Poetic Musings: Waterfall Haiku by Gary Snyder

Hiking in the Totsugawa Gorge

pissing
watching
a waterfall

Regarding Wave, 1969, p. 74

Gary Snyder

Though humorous, it is something more than witty, at least one reads it in the context of Snyder’s Zen studies. Beyond the obvious, hyperbolic parallelism of two streams, this poem embodies the intersection of the relative and the absolute. In Zen, the universe is all “one body,” and in that body there is only one stream, and yet there are two -- both containing one another and the poet. This non-dual ideation works for Snyder’s poem in the same way it does in Basho’s most famous and endlessly referenced haiku about frog-water-sound, "An old pond: a frog jumps in -- the sound of water" (Sato 118). At the instant of the frog's contact with the water, everything -- the frog, the speaker, the pond and the water's sound -- disappears into an indissoluble unity, while also remains distinct (pp. 281-2).

-- excerpted from Peter Harris's essay, entitled "In a Sea of Indeterminacy: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Haiku," which is included in A Companion to Poetic Genre, a collection of essays that examines genres and forms.

Beyond the obvious, hyperbolic parallelism of two streams, this poem embodies the intersection of the relative and the absolute. In Zen, the universe is all “one body,” and in that body there is only one stream, and yet there are two -- both containing one another and the poet.

As Harris emphasizes in his insightful comment above, Snyder's little gem reveals our proper relationship to the natural world: different sizes, but same source.

And technically speaking, the title, "Hiking in the Totsugawa Gorge," which has more words than the poem text, can be read as a prefatory note, a common characteristic of Japanese haiku that specifies the setting or provides a compositional context, and the cascading structure visually and thematically enhances the poem.