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Feature: Jim Kacian: A Haiku Primer

Chapter 1: What is a Haiku?

Let’s begin with a haiku:

red light.
and right now–
these few seconds

What is going on right now, right where you are? Is the sun shining or has it clouded over? Is the wind blowing or has the day gone still? Is that bird singing, or has it just left off? In the house, has your furnace just clicked on, or the air conditioner? Is water gurgling through the pipes? As for yourself, can you feel your blood coursing, lungs expanding or contracting? Are you aware of your emotions rising, your thoughts racing?

And we should ask at this point, is this haiku? Or is it merely a catalogue? To take Basho’s statement literally, everything–every action, feeling, thought–is a haiku, provided it is what is happening right here and right now. If this were true, then this book would end here–and haiku would be endlessly clogged by the minutiae of life.

John Cage, the 20th century composer, once said, in the same vein: “Everything you hear is music.” And he composed music designed to prove his point, including his famous “silent” compositions wherein the ambient noise of the environment was featured: we might hear the creaking of the chairs in the auditorium, or an airplane passing overhead, a cough (or several), and increasingly, whispers.

The fact is, we distinguish between music and noise. Even granting Cage a great deal of latitude, not all music is of similar interest: some works you want to hear again and again, some are exhausted in a single playing. The ambient noise which Cage wished us to focus upon, while occasionally capable of capturing our attention, generally does not interest us because it goes on from moment to moment into more of itself, and is not organized into areas of greater interest in the way we consider music to be.

It is the organization of sound that we appreciate as the art of music. In just this way haiku which is only a list of the objects and processes of “right here, right now,” would soon weary us, and we would quickly lose interest. And so to Basho’s famous dictum, we must append “and also something more than that.”

red light.
these few seconds
of robinsong

In this example we can find the here and now of the poem easily enough, but it is the something more which brings the here and now home to us. In haiku, most of all it is this something more that we will seek. We will attempt a working definition of haiku at this point. Definitions are made not to burden us with restrictions, but to make it possible to have at the ready information which will help us know what to look for when considering haiku.

Bear in mind that a definition may be slippery, and especially so for so lively and active a process as poetry. All definitions are retrospective rather than predictive. They comment on what has been the case in the past, and may be less useful when encountering something new. It is even possible for a definition to interfere with our understanding of what haiku is and may be, if we make it too restrictive or inflexible.

On the other hand, a definition can be useful and inspiring. It is an arrow, aiming us towards a target, indicating a direction that we may follow. It can be vital. It can inspire. It can open more than it closes. Haiku, as a still-vital entity, defies any sort of comprehensive definition. It is still engaged in the process of fulfilling its destiny, and what that will be no one can say. What we can say is that haiku has undergone dramatic change on several occasions, most recently in the last half of the twentieth century. At any moment when things are in flux, as now, we need to choose our definitions with care, and with a little bit of skepticism.

So to begin, let us say a haiku is

. . . a brief poem . . .

There are two parts to this opening phrase–let’s look at them in order. “brief”: nothing characterizes haiku, at least superficially, so much as this point: haiku are the shortest poems in the world.

snow drifts
on the driftwood
. . . Geri Barton

There have been some forms–the epigram, the couplet, the monostich — which also produce short poems. But all haiku are short, and this is part of their distinctiveness on paper, to the ear and in the mind. How brief is brief? We will consider this in detail later, but for now consider the examples in this chapter. All have two images laid out over two or three lines, and vary between 6 and 15 syllables, with the average being around 12. Haiku usually are somewhere close to these numbers; we might think of 17 syllables as an upper limit, only occasionally approached.

And then: “poem.” A haiku is a poem, which means it is a literary work using metrical, rhythmical and other poetical means to achieve an aesthetic point or moment. When published, it is a public sharing, and subject to the same kinds of scrutiny, criticism and appreciation that other art forms are. Throughout its history haiku has been used as many things: as meditation —

thinking about
mindfulness
I pee on my shoe
… Michael Ketchek

therapy–
after chemo
only wanting to read seed catalogs
…. Pamela Miller Ness

journal–
the village at dawn;
a bird’s song is part of the silence
… Larry Gates

memoir–
dad’s wake
the weight of my new shoes
… R. A. Stefanac

teaching–
while she counts syllables,
the haiku slips away
… Mildred Rose

farewell:
skipping stones
talking of people no longer here
.. Jack Barry

to name but a few. And it succeeds in each of these contexts. But only when considered as poetry, as literature, does haiku realize its highest potential and fullest range. R. H. Blyth, in considering this very issue, writes, “. . . if there is ever imagined to be any conflict between Zen and the poetry in haiku, the Zen goes overboard; poetry is the ultimate standard.”

Blyth was a believer that Zen was the proper attitude from which to consider haiku, and we may in fact substitute, for his use of Zen, what he would say in the larger context: if there is conflict between the poetry in haiku and “anything else”, the “anything else” is jettisoned. His final phrase–poetry is the ultimate standard–is ours as well. Of courses, what we mean by “poetry” will need to be defined, and it may be that we will have to dispose of some of the notions of poetry we inherit from our culture to come completely to a realization of what it means in haiku.

