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 metaphoric within 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’:
porch mist —
the woodsy aroma
of a paperback
Even philosophers have noses.
Thomas W Graves Jr
Salem, MA
August 13, 2024