Original subtitles

Welcome everyone to our first lecture on our course Basho and the Art of the

Haiku. It's wonderful to see you all and to begin this journey with you all. I'm

looking forward to how this intense study on the haiku is going to change

me. I don't know about you, but spending a whole month with a poet or a

particular form really allows me to see things in a different way.

Poetry acts upon our consciousness to transform it. And this is true of every

true experience, no matter how small.

Heraclitus could not step into the same river twice, he tells us, because it's

neither the same river nor he the same man.

And a book of poem is like that river.

Book of poems, I should say. It's like a river.

You never read the same book twice, which is another reason why we could

totally do Milton and Yeats again, as we've done before, and why we're going

to do a reprise of the four quartets.

So each lecture in this month is going to introduce you to a handful of

concepts about the haiku form, and on Thursdays, Shivani will be leading the

creative workshops, which I'll be participating in and trying to, and

we'll be learning right alongside you all there, so I'm excited for that.

But tonight's lecture is concerned with imagery, especially the nature of the

seasons. I'll introduce you first to Basho, briefly the haiku poet, and

closely read a handful of his haiku poems. I want to focus on imagery and

nature.

And then we'll also move into discussion on another haiku from our assignment and

apply what we learned in collaborative close reading there.

The whole event is scheduled to last an hour.

So Matsuo Basho was born in 1644 and he died in 1694.

He is the haiku master of early modern Japanese poetry.

And his work gives us such a beautiful meditation upon nature, the changing

seasons, life.

He was born in a rural area, grew up amid the serene landscapes of central

Japan, which is a setting that features in so much of his poetry.

And his early years were shaped by his activity in the rigid social

hierarchy of the Edo period.

And this was a time when Japan was largely isolated from the West.

He was, although there were Dutch folk coming in at the time, and so he does

mention that.

But for largely, it's largely isolated.

He was once in training as a samurai, but left that calling.

And for some time he likely studied in a monastery before living a life of

renunciation and simplicity as a poet and sometimes a traveling poet.

Now before I begin, I should mention that

As someone with a specialty in English poetry, I'll be guiding this course as,

well, in a way that an English major or an English professor might teach haiku

to English majors. That does sometimes happen in English departments, but this

approach would necessarily differ from the way in which this course would be

taught by a comparative literature professor or a professor in a department

of East Asian studies.

So this means that we will deal with the English translation predominantly, with

a focus on theme and form, without an analysis of the Japanese poetry.

So I see my role in this course as directing us to encounter the haiku as a

form, to equip you with the aspects of form and tone that are essential to the

haiku, no matter what language readers may approach it from.

But since we're reading in translation, I feel it's fair to say that.

So let's begin with the most famous haiku in all of Japanese verse, which is

Basho's famous frog poem, or the frog pond poem it's sometimes called. This is

number 270 in the Andrew Fitzsimons translation.

An olden pond now, a song frog springs off into the

sound of water.

Some translations will have that last line contain the word splash, which is

sometimes, in a way, a little bit more accurate, but this is, it's the sound of

water.

And I love what this English translation is doing with that enjambment. Of

course, this translator doesn't use punctuation in a way to remain faithful

to the Japanese, so this white space at the end song frog springs off into

And it's almost as if the sense is in midair as your eye makes its way to the

beginning of the next line To learn the sound of water what it's springing off

into and of course there's this ambiguity here in which is it springing

off into the sound of water or is it springing off into And the sentence

remains uncom incomplete

and then the sound of water kind of enacts that splash.

So for centuries, readers have found in this poem a simple and also an

indescribable mystery.

The haiku is a Japanese poetic form that condenses an

experience into a highly compressed single utterance.

So it's traditionally composed of three lines, what we see here, with a 5-7-5

syllable pattern, or what is called in Japanese the onset pattern.

We'll call them syllables.

And a haiku captures a moment, sometimes a moment of insight, often of natural

observation like what we see here in the world, in the natural world.

And it always leaves room for the reader's imagination to fill in the

gaps.

