Commentary: Richard Wright uses images skillfully in his haiku to produce a montage effect for the reader to sense the interaction between nature and human. This haiku focuses on the essence of a moment when non-human nature is connected to human nature through the interaction between visual and auditory images. The poet not only literally hears the sound of a trumpet but sees it weaving autumn mists in his imagination as well. He creates an intangible quality of peaceful atmosphere and mood with tangible words in this haiku and thus challenges the reader to appreciate it aesthetically based on the interaction of the senses... excerpted from Sensibility to Nature in Richard Wright's Haiku
A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing
-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, p.59
In the spring of 1958, Jack Kerouac was invited by Bob Thiele to make a poetry album for the Beat Generation. Accompanied by his friends, tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Kerouac made Blues and Haikus, a mixture of jazz and poetry. According to Bruce Eder, it was a “stunning duet between speaker and saxmen, working spontaneously in this peculiar mix of jazz and voice, in which the saxmen [did] get their solo spots around Kerouac's work”.
The opening number is a 10-minute piece called “American Haikus.” It features Kerouac’s “expressive recitation of a series of poems punctuated by the improvisational saxophone playing of Cohn and Sims.”
The most amazing thing about Jack Kerouac is his magic voice, which
sounds exactly like his works. It is capable of the most astounding and
disconcerting changes in no time flat. It dictates everything.
-- Ted Berrigan, poet and staff writer at the Paris Review
Now, Listen to Jack kerouac reading "American Haikus"
Below are some of his haiku I like:
In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
has died of old age
Evening coming --
the office girl
unloosing her scarf
The summer chair
rocking by itself
In the blizzard
Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway.
Useless, useless,
the heavy rain
Driving into the sea.
The windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction
Straining at the padlock
the garage doors
At noon
And the following haiku is my favorite:
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 below is a
merely factual description of a scene.
The sparrow hops
Along the verandah,
With wet feet
Kerouac’s two-axis, cinematic haiku is beautifully crafted and serves well as a starting point for many thoughts and emotions (for more information about Shiki's haiku and Kerouac’s view of it, see my "To the lighthouse" post, titled "The Model for All Haiku!?").
Reading Japanese haiku through the lens of R. H. Blyth, Jack Kerouac familiarized himself with the form, but in "Explanatory Note to Some Western Haikus," he also proposed a way to write haiku in Western languages:
The
"Haiku" was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to
be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision
of life in three short lines. A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself
with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt
themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that "Western
Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language....
Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery
and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi
Pastorella.
You have said that haiku is not written spontaneously but is reworked and revised. Is this true of all your poetry? Why must the method for writing poetry differ from that of prose?
KEROUAC
No, first; haiku is best reworked and revised. I know, I tried. It has to be completely economical, no foliage and flowers and language rhythm, it has to be a simple little picture in three little lines. At least that's the way the old masters did it, spending months on three little lines and coming up, say, with:
In the abandoned boat,
The hail
Bounces about.
That's Shiki. But as for my regular English verse, I knocked it off fast like the prose, using, get this, the size of the notebook page for the form and length of the poem, just as a musician has to get out, a jazz musician, his statement within a certain number of bars, within one chorus, which spills over into the next, but he has to stop where the chorus page stops. And finally, too, in poetry you can be completely free to say anything you want, you don't have to tell a story, you can use secret puns, that's why I always say, when writing prose, “No time for poetry now, get your plain tale.”
INTERVIEWER
How do you write haiku?
KEROUAC
Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into three short lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation—so you see a leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a sparrow during a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a little sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in Japanese you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do that in American—or English—because we don't have the same syllabic bullshit that your Japanese language has. So you say: “Little sparrow”—you don't have to say little—everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so you say”
Sparrow
with big leaf on its back—
windstorm
No good, don't work, I reject it.
A little sparrow
when an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back
from the wind.
Hah, that does it. No, it's a little bit too long. See? It's already a little bit too long, Berrigan, you know what I mean?
