This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good afternoon. So I thought I'd start by explaining how I imagined our proceeding process. So first I'll just say a few things about sort of where Haiku comes from and then a few things about the form and how it has developed and what it looks like a bit. And then that might take half an hour, let's say. And then I was thinking for 15 minutes or so we'll actually go out walking and that'll become more clear as to why we're doing that. a little later so we'll go for about a 15 minute walk at which point you'll be jotting things down and then for those who are interested in coming back and if there's time we'll sort of go over if you want the things you've written down and we can talk a bit about crafting them into haiku poems so if you're not interested in that or if you don't have time once we're all sort of heading off

[01:27]

to do our little meandering, then feel free to just take off and don't feel obliged to come back. So haiku is a Japanese, a short Japanese form of poetry. And the history, a brief history of it, well, before I get into that, it has a few nicknames in the English language. So it's considered snapshot poetry. It's considered one-breath poetry and even wordless poetry. That the attitude of haiku is almost like if we could do this without actually using words, we would. But we do have to use words, so we'll keep it down to the bare minimum. It's been in the English language... It's been sort of considered in English language poetry for about 100 years. And a couple of years ago, Norton Press came out with an anthology called Haiku in English, The First 100 Years, which I was fortunate enough to have one of my poems in that anthology.

[02:35]

And it starts with a poem by Ezra Pound in, let's, 1913. And it's something about... faces on the metro, wet leaves on a bow or something. And so that particular poem is considered sort of the first intended attempt at haiku in the English language, and so it's been 100 years in the English language. But it started in Japan, and Japanese poetry has a very long history, and their history, the Japanese poetic history, has a lot of roots in China. And the haiku form is derived from a form of poetry that was called renga, which are these linked poems that were very popular, mostly amongst the sort of leisure class and the aristocrats and the royal family and people with lots of time on their hands.

[03:37]

So folks would gather, because they have all this idle time on their hands, they would gather And they would write these linked poems. And there could be as many as, you know, sometimes there are 100 verses long, 500 verses long, 1,000 verses long. And there was a whole system of forms. And there's a lot of parallels with haiku and zen. So there's all these forms that these styles of poetry follow. And aranga, the form is that there would be a three-line verse to start it off with five, seven, five syllables. followed by another verse, which is two lines of seven syllables, and then five, seven, five again, and seven, seven. And it would be passed around from poet to poet to poet to link each of the verses. And sort of the attitude was that you would follow the fragrance of the verse before. So it's not that you were trying to tell a story or be really obvious in how you're connecting verse to verse to verse, but there's sort of this sense and sensitivity that would follow from verse to verse.

[04:44]

And you could actually sort of the first verse and the second verse could be considered a poem, which actually that form was also a kind of poetry called waka, which is the three lines followed by two lines. And there were all these systems and forms of these verses, things like... In the 17th verse, there needs to be a flower reference. In the 37th verse, there should be a moon reference. The 44th verse should have an optimistic tone. So there's all these rules or forms, as we like to call them, that this style of poetry would follow. And the first verse, called the haku, was seen as crucial. You always gave that to the best poet in the group, and it was seen as a very... crucial sort of the launch to this poem, it was so important to sort of set an appropriate tone and get this whole thing going. So it was always the best poet who was given the responsibility of writing the haku, which was this first verse of three lines.

[05:47]

And one of the rules was that it had a seasonal reference in it. And the seasonal reference was sort of a setting for the rest of the poem. And the seasons could change throughout the poem. But with that seasonal reference, it sort of gives you a sense of the where and the when and the what that sets the stage for the rest of the poem. So it became so important that people would train in just writing that first verse and trying to sort of hone their skills to write that first verse. And it became so important and people were spending so much time doing this that it actually became a form unto itself. And that's how haiku started. So they just said, well, let's forget about all the other stuff that follows after it. Let's just have this as a form unto itself. So that's how haiku started. And all these other forms of poetry still exist, but haiku sort of took off and has become sort of the most popular.

