Matsuo Basho achieved a degree of humble celebrity during 18 th century

Japan. By humble celebrity, I mean he was respected in his home villages

and the various places he visited on his many foot journeys across the
Japanese countryside, but humble, in way today’s celebrity culture has little
affinity. Basho taught just enough to keep moving. He lived in a series of
small huts built by his students. For the most part he lived a reclusive life
that mixed writing, travel, and teaching with the practice of Zen Buddhism.
Basho thought of his aesthetic as “the way of simple elegance. Yet, this
sometime hermit, wandering spirit with from a bygone age where technology
consisted of has much to teach today’s students. In fact, few writers have
more to contribute to our 21 century students than Basho.

Basho brings a few essential traits that postmodern culture saturated with
technology and plagued by distraction can be transformative to students on
an existential level.
Meditation and Calm
The practice of Zen, which stresses one pointed mediation, teaches the
indispensable skill of intense focus and concentration. The meditator’s
stillness and silence bring about the conditions necessary for true focus.
Today’s students are bombarded by distractions and the ubiquitous cell
phone. Even if turned off, a cellphone plays on a student’s mind distracting
attention for class discussion and activity.
Observation, Walking, and Place
Students struggle writing dramatic and objective prose. They often interject
opinions, feelings, biases in addition to using too many passive sentences.
For example, a student describes a local nature preserve as a “quiet and
tranquil place,” and “the sound of rushing water and rustling leaves,” but we
are left to wonder about the color of the leaves, which trees they fall from
and where does the rushing water emerge from? “quiet” and “tranquil” are
repetitive and slow down the prose. Even though the student names the
place, the prose does not indicate its uniqueness. It is a place with no sense
of place. In other words, this place could be almost anyplace.

Basho’s prose teaches the value of observation. You describe what you see
with concrete detail as concisely as possible. Deserve the color pf trees, the
type of trees and provide a clear sense of the place’s value to you as writer
and observer. Basho writes, “In the shade of a huge chestnut at the edge of
town, a monk made his hermitage a refuge from the world.” The tree is
specific, the location clear and its value precise, “a refuge from the world.”
The monk does not require a personal, name the fact a monk made this
place his hermitage indicates the places spirituality and its sacred value
which is inheres in the natural setting.

Observation can best be made, in a real sense. Only be made on foot. Basho
made many long journeys by foot- somewhere around 1,500 miles for his
haibun/travelogue Journey into the Interior-with an occasional short or
horseback. Aside from walking to class many students do little walking these
days. Walking provides unique opportunities for observation and sharpening
one’s sense of vision, hearing, and touch. Traveling by car dulls the senses,
detaches one from embodied experience, and allows for a blurred
experience, as one speeds by landscapes viewed only briefly in the rearview
mirror. Even driving into a wild area with a 4-wheel drive vehicle offers little
sense of place. You can only experience nature on foot. You must feet must
touch and traverse terra forma the very earth we have been harming for so
long. One foot you can smell the flowers, touch the trees, hear the birds,
taste the berries, and see, like Basho, that “ancient pond” far from the
trampling crowd, and hear water as a frog jumps . Place helps shape one’s
identity, andin.

Walking and observation give the student a genuine sense of place- a natural
place. Place helps shape one identity in a double sense. The observer’s
identity as part of the place and the place’s identity, through your
experience of it. For example, in the sentence quoted above Basho continues
about the chestnut tree: “Saigyō’s poem about gathering chestnuts deep in
the mountains refers to such a place.” Here Basho pays respect to a deeply
admired influence on his work, the 12th century Buddhist monk-poet Saigyo.
This simply allusion links the past and present to the reverence for place.
Such a poetic connection to place contributes to Basho’s identity as poet and
observer of nature in its specificity.

Finally, Basho allows his identity or personal mark to further link both the
chestnut tree to another revered person, the 8th century Buddhist priest
Gyoki, and pays homage to the priest’s incorporation of the chestnut into the
very tool that aids his walking and holds together his home. “I wrote on a slip
of paper: The Chinese character for ‘chestnut means ‘west tree,’ alluding to
the Western Paradise of Amida Buddha; the priest Gyōki, all his life, used
chestnut for his walking stick and for the posts of his home. Basho’s little
note links not just 2 poets and a priest to this place of nature, but the two
language-Chinese and Japanese- and “Amida Buddha” (immeasurable light)
connects the place to “pure land” Buddhism popular in East Asia. In other
words, the place has spiritual significance.

Haiku: Discipline, Presence, and Awareness

Basho elevate the Japanese haiku from light entertainment to high art. As a
poetic form, Haiku is now practiced and studied across the globe. Reading
Basho’s haikus helps students learn the values of disciple, conciseness,
nuance, sensitivity, and intuitive understanding.

