thoughts on haiku constraints

While it’s impossible for anything to be apart from politics or from chemistry or from what you already know or from embedded ideology, there’s a breathing space in haiku possible. The stringent constraints to brevity, simplicity, immediacy buzzers you? But haiku are completed, like other poems, by the perceiver. If it reaches the right experience and expectation, it is completed.

It doesn’t need to clinch a moment of understanding only exactly this or how this fits into the universe. It helps but it isn’t the core of quietness or shift.

It’s possible to make allegories, to twist the stems of wildflowers into some pat non-observation, non-thought, to load words with teetering piles of intensity or wobble a cutesy play to the audience’s awww reflex, then it falls to verse, which incidentally aligns in length. It doesn’t need to be 3 lines, or 5-7-5 or have a pivot point 2/3 of the way through, doesn’t need to evoke nature or profound eureka awe and abstractions of bliss. It can be read only with a codex by someone who has internalized the tradition of what all has been said and embedded culturally to play off resonances and deepen the words, or can be taken cold at face value. It can be literal. It can be simple words in the best order narrative or going no where, a heap of what’s seen, sitting content.

One doesn’t come to it with some prejudgement or lesson to scribble in. That’s baggage to leave outside. It doesn’t summarize for someone or even for itself, but pauses to encapsulates in a few phonemes, a breath, one small angle that is worthy of scrutiny, to let a realization of new seeing, for one moment, appreciation of being not doing, not talking, wash over without washing somewhere ingenuine, letting words or ideas suggest themselves away from whatever is real.

It’s a tricky balance to make verbal, word in on something that words disrupt, and do it without manufacturing a moment that would be cliche. Things have to be prevented from sliding into prejudged space. Connections suggest themselves. There is resistance against heavy-handed. It is rather like painting scenes on grains of rice.

It almost can’t fit an audience in. It’s not as big as all that. It could be extended to be self-referential, the language observing itself but only some minutely simple thing.

The peripheral vision of the rest of life, of aging, of children’s arc away, of death, of rebirth, of hope and despair. There isn’t room to wiggle thru much without cramping and banging your head.

It is outside the mandate to provide tour guide barking. The fundamental aspect of haiku seems to me to be that apex of a stride, that second a foot starts to set down but knowing there is a journey by the very being a foot and a movement.

There’s a symbolic way of thinking even stripping off as much as you can, to be as concrete as you can. Still the essence wants to expand, a gas and the approaching mind imposes the emotional reaction to the implied context, the brought context, the broad context.

It needs to be a dance of subtly, to evoke without being provocative, to neither overstate, trumpet humbleness, nor to be too far distant to be abstracted and lose lyrical or humorous or frustrated or whatever tenuous connection builds the potential for insight in the reader or hearer. Which is true as much in haiku as in swathes of other poetry genres and storytelling and conversation.

Why this interpretation? Perhaps if national mythology is correct and we are a self-effacing people who pound down the nail head that would stick up, if we love the non-bold speech in general, this interpretation of haiku springs from that. Or our national myth of humbleness being of more value than pride, self-deprecating being more vital than self-promotion, we are a fertile ground for the match of values of Japan and how that culture gets filtered through the poetry. We are ready to receive.

But my postulations have too little verifiable to latch onto and these are too big to pin. I’m projecting what I value onto the whole diverse nation of people incidentally connected by accidents of geography and various positions of acceptance, indifference and resistance, to what aspect of nations I notice throwing out the data set of exceptions and millions of experiences I don’t have. I project what parts of this conglomeration under the heading haiku that spans so many cultures and centuries with competing alliances to various core definitions and picking out one small element and then do it again for another association of nation of Japan and another tradition of poetry there. It’s like trying to hitch clouds together and make them stay in one corner of the sky tethered to a tree.

Yet clouds are physical entities and so are haiku and so are these concepts of nations. We have visceral reactions to them all. (Not that emotional response proves the existence of any thing reacted to.)

Depending on where we stand, there is only mistiness or opaqueness. We all can agree that these exist. Boundaries and perspectives are almost moot. The change is so constant. We can categorize by time. Cumulous poems, ones that bring rain, ones that are far up and away, ones that scuttle and ones that are part of overcast mass and ones that clear.

Constraints are based in expectation and understanding is based in which matters of consensus have been taken up or rejected and how that maps to what one sees. What language we speak may not set our boundaries of what we perceive or what we can readily say but constrain how we are perceived and what more fodder we are given to go further or stop, allow for scaffolding community based in functions and purposes that are satisfied by the words.

The meaning of haiku would be a jack-of-all-trades taking up where there is slack or niche or need. If there is a need for covert political expression, it can become the mechanism. If there is a need for validation of literary expression of how family matters, it can turn itself to be that outlet. If there is a need for entertain the troops, amusing correspondence verse, it can make itself useful. It doesn’t necessarily need to have one core, one essence of being. It clusters and disperses. It lives, as words live, to serve whatever use they will be put to.

In this way haiku is rather like the concept of holy books or of whatever god. As local cultures and customs and individuals have different need, the face of what aspect become relevant, terse or embracing, indulgent folksy, all is love, or punctilious with footnoted cross-reference experts-only study. It reflects the application of form, the users of form, not the nature of the form itself which is created by the label, chased for the title of itself, the ideal in fashion of itself but the material is innocuous, is generic, is immaterial by being merely raw goods material specs more than something primary and polished and absolute.

A definition of haiku is more real than any sample haiku in the way that any oil painting of cloud is more real than the cloud. The concept of haiku is has more lives, is vital than any one incidence of haiku just as the concept of god or religious edict of law has more immortality than any edict of religious law felt through representation of touch of water to thirsty lips or cat-o-nines. There is more immediacy in one application of concept person to person and the feet of the ideal continues through individual acts of participation but to summarize the concept in words causes all kinds of exemptions of an extremely complex network of behavior spanning time, place and individuals.