To the Lighthouse: The Model for All Haiku !?

Outside the haiku community, R. H. Blyth is a little known author, but in our increasingly globalized village, his books about Japanese short form poetry, especially about haiku, have a profound influence on English-speaking readers and writers, especially on the ones who are interested in Asian arts, culture, and spiritually (mainly Zen Buddhism). In his 1952 influential book, Haiku, Blyth viewed the following poem by Shiki as “the model for all haiku” (p. 517)

nureashi de suzume no ariku roka kana

The sparrow hops

Along the verandah,

With wet feet

And he made the following comment (pp. 517-8):

This might be taken as the model for all haiku. It is poetical and yet extremely matter-of-fact. It is like one of those perfect jokes, so simple, so inexplicable. The delicate three-pronged little marks on the floor of the verandah, so soon to dry up and vanish for ever, as transitory as the pyramids or the solar system -- what an infinity of meaning in them! (note: this is a typical comment by Blyth, in which he said little or nothing about the poet’s use of kigo or cutting, two formal characteristics of Japanese haiku; it’s mainly because he was more interested in Zenizing the haiku he reviewed )

His view was uncritically accepted by most of our fellow villagers and later this haiku was quoted in Jack Kerouac’s 1958 acclaimed novel, The Dharma Bums (p. 59), which has greatly helped promote Blyth’s view.

[Early in the novel, Ray Smith (“Jack Kerouac”), who lives in Alvah Goldbook’s (“Allen Ginsberg’s”) rose covered cottage in Berkeley, California, notes that: “On the walls are hundreds of books everything from Catullus to Pound to Blyth . . . “ (p. 17). And a few days later, while hiking with Japhy (“Gary Snyder”), Ray expresses with great joy;]

Oh this is like an early morning in China and I’m five years old in beginningless time!” I sang out and felt like sitting by the trail and whipping out my little notebook and writing sketches about it. “Look over there,” sang Japhy, “yellow aspens. Just put me in the mind of a haiku . . . . A real haiku’s gotta be simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ by Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles” (p. 59).

After searching University of  Toronto’s e-databases, I found out that Shiki’s haiku has never been commented on to further explore its “greatness” or “depth,” except that in a Simply Haiku interview (6:4, Winter 2008) with Robert Wilson, Richard Gilbert adopted a biographical approach to “enrich the meaning”  of  Shiki’s haiku by giving “an informed understanding of the place, era, and significant relationships in Shiki's life around the time of composition.”  This means the “enriched meaning” of the poem relies mainly on the reader's extratextual knowledge. Most importantly, throughout the whole interview, although pointing out that the haiku was kigoless, Gilbert never said anything about Shiki’s use of cutting. 

Now, be honest with me, if I didn't tell you Blyth’s comment  above and replaced Shiki with my name or any other little-known name, would you think this haiku was brilliantly crafted, and that it “might be taken as the model for all haiku?” If yes, I would like to know your reason(s), especially the ones based on Shiki’s use of kigo or cutting.

To conclude this post, I would like to share with you Kerouac’s haiku below, which is accredited as "the first baseball haiku and a classic:" (Burns, ‘Gallery Fifteen: Play Ball”)

Empty baseball field --

A robin,

Hops along the bench

L1 sets the context, seasonal, thematic and emotive, while allusive Ls 2 &3 make a shift in theme and imagery, thus establishing a contrasting relationship with their preceding line through Kerouac’s skillful use of the zoom-in technique. This contrasting relationship fully embodies the “principle of internal comparison,” which is well articulated by Harold G. Henderson in his study of Japanese haiku (p. 18); therefore, it  gains added poignancy. On the contrary, without establishing any sort of comparisons/contrasts, Shiki’s haiku is a merely factual description of a scene.

Kerouac’s two-axis, cinematic haiku is beautifully crafted and serves well as a starting point for many thoughts and emotions.

Updates:

1 Below is an excerpt from John J. Morrell's "Summers in the Skagit: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and the Language of the Lookout"

Kerouac’s interest in and use of haiku in The Dharma Bums results from Snyder’s influence, and he represents it as such in the text. Japhy even critiques Ray’s attempts at haiku, offering examples and advice. When Ray makes his first try at spontaneous haiku during their hike up Matterhorn, suggesting, “Rocks on the side of the cliff…why don’t they tumble down?,” Japhy responds:‘Maybe that’s a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated,’ said Japhy. ‘a real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles. (DB, 59).