Although, an English language version of a haiku does not match the form’s
original structure, some basic constraints remain. In the English, the haiku
requires a few essential components. Learning to master these conventions
develops disciple and precision that translates well beyond poetry.
Furthermore, writing from contents like designing from constraints promote
the creative thinking required but not taught very often.

The English language haiku should have:

 3 lines
 17 syllables in the following format 5-7-5
 A seasonal word (this stresses the natural setting of classic haikus)
 A cutting word that marks the transition in the poem between two
different moments.

The cutting word makes possible the double nature of this short lyric form. It
is a conversation much like that between two parts of a Renaissance sonnet:
the octave, a volta, and a sestet.

Here is an example from Basho.

Japanese
朝茶飲む 僧静かなり 菊の花

Asacha nomu/ So shizuka nari/ Kiku no hana

English

Drinking the morning green tea,

The monk is calm.

The flowers of chrysanthemum.

The first two lines are descriptive, and the third juxtaposes an image
seemingly unrelated to the first two lines. This demands reflection from the
reader. Consequently, unlike a snapshot of a moment in time, the haiku build
in this addition moment of reflection strengthening the art’s depth and
resonance.

Reflection brings about the potential of awareness. A great haiku prompts

the reader to an “aha” moment, an epiphany or illumination understood as
awareness. Awareness from a Zen perspective, however, shares little with
the west’s academic emphasis on intellectual awareness or an analysis of
the poem. The awareness is intuitive and goes beyond the cognitive aspects
of understanding to something more profound. That something stretches
beyond words hence the Buddha’s “Flower Sermon” was comprehended
through a smile not a “the meaning of the poem is…”. This intuition
transcends duality or binary thinking through categories to Awareness of
interconnectedness: monk, tea, chrysanthemum. In reaching this awareness
students obtain an appreciation of nature and our interdependence with
nature. Students now reach a “calm”, a sense of tranquility their grade and
anxiety provoking search for the right meaning or answer does not allow.

The Art of Life: The Simplicity of Beauty

Basho travel light, but in addition not a writing tool he would bring a brush.
Nature spoke to him of its beauty and he spoke of nature in a beautiful style,
the Basho haiku is not just a written poem, but a poem expressed through
the beauty of calligraphy. The word translates as something like “beautiful
writing” so the very act of compassion, putting pen, ink brush or similar
instrument to paper becomes an artistic practice. Both visual art and written
practice, calligraphy expresses reverence for the very inscription of the word.
In a world where students type everything on their computer, the practice of
handwriting a poem or, for that matter, a letter, brings about a greater
awareness of the actual word as symbol and meaning, an expression and
object of beauty, visual and tactile, even kinesthetic, as the brush stroke
applies pressure, forming the word in a single stroke. The student now has an
embodied experience and sense of poetry and language academic writing
with its detached intellectual style frustrates.

Finally, haiku poets (haijin) often practice haiga, the visual equivalent of the
poem. The poet paints the same scene he or she has just captured in words.
The haiku and haiga work together as a harmonious work of art. They
complement each other not in opposition as light-dark, or right-wrong, but as
one whole, a coin with two sides.

The exemplar of haiga would be one of Basho’s prominent disciples Yosa

Buson.

A_little_cuckoo_across_a_hydrangea(Haiga) ほととぎす自画賛 紙本墨画

In haiga, like a comic, or any graphic storytelling that combines image and
text, the artist or artist and writer strive for what Scott McClud calls
interdependent combination of word-image. The haiga or comic panel
requires both image and picture in equal measure. To remove one would
diminish the product considerably. For students appreciating
interdependence translates to teamwork and both cooperative learning an
cooperative art making.
Reimaging Haiku for the Contemporary World
Once students have a foundation in Basho’s work then instructors can move
to modern versions of haiku, haiga and haibun. Ezra Pound imported haiku
into modern poetry and made the classic form a cornerstone for his own
experiments with imagism. “In a Station of the Metro” perfectly captures the
haiku’s essence, but now in an urban setting, literary underneath the earth
evoked by traditional Japanese poets, with an excised third line.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Likewise, you don’t find “crowds” on Japan’s mountain roads, but the
juxtaposition of two striking, unrelated images, urban-nature, has lead to
volumes of commentary signifying its rich, evocative power and its
resonance with millions for readers.
Empowering Minority Youth
African American poet Sonya Sanchez uses the haiku in a powerful,
frequently political fashion that offers not just an appreciation of beauty or
an homage to tradition, but also a strong social critique. Just as Basho pays
homage to past poets when a stops a places recalling these figures like
monk-oet Saigo or the warrior , Sanchez remembers the African American
ancestor’s whose spirits animate her poetry. One of her most powerful
sequences, “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman” begins:
“Picture a woman
riding thunder on
the legs of slavery ... ”
Nature is present in the “thunder” and Harriet Tubman, preeminent conductor of the
underground railroad links the ghost of slavery with the ride to freedom.