INTERVIEWER
Seems like there's an extra word or something, like when. How about leaving out when? Say:
A sparrow
an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back --
from the wind!
KEROUAC
Hey, that's all right. I think when was the extra word. You got the right idea there, O'Hara! “A sparrow, an autumn leaf suddenly”—we don't have to say suddenly do we?
A sparrow
an autumn leaf sticks to its back --
from the wind!
[Kerouac writes final version into a spiral notebook.]
INTERVIEWER
Suddenly is absolutely the kind of word we don't need there. When you publish that will you give me a footnote saying you asked me a couple of questions?
KEROUAC
[writes] Berrigan noticed. Right?
INTERVIEWER
Do you write poetry very much? Do you write other poetry besides haiku?
KEROUAC
It's hard to write haiku. I write long silly Indian poems. You want to hear my long silly Indian poem?
INTERVIEWER
How has Zen influenced your work?
KEROUAC
What's really influenced my work is the Mahayana Buddhism, the original Buddhism of Gautama ´Sàkyamuni, the Buddha himself, of the India of old . . . Zen is what's left of his Buddhism, or Bodhi, after its passing into China and then into Japan. The part of Zen that's influenced my writing is the Zen contained in the haiku, like I said, the three-line, seventeen-syllable poems written hundreds of years ago by guys like Basho[WITH FLAT LINE ON TOP PLEASE!!], Issa, Shiki, and there've been recent masters. A sentence that's short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought in it is a kind of haiku, and there's a lot of freedom and fun in surprising yourself with that, let the mind willy-nilly jump from the branch to the bird. But my serious Buddhism, that of ancient India, has influenced that part in my writing that you might call religious, or fervent, or pious, almost as much as Catholicism has. Original Buddhism referred to continual conscious compassion, brotherhood, the dana paramita (meaning the perfection of charity), don't step on the bug, all that, humility, mendicancy, the sweet sorrowful face of the Buddha (who was of Aryan origin by the way, I mean of Persian warrior caste, and not Oriental as pictured) . . . in original Buddhism no young kid coming to a monastery was warned that “Here we bury them alive.” He was simply given soft encouragement to meditate and be kind. The beginning of Zen was when Buddha, however, assembled all the monks together to announce a sermon and choose the first patriarch of the Mahayana church: instead of speaking, he simply held up a flower. Everybody was flabbergasted except Ka´syapiya [FLAT THINGIES OVER FIRST A AND I], who smiled. Kásyapiya [DITTO!!] was appointed the first patriarch. This idea appealed to the Chinese, like the sixth patriarch Hui-Neng who said, “From the beginning nothing ever was,” and wanted to tear up the records of Buddha's sayings as kept in the sutras; sutras are “threads of discourse.” In a way, then, Zen is a gentle but goofy form of heresy, though there must be some real kindly old monks somewhere and we've heard about the nutty ones. I haven't been to Japan. Your Maha Roshi Yoshi is simply a disciple of all this and not the founder of anything new at all, of course. On The Johnny Carson Show he didn't even mention Buddha's name. Maybe his Buddha is Mia.
I just read William Yardley's New York Times article, and found out that American expatriate poet, critic and inventor of the jazz haiku, James A. Emanuel, died on Sept. 28 in Paris.
James A. Emanuel, a poet, educator and critic who published more than a dozen volumes of his poetry, much of it after his frustration with racism in the United States helped motivate him to move to France, died on Sept. 27 in Paris. He was 92. ...
In the 1960s he taught at City College in New York, where he started the first class on black poetry, wrote academic studies of Langston Hughes and other black writers, and mentored young scholars, including the critic Addison Gayle Jr. ...
Even as his reputation grew, he became increasingly frustrated with racism in America. When European universities began offering him teaching positions in the late ’60s, he accepted. By the early ’80s, after the death of his only child in Los Angeles, he had vowed never to return to the United States. He never did.
