The Evolution of Haiku

The Evolution of Haiku
by Bob Leutner

The haiku known to English readers is a small, quiet thing. It may or may not (usually not) fall into the Japanese form of seventeen syllables, and how strictly it follows other, less obvious Japanese conventions varies widely among its practitioners. But it almost always presents itself as the distillation of a private moment of observation or revelation, and it is a kind of poetry that for several generations now has been a good fit with modern ideas of the poet as a reflective soul doing the work of poetry in solitude. It also looks like a liberated kind of poetry, free to jump in any direction the mind leads and free of confining rules about rhyme, rhythm, and diction.

But haiku in its original setting negates almost everything that seems to characterize it in its transplanted home. The word itself carries clues: what we call haiku was originally a hokku, the opening verse of a series of "comic" (haikai) linked verse (renga). It stood alone only until a second verse, this time of 14 syllables, was composed as the beginning of a chain of verses of alternating 17- and 14-syllable length, a chain usually of 36 or 100 verses. Each verse contained one or more "links" to the preceding one, by sharing imagery or setting, for instance, or in a punning use of language.

The intended effect was of a series of overlapping 31-syllable poems, each able to stand alone, but still embedded in a tightly-linked chain. Remarkably, such chains were usually written by a group of poets, each following another's verse with one that not only worked with it to form a single two-part poem but also left openings and suggestions that would allow a third verse to follow on seamlessly.

In its most serious form, the practice of renga linked verse demanded a lot of its poets, including encyclopedic knowledge of classical Japanese poetry and prose and full mastery of a long list of special rules about how links between verses could be made, which images or specific words could be used at certain points in the chain, and so on.

Comic haikai linked verse came into being as a complement to that very difficult art form, first as an amusement (usually accompanied by food and much drink) for serious poets, but later -- when incomes and literacy rates rose in the early 1600s -- as a poetry particularly suited to writers and readers who were not steeped in the classical tradition.

How truly "comic" this poetry was depended on its origin, since by the late seventeenth century, the time of Matsuo Basho, the best known of all its masters, there were many different schools of haikai. Some took haikai every bit as seriously as anyone had taken renga, keeping its comic impulse well under control (if not suppressing it entirely) with an arcane book of rules of composition. Others valued spontaneity and flash.

Ihara Saikaku, for instance, who chronicled seventeenth-century town life in fiction, turned haikai into show business madness in marathon solo compositions of linked verse. He retired from the field undefeated after reciting a chain of over 20,000 verses at such speed his scribe gave up trying to write them down. (Basho is generally described as striking a mean between such extremes.)

So haiku was not necessarily the serious, spiritually significant statement it often seems to be when it is transplanted. Nor was it a poetry of solitary contemplation -- it came into being in a very social, very competitive setting that required both a nimble wit and considerable sensitivity to other people -- your fellow poets who trusted you to give them verses they could work with as your turn passed.

The best haiku verses either in Japanese or in translation have an air of the spontaneous, the fortuitous moment observed, or just the right word popping into consciousness. They seem artless, and that is one reason why the form attracts amateurs.* But what has been preserved as the best of the genre is ironically quite different, because the modern free-standing haiku divorced from the practice of linked verse is a direct descendant of the hokku opening verses of haikai sequences, and the hokku was the one verse in the chain that was most determined by rules, setting, and circumstance.

By the rules, it had to refer to the season when the poets were gathered, it should make some note, however oblique, of the occasion for the gathering and of the physical location, and (like all verses in the series) include a haigon, a word that in one way or another was "non-standard," either slangy, earthier than the usual poetic language, or even just a Chinese loan word. This long list of requirements came on top of the formal requirements (syllable count among them) and the need for a congenial openness to the verse that must follow.

Above all, haiku was a social poetry. It shares that characteristic in particular with other, less known kinds of poetry of the Edo period, among them senryu, a truly comic development out of the supposedly comic haiku and kyoka, "mad verse," a comic mutant version of the old 31-syllable tanka that generated a complicated web of clubs and factions in Edo late in the 1700s.

No matter the genre of poetry, the poet of the Edo period as popularly conceived was no withdrawn scribbler but a familiar, sociable figure practicing his art in public.

* just as well as we do not have the funds to attract members of the Haiku Writers Union

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