writers.
I
discovered the four-volume set of haiku translations by
R.H. Blyth that now we all know so well. Reading the four
Blyth volumes gave me my first clear sense of the marvelous
power of haiku. (The other reading of that era that helped
shape my life was books by D.T. Suzuki.) I lived with Blyths
translations for a long time, and began to be able to see
our North American landscapes in the light of haiku sensibility
(which of course includes the human.) When I ran across
Bashôs great instruction To learn of the
pine tree, go to the pine my path was set.
In
the fall of 1953 I moved to Berkeley and entered as a graduate
student in East Asian Languages at the University of California.
I read Chinese poetry with Dr. Chen Shih-hsiang and translated
poems of the Chinese Zen poet Han-shan/Kanzan. I studied
Japanese with Dr. Donald Shively.
This
was 1954. Through Dr. Shively I got to know the formidable
American Buddhist scholar Ruth F. Sasaki, who had been married
to the Japanese Zen Master Sasaki Shigetsu. They had met
before World War II when he was teaching Rinzai Zen in a
little zendô zend in New York City. He died during
the war. Mrs. Sasaki returned to Kyoto after the war to
continue her Zen training with Sasaki Shigetsus Dharma
brother Gotô Zuigan Roshi. She was also hard at work
translating and publishing Zen texts. She offered to help
me get to Kyoto, saying that it would deepen my knowledge
of Japanese and Chinese, and give me an opportunity for
first-hand Rinzai Zen practice. Just as I was preparing
to leave the West Coast I got involved with the literary
circles that are now remembered as the Beat Generation
in San Francisco. I participated in poetry readings and
had some minor publications. Those early poems already show
the influence of haiku with strong short verses contained
within longer poems. This was a strategy that came to me
through W.C. Williams and Ezra Pound.
I
first arrived in Japan in May of 1956. Exposure to Buddhist
scholars and translators soon brought me to the Zenrinkushû,
that remarkable anthology of bits and pieces of Chinese
poetry plus a number of folk proverbs as they became used
within the Zen world as part of the training dialog. If
one was looking at the possibilities of short poems
the Zenrinkushû practice of breaking up Chinese poems
would certainly have to be included. R.H. Blyth famously
said The Zenrinkushû is Chinese poetry on its
way to becoming haiku. Maybe it is that somebody
one of the old Zen monk editors realized that practically
all poems are too long and that theyd be better if
they were cut up. So he cut up hundreds of Chinese poems
and came out with new, shorter poems! I now know I was extremely
fortunate to have been exposed to the elegant Zen
culture aspects of Kyoto. But as I traveled around
Japan I came to thoroughly appreciate popular culture, ordinary
peoples lives, and the brave irreverent progressive
vitality of postwar Japanese life. I realized that the spirit
of haiku comes as much from that daily-life spirit as it
does from high culture and still, haiku
is totally refined.
One
of my friends from early Kyoto days was Dr. Burton Watson.
He was on Mrs. Ruth Sasakis translation team at Daitôku-ji
in the late fifties, working on Zen texts, as well as his
own projects. I joined that team as an assistant. He has
lived in Japan almost continuously since that time, maintaining
affiliations with Columbia University. He is without question
the worlds premier translator from both Chinese and
Japanese into English. Only long years of friendship allow
me to call him Burt. Though I had read translations of Shiki
before, it was Dr. Watsons versions of Shiki published
by Columbia
University Press in 1997 that enabled me to fully appreciate
him. Janine Beichman wrote Masaoka Shiki: His Life and
Works, first published in 1982, but I didnt read
Beichmans book until after my exciting exposure to
Shiki through Dr. Watson. We English/American language speakers
are fortunate to have these two excellent books to give
us access to a man who was a giant in the world of haiku
poetry. (Watson did a volume of translations of
another poet of Matsuyama City, Taneda Santôka, that
was also published by Columbia University Press, in 2003.
It is titled For All My Walking. It is a Walking
delightful volume.)
I
continued to live and study in Kyoto until 1968. My ability
to speak and read Japanese improved a bit, though I am still
embarrassed by how clumsy I am with this elegant language.
I managed to read haiku in the original just enough to comprehend
that the power of haiku poetry is not only from clear images,
or vivid presentation of the moment, or transcendent insight
into nature and the world, but in a marvelous creative play
with the language. Poetry always comes down to language
if the choice of words, the tricks of the syntax,
are not exactly right, whatever other virtues a piece of
writing might have, it is not a poem. (These are the standards
we apply to poetry in each our own language. Poems in translation
of course can not be judged this way. Images
however are translatable.)
I
returned to North America in 1968 (Some of us prefer to
call it Turtle Island after Native American
creation stories). In 1970 I moved with my family to a remote
plot of forest land in the Sierra Nevada at the 1,000-meter
elevation pine and oak woods. We built a house and
have made that our home base ever since.
Having
a home base for my wife and family made it possible
to go on periodic trips over the years doing lectures, readings,
and workshops. Honoring the haiku sensibility, I look for
what would be the seasonal signals, kigo, in our Mediterranean
middle-elevation Sierra mountain landscape. What xeric aromatic
herbs and flowers, what birds, what weather signals, will
we find? They are different from Japan. I read translations
of the myths and tales of the Native people who once lived
where I live now, from the Nisenan language
(which is no longer spoken) and I can see how much they
valued the magic of the woodpecker, the sly character of
fox, and the trickster coyote. High-flying migratory sandhill
cranes pass north and south in the spring and in the fall
directly over my house. They have been doing this for at
least a million years.
