One Person Is Laughing

"I continued to live and study in Kyoto until 1968. My ability to speak and read Japanese improved a bit, though I am still embarrassed by how clumsy I am with this elegant language. I managed to read haiku in the original just enough to comprehend that the power of haiku poetry is not only from clear images, or vivid presentation of the moment, or transcendent insight into nature and the world, but in a marvelous creative play with the language. Poetry always comes down to language — if the choice of words, the tricks of the syntax, are not exactly right, whatever other virtues a piece of writing might have, it is not a poem. (These are the standards we apply to poetry in each our own language. Poems in translation of course can not be judged this way. “Images” however are translatable.)

I returned to North America in 1968 (Some of us prefer to call it “Turtle Island” after Native American creation stories). In 1970 I moved with my family to a remote plot of forest land in the Sierra Nevada at the 1,000-meter elevation — pine and oak woods. We built a house and have made that our home base ever since.

Having a “home base” for my wife and family made it possible to go on periodic trips over the years doing lectures, readings, and workshops. Honoring the haiku sensibility, I look for what would be the seasonal signals, kigo, in our Mediterranean middle-elevation Sierra mountain landscape. What xeric aromatic herbs and flowers, what birds, what weather signals, will we find? They are different from Japan. I read translations of the myths and tales of the Native people who once lived where I live now, from the Nisenan language
(which is no longer spoken) and I can see how much they valued the magic of the woodpecker, the sly character of fox, and the trickster coyote. High-flying migratory sandhill cranes pass north and south in the spring and in the fall directly over my house. They have been doing this for at least a million years.

The Euro-, African-, and Asian-Americans are just a little more than 200 years on the west coast of North America, and it will be several centuries yet before our poetic vocabulary matches the land. The haiku tradition gives us the pointers that we need to begin this process, which will be part of making a culture and a home in North America (and I hope eventually, for all people, a home on planet earth) for the long future ahead.

The ancient Buddhist teaching of non-harming and respect for all of nature, (which is quietly present within the haiku tradition) is an ethical precept we are in greater need of now than ever, as the explosive energy of the modern industrial world pushes relentlessly toward an endless exploitation of all the resources of the planet.

Now I want to go back to talking about how Japanese haiku poetry has been discovered world-wide. Up till now I have been speaking of haiku as it exists in Japan from early times up to the present. Though haiku may be considered old fashioned and conservative by some people in Japan, in the rest of the world it is received as fresh, new, experimental, youthful and playful, unpretentious, and available to students and beginners who want to try out a poetic way of speaking.

As we all know there’s scarcely a literate culture on earth that doesn’t have some translations of Japanese haiku in its poetry anthologies. From this, an international non-Japanese haiku movement has begun, which takes the idea of haiku hundreds of new directions. School teachers in Denmark, Italy, or California have no hesitation giving translations of Japanese haiku to their students, and then also reading locally-written brief poems to them, telling the children to look around, see what they see, have a thought, make an image, and write their own brief poem. Children everywhere are learning about poetry and themselves just this way. Though this may not be entirely true to the haiku tradition itself, it is of immense value to young people to have their language and imagination liberated. Short poems and haiku inspire them more than the usual English or European-language poetry which always seems (to children) either too metrical and formal or too modern and experimental.

The haiku tradition is now part of a world-wide experimental movement in freshly teaching poetry in the schools. This is another reason to celebrate haiku. As a teacher in the graduate creative writing program at the University of California at Davis, I taught the haiku tradition to older students on a serious poetry-writing track, using Robert Hass’s superb book The Essential Haiku, and it was as surprising and useful to these sophisticated young adults as to any schoolchild. Haiku amazingly reaches every class, every age.

Eventually somehow I became known as a poet. My poetic work has had many influences: Scotch-English traditional ballads and folksongs, William Blake, Classical Chinese poetry, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Native American songs and poems, haiku, Noh drama, Zen sayings, Federico Garcia Lorca, and much more. The influence from haiku and from the Chinese is, I think, the deepest, but I rarely talk about it. Though not a “haiku poet” I have written a number of brief poems, some of which may approach the haiku aesthetic. They also fit into a larger project which I call “Mountains and Rivers Without End” in which I am searching for ways to talk about the natural landscapes and old myths and stories of the whole planet. I am sure I have bitten off far too much, and my poetry might be better if someone just cut it up into little pieces.

Over the years I have made many trips to Japan, and continued to learn from contemporary Japanese poets, especially Tanikawa Shuntarô, Ôoka Makoto, and Sakaki Nanao — Nanao is a truly unique figure. The contemporary Korean poet Ko Un’s very short Zen (Korean Son)–inspired poems are hugely pleasurable and very subtle. I enjoyed getting to know the haiku of Dr. Arima Akito through the translations of Miyashita Emiko and Lee Gurga.

Before I wind this up, I want to share with you the pleasure I take in a just a few of Masaoka Shiki’s haiku (I could cite many more.) For example,

Lightning flash—
in the bottom of the basin,
water someone forgot to throw out

—which I remember almost every time I bend over and wash my face, hoping for a flash of light ! —and,

A single peak,
snow still on it—
that’s where the province ends

because from where I live (which is in the mountains of California) there is a mountain not too far to the east forever with springtime snow. I always think “beyond that is the desert state of Nevada” — and remember Shiki. But perhaps most interesting for me is this:

Picture of the Buddha
Entering Nirvana
One person is laughing !

When I was a Zen student in Kyoto my teacher once gave me a little testing koan which was “In the Buddha’s Nirvana-picture, everyone is crying. Why are they crying?” Some years later I find Shiki’s nehanzô haiku and I can never stop laughing. What a fresh mind he had ! (All the above translations are by Burton Watson.)

To finish up: Yves Bonnefoy in his excellent presentation here in 2000 said that we in the Occident are not experiencing “a kind of haiku fashion” but an awakening to a necessary and fundamental reference, which can only remain at the center of Western poetic thought.” And he goes on to say, that all these exchanges are for the “greater good of poetry, which is our common good and one of the few means that remain for preserving society from the dangers that beset it.”

It is quite to be expected that Mr. Bonnefoy and myself, French and American, each in our own way, invoke haiku as a benefit and a value in matters of the troubled world today. People are always asking “what’s the use of poetry?” The mystery of language, the poetic imagination, and the mind of compassion, are roughly one and the same, and through poetry perhaps they can keep guiding the world toward occasional moments of peace, gratitude, and delight. One hesitates to ask for more."

~ Gary Snyder,  from "The Path to Matsuyama"
Modern Haiku 36.2, Summer 2005.