Haikú

This inquiry builds on the work of such thinkers as David Abram and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty; like their work, it addresses the fact that people in the Western developed world,
through their acculturations, sacrifice intimacy with the natural world. The article explores
one remedial measure: the Yamato Kotoba language of the Japanese. This is a language
before the Chinese injection of spoken and written words, one that preserves the earlier
words better suited, the authors propose, to expressing the interpenetrating experience of
the person with—in this case the Japanese—natural setting. Such an intimacy appears, for
instance, in Basho’s Haiku. In the same vein, Japanese Koto Dama deploys the spiritual power
that resides in words—as they are both spoken and unspoken. These linguistic phenomena
are explored and explained insofar as they preserve, capture, and celebrate human intimacy
with nature. In the words of Merleau-Ponty, they re-member humans as “flesh of the world’s
flesh.”

late evening
a vase of red tulips
on the kitchen table

“This collection was born on Epiphany. For three days, snow has been lighting roofs and resting on branches. Ontario is in the middle of lockdown, and I have time to sit by my window. I am reminded of the kitchen windows in the farmhouse: if you couldn’t see the highway across the fields, then snow was drifting in from the lake; in the other direction, not being able to see the neighbour’s home at the near corner meant it was time to stay inside. One memory led to another.

I completed this collection on Pentecost. January 2021 Ontario is still in stay-at-home lockdown. The apple blossoms have come and gone, and the lilacs are in full bloom. May2021”

-  Kocher, Philomene, “new boards on the barn,” The Haiku Foundation Digital Library
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“Walking down the street where I had lived for nine years, something caught my attention: on my neighbour’s rosebush were rose hips, roses, and buds. It was late August, and I was amazed at seeing buds still. As a haiku poet, it is often when I am surprised that I am moved to write. It is also often true that this happens when I am walking, perhaps because I am closer to nature despite the sidewalks and traffic, and because I have slowed down. And so I wrote this poem: 

rose hips and roses and buds
on the same bush
August evening

I recorded my awareness of a particular moment. Reflecting on it later, I realized how much this image spoke also to my life circumstances. I was only months away from my fortieth birthday, and I pondered the parts of my life that were mature, that were blooming, and that were still in bud. After almost two decades exploring haiku, I am still astonished at how much story can be distilled into such small poems.  The potential of haiku to capture so much experience with so few words has always fascinated me.”

- Inviting connection through the gap in haiku PHILOMENE KOCHER Language and Literacy Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2009

“rainy day
on the floor a puzzle piece
of blue sky

Today a puzzle piece takes over. It’s the perfect poem for today as the sun has relented a little and we are not sweltering, but upon my opening Taj’s ... rendering of Grant’s poem, the  sky has become blue again."

Read more by Claudia Radmore, Writer & Publisher
https://claudiaradmore.com/2015/08/25/grant-savagemasud-taj/

Es el haiku un arte literario de gran importancia que mantiene al ser humano impresionado a pesar de vivir en un mundo moderno, sea esto por su muy reducida estructura silábica y el poder místico que mantiene en su fondo sin importar la brevedad dicha. Esta forma poética fue y es la influencia de brillantes creadores que han intentado imitarla, algunos mejor que otros, cuestión que se agradece pues con ello se preserva este antiguo modo de ver el mundo. José Juan Tablada brinda tal magia a nuestro país, adaptando a su manera el haiku y, apropiándose de él para dar paso a la vanguardia, labor que sirvió, como una suerte de Prometeo, para que los escritores de la época encontraran un camino distinto para crear poesía.

While the Spanish language had already been engaged with brief forms such as couplets, proverbs and aphorisms prior to the explosion of modernity and its artistic avant-garde “isms” throughout the first few decades of the 20th century, it can be argued that the introduction of the Japanese poetic form, known nowadays as the haiku, can be credited as one of the original inspirations for the short, unrhymed, free verse poem’s trendiness over the last hundred years. Since José Juan Tablada’s 1919 publication of the first collection of original Spanish-language haikus, the form has made its way throughout Ibero-America stimulating a steady flow of experimentation and creolization that has transformed the poetic genre into an integral part of the Ibero-American poetic tradition having been cultivated by some of the brightest poets of various nations: Rafael Lozano, Francisco Monterde, Octavio Paz (Mexico); Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina); Flavio Herrera (Guatemala); Guilherme de Almeida, Millôr Fernandes, Haroldo de Campos, Pedro Xisto, Paulo Leminski, Alice Ruiz (Brazil). The haiku’s brevity requires the poet to capture a singular moment and transmit that moment’s sensation to the reader. Ideograms, visual wordplay, and typography are just some of the ways in which the image-centered Japanese haiku inspired graphic innovation in the Western poetic form. Variations of the haiku can be traced throughout several major poetic movements and philosophical ideologies of the last century (Imagists, ultraístas, concretistas, Zen Buddhists, etc.) leading us to or, perhaps, paving the way for the minimalist contemporary poetry of this century.