The Book:
How to Read a Japanese Poem
By Steven D. Carter
Columbia University Press
2019
The Talk:
“A billion worlds can be sat through within a single sitting.” ~ Dogen
In my experience, to truly enjoy Japanese poetry, you have to savor it. Take a deep breath, relax, and read it slowly. Then maybe read it a few more times, letting the full resonances of each word have their space.
A haiku is like sushi, a single compressed mouthful, a discrete unit of experience, complete on its own.
And yet if you know the context of a haiku, the author, the intertexual references, the iconography, the simplest phrase can go deeper and deeper still.
Thus, the more haiku you read, the more each individual haiku means, as your mind makes connections upon connections. A single poem, with three short lines, explodes with a richness of meaning because of all the other poems you’ve experienced.
Like a white or black piece in the game of Go, the poem stands alone, and yet finds its full meaning—and gains its power—in its relationship to other pieces over a large and empty grid space of connections.
Nano-poems
This is not only psychological, however. Japanese poetry has been collected and anthologized over centuries into catalogues that contain thousands of poems, sorted by categories, topics, authors, styles, even aesthetic effects.
These poetic atoms can be reorganized and recombined in an infinite number of ways, with each way foregrounding a different aspect of each poem.
Some of these linkages may be accidental, but many are intentional, even anticipatorily intentional. The haiku as we know it today emerged as the starter verse for renga, a series of verses linked by association, usually generated by friends at a party.
Thus, a good haiku opens up to opportunities that do not yet exist but might. It is a welcome host, creating space for others to join in and play.
Which way to turn?
Winds in the autumn leaves,
snow in the pines.
Japanese verse is simple, minimalist, and yet every word is a possible association—by sound, imagery, sense, subject, language, or mood. Everything is a link to everything else, as if each poem was a kind of nanobot, a micro-machine designed with appendages and orifices that allow it to assemble with other nano-poems, and to interact with its immediate environment in novel ways, as if literature itself is an ecology where textual organisms are constantly moving about and bumping into one another.
Augmented reality
And yet we have hardly even begun. These links reach out beyond the individual reader’s mental space, beyond the literary space, into the experienced phenomenal world.
Poems are linked to places. Some places in Japan have become famous because of the poems written about them; some poems have become famous because of the places they are written about. And many of the titles (or contextual notes) say exactly where the poem was composed.
Lower Kyoto:
snow piles up, and then—
night rain.
To write a poem about a place is to link one’s unique moment of perception to all the previous poems written about that place, and, by nature of the medium of writing, reach out in invitation to the potential future visitor, reader, or writer of that place.
Poems are linked to times, times general and times specific. Many old poems name the specific date when they were composed. And, if you pay attention, you can often tell the time of day the poem was written.
If I had my wish,
I would die beneath the blossoms
in the springtime—
midway through the Second Month,
when the moon is at the full.
At minimum, nearly every poem gestures to the season in which it was written, which links it to, say, a particular winter, and also every winter that has ever happened and is yet to happen.
Some poems are tied to specific historical events or specific holidays. To write a haiku on New Years is to start new, to start clean and create something fresh—and also to link to all your past selves and all the New Years poems that have been written by others.
And poems are linked to objects, like the moon, which are loaded with meaning. There are so many Japanese poems in the moon that one versed in its poetry can only see the moon through the poems written about it.
The clouds clear away
and we are sure of its place:
the moon in the night.
Literary cinema
As the forms of Japanese poetry developed over centuries, it became an aesthetic ideal for the poem to capture the authentic experience of the poet himself, i.e., the things that are sensed (by the five senses) in the poem should have been actually experienced by the poet, the quotidian moments of daily life.
I wake from a dream,
and through the gaps in blinds
not yet rolled up,
it seeks its way into my chambers—
the scent of flowering plum.
If we add in the dates, time of day, the specific places, each poem becomes a record of a unique moment in time, both of the sensory experience and the emotional experience of the poet. There are no monsters, no dragons, only the faintest hint of myths or legends. It’s a record of rain, flowers, trees, clouds, smoke, wind.
In addition, as the centuries unfold, we see a courtly, samurai-class art form become more egalitarian and middle class. By the 18th and 19th Centuries, more common language is used, and the lives of the poor and working class become visible (sensible) in the poetry. Formal, courtly devices and images get refashioned into whole new contexts, nodding to the past, while expressing the ineffable texture of modern life at the same time.
Penniless,
I walk through autumn
in Kyoto.
A collection of these poems becomes a kind of documentary, a kind of cinema, in which each verse is like a shot of a scene in motion, followed by a different moving picture, a different scene, moving for a few seconds, and onward in a sequence. And through each of these small frames, we can feel, taste, touch, see, an entire world to some degree as it felt. A kind of literary world built through a hundred little windows of perception.
Rainy evening:
mosquitoes buzzing around
my umbrella.
Nothing, everything
What am I trying to say? Japanese poetry is a kind of hypertextual, hyper-temporal, geo-spatial, personal-collaborative, multi-cellular, phenomenological, consciousness-recording open-ended possibility field.
The cultural genius of it all is found in that simple form that became the modern haiku and its cousins.
But not merely the form, also the aesthetic values around it—the dropping of pronouns, the focus on the senses and the natural world, the recording of times and dates, the anthologizing, the intentional openness to yet uncomposed.
Yes, other forms of literature have similar intertextuality or autobiography. You can read lots of poetry that references other poetry. You can read a diary or a journal. You can anthologize anything.
A haiku is just a haiku. You can read them like a sushi roll. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Each one so light and subtle, hardly anything at all.
Just like a moment is just a moment, a thought just a thought, a cell just a cell, an atom just an atom—simple little things open to other little things that make a mind, a universe.
Thank you, Steven Carter, for your wonderful book.
Related:
Wisdom is seeking wisdom: Dogen's contemplative path
The horses of war are running again
Blurred lines: Sex, God, and poetry in the gardens of Shiraz