I'll let the sea carry me over the land to visit Farah who is not free. I'll let the sea.
I'll let the sea darken the dark day differently in the unspoken realms unchangeable to me. I'll let the sea.
Here Farah is not free, and cannot spy the free delightfully, where people see but cannot see, the mountains poor and the fountains pouring no more. The robes do not recognize me. What songs can correct their wrongs?
The sea which calmed the Greeks when all that washed ashore was lost and drowned before--- and none of their stories fit, unless a blind man was writing it. They'll remember me for writing the same story as I visited Tehran. I'll let the sea carry me over the land. I see the statue of liberty buried in the sand.
I'll let the sea, carry one country. I hope the bearded clerics see, and respect the poem written by me, the same poem painted differently. I will visit you, Farah, who were, back then, the difference to me, when I lived calmly by the calm sea.
By publishing his second volume of original haiku in three years, Indian poet Daipayan Nair threatens to become a haiku treasure.
Famous paintings sometimes surprise us in a museum—“I had no idea it was so small!”
Poems can’t be disguised in this way—or can they? What if I told you Daipayan Nair can hide an epic inside a haiku?
To relieve the philosophical itch of defining poetry, societies have leaned heavily on the popularity of the poetic form.
The vocation, poet, if too loosely defined, implies a lone genius up to no good.
Dante wrote his famous long poem in exile. When Dante was younger, and in good standing in society, he wrote sonnets. Dante’s sonnets lived within in a book of prose—his Vita Nuova. Early haiku lived in prose, as well. Eventually, the sonnet and the haiku were able to stand on their own.
The diplomat wrote sonnets. The court poet wrote haiku. Everyone and their uncle can write a haiku, and put them in a family album, like snapshots.
The English Poet Laureate Nahum Tate—born 100 years after Shakespeare, and who re-wrote “King Lear” with a happy ending—died less than 100 years before Alfred Lord Tennyson was born. Basho, the Japanese haiku master, who popularized the haiku, was a contemporary of Nahum Tate.
Basho abandoned his service to a wealthy family (Basho’s father was a samurai) when his friend, a young man of the family, died. Depressed, in his 30s, Basho became a recluse, studied Zen, and his home was destroyed by fire. Later, Basho traveled and recorded his travels in prose and poetry. The most famous haiku in the world, the ‘frog splash’ poem, emerged from Basho’s anthologized travel writing—the haiku was a part of longer poems—and called hokku (it wasn’t called haiku until the 20th century).
Basho is considered the pinnacle of haiku, but studying Basho, we find that haiku as we know it today came about by accident—emerging, like the sonnet, from longer forms.
Japanese poetry is impossible to translate into English.
What does this mean? This means that haiku, the English art form, is urgently new.
Haiku, as English-speakers know it, is not the ancient art we assume it to be.
Haiku in English is about as old as American Modernism—W.C. Williams and Ezra Pound, to be exact, who wrote terrible examples of haiku: the Red Wheelbarrow (Williams) and the White Petals on a Wet, Black Bough (Pound) are wretched.
What are we supposed to do with this “wheelbarrow?” We are supposed to look at it. And Pound’s poem is worse—a hackneyed comparison between petals and faces in a metro. What good is it to be metaphoricwithin a picture? These westerners had no idea what to do with haiku. They were gawkers, overwhelmed by the pictorial aspect of the form.
We look at, rather than read, haiku. Haiku belongs to pictorial expression, which has no before or after, as poetry does. This is the Western, shallow view.
The neglected poet Yone Noguchi (1875-1947), the first Japanese writer to publish novels and poetry in English, wrote in a 1904 essay, “My American poets, you say far too much!” Here’s the brilliant way he defined haiku: “a tiny star…carrying the whole sky at its back…a slightly open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy.” Noguchi is the father of English haiku. A pity he’s been eclipsed by Ezra Pound. How many know Noguchi?
Noguchi’s home in Tokyo was destroyed by American bombs in 1945. So much for his attempt to be a haiku friend to America!
And remember the fire which destroyed Basho’s home.
And not only are haiku poets homeless, the haiku itself is homeless.
In haiku’s origins, haiku was exiled from longer forms.
Haiku’s lonely journey from Japan to America traveled inside a novel!
And haiku, this most famous (English) poetic form, is strangely empty of famous poets
Haiku, a homeless art.
Basho did make some philosophical remarks, in what I’m guessing was a sincere (if desperate) attempt to make the haiku legitimate and profound (“poet and object need to be one” and “your feeling” must be true or your poem will be “counterfeit”) but this is a species of over-thinking by the overwrought. The action (a frog jumping into a pond) determines the poetic form, not the other way around. Those who are bold enough to define poetry do not become too overly engrossed in defining poetic forms.
We can’t understand haiku as it comes from Basho, the “master,” unless we understand the accident of haiku within Basho’s tortured existence.
Noguchi’s greatest haiku is found in his novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902) written by the character Miss Morning Glory, an 18 year old Japanese girl—who was initially attributed as the author of the work! Upon leaving San Francisco (as Noguchi did, returning to Japan in 1904) Miss Morning Glory wrote:
Sayanora no Ureiya nokore Mizu no neni!
Remain, oh remain, My grief of sayonara, There in water sound!
Noguchi, himself, the true founder of Western, English-speaking, haiku, was often too 19th century in his taste to write haiku:
Bits of song — what else? I, a rider of the stream, Lone between the clouds.