So this form, the haiku, evolved from the haikai no renga, a linked verse form

from the 17th century Edo period, where it was very popular, where the opening

stanza of a linked poem, which was called the hoku, set the tone for the

rest of the sequence. So it was actually a very collaborative experience.

there would be a party, we'll talk about this, and the poet would give that first

hoku, and then the rest would follow.

But we call this, ever since the 19th century, the separated hoku from the

rest of the verses is called a haiku. That's been the name since the 19th

century. So let's go back to this poem.

Records show that when he composed this poem in April, of 1686.

Basho was ill.

Although seriously enough to keep him at his riverside hut, the illness was not

life-threatening.

He hosted hoku gatherings at his home, and one day he held a contest on the

subject of frogs.

So Basho's original form was this hoku, the opening stanza. So this, he had the

gathering, he wrote the hoku, this is what we have.

And then there was a series of the collaboratively composed lines that

friends would participate in composing.

But we're going to refer to all of these as haiku in this lecture.

But this was the first poem, the opening stanza of a large oranga.

But being the first poem, this set the pace and the tone for the other

participants in the contest. You kind of had to follow whatever the tone was.

Sometimes this was called the...

Kawazu Awaze, or the Frog Contest. It was very famous, became canon.

So if you've read any haiku, you're likely to have read this one.

An olden pond now, a song frog springs off into

the sound of water.

This poem made me smile when I first read it aloud.

It's a profound poem, although it's deceptively simple.

It's almost humorously so.

And this is what's called the Haikai.

And if you look in your glossary at the end of your book, you'll actually see a

really great glossary around 360.

And the Haikai simply means humorous or playful. And this is on page 365.

It's really useful, this glossary. Some of it's just gorgeously written.

a word that originally referred to certain poems collected during this

period, but eventually the haikai became known as a spirit of creative play,

as Fitzsimons writes.

So it describes the sound of water after a frog breaks the surface. That's the

poem. It's kind of playful and unexpected.

And this playfulness is called haikai, which in the Japanese haiku tradition is

a word that...

means this playfulness, our humor.

And this characterizes a whole tradition, a whole aspect of the haiku

tradition.

So you can imagine the haiku tradition, especially Basho's haiku, as

rotating between two poles of reverence and humor.

And many poems will contain both.

The apparently playful and mundane haiku will often

upon further contemplation, reveal a very profound depth of philosophical

seriousness.

And likewise, the more serious sounding poems will often contain one or two

playful words or haikai words.

And in the Edo period in which Basho was writing the haiku, playfulness was

innovative. I mean, this was something new to do. It was a little edgy because

the tradition had been Previously, a little more serious and philosophical,

but there's this emerging playfulness as well. So the question is whether the

haikai, playful impulse here, was elevating the mundane,

or does it profane the elevated?

And the same question you could ask for Joyce and what he does.

Is he profaning the elevated, or is he elevating the mundane?

And the answer is...

Both. The poem performs the elevation and what might be called the profane or

the common.

In haikai playfulness, this offsets the more serious expectations of the

tradition at times, but it also added a new layer of significance and humor.

And the poem gives us this blend of humor and, I don't know if you felt

this, a tone of melancholy.

And that exemplifies the spirit of haikai.

The scholars have noted that Basho deliberately eschews the traditional

lyricism of his predecessors in favor of this more everyday, almost mundane

image. And we see this perfectly exemplified here.

A frog leaping into a pond.

The sound of splash, they argue, is what's sometimes called that novel

element, that haikai joke that lightens it.

An olden pond now, a song frog springs off into the

sound of water.

The more you return to it, a more prolonged contemplation of the poem

begins to reveal a depth here.

Think of a clear stream, and Basho himself uses this image, as we'll see at

the end of this lecture. The poem is tempered by the image of the pond

itself, which really is a symbol.

You could take it as a symbol of human consciousness, which can be both

reflective, like a pond in its serenity, and broken by the admission of something

external, whether it's sound, whether it's sight.

Here it's the entrance of the frog breaking its surface.

The fact that it's an old pond, here in this translation, an olden pond.

That word olden really gives it a sense of archaic seriousness.

And it gets shattered there at the end by the sound of water.

