To the Lighthouse: Reexamining One-Line Haiku

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare color

Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

by John Ashbery, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years edited by Jim Kacian and published by W. W. Norton & Company, p. 91

The “haiku” above are taken from  John Ashbery's poem, titled “37 Haiku,”  that originally appeared in Sulfur, #5, 1981 and later was included in Ashbery’s 1984 book,  A Wave:

Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon

Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year

Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic

Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel

And I think there's going to be even more but waist-high

Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer

You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit

You nearly undermined the brush I now place againts the ball field arguing

That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now

And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove

Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance

Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

He is a monster like everyone else but what do you if you're a monster

Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car

The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it

What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises

Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there

In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there

You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now

Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country

A pencil on glass—shattered! The water runs down the drain

In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer

A child must go down it must stand and last

Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms

Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking

There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book

The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?

In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity

The box must have known the particles fell through the house after him

All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates

I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare color

When I first flipped through the actual book, I was startled by the large amount of haiku written in one line. There were far more one-line haiku in Haiku in English:The First Hundred Years, a style that Kacian favors and fosters, than are currently in magazines and haiku books. For someone without a large overview of the current haiku styles, they will get the wrong impression of what is actually being written and in what style.

As I read the one-line haiku, it became apparent to me that whoever had done the choosing of the poems to include in the book was not very rigorous. One-line haiku can be as good as any three-line haiku in the hands of the experienced. The main weakness of the form is the ease of a one-line to become a simple run-on sentence. It is absolutely vital that the author understands, and uses, the concept that a haiku is composed of two parts – the fragment and the phrase, especially when there are no line breaks to show this hallmark of haiku. Experienced haiku writers can create the cut with grammar; persons less adept need punctuation. When they leave out the break the one-line haiku becomes simply a sentence without punctuation. It is then possible for one to pick out any sentence of vision or genius in a work and declare it to be a one-line haiku as I suspect in the case of Ashberry’s poems. For readers, it is too easy for the eye to swipe across the one line in one movement. The line breaks stop the reader’s eye, give the brain the time to form an image, before continuing on to capture another image to add to it and then! the image that pulls the poem together. Just printing one line of illogical words does not make a haiku no matter how well-known the name.

-- excerpted from A Review by Jane Reichhold, Simply Haiku, 10:3, Spring/Summer 2013

“It is absolutely vital that the author understands, and uses, the concept that a haiku is composed of two parts – the fragment and the phrase, ...”

I concur !!

This structural characteristic, one of the defining cutting effects, helps to differentiate haiku from the rest of three-lined poetry.

“Experienced haiku writers can create the cut with grammar; persons less adept need punctuation. When they leave out the break the one-line haiku becomes simply a sentence without punctuation. It is then possible for one to pick out any sentence of vision or genius in a work and declare it to be a one-line haiku as I suspect in the case of Ashberry’s poems.“

I respectfully disagree with Jane Reichhold. The key issue regarding cutting (kire) is about the cutting effects, not about the use of punctuation or creating a syntactic break.

Take my one-line sentence haiku for example,

I think therefore I am entering a butterfly's dream

3rd Prize, 18th Kusamakura International Haiku Competition (2013)

In terms of reality-sense, the closing phrase, “entering a butterfly's dream,” which alludes to the story about Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, the foundational text of the Japanese butterfly haiku, lets readers experience an instantaneous cutting away of linear time and space.  At the completion of the haiku there is an abrupt return, which is based on the thematic motif of Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, to the Cartesian subject described in the opening phrase.

Below is a relevant excerpt from To the Lighthouse: “Re-examining the Concept and Practice of Cutting”

Evaluated in the historical and literary context, cutting words (kireji) “need not be as dramatic in effect as many non-Japanese poets have believed.” (Morris, p. 409). However, some kind or another of cutting (kire) or break has been the major aesthetic criterion that makes a hokku (pre-modern name for haiku) a hokku. The way cutting words were employed and the kinds of hokku they helped shape have changed a lot since the early days of haikai no renga (Morris, p.409)

According to his groundbreaking essay, entitled “Buson and Shiki” (pp. 409-14), Mark Morris points out three formulations about the use of cutting in the classic Japanese haiku tradition. Unlike his poetic predecessors, Basho treated cutting words in terms of function and effect:

First, the cutting word is inserted in order to cut the verse. If the verse is already cut, it is not necessary to employ a word to cut it. For those poets who cannot distinguish between a cut and non-cut poem, earlier poets established cutting words. If one uses one of these words in a hokku, seven or eight times out of ten the hokku will be cut. The remaining two or three times, however, the hokku will not be cut even though it includes a cutting word. On the other hand, there are hokku that are cut even though they include no cutting words (NKBZ 51:478-79)”

For Basho, it was “the cutting effect rather than the cutting word itself that ultimately mattered.” (Shirane, p 104). According to Herbert Jonsson's study, in the haikai-related writings after Basho the actual use of cutting words became less important, whereas, the cut, whether it is marked by a cutting word or not, was the central issue (Jonsson, p. 43)

This view of cutting was re-articulated in “one of Buson's texts, the preface written for an ambitious study of cutting words, the Ya-kana-sho, by Ueda Akinari:

A Kireji is something which is not when it is, and is when it is not. There are poems with kireji that are not cut, and poems with no kireji that are cut. (Jonsson, p. 43)

Buson's main point here is the mere insertion of a cutting word doesn't by itself create a cut.

