Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

I wondered if the pronoun might have been there to fill in the
count, since these were haiku written in the traditional 5-7-5.
But I think it runs deeper, and is more a reflection of how
poetry in general is written in America today.
Bashō studied both Taoism and Zen, and his relationship to
poetry reflected that. Bashō once said that the problem with
most haiku was that they were either subjective or objective.
A student asked him, “Don’t you mean too subjective or objective?”
Bashō answered, simply “No.” I share Bashō’s Zen
training and interests, and I see poetry as, in part, a mode of
perception by which we can slip the shackles of single view
and single stance. I think that is one of poetry’s tasks in our
lives, to liberate us from narrow, overly pointed seeing. A
good poem never says or holds only one thing.
This opening into broader ways of perceiving does happen in
poems that include “I” and personal circumstance, I should
add. And on the other side, I think it a misconception to believe
that all haiku are somehow supposed to be “objective,”
and impersonal. Poetry reflects inner experience and understanding.
The most objective haiku I can think of is Buson’s:
“Spring rain / the belly of the frog/ is not wet.” This is not a
metaphor for anything other than what it holds, the awareness
of rain so gentle that it does not drip down to or splash up to
even something so near as the frog’s belly. And yet, reading
that haiku, I feel it, in body and in spirit; I feel appreciation for
the action of the small and the subtle, for the wetness of the
frog’s back and the grass tips’ thirst. To have such an experience
is to step outside of ego, but not outside our experience
of life on this earth, a life with rain, shared with other creatures.
And this modest, homely, silent frog is something that
emerged into Japanese poetry with haiku—in earlier Japanese
poems, we know frogs by their voices, not by their skin’s dryness
or wetness. Frogs’ calling is an image of our own longing,
desire, and courtship, of the small sounds we ourselves
make amid the vast dark. Buson’s silent frog, or Bashō’s in his
famous “Old pond,/ frog jumps in/ the sound of water,” these
are different. Frog is frog, water is water, the sound of their
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70 Haiku Society of America