Japhy points to Ray’s questioning “why” the rocks don’t fall as the element of his haiku that complicates his image, imposing a metaphysical question on top of what should be the simple record of an encounter with the material world. Japhy suggests the appropriateness of haiku as a poetic form for representing engagement with the natural world, and more importantly, for prompting in the reader a more-than-intellectual encounter with the poem itself. Kerouac represents Ray’s increasing understanding of haiku as the result not only of his conversations with Japhy, importantly, but also as an organic product of his engagement with a particular landscape: “Walking in this country you could understand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had written, never getting drunk in the mountains or anything but just going along as fresh as children writing down what they saw without literary devices or fanciness of expression. We made up haikus as we climbed, winding up and up on the slopes of brush” (TDB, 59). Kerouac’s stylistic shift towards haiku and away from “bop prosody” represents Ray’s changing conception of the natural world and his attainment, in the fictional world of The Dharma Bums, of Buddhist insight.

2 Below is an excerpt from Robert Wilson's interview with Richard Gilbert:

RW: I read with great interest your comments regarding Blyth, who for many is a non-reproachable iconoclast revered for his insight into and translation of haiku. The American Beat poets of the late 1950s and '60s (Snyder, Kerouac, Corso, etc.) read his treatises on haiku and were greatly influenced by them; yet, you say he was biased towards classical haiku and held little value in modern haiku. "Blyth idealized the classical while devaluing the modern as at root selfish, small-minded, and confused." Your comments challenge popular thinking and will certainly shake heads. What are we to make of Blyth? Was he on or off the mark regarding haiku theory?

RG: Regarding haiku theory, he was on his own mark. Blyth sited or situated haiku in an idiosyncratic way, voluminously, and with great passion. As someone who was excited by haiku and Japanese culture via Blyth, I have great respect and admiration for his efforts. At the same time, it's worth asking why he isn't quoted and referenced by academicians these days. (note: for example, in his 40-page Introduction to Light Verse from the Floating World: An Anthology of Premodern Japanese Senryu, Makoto Ueda  emphasizes only one simple fact that "R. H. Blyth [had] translated more senryu into English than anyone else, " p. 27-8, That's all. He says nothing about Blyth's books on senryu, Japanese Life and Character in Senryu and Senryu: Japanese Satirical Verses). It's hard to know where to place Blyth. Certainly, if we consider him an authority on the meaning and cultural value of haiku, on its native soil, it seems valuable to re-work and enrich Blyth's interpretations. To do justice to this topic, a long paper needs to be written. In this short space, my colleague Itō and I would like to discuss Blyth's translation of an internationally influential haiku penned by Shiki.

First, here's a quote from a paper published in 2000 on haiku metrics written by myself and Professor Judy Yoneoka, illustrating a cross-cultural encounter with Blyth, as penned by Kerouac.

Even considering the increased interest in haiku form and its development, Japanese haiku and possibilities in English might have remained minor cultural footnotes if it hadn't been for the publication and popular success of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, in 1958 (following the publication of On The Road, in 1957, and his resulting rise to fame). Kerouac did something for the haiku movement no amount of scholarship alone could, in creating the character Japhy Ryder, a scarcely-veiled portrait of the poet Gary Snyder. Japhy transplants something of the Japanese haiku ethos, or an imagination of it, into the heart of American vernacular. Japhy seems like a modern-day gloss on Bashō—a kind of Bashō cum Li Po cum Oregonian lumberjack: "From the beginning a woods boy, an axeman, a farmer . . . . his face was a mask of woeful bone, but his eyes twinkled like the eyes of old giggling sages of China, over that little goatee . . . . he'll make the top of your head fly off, boy, with a choice chance word." In his pilgrimages into natural settings and intuitive feeling for nature, acquaintance with Zen practice and philosophy, simple lifestyle and dwelling-place, Japhy tantalized and inspired readers with novel possibilities for perception, spirituality, lifestyle, and poetic process.

3 I just came across the following poem by Ozaki Hosai, which I think could be read as a response haiku to Shiki's above:

the footsteps of a sparrow
walking on the tatami floor
sound familiar


References:

Reginald Horace Blyth, Haiku, Volume 2: Spring, The Hokuseido Press, 1952.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Penguin Books, 1958.

Allan Burns, Montage: The Book, The Haiku Foundation, 2010.

Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho and Shiki, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

John J. Morrell, "Summers in the Skagit: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and the Language of the Lookout," Beat Generation Symposium, 2008.

Robert D. Wilson,  "A Brilliant Literature: Robert Wilson Interviews Professor Richard Gilbert, Part I," Simply Haiku, 6:4, Winter 2008.