To the Lighthouse: Haiku Noir

The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning.  And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning -- an indicator for the exact reading -- placed alongside the basic hieroglyph…From our point of view, haiku are montage phrases. Shot lists.

-- Sergei Eisenstein, pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage".

English-language anthologies of haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments. This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.

-- Haruo Shirane, “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:”

Every time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the connectedness of human experience.

-- Chen-ou Liu, June 2012 Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold

Below is an excerpt from my June 2012 Lynx interview with Jane Reichhold:

L: Recently you were working with “darker themes” in your haiku. Why did you want to do this? And how did it work out for you? Do we need to enlarge the subject matter used in the Japanese genres?

CL: I've been writing a series of haiku noir on darker themes, such as sudden death, suicide, psychiatric illness, violence, homelessness, alienation, estrangement, racism, rape, …etc. I've had first-hand or second-hand experiences of dealing with most of them (Note: A haiku noir is a narrative haiku, i.e. a cinematically dark flash non/fiction in verse. I gave an in-depth analysis and examples in my  “To the Lighthouse” post, entitled "The Arranged Marriage of Haiku and Cinema" . For further information on the relationship between haiku and cinema, please read my Haiku Reality essay, titled "Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective").

I am most influenced by Takuboku's conception of "poems to eat." He defined them as "poems written without putting any distance from actual life,...and they are not delicacies, or dainty dishes, but food indispensable for us in our daily meal."

In terms of dealing with one's dark moments, the difference between poets and other people is that poets can convey their feelings through poetry. As Graham Greene stresses, “writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in [that] human condition.”

Every time when I put my tangled feelings, stress, or anxiety on paper, I feel relief in the moment. Especially when writing about dark moments, I connect them to the feelings of the past and of the present, and in doing so, it enables me to discover the wholeness of things and the connectedness of human experience. This view of writing about dark moments as a way of healing is well explored in Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our stories Transforms Our Lives. My review of this book can be accessed at http://scr.bi/owyOEI .

As for enlarging the subject matter used in English language haiku, I think there is an urgent need to do so. most English language haiku are based on a narrower definition of haiku. Professor Haruo Shirane discusses this in his famous essay, titled “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Basho, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths:” “English-language anthologies of haiku are overwhelmingly set in country or natural settings even though ninety percent of the haiku poets actually live in urban environments. This would seem to discourage haiku poets from writing serious poetry on the immediate urban environment or broader social issues.”  His essay reminds me of Shiki’s , titled “Haiku on Excrement,” about discovering -- or rediscovering -- beauty in excrement. In the essay, Shiki demonstrates that the old masters had great capabilities of producing beauty out of ugly material, “citing 41 poems (most of them haiku) on feces, 18 on urine, 4 on farts, 24 on toilets, and 21 on loincloths.” In the concluding section, he makes clear that he is not particularly fond of writing haiku on excrement; but he mainly uses this topic as an example to show how the poet can explore a wide range of themes (Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, pp. 29-30)

I identify with Shiki’s approach to writing haiku. Most of darker themes in my recent haiku are, directly and indirectly, related to urban life issues that are experienced by all of us and covered by media on a daily basis. For me, they are legitimate subject matters for haiku writing.

Selected Haiku Noir:

dark clouds gathering

a man sets himself on fire

outside the bank

a column of smoke …

last night’s distant howling

follows me

new scar on his neck

her eyes cut my question

into small talk

a bag of cherries

crushed on the dirt road

red shoes

washing an apple

over and over and again...

leaden sky

Sketchbook, 6:5, September/October 2011

shouting match...

a boy drums his fingertips

on the windowpane

first day of Ghost Month

a distant howl breaking

the moonless night

Sketchbook, 7:2, March/April, 2012

end of Ghost Month

a blue mist drifting

through the basement

lovers' lane

a baby crying

in the garbage

autumn sunset

stray dog carcass

cut in two

"Urban Haiku and Senryu," World Kigo Database, 2011

pop, pop, pop

in a dark alley

the harvest moon

Haiku Canada Review, Winter/Spring 2012

wolf moon…

with monosyllabic words

she answers the question

Magnapoets, 8, July 2011

Silent Night…

KKK snowman with dark eyes

holding a noose

Haiku News, Jan. 8, 2011

Christmas morning

my neighbor's kid cuts off

his snowman's head

Sketchbook,7:2, March/April 2012

winter solstice...

she cuts her hair off

in a hot bath

Paper Wasp, 18:2, Winter 2012

blood moon...

a scream cut off

in the middle

Sketchbook, 7:1, January/February 2012

cliff inside my head

the darkness at the end

of a winter dream

English-Romanian Haiku Anthology, 2014

rain beating on rain he cracks

Under the Basho, 2, 2014

You can read the full text of  A Far Distant Howl: Selected Haiku Noir by Chen-ou Liu, a freebie at Scribd.