[06:53]

So three lines traditionally, and the one thing that most people... suspect about haiku is that it is three lines of the first line is five syllables the second line is seven syllables the third line is five syllables and traditional so conservative old school haiku poets still commit themselves to that there's a american poet and author and zen priest called clark strand who says if it doesn't follow that form it's not a haiku but he's very much in the minority most English language haiku poets actually think that's way too many syllables. And so there is this spirit of brevity, though, that carries on. And with the seasonal reference, that has generally sort of shifted into a priority of just being an expression of encounter, an encounter in the natural world. And in Japan, they have these books

[07:55]

like a 500-page reference book on seasonal words with bugs and plants and animals and weather conditions and ceremonies and holidays and so on and so forth. So you can go through, if you want a seasonal word, you can go through this dictionary and find a particular bird and say, oh, I'll use that one and that... and means it's a spring haiku so cherry blossoms are a spring thing the wind is typically considered an autumn reference so these various natural phenomena have these seasonal references but again that's been sort of simplified or broadened into just it is an intimate and an immediate encounter in the natural world so that's why You know, we'll go out for 15 minutes and you'll bring a pen and paper with you and you will be walking about paying attention.

[08:56]

And there's actually a name for that. It's called a ginkgo or a haiku walk. So this is seen as a, you know, there are haiku clubs. called high gin so that who gather on a regular basis and part of that quite often is they'll all go off on walks and then they'll jot things down and then they'll gather again and they'll share their efforts with each other and trying to refine and work and see how it sounds and looks and so on and so forth so we'll basically be doing a ginkgo walk with the intention of generating either little sort of um maybe starting points of a haiku or a finished first thought, best thought haiku, whatever comes out of that. There's a British author named R.H. Blythe, who, if you're looking to learn about haiku, he's written a four-volume set on haiku, and they're all in the library here. He's written a two-volume set on the history of haiku, and what impresses the hell out of me is that given the...

[10:02]

the six volume, he's also written a lot about Zen, and given the six volumes he's written about haiku, he's never written a haiku. So I have great respect for that, that he would put that much effort in, in the study and practice and philosophy and style, but never actually, he sort of says, okay, that's your business, this is my business. And he actually was in Japan before the Second World War, and he was a scholar and worked with the Japanese government. And then the war happened and he was put in an internment camp, which is where he met Robert Aiken. And that was Robert Aiken's first exposure to Zen was meeting R.H. Blythe in an internment camp in Japan. So I've written some things down. So here's R.H. Blythe. I said a bit about him and he wrote in the first volume of his four volume set on haiku sort of the spirit or attitude of sort of the zen spirit and the zen attitude that one would bring to the practice of haiku and I far prefer these considerations than how many syllables are in a poem so I'll just read them out selflessness loneliness grateful acceptance

[11:26]

wordlessness, non-intellectuality, contradictoriness, humor, freedom, non-morality, simplicity, materiality, love and courage. So I see a lot of people who will send me efforts and say, is this a haiku? And there seems to be this tendency that says, you know, when you think of something so brief, Usually the brief experiences I have are sort of charged with something, and it's not always something good, right? It can be a very sort of curt or terse or angry or reactionary thing if it's short. So quite often people submit things to me and say, is that a haiku? And it has this kind of tension and almost aggression about it. And so one of the great challenges is to try and express that kind of And like I said, the love and courage that comes through this in such a simple, short, poetic form.

[12:32]

And I guess the attitude, you know, to summarize, I think, all of that is sort of an expression of immediacy. So it's an actual encounter. They often call it the haiku moment, which is sort of this aha thing where you're just walking around and then something catches your attention. whatever, the wind, a bird, a sound, the creek, the tree, flower, bug, whatever, something, out of all the things going on, something grabs your attention. And in that moment, it's an immediate moment and then it's an intimate moment. So the intimacy is sort of explored in my mind, in my heart, that intimacy is explored through the question of, well, what is it about that that caught my attention? So of all the things I'm surrounded by in any given moment, what is it that in me and that created this moment and created this encounter? And I think that's also sort of consistent with Zen practices.

[13:36]

Who is this? What is this? What catches my attention and why? What are my values? What are my intentions? What are my habits? What are my tendencies? And if you spend time writing these things out and doing a lot of them, you may discover your own voice, and you may discover your own style, and you may discover your own priorities, and you might start wondering, well, why that, and what is this that wants me to focus on these sorts of things? So that's sort of the spirit, is the intimacy and the immediacy of what's often called the haiku moment. So let's say you're trying to write one. Well, what kind of language might one use? And you can imagine that because it's so brief, large words, large, poetic, complicated, academic, or flowery, or convoluted words don't really fit.

