The Joys of Fishes

Knowability

In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm says that Chuang Tzu has “empathic resonance” with the fish described in this poem. This is Chuang Tzu’s way of knowing. Who can deny this? However, does this generous stance apply to the writing of haiku? I often promote the idea of “knowability” in haiku, by which I mean to write about what you can observe through your five senses, as opposed to employing excesses of speculation or intellectual understanding, especially if it comes from an omniscient point of view. Chuang Tzu’s argument counters this perspective—or seems to. Whether it does or doesn’t, though, strikes me as beside the point. I see haiku as first-person poetry. In haiku, if the poem presents personal sensory experience, the reader can join the observation in a summoning of feeling or idea through their own shared sensory experiences. If the poem presents something seemingly “unknowable” (such as saying that fishes are joyful or by taking a third-person omniscient viewpoint), that choice too easily imposes an idea—and I’ve found that haiku work best by summoning a feeling or idea rather than by imposing it (this thought comes from an essay by Louise Glück). In that sense, it’s irrelevant if you “know” a fish is happy or if you don’t. Show me that the fish is jumping and I will know for myself that the fish might well be happy. I am not saying that Chuang Tzu is wrong. I am saying that haiku typically work better if they lean as much as possible on what you can experience through the five senses. This stance has been shown in centuries of the best haiku in Japanese, and a century of the best haiku in English.

—31 July 2025