Which, granted, is a more reverent translation than splash, right? But it's

still working in that tension.

So the fact that it is an old pond, I think, is significant.

Because we're going to see in a lot of these poems we read this week, there is

this concern with age.

It's either in the background or it's suggested by certain associations.

And it is found in the original Japanese, this old.

So this is not just the translation.

The age of the pond is suggestive of

time's passage and the pond's endurance, pool of water,

what remains and what is passing away, what comes and what goes, what the pool

receives and what the pool gives back in its reflection and its sound.

There is this...

equilibrium between playful splash and this ghostly sense of loss that

the old pond holds and this is an emotional balance that the poem

maintains it's like two hands coming together to cusp to hold something maybe

water even if it's tightly cusped and it's balanced

so there's a great power of imagery here which is one of the the things we're

focusing on in this lecture. In haiku, imagery is the vehicle that carries the

poem's emotional weight across this brief three-line structure.

It begins with a single image, the old pond, then a second image is introduced,

and then at the end you have the collapsing of those two as the song frog

blends into the pond.

It's interesting, you'll see that the poems often have this This either

pulling back and then going forward again, or this going forward and then

pulling back.

There's usually this going out and coming back that the poems do, this

dance.

And there's a single vivid image that creates a vignette.

You know a vignette. It's a picture whose edges fade into the background of

the image, sometimes into darkness, sometimes into light.

And it's that image that the reader can see in the mind's eye, but whose borders

are indeterminate.

So because the form traditionally allows only 17 onsets or syllables,

the poet must distill the sensations into a single or a

series of concrete images. Sometimes a single concrete image, other times a

series.

And the economy of language forces the image to be precise.

and concise.

And this concision and precision accommodate the drawing forth of

particular imaginations within us all.

We all, like this language, constructs this other space in which we're

imagining our own pond and our own frog, really.

This invites the readers to fill the surrounding silence with their own

associations. That's the evocative quality of an image in haiku.

And it's not ornamental.

or just being cute.

There's a very point to this, a very serious point.

And it offers an immediate visceral experience that transcends the literal.

So you remember maybe from the January course on Blake, you have the fourfold

vision. You have at one level, there's the literal. The other there is the

imaginative or way it looks in the mind, the subconscious.

Then you have the spiritual vision and then the heavenly vision. There's kind

of these four dynamics.

In medieval interpretation, in medieval hermeneutics, you also have the four

levels too. You've got the literal, the moral, the symbolic, and then the

heavenly or the eschatological.

So these are just different ways to think about, okay, so a poem can often

contain many meanings, and the best poems often do.

An olden pond now, a song frog springs off.

into the sound of water It's a beautiful translation

Olden pong now notice what the mouth is doing with the the opening and

closing of the vowels song frog springs off into the sound

of water you have that sibilance the sound in The the opening of the vowel

sound he does really well with the translation. I really really loved what?

Andrew Fitzsimons does here.

Let's go to the second line here.

This is what's called the Kaigo.

The song Frog is an interesting translation

because most translations render it frog,

and it's most likely the Kachika frog, which sings from April to August.

So this kind of places it.

In spring?

The fact that the song frog is leaping into the water.

It's the seasonal word, what's called the kaigo.

And haiku will have this. One or two seasonal words. We're going to read one

poem with two of them.

Seasons in haiku function as this subtle and evocative marker of time and change.

So the kaigo, a season word, places the poem within that specific temporal,

earthly time.

that earthly context that instantly informs the reader of this broader

environmental rhythm within earth time which is interesting because there's

nothing more evocative than a season and we're all talking about how the poem

opens it up into a network of associations with our own brain that

draws us into it that really like activates this our seasonal cues

and it taps into the collective memory that we all have with the time of year

There's a particular set of emotions associated with harvest or autumn,

planting season, the spring, and summer and winter.

And these associations are activated in our consciousness by the kygo, the

seasonal word.

So you might sometimes find the plum blossom, or as we'll see, the blooming

hibiscus. That's early spring.

The plum blossom is, at least.

Hibiscus is autumn.