[14:38]

The simplicity of haiku is the language is very simple. And the challenge there... is to write something that is evocative and is charged and is suggestive. That's a word that's often used with haiku, is that they suggest something. So it's a kind of reporting more than creating. You're reporting on this encounter that you're having in very... Like in newspapers, they say, you know, always write for a grade five level of education if you're writing for a newspaper. And haiku is sort of the same thing. You're using this very simple, straightforward language. And yet at the same time, you're trying to point to something quite immediate, intimate, magical that happened to you walking along a path or by a creek or what have you. So that can be the great challenge. And if you start using... The other thing that is discouraged is sort of poetic devices.

[15:40]

You know, there's things like simile or metaphor or rhyming even. These sort of poetic methods or tools or whatever are also quite discouraged. And it's a bit like, you know, in Zen they talk about the finger pointing to the moon, that if your language is too heavy or if your language is too poetic, people will focus on the language rather than what you're pointing to. So just like in Zen says, finger pointing to the moon, if you've got too many jewels on the hand pointing to the moon, you'll be looking at the finger and not at what the finger's pointing to. So very, very simple language. Again, adding to the challenge. Adjectives, even adjectives are often... discouraged and kept to a minimum. It's sort of like there's a saying in literature that says, show, don't tell.

[16:42]

So if you have this encounter that brought up joy in you, don't use the word joyful in the poem. Try and show that this was a joyful encounter. So telling is, I was joyful. Whereas showing is might be talking about the brightness of something or the quickness of something or the color of something. So again, that's a showing rather than a telling approach. Now, there's something that are called desktop haiku. And that's when... And this is where a lot of other poetic forms, I think, are created, where you're sitting comfortably in your room at your desk and you're tapping your pen on your chin and imagining a creek, right? Or imagining a bird. And then you're jotting things down and you're imagining.

[17:45]

So that's a desktop haiku. So you're not actually there at the creek or not actually there with the bird. You're imagining it. And quite often when you see a desktop haiku, it has to do with things like eagles soaring above mountaintops and what have you. And how often are we on... I mean, around here it happens once in a while, but for most of us that's a bit of a stretch. So any questions or thoughts so far? Too much? Not enough? I'm curious how you got into it. I was in a monastery in England, a Soto Zen monastery, and there was a fellow there, Bill Wyatt, who was the first monk ordained on British soil, first Zen monk ordained, and he'd been writing haiku since the 50s, and he's this eccentric, wine-drinking, hermit-type practitioner and big into haiku poetry.

[18:53]

And I used to try other forms of poetry. And then he showed me haiku, and that was about 17 or 18 years ago. And I can't stop now. Should we go into, are people interested about poets of the past who are sort of, have influenced, or do you want to get more into how to do it? Any preferences? What's that? Should we go? Okay. So this fellow named Matsuo, I don't even know how to pronounce his first name, but Basho, he's considered sort of the Renaissance man, the founder of what we today consider haiku poetry. And he was around in the 1600s. He died young, which most sort of famous Japanese haiku poets did. A lot of the most revered poets in Japan lived this sort of struggling, impoverished... lonely existence. And Japanese culture has a fondness for sort of the struggling failure almost.

[19:59]

I mean, some of them are successful as poets, but their life in general is this ongoing struggle. And so many of these poets were strugglers. And Basho is probably the most famous of them all. And he had a ton of disciples and died young. And he thought of himself as a bat. And this again refers to the Zen... that he went on very long walks, like for months at a time, and he wrote about these journeys. And he used a form that's now called Hai Bun, which is a little short prose piece of maybe three, four paragraphs long about what he was doing, who he was meeting, where he was staying, what he found on his journey. So there'd be a little matter-of-fact prose piece with a haiku at the end. And traveling is the prime opportunity for writing haiku. Again, it sort of feeds this sort of snapshot approach to poetry.

[21:04]

People, when they go on holidays, they're taking snapshots. And in some ways, that's a classic place to write because everything is so fresh. You're having all these new and fresh encounters because you're in places you've never been before. So it's easy to sort of remark and write about these new experiences you had. And I suppose the great challenge, and again, a bit of the Zen spin, is to see... wherever you are, home territory as the great adventure, right? And having fresh eyes and being open and surprised and seeing the adventure in your own backyard. But he would go on these long journeys and writing about them. So another thing is, here's probably his most famous poem and probably the most famous haiku ever. is this one here. And it's always funny to read them out loud because they just kind of sound funny, but I'll read this one. So the old pond, a frog jumps in, sound of water. So that is seen as the most famous.

