To Ants…
To ants on the kitchen counter— I am a wrathful god.
The Essential Haiku, End Notes
… a sense of the impossibility of translating Japanese haiku is given in these two paragraphs…
Winter Sun: This is Ueda’s translation, from Basho and His Interpreters, p. 170. The alliteration and assonance in this poem are particularly admired: fuyu no hi ya bajo ni koru kageboshi.1
… and…
A Petal Shower: The phrase used to describe the falling petals is onomatopoeic: horohoro. Some connection between that sound and the sound of the river.2
… in the note to the poem How Admirable!, some sound information on enlightenment, which is…
to see nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.3
… the commentary on Hailstones…
Hard things hitting hard things in a hard place. Mountain passes were mysterious places in old Japanese culture, inhabited by boundary gods and placatory shrines, sometimes with the carved figure of a man and a woman coupling.4
Basho On Poetry
… winding down to the end of The Essential Haiku…
The basis of art is change in the universe. What’s still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.1
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.2
… Basho promoting Panpsychism?…
Every form of insentient existence—plants, stones, or utensils—has its individual feelings similar to those of men3
… Learn from the Pine has a lot of wisdom… it comforts me because in general, i follow its proscriptions, not perfectly, not even admirably, but i follow them as best i can…
The Prose of Issa
… excerpts from “A Year of My Life (1819)…
… the interesting part being prose passages after which haiku have been inserted… as if what happened in the prose lead to the poem… or course, it could also be that the poem was written at some time in the past and inserted for it’s relevance to the moment described in the prose… Issa inserted one of his most famous poems after a passage about the death of his daughter…
The world of dew,
is the world of dew,
and yet, and yet—
… the prose in general seems to be a little banal, a little removed emotionally from what it talks about… i wonder if these journal entries seem the same to anyone who reads them?…
The Haiku of Issa
… the last two in the book…
… i have a new book on haiku coming… this one offers multiple translations of each haiku as a singular haiku can’t get at all the nuances and cultural references of the original… it’s a thick book apparently… may take me a long time to get through it…
The Haiku of Issa
… i am nearing the end of The Essential Haiku… a few more poems, a couple of prose pieces at the end of the book, i am finished… yesterday i gathered together a dozen of my micro poems to read at an event in the evening that was postponed until next week due to the rain… a COVID precaution… i read them to H who did not seem that enthusiastic about them… haiku and micro poems are funny things… i suspect you get them, or you don’t and the difference between a passable one and a great one is hard to pin down… they need to be specific enough to call you to the details of a moment, but then use those details to open a window on the infinite…
… today’s haiku summaries and interpretations…
The Haiku of Issa
… each day i read six Haiku from The Essential Haiku, translations by Robert Hass… i do it as a mindfulness practice, to start my day with something centering, something that shows how to be in the moments and see what is present, what is important, what your connection to the earth, sun, moon and stars is…
The Haiku of Issa
Today’s six Haiku summarized with notes on what they mean or suggest to me, or the questions they raise…
The Haiku of Issa
… reading and thinking about these poems as a daily practice has done a great deal to center me… they are guiding lanterns, illuminating what is truly important, not the glorious deeds of men and women, not conquering heroes and explorers, not rich men shooting themselves into space… but the fly that mimics the actions of a person praying over their rosary beads or brushing the flies away from the father’s face one last time… what is important is humility in the face of a cosmos in which we are a minuscule factor and will always be a minuscule factor…
… on with today’s six haiku…
The Haiku of Issa
… less progress on actual unraveling of meaning in these haiku today, but, several books on the subject, one of which i have ordered for my library… one thing that i knew, but which is confirmed in my exploration today, no single translation can transmit all the meaning possibilities packed into a great haiku… numerous translations are required…
Haiku of Issa
The Haiku of Issa
In today’s episode…
The Earliest Bird
… for years i have wondered about a bird that sings quite loudly starting very early in the morning, well before sunrise… it seems to be the first bird to start singing and sometimes i swear it sings all night long… i decided to duckduckgo earliest bird to sing… the answer, a robin!… i went to iBird and listened to the dawn song of the Robin… yup, that’s my bird… there is a reason why a robin is often depicted as the bird that gets the worm… i compose a micro poem on the spot…
A robin singing by itself— watch out worms!