Here is one line from another haiku by Noguchi: “Break song to sing the new song!”
This sounds more like Pound (who came after Noguchi) than Basho.
A poem perfecting the haiku form as a form was bound to happen, and it did, in the middle of the 20th century, by James W. Hackett (1963):
The fleeing sandpipers turn about suddenly and chase back the sea!
But the perfection of the form means next to nothing, since the action creates the form, as every good poet will understand.
Daipayan Nair is a master of the short form—he is philosophical enough to know that perfecting the haiku as a form is not the point.
The great poem will always fill up the poetic form as a great poem—which accidentally lives in the poetic form.
Not as a poem which begs at the door to get permission to enter and occupy the poetic form and, by doing so, becomes great.
I’m sure Shakespeare did not lie awake at night thinking about the ‘sonnet form.’ He took part in the ‘sonnet craze’ only because the ‘sonnet craze’ existed. The sonnet form did not tell Shakespeare what to do. Shakespeare ordered around the sonnet.
Daipayan Nair’s the ten hands of the fuchka seller — Collection of haiku and senryu (2024) Penprints, contains a haiku which demonstrates what has just been said—the poet matters more than his form, whether it be haiku or senryu—same origin, less nature-centered than haiku:
full moon chat she gives her heart to a bad haiku
The naturalism and the brevity of the haiku is supposed to guard against the sentimental, but it does not. The lesson gradually learned by haiku poets in English is that a poetic form by itself can do nothing. Nair brings family into his haiku. This one works for me:
50th anniversary dad asks for a cup of tea
In the Foreword to Nair’s book, Pravat Kumar Padhy writes: “His brilliantly crafted senryu are unique in the sense that they reflect Indianness.”
I must believe this. I did look up my share of Indian words. I suppose it won’t hurt Daipayan Nair’s reputation to be known as the best haiku writer, perhaps, in India.
Once I knew what bhel poori was, I smiled, and saw the dual (happy, sad) meaning of the poem:
bhel poori this misunderstanding between us
And then we have this:
bhog thali — the priest makes space for his last demand
The best writers of haiku must philosophically understand how the brevity of the form lends itself to silence or absence. For me, this is a perfect example of that:
rainy night I neither chirp nor croak
This one might be my favorite. The “I” is both silent and a cacophony.
Many of Nair’s poems have a sweet melancholy humor.
to think that was love … Chilekotha
A hint of the mysterious and the romantic resonates in:
between the city buses her face
When does a poetic form which provides so little give you enough? From what has been said, the poetic form cannot give us the answer. And yet, Daipayan is nothing if not a student of the haiku form. How can he not let the form take the lead sometimes? The eternal argument between poetry and philosophy. To ponder or feel? Here are two lovely examples:
evening adda I sip the first line of her recital
Coffee House a teaspoon of Marxism in her argument
There is nothing wrong with the feeling that one is reading a ‘perfect’ haiku, rather than ‘a poem’:
Morals hinge on recognizing beauty. Keats and Poe were right. To make the good a pleasure, not a duty, I pretend I am standing on a gigantic height and the one I love is about to fall. The secret to aesthetics is fright. There is nothing complicated at all about this. The genius adores simplicity. The world isn't big---it's tall. The long-limbed are out to conquer the sensual. There is a freshness, an awful newness about the land. There are echoes. I am about to scream. Give me your hand.
The war protestor secretly likes war and the war protest is war. Jealousy dominates the newspaper stand. That's what reporting is for. Sadism and schadenfreude stalk the land and betray themselves in the kindly poet's anti-war poem kindly published by the flippant force, "The London Review of Books," with a child's body parts, of course.
The left has gone so far left, it's right. Don't be confused. London's Islamic influence is teaching the sexy new manners. To tell you the truth, the renowned rock star, now a knight, quickly got sick of free love, never liked it. Haven't you heard? The party's over. We're not young forever. The "wealthy" and their "wealth" have become a bit of a joke. Death dominates literature in fearful undertones.
The Rolling Stones keep touring. Brian Jones and Beatles, ghosts. The presidential candidate giggles. The author turning sixty-eight yawns; his brother hated his father, or so he says; he didn't remember the hate; he would never say something like that; they don't say things like that at work; the plain life keeps asserting itself. Why are we scared? There's something that isn't. The old tape proves beyond a doubt he was a jerk.
I dreamed what heaven was as I walked along, plainly, along the wharf museum I walk along daily. The old ship, the tourists, the custom house, the blue sky! The fussy federal park service going about its business noisily and lazily. In a summer nonchalance close to evening I passed a tourist child gesturing, solitary, small groups of adults resembling trees, most from somewhat far away, I'm guessing. This was heaven. The weather near the pier a blessing. My Massachusetts neighborhood a setting as good as any for somber, sunlight-on-the-horizon, ruminations. I thought, how pitiful most conceptions of heaven are: a pleasant place somewhere else. Really? Is that all? Heaven must be something else. (In my literary heart I respect Dante's try--- Beatrice harmonious and alone in the light of stars sitting atop actual punishments of hell.) I thought: maybe heaven is here and I will move about invisible, free to inhabit the thoughts of others, free to notice everything. Sorrow and pain unreal because in my heaven it is clear life's unreal. There's nothing to fear. All sorrow brightens to relief. This is what I thought. To ask: "is that the sun?" To close my hand and catch the thief.
Scarriet 