When the world stopped, tilted on its axis in March 2020 everything went quiet. The traffic outside my house stopped. I began to notice the birds singing, the lilt of the spring breeze, the honeyed waft of oil seed rape in the air.
My daily prescribed walk in the countryside was a walk of wonder. I noticed things I had not been aware of before. The famers continued to grow crops, the birds nested, insects scurried about. The natural world was busy while we were on hold.
And so, having time to stop and notice more, I began to write haiku. Being a Japanophile this was the most natural creative writing form for me to take. Sparse, direct, capturing a moment’s experience in three short lines. Something that could be said aloud in one breath.
I confess, it was also a comfort in a time of fear. The writer Natalie Goldberg said in her latest book Three Simple Lines that haiku is a refuge when the world seems chaotic, when you are lost, frightened and nothing is clear.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho is one of my favourite haiku books, it tells of Basho’s two and a half year journey in Japan from which he never expected to return. He sold his house in Edo prior to his departure for because he did not expect to return from his journey. He went North, avoiding the familiar. The north was largely unexplored territory and it represented for Basho all that was unknown.
What happened in 2020 was truly unknown. We were on uncharted ground too and very fearful.
I wrote a haiku every day that year and continued my practice the following year writing regularly. And now it has become a practice.
Slowing down enough to notice
To write a haiku your world has to slow down enough for you to notice. You have to tune into your senses. Capture that one moment and express it, like a instant of awakening, so that if someone else were to read your haiku, they too would have the same direct experience.
Haiku are always there, just waiting to be noticed, waiting for us to slow down, bring our attention to what is happening around us, appreciate our world just as it is, and in doing so we may notice the small things and learn about the bigger things.
Haiku are an opportunity for revelation our ordinary lives. Simple wonders appear to us in flash of insight about how things really are. And that flash of insight or direct experience is felt by the reader too so that haiku is shared experience.
A little haiku history
Not popularized in the West until the early 1900s, the Haiku originates from the Japanese hokku, or the opening section of a longer ‘renga’ poem introducing it by establishing a season. Unlike the rest of the renga sequence, which was usually composed collaboratively, the hokku was often created by a single poet working alone, and over time, the hoku began to be appreciated for its own worth and became distinct poetic form we know as Haiku.
The natural world is common ground for haiku poets and emerges from Japanese culture grounded in nature and seasons. In Japan’s Shinto religion everything in nature is alive and has spirit and added on to this is the interconnected nature of Buddhism expressed in Japanese Zen.
Haikus often contain season words (kigo) to sitauate the poem such as moon for autumn, owl for winter, cherry blossom for spring, water for summer. Of course writing Haikus in the UK our references will be different: daffodils, sweet peas, acorns, conkers, frost, drizzle, mist, and clouds. These season words or kigo help situate the poem.
In its original Japanese form, the haiku is often divided into 17 mora (a Japanese unit of syllable weight) and arranged in a single vertical line. But in English there is no exact equivalent to this and as a result, its been adapted into three lines of unrhymed verse composed of five, seven, and five syllables. But when I compose a haiku I like to ask myself can it be said in one breath?
Haiku often has a strong image or two juxtaposed images and a sense that something is revealing itself to us for the first time. An ‘aha’ moment. Sometimes this is done through a ‘cutting word’ (kireji). The stronger these are the more the reader is surprised and brought into the present moment experience.
In order to write haiku we need to get out of our own way. To go beyond a sense of self. Haiku aims to connect with what is true for all of us so we can directly share the experience. And that experience is illuminated through the imagery of the poem.
In Natalie Goldberg’s recent book on Haiku her Japanese translator says: English builds from the Inside Out, Japanese from the Outside In. The inside of Japanese is hollow, soft, empty of a personal self. You don’t have to say everything. It can be ambiguous. Less is better…Sometimes Japanese uses I, but not the concept of I. We think of another person and almost enter another person’s consciousness. We try to stand with the other person’s point of view. In the Japanese language we can even change what we saying right in the middle if we see evidence that the other person doesn’t like or agree. We want harmony. This is what matters’. This deep linguistic sense of Japanese culture is intrinsic to Haiku.
But you don’t have to stick to the rules
Anything we experience may be the subject of a haiku. Your haiku can reflect the time and space you are in. So we can look for beauty and truth in nature but you might equally find it in the laundry. No need to reference cherry blossoms or moons if that is not your experience. In this way haiku has an element of wabi sabi about it, the form is imbued with simplicity, intimacy and unpretentiousness, the truth that comes from observing life as it is.
The first translator of haiku in the West, R. H. Blyth once noted “. . .the true subject of a haiku is never mentioned in the haiku. It is what a haiku implies that makes it a great or worthless haiku.” In other words, what is left unexpressed is the true expression. The reader is left to have their own moment of insight.
William Blake once said we need to cleanse the doors of perception and let reality flood in. Our whole life is made up of moments of reality. Everything happens now, nothing happens outside of now . And our moments are utterly complete just as they are. All we need to do is get out of the way. As13th century Zen Master Dogen observed, “When the self withdraws, the ten thousand things advance; when the self advances, the ten thousand things withdraw.”
You can follow my haiku writing on instagram at Hello Haiku