[22:09]

It's the Mona Lisa of haiku right there. Most well-known, most often quoted, and most translated. There's a book in our library here called 100 Frogs, and it's 100 different English translations of that one poem. So that gives you a bit of a feel for the challenge of Japanese language into English language. And in some ways, that's where the 17-syllable thing doesn't carry over to English so well. That 17 syllables for a haiku is a lot in the English language, but in the Japanese form, it's far more sort of... punchy and succinct with that many and it also follows the rhythm of I don't know Japanese but I've been told that it sort of follows the rhythm of their language is to do the 575 and again died young he went on many of these journeys and he would often report at the beginning that he wasn't sure if he would return home alive and the name Basho comes from

[23:12]

a little hut that his disciples built for him, and there was a banana leaf tree outside the hut, and I think basho is the name of the tree in Japanese, so a banana leaf tree. So two more of his are, even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo's cry, I long for Kyoto. And another very famous one of his, a crow has settled on a bare branch autumn evening. So that's that show. Just checking the time. So Busan, I don't know. And these are all done sort of chronologically. So Busan is the next character. He was an artist. His livelihood was as an artist. And he actually lived what would be considered a sort of normal, healthy, happy life, which is unusual for haiku poets. And it's often said that Busan had the approach of an artist and Basho had the approach of a seeker.

[24:14]

Oh, and I was going to mention the bat thing with Basho, that when he went on these travels, he dressed as a Zen monk. And I've read different understandings. One is that he was actually ordained as a priest or a monk. And the other is that he just wore the clothes of a monk because to wander in Japan, it was actually safer. It was sort of culturally understood that there would be these wandering Zen folk, and they didn't have any money or anything, so there's no point in robbing them. So it was just a safer way for him to go on these long journeys dressed as a Zen monk. And he called himself a bat because he thought, okay, laypeople are mice and priests are birds, and he's sort of somewhere in between, so he called himself a bat. So Boussaint's the artist. following the seeker. So Basha was the seeker and Busan is the artist.

[25:15]

And a few of his, or a couple of his more recognized poems, I go, you stay, two autumns. And butterfly sleeping on the temple bell. So as you can tell, with that one, the translation is nowhere near 17 syllables. And shorter... In the English language haiku, shorter is always better. And you can tell there's no adjectives, no flowery language, no poetic devices. They can really just be sentences that evoke or are suggestive of larger things. A very popular and probably one of the most accessible... of the haiku poets is this fellow named Isa, who led maybe the most tragic life of all these poets. He was this very happy, high-spirited fellow who was dirt poor, married, and I don't know how many kids he had, but it was a lot, and they all died in infancy or early childhood.

[26:22]

And to read his poetry, there is still this sort of very light, bright, sort of childish voice and childlike spirit in him, even given this tragedy of his life. So one of his is, climb Mount Fuji, O snail, but slowly, slowly. And the second one, the man pulling radishes pointed the way with a radish. Yes. I just want to say that There's sort of two related forms. There's haiku and there's something else called senryu. And haiku is traditionally, the focus is Mother Nature. So as I was mentioning, we go out, we walk in Mother Nature, we jot down our encounters. Senryu focuses on human nature. So... Amongst haiku groups, when they gather and somebody writes something, there's this sort of false debate going on, well, is that a senryu or is that a haiku?

[27:26]

And if you're interested in sort of the foibles of humanity and our shortcomings and our peculiar behavior and so on and so forth, they tend to be sort of a funny, almost cynical reflection on our human behavior. It follows the same form, and it's called senryu. So... I tried to find, I mentioned earlier in Matsuyama, Japan, there's a museum dedicated to a fellow named Shiki who is a haiku poet. And he's sort of the modernist haiku poet where he was writing during what's called the Meiji Restoration when Japan finally decided to modernize. And so he modernized haiku. And one way he did that was by starting to include subject matter that the traditionalists said, wait a minute, you can't write about baseball. You can't write about trains. You can't write about, you know, these sorts of things.

