Thoreau’s gravesite:
the smell of woodsmoke
on the cold spring air
Among Floating Duckweed, 1994.
Bruce Ross
Commentary by Paul Scherschel: First of all, I think this haiku is wonderful.
Throeau, who went to the woods to find himself, can also show this connection between Self and Nature. People tend to disconnect themselves when they do not realize they are a part of nature. As Thoreau did, people need to discover nature. Also, we need to enter into the nature conveyed in Ross’s haiku. The haiku written above shows the connection between life and death.
Ross wrote to me that writing haiku should have, “Honesty of feeling. Connection with nature. Linking two aspects of the world in an "absolute metaphor." Evoking beauty, joy, sadness, insight, etc.” We can smell the woodsmoke, visualize the gravesite, and feel the coolness. The gravesite can represent death, but spring represents birth.
This haiku by Ross includes the Zen principle of oneness to combine the reader with the haiku, and the nature expressed in that haiku.
Ian Marshall's Walden by Haiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) is the first collection of found haiku that won a award (2010 Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Awards for Best Criticism) for its opening up new insights into haiku and its source text, Walden. Ian Marshall distills Henry David Thoreau's musings on nature and the world around him, chapter by chapter, down to 293 "haiku moments." Each chapter ends with an explanation of the specific haiku aesthetics or principles that fit the theme, such as juxtaposition, wabi, sabi, yugen, resonance, and impermanence. In the introduction, Ian Marshall speaks of his threefold purpose in writing the book: "to offer a primer on haiku, to provide fresh insights into Walden, and to demonstrate the pertinence of haiku aesthetics as a theoretical basis for understanding the nature-writing tradition in English” (p. xvi), and he also emphasizes that
Thoreau’s aesthetic principles and his relationship with the natural world do turn out to have a great deal in common with haiku. Let us count the ways: an emphasis on simplicity, a respect for worn and humble and familiar things (wabi), a sense of aloneness (sabi), a reliance on paradox, and the use of humor, especially in the form of puns …. in trying to see the world as it is, to come to know it through direct experience, to inquire into the meaning and value of a natural fact, to wonder what it means ‘to live deliberately,’ Thoreau indeed had to have in mind (some of) these intentions and to have pursued them deliberately, in a way that suggests some convergent evolution between Thoreau at Walden and the writer of haiku… Thoreau's senses and intuition become his primary means of engaging with the world around Walden Pond, much like renowned Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho's experience at "The Old Pond.” … I contend that the haiku moments are latent in the text [Walden], waiting to be "found" or unearthed or brought to our attention, and I contend that haiku aesthetics can help us better understand what is going on in Walden . . . I suggest that a whole vein of American-nature writing tradition may be similarly compatible with the aesthetics of haiku, and so literary ecocritics might find a long-standing body of aesthetic theory useful in reading and understanding their subject (pp. xv, xvi, xvii, xx, xxviii).
Selected “Found Haiku” by Henry David Thoreau
a borrowed axe
returned
sharper
where a forest was cut down
last winter
another is springing up
much published, little printed
the rays which stream
through the shutters
huckleberries
the bloom rubbed off
in the market cart