Armed with this view of the use of cutting, I think it’s fair to say that the mere use of a punctuation mark/line break/… doesn’t by itself create the cutting effect, and that most importantly, there are some haiku creating the cutting effects without using any sort of Western equivalents of Japanese cutting words.

Most English-speaking haiku poets understand a cut as a syntactic break through the use of punctuation. This view produces, comparatively speaking, weaker haiku (at best, “postcard” haiku or “aha” haiku). For me, a good haiku, evaluated in the historical and literary contexts of the English language haiku (with no abiding kigo tradition) and of modern poetry (with an emphasis on psychological depth and the poetic image), is an imagistic poem with a psychological bent, opening up an interpretative space for the reader to co-author the poem. This type of haiku can be easily found in the ones with psychological “ma” advocated by Professor Hasegawa Kai, who, in my view, has been articulating a new/the fourth view on the use of cutting/cutting words.

The case of John Ashbery’s “One-Line Haiku:”

John Ashbery’s haiku impetus came from From the Country of Eight Islands, translated primarily by Hiroaki Sato, who rendered Basho's "Seventy-Sixe Hokku" in single lines. Not knowing haiku's bipartite structure, he simply imitated Sato's one-line translations of Basho's hokku. His poem, “37 Haiku,” really is a series of sparsely punctuated single line poems that  may be considered either as prose or as verse. Comparatively speaking, the three “one-line” haiku selected by Jim Kacian are visually appealing; however, the phrases in each “haiku” are isolated fragments bearing no discernable relationships (thematic, emotive, or visual) to the surrounding phrases. These poems are mainly fusion of  lyric images. Like Peter Stitt, I might best conclude that each of these one-line poems is a "word- or image-construct than a meaning-construct (p. 34).

For more information about one-line haiku, see To the Lighthouse: To Be or Not to Be a One-line Haiku?

References:

Mark Morris, "Buson and Shiki: Part One," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Dec., 1984), pp. 381-425

Herbert Jonsson, Haikai Poetics: Buson, Kitō and the Interpretation of Renku Poetry, Doctoral Thesis, Stockholm University, 2006

 Peter Stitt, Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets, University of Iowa Press, 1997


Updated, Nov. 28

Dean Brink, “John Ashbery’s '37 Haiku' and the American Haiku Orthodoxy,” Globalization and Cultural Identity/Translation (2010), pp. 157-165.

According to Dean Brink, Ashbery’s “37 Haiku” can be viewed as a ”low-key satire of the American haiku tradition and a critique in light of haiku conventions in Japanese haiku” (p. 159). Below is his interpretative reading of  one of Ashbery’s “37 Haiku:”

In “37 Haiku” Ashbery treats the form as a line, and adds humor in his critique and satirical rendering of haiku, speaking about the line standing, the virility of the haiku line, which he has brought to American haiku: one long line, not a broken line as if afraid to stand up as a real haiku. Ashbery playfully presents a haiku on Viagra: a performative, phallic haiku, somewhat bawdily and literally, as in the opening verse:

Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon

This opening verse alludes to impotence based on “Old-fashioned” thinking that sex only follows a long courtship and perhaps marriage, and that “difficulty” arises because of these “shadows” of guilt, with “hanging down” and “difficulty in love too soon” reinforcing this interpretation by association – called in Japanese engo or “associated words.” Such words appear in proximity to create an ambiguous expression, reinforcing multiple meanings, not one, thus heightening ambiguity and imaginative possibilities. Ashbery is adept at weaving such intertexts and associated words so as to generate multidimensional and playful haiku. As in Japanese haiku, this should not be confused with an expressive poetics per se, for poetic matrices can be accessed in such formations that parallel the use in classical poetry, as in the modern tanka by Tawara Machi (Brink 2008). Japanese poetry tends to invoke this allusive drawing of vectors to various planes of reference into convergence. The intertexts combined in this haiku by Ashbery can be said to surreally mingle Victorian morality (“Old-fashioned shadows”), pearls of wisdom on how love should take its course (“that difficulty in love too soon”), and a vague allusion to the question of impotence of the haiku itself (“hanging down”). He presents a more vital, dynamic and indeed, as a single unbroken line, a more phallic line. In addition, there are in these haiku an unusually high frequency of references to his gay sexual orientation, as appears elsewhere in the book, A Wave.