[28:29]

And so he started, he sort of widened it and accommodated the sort of the modern attitude. And again, he had tuberculosis. And he spent probably the last six or seven years of his life bedridden. And his last two poems are in the museum. And his sister, who was tending to him at his bedside, held the paper up for him. And he barely was able to write his last two poems. And that sort of straggly, faint piece of paper is in the museum in Matsuyama. And they were both about gourd water, which is... the water from these gourds that was supposed to be good for your lungs for people with tuberculosis. And it was basically saying how not even the gourd water was working anymore, and he died shortly afterwards. And then my favorite is this guy named Teneda Santoka, who was a drunk failure. He was a failed Zen priest, suicidal, and died young.

[29:30]

And there's a book of his in the library, and it's considered Free Verse Haiku. And his story is that his mother committed suicide, jumping in a well, and tragedy, tragedy. His father was sleeping around, and he went to university, had a nervous breakdown, failed at that, then got married, and his marriage broke down. And then he and his father tried to start a sake brewery, and that failed, and they drank a lot of their proceeds. And... And then he tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a streetcar, and a Zen priest pulled him out of the way and took him to his temple and sort of rehabilitated him and ordained him, and then eventually sent him off to a little country temple to be the managing priest, and he failed at that. And so he ended up spending the last years of his life walking, drinking sake, and writing haiku.

[30:31]

And... Just to give you an idea how 17 syllables is too long, one of his haiku is that sound, the rain. So four syllables, four words, haiku. His most famous one is the deeper I go, the deeper I go, green mountains. Another one is slipped, fell down, mountains are silent. And another one is I don't care if it does rain, It rains. So again, you get a sense that he's outside a lot, he's walking a lot, and he's stumbling and a very sensitive lad. So I think that's all I've written down. It's now five after four. Do you have enough information to go out and try and jot some things down? Are there any other sort of

[31:34]

Is there any questions or help I might offer before we do that? Yeah, I got a question. Actually, I didn't get the syllables in the translations. It seemed kind of random or so. Forget syllables. Well, there's two ways to appreciate syllables, I would say, at this point. It can be a very good place to start is actually to pay attention and try and do 5-7-5. Because I think that can give you a sense of, okay, I'm trying to write something within a limited space and in this structured form. So it can help, if you want to commit to this or try it out, it helps with the discipline to actually do 5.75. And the other thing, when I first started, I was always doing 5.75 because I wanted to write something that I know could be considered a haiku, right? And if it was 5.75 and had something to do with nature, I could say, well, I've written a haiku.

[32:37]

Now I can work on sort of the form or the style or whatever. So feel free to try that. That's an option. The other general sort of consideration is short, first line short, second line slightly longer, third line short. And there's a few form options. So one is... to, like, let's see if there's an example. So that fascia poem is an example, I think. Well, let's see. No, I don't have. So most of these are just sort of one thought expressed in three lines. But there is another way is to bring two sort of experiences together. So one can be, let's see if I've written one. So this is sort of one.

[33:39]

Indoor plunge. I move away from a thing moving towards me. So the first line is setting and then the second two lines are what happens within that setting. So you can do it that way or you can do two lines and then the third line and they're somehow related to each other. I'm trying not to throw too much at you here. But I find the simplest thing is just one thought expressed in three short lines. And if you can find sort of those natural breaks in the line, that creates the three lines that can help too. I don't know if you said this here, but you were mentioning the other day that haiku isn't meant to be read aloud. Yeah. I mean, when folks gather to explore their haiku, you can share it with each other to see if it sounds and if the structure and so on and so forth is sensible. But typically, haiku is a form of poetry that is seen and not heard.

[34:40]

So calligraphy is associated with haiku, where people will do very artistic or expressive calligraphy, and then the haiku is actually hung on the wall as a visual form of art. So I've gone to open mic poetry events reading haiku, and it just falls flatter than a pancake. Because it's over before it even starts and people just sort of stare and they're not sure what just happened sort of thing, right? So it's really not a form of poetry that works as a spoken form of poetry. Except, again, like I said, when you're working on it, you can sort of get the sound and the rhythm and the structure down by getting people to share their thoughts with it. Anything else? So again, let's... Let's go walk about for 15 minutes. Jot down whatever you want. If you're done for the day, feel free to just head on your way. And I'm thinking of carrying on.

[35:44]

If people continue to be interested and want to gather and jot things down and share them, there may be further opportunities down the road for that. So we'll see some of you back here in 15 minutes or so. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[36:18]

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