Updated, July 9:

she slits her wrist
lying down in a warm bath...
hazy winter moon

When I workshopped the haiku above at THF on September 21, 2011, all of the suggested revisions I got are various minimalist versions of my original. Only one poet noticed my employment of the emotional montage technique

Here is my reply to the suggestions I got:

The emotionally suggestive power of a haiku noir where the emotional montage technique is employed depends on the visual details and the chronological order of shots (described in the fragment and phrase of the haiku).

The juxtaposed fragment (L3)  not only enhances the mood of the poem, but also can function as human emotions over/ reflection on the opening image (the phrase, Ls 1&2), bringing out the "emotional truth" in response to the fate of the "she" portrayed in the poem.

To the Lighthouse: Arranged Marriage of Haiku and Cinema

The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning.  And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronunciation only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyph…From our point of view, [haiku] are montage phrases. Shot lists.

-- Sergei Eisenstein, pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage".

In his 1989 Tanner lecture, entitled "Poetry and Modernity," Octavio Paz ,winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature who wrote haiku, emphasized that in the early 20th century, the poets were influenced by the new forms of reproducing reality, and that the major attraction, especially for the poets, was photography in motion: the cinema. According to his study, Blaise Cendrars's “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” is the “first marriage of poetry and film.” And more importantly, Cendrars even employed some filmic/cinematographic techniques, such as montage and flashback, in his poetry to shatter “syntax and the linear and successive nature of traditional poetry.”

To the best of my knowledge, Jane Reichhold is the first haiku poet who wrote about and employed a filmic technique (zoom-in) in haiku writing 1. Below ia an excerpt from her article, “Haiku Techniques,” which was first published in Frogpond, 23:3 Autumn 2000 and on AHApoetry.com:

The Technique of Narrowing Focus - This is a device the Japanese master, Buson used often because he, being an artist, was a very visual person. Basically what you do is to start with a wide-angle lens on the world in the first line, switch to a normal lens for the second line and zoom in for a close-up in the end. It sounds simple, but when done well it is very effective in bringing the reader’s attention down to one basic element or fact of the haiku.

the whole sky
in a wide field of flowers
one tulip

Inspired by Jane's writing, I wrote an essay, entitled “Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective,” (Haiku Reality, 5),  on Sergei Eisenstein’s view of haiku and his use of the haiku aesthetics to develop his theory of montages:

Below is a relevant excerpt:

Utilizing the fact that the human mind is highly capable of associating ideas or images in a way that the “senses overlap, subconsciously associating one with another to produce a unified effect,” 25 Eisenstein argues that film can communicate by a series of juxtaposed images that do not need a linear, narrative or consequential relationship between them. 26 In the mind of the viewer, shot A followed by shot B will create a new meaning C, one that is greater than the sum of its component parts, A and B. 27 For a cinema “seeking a maximum laconism for the visual representation of abstract concepts,” 28 the employment of montage as a collision of shots is a “means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition…the starting point for ‘intellectual cinema.’” 29

Furthermore, Eisenstein likens montage to haiku, “the most laconic form of poetry.” 30 He describes haiku as the “concentrated impressionist sketch,” 31 in which minute details are highlighted by using minimal language. In the following haiku written by Japanese haiku masters:

A lonely crow

On leafless bough,

One autumn eve.

-- Basho

What a resplendent moon!

It casts the shadow of pine boughs

Upon the mats.

-- Kikaku

An evening breeze blows.

The water ripples

Against the blue heron’s legs.

-- Buson

It is early dawn.

The castle is surrounded

By the cries of wild ducks

-- Kyoroku 32

Eisenstein thinks that haiku is “little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases,” 33 and that each of these haiku is made up of montage phrases or shot lists. 34 The “simple combination of two or three details of a material kind yields a perfectly finished representation of another kind – [the] psychological.” 35 For him, “haiku… act simultaneously as linguistic signifiers and denotative images of ‘natural’ things.” 36 Structurally and consequentially speaking, he considers haiku as an extension of the ideogrammatic structure characterizing the Chinese and Japanese writing systems. He believes that a Japanese haiku master’s juxtaposing two or three separate images to create a new meaning parallels his crashing two or three conflicting shots with each other to produce a new filmic essence. The juxtaposition of contrasting images in haiku (or the collision of conflicting shots in cinema) may single out, highlight, and purify a particular quality. Take Basho’s ever-famous frog haiku for example:

an old pond...