The
Euro-, African-, and Asian-Americans are just a little more
than 200 years on the west coast of North America, and it
will be several centuries yet before our poetic vocabulary
matches the land. The haiku tradition gives us the pointers
that we need to begin this process, which will be part of
making a culture and a home in North America (and I hope
eventually, for all people, a home on planet earth) for
the long future ahead.
The
ancient Buddhist teaching of non-harming and respect for
all of nature, (which is quietly present within the haiku
tradition) is an ethical precept we are in greater need
of now than ever, as the explosive energy of the modern
industrial world pushes relentlessly toward an endless exploitation
of all the resources of the planet.
Now
I want to go back to talking about how Japanese haiku poetry
has been discovered world-wide. Up till now I have been
speaking of haiku as it exists in Japan from early times
up to the present. Though haiku may be considered old fashioned
and conservative by some people in Japan, in the rest of
the world it is received as fresh, new, experimental, youthful
and playful, unpretentious, and available to students and
beginners who want to try out a poetic way of speaking.
As
we all know theres scarcely a literate culture on
earth that doesnt have some translations of Japanese
haiku in its poetry anthologies. From this, an international
non-Japanese haiku movement has begun, which takes the idea
of haiku hundreds of new directions. School teachers in
Denmark, Italy, or California have no hesitation giving
translations of Japanese haiku to their students, and then
also reading locally-written brief poems to them, telling
the children to look around, see what they see, have a thought,
make an image, and write their own brief poem. Children
everywhere are learning about poetry and themselves just
this way. Though this may not be entirely true to the haiku
tradition itself, it is of immense value to young people
to have their language and imagination liberated. Short
poems and haiku inspire them more than the usual English
or European-language poetry which always seems (to children)
either too metrical and formal or too modern and experimental.
The
haiku tradition is now part of a world-wide experimental
movement in freshly teaching poetry in the schools. This
is another reason to celebrate haiku. As a teacher in the
graduate creative writing program at the University of California
at Davis, I taught the haiku tradition to older students
on a serious poetry-writing track, using Robert Hasss
superb book The Essential Haiku, and it was as surprising
and useful to these sophisticated young adults as to any
schoolchild. Haiku amazingly reaches every class, every
age.
Eventually
somehow I became known as a poet. My poetic work has had
many influences: Scotch-English traditional ballads and
folksongs, William Blake, Classical Chinese poetry, Walt
Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Native American songs
and poems, haiku, Noh drama, Zen sayings, Federico Garcia
Lorca, and much more. The influence from haiku and from
the Chinese is, I think, the deepest, but I rarely talk
about it. Though not a haiku poet I have written
a number of brief poems, some of which may approach the
haiku aesthetic. They also fit into a larger project which
I call Mountains and Rivers Without End in which
I am searching for ways to talk about the natural landscapes
and old myths and stories of the whole planet. I am sure
I have bitten off far too much, and my poetry might be better
if someone just cut it up into little pieces.
Over
the years I have made many trips to Japan, and continued
to learn from contemporary Japanese poets, especially Tanikawa
Shuntarô, Ôoka Makoto, and Sakaki Nanao
Nanao is a truly unique figure. The contemporary Korean
poet Ko Uns very short Zen (Korean Son)inspired
poems are hugely pleasurable and very subtle. I enjoyed
getting to know the haiku of Dr. Arima Akito through the
translations of Miyashita Emiko and Lee Gurga.
Before
I wind this up, I want to share with you the pleasure I
take in a just a few of Masaoka Shikis haiku (I could
cite many more.) For example,
inazuma
ya / tarai no soko no / wasure-mizu
Lightning
flash
in the bottom of the basin,
water someone forgot to throw out
which
I remember almost every time I bend over and wash my face,
hoping for a flash of light ! and,
yuki
nokoru / itadaki hitotsu / kuni-zakai
A
single peak,
snow still on it
thats where the province ends
because
from where I live (which is in the mountains of California)
there is a mountain not too far to the east forever with
springtime snow. I always think beyond that is the
desert state of Nevada and remember Shiki.
But perhaps most interesting for me is this:
nehanzô
/ hotoke hitori / waraikeri
Picture
of the Buddha
Entering Nirvana
One person is laughing !
When
I was a Zen student in Kyoto my teacher once gave me a little
testing koan which was In the Buddhas Nirvana-picture,
everyone is crying. Why are they crying? Some years
later I find Shikis nehanzô haiku and I can
never stop laughing. What a fresh mind he had ! (All the
above translations are by Burton Watson.)
To
finish up: Yves Bonnefoy in his excellent presentation here
in 2000 said that we in the Occident are not experiencing
a kind of haiku fashion but an awakening
to a necessary and fundamental reference, which can only
remain at the center of Western poetic thought. And
he goes on to say, that all these exchanges are for the
greater good of poetry, which is our common good and
one of the few means that remain for preserving society
from the dangers that beset it.
It
is quite to be expected that Mr. Bonnefoy and myself, French
and American, each in our own way, invoke haiku as a benefit
and a value in matters of the troubled world today. People
are always asking whats the use of poetry?
The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the
mind of compassion, are roughly one and the same, and through
poetry perhaps they can keep guiding the world toward occasional
moments of peace, gratitude, and delight. One hesitates
to ask for more.
|