He wrote often of racism, including in an early work, “The Negro”:
Never saw him.
Never can.
Hypothetical,
Haunting man.
Eyes a-saucer,
Yessir bossir,
Dice a-clicking,
Razor flicking.
The-ness froze him
In a dance.
A-ness never
Had a chance.
Naomi Long Madgett, a poet and the founder of Lotus Press, which published many of his works, said Mr. Emanuel was masterfully precise, careful to leave room for readers to participate.
“Some poets don’t know when a poem should stop,” Ms. Madgett said. “It’s much harder to write a short poem than it is to write one that just rambles on and on. James Emanuel knew what to say and what to leave out.” ...
In his later years, Mr. Emanuel claimed to have invented a new form of literature:the jazz haiku, stanzas of 17 syllables he read to the accompaniment of jazz music. Like the music, they felt improvisational even as they respected structure:
James A. Emanuel is credited with creating the jazz haiku, which he had read to musical accompaniment throughout Europe and Africa. He successfully “[expanded] the imagery of the traditional haiku beyond its single impression by including narrative and rhyme” (Hakutani, p.195). For this creation he was awarded the Sidney Bechet Creative Award in 1996. Throughout his writing career, he published two collections of haiku: Reaching for Mumia: 16 Haiku in 1995, and Jazz from the Haiku King in 1999. For him, Jazz and haiku both “convey spontaneously created expressions that are free from any economic, social, or political impulses” (Hakutani, p.202), and one of the most important motifs in his haiku is jazz: everything is jazz and can be expressed in a three-line poem:
EVERYTHING is jazz:
snails, jails, rails, tails, males, females,
snow-white cotton bales.
The following is a group of haiku, entitled “‘I’m a Jazz Singer,’ She Replied,” that consists of an introductory haiku followed by four haiku, each beginning with “Jazz”:
He dug what she said:
bright jellies, smooth marmalade
spread on warm brown bread.
“Jazz” from drowsy lips
orchids lift to honeybees
floating on long sips.
“Jazz”: quick fingerpops
pancake on a griddle-top
of memories. Stop.
“Jazz”: mysterious
as nutmeg, missing fingers,
gold. Less serious.
“Jazz”: cool bannister.
Don’t need no stair. Ways to climb
when the sax is there.
To conclude this post, I would like to share with you one of my political haiku about jazz music written for James A. Emanuel
twilit Route Irish...
loud Jazz music
from the tanks
Note: Rout Irish is the military main supply route, leading from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone, and it is one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in Iraq, if not the world.
Reference:
Yoshinobu Hakutani, Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From the Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku, The Ohio State University Press, 2006.
DS: You place great emphasis on craft in your work, and this is something that is lacking in contemporary published poetry. Are you a perfectionist? In later years you’ve turned to the haiku form. Have you simply run out of things to say in free verse or sonnets?
JAE: I am a perfectionist only in those situations which perfection is both possible and desirable in my opinion. Much published poetry is mediocre because the poets concerned cannot improve upon it or will not try to do so. Commercial publishers accelerate this downgrade. Some editors assist the decline because they either do not like poetry (like some teachers) or share the cash-and-carry mentality of those in front of the office assembly line.
Just as discipline is most needed when freedom is first won, my turn to free verse at the end of the 1960s entailed a conscious struggle to fuse widening subjects with what might be called “veteran” form. Like the boxer who knows when to shift from dancing jabs to a strong right hook, the veteran in free verse knows when an anapest or two cannot do the job of a well-chosen monosyllable.
What I want to say in poetry (what I want to present or picture, rather) has little to do with form, for I could use a sonnet to present the Harlem street jive, dig? Some time ago, the following line in iambic pentameter could have opened a sonnet: “Had only ink to drink for many brights.” As for the haiku form, its subjects are unlimited. I turned to it because of its unusual challenge to say much in little, to waste no word, to find and express the possibilities of beauty in all of creation.
