Go to the Pine: The Haiku Moment

Bashō advised his students, “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine. . . .” By the same token, if one wishes to learn about haiku, one should go to the haiku themselves. As it seems reasonable to suppose that Bashō intended his pupils to go to Japanese pines rather than to the pines of New Jersey or Oregon, it seems equally reasonable that we should go to the haiku written by our contemporaries in our own language for instruction.1 For this reason, I choose to use only English-language haiku as examples.

To a certain extent, classes, workshops, articles, and handbooks are useful in learning to write haiku; however, the best and ultimate teachers are the haiku themselves. Each honest haiku is a learning experience for the poet, and though a particular haiku may have been many times rewritten and much polished in the process of creation, careful reading frequently reveals some of the steps in the progress of evolution from haiku moment to haiku.

Each of our days is filled with hundreds of potential haiku moments, but they do not become haiku moments until we recognize them as such. Recognition does not mean that our senses merely identify and record the impressions of the moment; it means that the moment absorbs our total awareness, that through awareness we intuitively grasp the significance of the moment and its relationships within the context of a larger design. To enter this world of complete absorption, we must first learn to pause—

pausing

halfway up the stair—

white chrysanthemums

Elizabeth Searle Lamb 2

A stair leads from the first to the second floor. Halfway up is a window—and on the sill of this window or in the garden below, white chrysanthemums. In her comings and goings, the poet passes these white flowers often. Her eyes see them; her brain registers the fact that she has seen them. But one time she pauses, banishing thoughts of errands and tasks—pausing, her senses embrace and are embraced by the white flowers until nothing exists but her and the chrysanthemums. On the other hand, there may have been no chrysanthemums at all except remembered chrysanthemums, seen in another place, at another time, and halfway up the stair this visual memory became more vivid than present reality. The poet suddenly perceived a relationship between the chrysanthemums and something else that gave her original experience deeper significance. Readers, of course, will find various other meanings below the surface of the poem, but our main concern here is the “pausing.”

There are times, though, when one cannot pause, when potential haiku moments go flying by, as in—

the express subway

rushing between darknesses

past patches of light

L. A. Davidson 3

Each patch of light is a platform where people wait for trains, where possible haiku moments also wait, but the poet is whisked by at a speed that reduces all to a momentary streak of light. Very likely, she sits there thinking of nothing in particular except that she has some distance to go before her stop. Her mind is passive, patient, at rest. Without conscious thought, the poet begins to feel the rhythm of light patches alternating with stretches of darkness. The haiku may have taken form during the subway ride; it may have taken form later when recalled through the stimulus of other rhythms.

These two haiku give us some insight into how to be receptive to the haiku moment: first, we must pause—and pausing, disengage our thoughts from matters outside the haiku moment. Then, we must yield to the rhythms of living inherent in the haiku moment, for life’s rhythm is the only rhythm required in the haiku. Finally, neither the first poet ascending the stair, nor the second poet taking the express subway, did so with the intention of finding a haiku moment. Thus, it would seem we are being told: do not go looking for the haiku moment—let it come to you.

Notes

1 This is not to say that we should turn our backs on the Japanese haiku masters. The master poets of old Japan were indebted to those of older China, but their assimilation of a literary tradition, transplanted in time and geography, required that poetic forms be modified in order to adapt to the needs of Japanese language and taste. In the same way, we who write haiku in English are indebted to the haijin of Japan and, in like manner, have made changes in the haiku form to accommodate it to our own cultural and linguistic tradition.

2 Lamb, Elizabeth Searle. In This Blaze of Sun. Paterson, New Jersey: From Here Press, 1975. p. 5.

3 Davidson, L. A. The Shape of the Tree. Glen Burnie, Maryland: Wind Chimes Press, 1982. p. 47.