The Haiku of Issa
… studying and trying to interpret the Haiku of Basho, Buson and Issa, and trying to write my own micro poems has had an interesting effect… it has led me to begin withdrawing from Instagram and Facebook and to reconsider the attitude with which i make art… i have decided that it might be better simply to make and let the universe decide what will come from it…
… on with the Issa haiku…
The Haiku of Issa
Micro Poem
… i began this one days ago, but struggled to get it right… i think i may be close on this iteration…
My new electric shaver— have I met the Buddha?
The Haiku of Issa
The Six Ways…
… this is a funny set of six… there are…
… i really like this set of poems…
The Daily Read
The Haiku of Issa…
… an interesting set of poems today…
… a cricket chirps in the belly of a scarecrow…
… crickets are symbols of fall in Japanese haiku… in the west, they are symbols of summer…
… scarecrows in Japanese mythology (Kuebiko) are wise creatures and is one of three knowledge deities…
… taken together, a cricket in the scarecrow’s belly might be seen as suggesting the autumn phase of human aging, there being wisdom associated with approaching old age…
… another talks about the face of a spring moon 12 years old… the 12 years old part is the dead giveaway to me that the poet speaks of a girl on the cusp of menstruation, becoming an woman…
… another speaks of a woman washing the dishes by moonlight in the shallows of a river…
… this seems a multiple reference to feminine fluidity, the moon being a complex symbol of fluidity in Japanese culture… the river being a direct symbol of flowing time, the woman washing the dishes… the dishes themselves being concrete items that around which all this fluidity revolves… everything is feminine here… evocative of intuitive understandings… evocative of inner knowledge… wow, what a beautiful poem!…
Washing the saucepans—
the moon glows on her hands
in the shallow river.
… i am going to have to continue looking into this last one… there seems to be so much to it…
Micro Poems
Today’s offerings…
_ Buoyant Queen Anne’s Lace– lazy, hazy days._
_ A quiet walk with my dog– she stops to sniff some poop.
05 Walking:
Madame Brett Park…
… while walking, i composed several micro poems…
_ Collecting eggs– while rooster casually rapes a chicken._
_ Early morning walk– the air thick and pregnant with heat._
_ Two cormorants, wings outstretched– we’re innocent!_
_ Plush rabbit doll lying on the trail– missing childhood._
_ Two redwing blackbirds fussing– love or war?_
02 Daily Read:
Haiku by Issa…
… six poems… none of them grabs me… maybe the one about one fly, one human and a large room… flies are annoying… Issa seems to have written a lot about flies… in searching for the cultural meaning of flies, nothing much comes up… an article in Kyoto Journal sites Issa as a major writer on the fly situation… i read the following poem a number of days ago…
やれうつな蠅が手をすり足をする
yare utsuna hae ga te wo suri ashi wo suru
No, not that fly!
It wrings its hands,
its feet, imploringly.1
… about which the author of the Kyoto Journal article says…
_ Among the hundreds of poems written by Japanese authors about flies and their vexed hunters, the most famous —there’s a whole book about its long genealogy and vast progeny — is without doubt the one written by Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827):2_
… i wonder why Issa had such a preoccupation with flies?… i am not sure that the straightforward answer, that they are ubiquitous and utterly annoying, is the best answer… i think one needs to look to what the spiritual purpose of flies are in a religion like Buddhism, to remind one that being in the moment is important, but not always likable… and that compassion is often difficult…
… another article in Tricycle, a Buddhist publication… about compassion, about flies… a quote from it…
Compassion in all its flavors is woven through the enormous canon of Buddhist thought. Its root meaning is “to suffer with.” We are able to feel compassion toward those beings who look like us and those who are most familiar. (These are not the same thing; dissimilar creatures can be deeply familiar, as we know from our time spent with dogs, with horses—even lizards.) At what point do we extend this circle past what is known, past what looks like us? At what point do we suffer with what is completely strange? And how far must that circle extend before it includes the sheep bot fly?3
… well, it seems after all, there was something to pay attention to in the morning’s poems…
Issa, Kobabyashi. Via: https://www.kyotojournal.org/fiction-poetry/a-swarm-of-japanese-flies/ ↩︎
Asiain, Aurelio. https://www.kyotojournal.org/fiction-poetry/a-swarm-of-japanese-flies/ ↩︎
Tisdale, Sallie. https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/the-sutra-of-maggots-and-blowflies/ ↩︎