a frog leaps in,

the sound of water

His juxtaposition of two contrasting images of "an old pond" and " a frog leaping into the pond" makes a larger meditative, lonely silence “heard” through the opposition of the water sound. 37 More importantly, juxtaposed images of some haiku engage the reader in more than one sense, as can be seen in the following ones by Basho:

Their fragrance

Is whiter than peach blossoms

The daffodils

Over the even sea

The wild ducks' cry

Is faintly white

It is whiter

Than the rocks of Ishiyama

The autumn wind

Onions lie

Washed in white

How chilly it is 38

A color is employed to suggest the quality of scent, a crying sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature. 39 As in the case of the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein argues that the montage effect of haiku results in the experience of synaesthesia or multisensory experience. 40 This characteristic helps him to develop the key principles of audiovisual montage and color-sound montage. 41

It is through his intensive study of Japanese culture in general, and haiku along with Kabuki theatre in particular, and his engaging discussions with his contemporaries that Eisenstein develops a different conception of montage. It is one that is highly influenced by his fascination with the ideogrammatic structure embedded in haiku and Chinese and Japanese writing systems. What he finds so intriguing about haiku is “how it manages to present a conceptual image, or mise-en-scene effect without resorting to any direct copulative ‘is’ or word to link the series of disjunctive images.” 42 As Steve Odin emphasizes in his essay regarding the Influence of traditional Japanese aesthetics on Eisenstein’s film theory, “Eisenstein's incorporation of basic principles from traditional Japanese aesthetics into his universally acclaimed montage theory of film, together with his practical application of this theory as a film director in the making of Potemkin and other landmark motion pictures, ranks as one of the most significant twentieth-century achievements in East-West comparative aesthetics and philosophy of art.” 43 Moreover, many Japanese haiku poets and scholars have recently re-appropriated his ideas about montage to write or interpret haiku. Among them, Yamaguchi Seishi applies the concept of “nibutsu shogeki (collision of two objects),” 44 borrowed from Eisenstein's notion of montage, to haiku writing, and he believes that “haiku should focus on the interrelationship between different objects of nature, a relationship that must ‘leap beyond’ the predictable.’” 45 The famous Basho scholar, Haruo Shirane, also excels in applying the montage theory to interpret Basho’s “poetics of scent,” 46 claiming that “the notion of the montage can be helpful in analyzing the dynamics of linking.” 47 There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenstein’s montage theory has made and will continue to make a great contribution to reading, writing, and interpreting haiku and its related genres.

Examples

Below are three cinematic haiku that were published on NeverEnding Story. See my detailed analyses in their comment sections:

Spring evening --
the wheel of a troop carrier
crushes a lizard

-- Dimitar Anakiev

a poppy . . .
a field of poppies!
the hills blowing with poppies!

-- Michael McClintock

through the smoke
dark red lips
of a drag queen

-- Kirsten Cliff

Note:

In his essay, entitled "Matsuo Basho and The Poetics of Scent," Haruo Shirane writes about the comparisons between Basho's poetics of scent and the montage techniques employed in modern cinema:

Basho's poetics of scent and mutual reflection may be compared to the montage in modern cinema in which a succession of seemingly unrelated shots are closely linked by connotation or overtone. Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer in film production and theory, once defined montage as "an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots" and that may result in "emotional dynamization."9 A montage equivalent of the meditative nioi link-nioi in the narrow sense-might be the scene of a young aristocratic lady strolling across a well-manicured garden followed by a shot of a swan gliding across the water, the subdued but elegant moods of the two gently intersecting. A hibiki montage, on the other hand, with its dramatic tension or emotional intensity, might be the cinematic juxtaposition of an explosion rocking a brick building and a sleepy-faced lion suddenly roaring. A cinematic utsuri ("transference") link could be a scene of a couple kissing followed by a shot of an avocado being peeled. The second scene, while unrelated to the first, is obviously "colored," given a definite sexual resonance. The sense of sexuality is transferred from one scene to the next. A kurai link might be the juxtaposition of a shot of a beggar on a city street with the shot of a dog emerging from a mud puddle. In the montage, the second shot deepens a particular emotional effect found in the first shot, or vice versa, the combination often creating Eisenstein's "emotional dynamization," an emotional reverberation that neither of the shots by itself could produce."10

9 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Forum Essays in Film Theory and Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda, A Meridian Book (Cleveland/New York: The World Publishing Company, 1957), 49, 57.

10 Nose Tomoji, Renku no geijutsu no seikaku (Kadokawa shoten, 1970), 19-20.