At least the rose mallow that blooms in Japan is an autumn flower. So that's the

Kaigo in the next poem we'll read.

This is how haiku links the microcosm of this very particular moment with this

broad microcosm of the natural world and ourselves.

It's all about how far you can stretch that connection, how particular and

minute you can get to the granular and then to the cosmic or the

earthly. You know, the universal.

In this last line, the sound of water. As the frog breaks the surface of the

water, so the sound breaks the reflective silence of the mind.

Just as the water enfolds over the body of the frog, so the silence

envelops the ending of the poem.

What is a poem?

But a song frog that momentarily launches from stillness and silence

journeys suspended upon the air and breaks the surface with the utterance of

sound.

In this poem, the utterance of a body breaking the surface.

The poem in this way is emblematic.

It's emblematic.

It's significant that the frog is not singing. It's not actually the song that

we hear.

We hear it because its body's broken the water.

Poetry, as the utterance of the human spirit, is momentarily suspended upon

the air by sound, and it breaks the silence into which silence in turn

hastens to enfold it.

Really, what am I trying to say here? That poetry is the utterance of the

human spirit.

that is momentarily suspended upon the air and breaks the silence which in turn

hastens to close over it and you can

see why this poem is is the one that's so famous because it's almost as though

the frog is a haiku itself so translucent that way you just look

through it it's so emblematic of the tradition and there's a really rich

tradition of japanese commentary upon basho's haiku This poem has been read in

many ways.

One is that the haiku is emblematic of an emotional state.

One commentator named Shida argues that the poem is not about a frog at all.

It's not even about an old pond.

But it's rather an expression of emotion and common life.

And it's the result of the mind taking part in the environment in which that

mind lives. In this case, Basho's consciousness at the riverside and the

hut.

Another reading is informed by Zen Buddhism, which reads the frog's leap as

a sudden cut.

So kirijai is one of, kirijai, kirijai, I believe it is, is the

cutting word that is often in a haiku that interrupts the ordinary and creates

a form of punctuation, a pause, an abrupt stillness sometimes.

which is that moment of that non-conceptual insight.

The splash or the sound of water is the cutting line, the cutting word that

pulls the reader into the image and then falls silent.

So let's read another poem, number 195.

So we're going to go back in the Fitzsimons translation.

And this will lead us to discuss a little bit more about the importance of

Zen Buddhism in his work.

So 195.

195.

Along a byroad, the hibiscus meets my horse, chomping and chewing.

This is a travel poem.

And Bajo's travels across Edo, Japan, exposed him to a wide range of people

and natural settings and incidents.

The old pond, which is a recurring motif in the Edo haikai circles.

becomes this canvas for everyday life, just like this moment here.

So if you think about the seasonal word, what's the caigo?

This poem is the hibiscus, which is sometimes called the rose mallow, which

blooms from August to October.

And as one commentator observes, the rose mallow will not be eaten by a horse

if it is not blooming.

Which somebody has really direct experience with this which which I just

love you tell some of the commentators are actually not only Really intimate

with Basho, but also his world which is just opens it up beautifully so the rose

mallow will not be eaten if it's not blooming and Some of the more moralistic

readings of this particular haiku will take it as a warning against pride or

performance So don't go, you know showing off to everyone and it's going

to attract the horses

There's a fun story associated with this poem. So according to one commentator,

this was written when Basho was studying under the Zen monk Buzhcho.

And the monks were against Haikai because they were irreverent.

And legend has it that this monk was trying to persuade Basho to give up

haiku, particularly Haikai.

But Basho insisted that Haikai was nothing more than what happens here and

now. And once when they were arguing, they were walking along the road, the

monk said, prove it.

Write about this hibiscus.

Or compose a poem on this hibiscus.

And this poem, legend has it, was the direct result of that prompting.

And the monk suddenly convinced that Haikai could contain such deep meaning.

Never try to persuade Basho to renounce Haikai again.

So there is this depth here that was immediately recognized by the Zen

Buddhist monk that I love. What is that depth?

So Basho's formative years were marked by a deep engagement with Zen Buddhism,

which is a philosophy that is worth reading about. It's just for this

course. I'll talk more about it.