In fact, it is only when we understand haiku in this way that its other uses become available to us to full effect. Only at this point does haiku become what poetry must be for all poets: a way of life. Of course, there is more to consider in how haiku realizes itself as poetry: and we will examine issues of form, content, language and qualities best served by the haiku form. But it is important to establish that we mean to consider haiku first and foremost as literature. Everything else will devolve from this principle point.

. . . which records an experience . . .

Haiku always begin with an experience. This experience can take many forms: it can be something actually witnessed or participated in–

garden work–
talking to each other
back to back
. . . Dimitar Anakiev

or something from memory—

wind against
my pantleg–
cat gone for years
. . . Edward Beatty

even something imaginary —

pulling light
from the other world . . .
the Milky Way
. . . Yatsuka Ishihara

Throughout the history of haiku, the first of these kinds of experience has been preferred by poets, editors and readers, and because of this haiku is often referred to as the poetry of the real. Many of the most revered and quoted haiku that have been of this sort. But memory and imagination are powerful providers of experience, too, and many poems fulminated from them achieve a resonance within us, since they reach the truth of a situation and of a feeling.

Walking with you again
in the snow . . .
only my footprints
. . . Frances Bradford Neighbors

While experience, of whatever sort, is primary to the creation of haiku, it is the radical step of recording the experience which opens it from a private experience into a work of art.

Moments of insight are usually actual rather than verbal, so the act of “translating” the moment into words is the artistic leap, the act in which the catalog of “what’s happening right here, right now” is selected, organized, alchemized into poetry.

. . . of a moment of revelation . . .

What moments are so compelling that they are worth this exacting artistic treatment? It is not enough that the moment be beautiful, or touching, or closely observed, although all of these are elements which the best haiku evince. Haiku are about something more than these things: they are about those moments when we see the world clearly, as it is, and not as we have become habituated to see it.

not seeing
the room is white
until that red apple
. . . Anita Virgil

Insight may be profound —

trembling
as the grape next to it
is plucked
. . . Dhugal Lindsay

it may be slight–

In the wake
of a gliding swan
ducks rocking
. . . Gustave Keyser

but once we have had it, we cannot ever see the world in quite the same way again.

. . . into the nature of the world . . .

But this is not to say that haiku is merely close observation. Neither is it simply the statement of discovered significance. Haiku is the poetry we make of our experiences of significance and close observation. The revelation that is inherent in haiku is tied closely to the way we regard the world. It is alternately dependent upon the newness of our observation, as if we are seeing something for the first time, but at the same time it hinges upon our feeling that, once seen, we know this observation to be true, as though we’ve known it before and all along.

So a sense of familiarity is critical to our sense of revelation: revelation, and therefore haiku, is not novelty, but renewal.

Summer night:
we turn out all the lights
to hear the rain
. . . Peggy Willis Lyles

This insight may relate to the natural world–

Canada Geese
suddenly from the heart
the field takes wing
… James Tipton

One of the reasons for this is that the natural world is the common ground between all poets and readers of haiku. There is virtually no one who has not experienced a wide array of natural phenomenon, and stood in awe of its incidents and effects. This common ground helps situate the poem, and therefore the poet and the reader, quickly and usefully in much haiku. Our attention therefore may be given to the rest of the experience; and, at the same time, the background of natural phenomenon serves to broaden our response to the experience, giving us a natural sounding-board for our feelings and responses.

Or again, it may take a more human face–

second husband
painting the fence
the same green
. . . Carol Montgomery

However, while haiku may explore interior space, they are not by nature personal. Haiku are not poems we write about ourselves, not another form of confessional poetry; in fact, they are moments when the poet loses his own self-consciousness because of an identification with his subject —

yellow daffodil
I look for something
very blue to wear
. . . David Cobb

Haiku attempt to objectify reality, and look outward upon it, rather than inward.

. . . in an effort to share it with others . . .

Spring.
The child sharpens
the green pencil
. . . Elena Manta Ciubotariu

to its most obscure recesses–

snowstorm outside
inside the bloody
rain of the month
. . . Kaye E. Bache

As the body of poetry grows, so too does our picture of the world, and not merely by the accumulation of facts. Instead, we have the means to see directly into the nature of reality, untinged by personal considerations, moment to moment.

Haiku create a reality. Like all good art, they persuade. In the sense that our map of the cosmos is changed by reading and entering haiku — that is, in the sense that haiku have power — they have, they are, reality.

Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation; owner of Red Moon Press; and editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Yearsh (W.W.Norton, 2013). He was also founder in 1999 and is presently general editor of Contemporary Haibun. He was the founder of Contemporary Haibun Online, and was its sgeneral editor until Bob Lucky stepped into the general editor role.

A Draft of "A Haiku Primer" was first published in f/k/a: archives real opinions & real haiku.