But to reduce it to a statement, well, it prizes simplicity.

It honors the immediacy.

And there's also this quality of acceptance, acceptance of impermanence.

And this worldview would permeate his poetry, and it encourages him to observe

fleeting moments. Or rather, his poetry encourages us to observe fleeting

moments in nature, to see them as mirrors of human experience and

consciousness. And reflection, really, I think that's the key word.

To stand back and to see and to observe.

reality as it really is.

So Basho and his travels across the Japanese archipelago were documented in

his book, The Narrow Road to the Interior.

And they were part literal journeys through the varied landscapes that he

actually traveled through.

They're also a spiritual pilgrimage, and he blends prose and haiku.

And along the way, he met fellow poets and participated in the Haikai and

Oranga gatherings.

I want to read you what one commentator, Yamamoto,

wrote about this poem.

And this is just a glimpse into the beautiful rich tradition of commentary

on the haiku.

I'm sorry this is so small.

I'll actually post the slides with this course so you can go back and look at

this.

Underlying Basho's thought were a sense of life's ephemerality inherited from

medieval hermits, a philosophy of intuition like that of Zen, and the

nihilistic thought of Taoism.

Especially in this poem, as well as in the famous frog poem, one can clearly

detect elements of Zen lurking in the background.

The demonstrative manner of speech in the first half of the Hoku reminds us of

a Zen dialogue, while the idea of freedom from discriminative thinking

implied in the second half is reminiscent of the realm of momentary

satori that transcends speculation.

Of course, such implications are not to be found on the poem's surface, but are

hidden in its depths. So always remember, just pausing here and breaking

from reading, that there's surface and depth.

And when you're writing your haiku, remember just to stay playful.

Don't try to aim for depth. A lot of times depth will be there no matter what

you do.

And the prolonged gaze and meditation upon what came forth will sometimes

reveal the depth. So be aware of that. Don't get hung up about it's got to have

depth and it's got to have surface and it's got to have this sophisticated

element and this subtlety.

Your sensibilities and intuition will be trained, I think, by reading Basho and

by not thinking too consciously about it.

So, okay, to return to this commentator.

And these multiple layers of meaning are present in the poem, regardless of what

Basho's intent might have been.

And I love what he mentions here, that a poem can contain meaning that the poet

did not intend.

This is true for your own haiku.

Sometimes you'll write one.

I bet this will happen to you in the course of this class.

You'll write one, and it doesn't seem really significant at all, but you go

back to it, always save them, you go back to it, and there's meaning there

that you weren't even aware of.

T.S. Eliot said that happened to him with a lot of his poems, so it happens.

Okay, to continue this, because I'm digressing too much.

It would not be enough to take this hoku for a simple descriptive poem.

It would be too much to say that it is a didactic poem, meaning that it has a

moral.

The hoku stops just short of creating its own world of metaphor.

So there are many ways that this poem prompts contemplation on the brevity of

life. And in Zen Buddhism, this is called anicha.

Anicha. the impermanence of all things.

Everything's fleeting. Nothing remains the same.

The horse's eating of the mallow or the hibiscus is a single transient act that

instantly dissolves the plant's form into another form.

And this chomping and chewing horse, advancing and indiscriminate in his

eating, becomes, under one reading, an emblem of death.

cutting down the flower of youth and beauty.

And I think that's the kariji, the cutting word, that chomping and chewing,

which is rendered in Japanese by that single word, kuwarakiri.

That means, has been eaten.

There's a beautiful poem by Dickinson that this reminds me of, and she too was

a highly compressed poet, who of course didn't write haiku, but...

Her poems resemble the haiku.

Apparently with no surprise.

It's the poem about the... The frost beheads the flower in its accidental

play while looking on is an approving God.

An approving God. So it's like even in this whole concept of death and

ruthless, relentless eating and transformation of form, there's this

broader context of...

Kind of distance, apathy, or approval, even.

That's an interesting comparison.

Comparative comparison, we might say.

So, one last poem to read, and briefly.

And this is 338.

Smoothing out wrinkles.

Attending the snow viewing.

In my paper robe.

Smoothing out wrinkles.

attending the snow viewing in my paper robe.

Again, we have this contemplative ethos that underpins the Zen practice.

The act of smoothing out the wrinkles, so he's getting ready for a party, for

the snow viewing, I take it. And again, the lack of punctuation does allow that

ambiguity there.

He's smoothing out the wrinkles of his paper robe.

The act of smoothing out, kind of mirrors the Zen imperative to rid

oneself of clutter, mental clutter, we might say, and even to return to the

state of clear, even awareness.

And the snow viewing is a classic Kaigo, that season word, for

winter. So we know we're in winter.

And the snow viewing implies that the observers,

Well going to accept the impermanence without attachment because what does it

mean to watch the snowfall?

What does it mean to watch falling snow I did that a lot last weekend and

It actually is really it is significant. What does it mean to watch that?

Do any other animals do that?

And what does it mean when they're doing it? Why?

because I mean, it is an act of attention, but it's like watching the

fire. It's kind of mesmerizing. There's the... I always find it striking.

Oftentimes when the snow falls here, at least, there's very little wind. So you

have this motionless and fixed landscape and it's motionless objects that are

cloaked in an incessant moving curtain.

Like the paper robe the viewer is preparing for this party, the snow

itself blankets and smooths out the contours of the landscape. The starkness

of the trees and the garden walls and the roofs all blend in this uniform

white. Even, you might say, the horizon and the sky blend in this

elemental whiteness.

And what does it mean to watch the snow fall with other people?

Because this was a communal event, the snow viewing.

It means, among other things, to bear witness to the changes of nature and

that it's worth doing, to collectively affirm the worth of viewing and

contemplating the incremental covering of the landscape with snow.

Basho's late style can be characterized by the Japanese word karumi.

It's the playful tone in plain theme this is a plain theme this is how basho

described karumi and this is in the back with the glossary under the entrance of

karumi it's on page 366 but i'll read it aloud he said my thinking now is as when

looking at the sand in a shallow stream both the shape of the poem and the mind

light only when you reach that point do things have meaning

I mean, looking at the sand in a shallow stream, both the shape of the poem and

the mind are light.

Only when you reach that point, you have the meaning.

So the haiku also suggests this one, this particular haiku suggests that the

speaker is preparing to go to the snow viewing by preparing that paper robe,

which by the way, paper robe, I believe is another Kaigo because it's a

customary dress.

It's a humble garment.

that you would wear in the winter. It's a winter garment.

But also it was something that the older folk would wear. The aged. Usually

worn by the aged. So there is here this suggestion of death and impermanence.

And that eventually the viewer's life will, like the world's edges

disappearing in the snowfall, like the wrinkles being pressed out of this paper

robe,

The viewer, too, will become indiscriminately one with the passage of

time.

It's possibly too Kaigo here.

Too seasonal words.

Okay, so just to review, I just introduced some terms, which, um,

let's just review those. So, haikai, that's the humorous playful.

Playful, often irreverent, or humorous quality of poetry, particularly the

haiku.

The hoku, that's originally that first haiku that began a Ranga linked

verse and later became the standalone haiku that we're studying now.

Just a little background there.

Kaigo is the seasonal word that signals the time of year.

And the kairiji is that cutting word.

It's sometimes like punctuation, a word that creates a pause or a shift or

something abrupt.

sometimes inspires a moment of pause and contemplation, like, I need to think

about what just happened.

And so these are the main terms that I introduced in this lecture. So just to

keep in mind, as you go along, this will help you, I think, with your poem. So

when you're reading this week and you're thinking about writing poetry, I'm sure

Shivani will talk about this, but look for the Kaigo.

in your next readings and you can you can see how how he's he's engaging with

the seasonal words and invoking those associations so let's

let's have a collaborative close reading in the last 15 minutes of one of the

poems we read this week and i'll ask for three people to read it and i'll ask of

them to read it differently from each other, which obviously I don't think you

can help but do.

But putting pauses in different areas, putting inflection on different words.

So can we have three volunteers to read aloud this poem for us, and then we'll

begin by free discussion.