Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: Today we're reading a selection of Haiku by Kobayashi Issa. Joanne, would you like to read the first Haiku? Joanne: Yes, I would love to. [To read this haiku, visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50983/selected-haiku-by-issa] Abram: And that's it. That's the poem. Joanne: Yeah. I love it. This is truly, if I'm being honest, one of my favorite poems of all time. Abram: Talk to me. Tell me what, how, and why is this one of your favorite poems of all time. Joanne: Well, first of all, the haiku poetic form might be a perfect poetic form. Abram: Not to understate it. Joanne: Oh, let me tell you why I love it so much. It is, I think there's a million right reasons why it's such an enduring form in many traditions, many time periods and languages, but it, the haiku as it evolved with Basho and Issa and Busan and their contemporaries, a very, very Seemingly simple form. Some of our listeners were probably introduced to the haiku form in elementary school or something like that. And I'm sure that anyone could recite to you, “Oh, it's a three line poem, five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, five syllables in the third line”. But that's not quite right. I think that we do that in English. We teach children that that's the haiku poetic form because, you know, as they're acquiring language, as they're learning to write, it's easy for them to count a small number of syllables and be precise, you know, when they write a haiku as children. But it's not easy to translate Japanese into English syllabics. So we don't want to be merely in service of that 5 7 5 rule when we read haiku and when we write them. So the first thing to think about is, yes, generally, there are three lines, generally, very small number of syllables, a very plain language. This is not ornate language that's being used, very accessible. A haiku poem has to use very original images, mostly drawn from common life, just ordinary experiences in our daily existence. The insistence on time and place is important, right? Seasonal change, very important. You have to have a sense of economy and a kind of turn at the end of the poem. So quite often, a lot of haiku poems will set up an idea or a feeling in the first two lines. And then in the third line, you have an aha kind of moment. And, typically that's in Japanese it's referred to as the kireiji. Abram: Yeah, that's exactly what you get here. We could just take this line by line, you get the first line, “the snow is melting”. And in this translation by Robert Haas, we get the five syllables, although you'll notice as we go that the last line is not five syllables. So there's no strict 575 here in this very famous haiku. And so I think that's important because the only thing I knew about haiku really, before this podcast began was the 575 rule. But doing just a bit of research into that haiku, of course that doesn't translate perfectly. And so, yeah, we get five here in the first line, but not in the last line, but we do get this indication of season. And I think that is really important that haiku really always, generally speaking, has this reference to a season, to some point in nature's time, which is here, the snow is melting. So it's a pretty precise point in time, which is the turn from winter to spring. And so we get that first line, “the snow is melting” and the second line, “and the village is flooded”. And if the poem were to end there, it wouldn't be a poem, but that creates in us this sense, this imagery of a really sloppy mess, basically. And then suddenly this turn “flooded with children”. Joanne: That's right. And you know, not only is it a sloppy mess in those first two lines, it's potentially quite dangerous. If a village is flooded, that's potentially deadly. And so that's an example of where that cutting line or cutting image is so powerful because those first two lines set up a real sense of danger, and then within just two words. Everything turns to joy with children. The children are flooding the village. They've been cooped up all winter. Their parents have been telling them to stay inside and keep warm. And finally it's spring. And you could just imagine, if anyone has ever seen children, especially like elementary school children, like running out of an elementary school at the end of the school day, and they're just shouting and the teachers just say “walk”. Don't run to the bus. And they're just like, AAAHHHH. That's totally the sound. I imagine just pure joy. And that's so important. That might be as, or more important than any formal constraint of the haiku. It's a very philosophical and emotional core tenet of the haiku tradition. And it comes from Buddhist metaphysics. The world is transient. Everything is contingent and we all suffer. And so there's a constant concern with that transience of the world, those changes in the natural, in the landscape, in the weather and the climate, and that there's always that sense that all of us suffer, and how do we manage that suffering and what do we do. In the case of this poem with joy, just pure joy of those children, it is just wonderful. Abram: Well, maybe we could take those themes and those ideas about the haiku into another haiku [which, if you want to read it, go here https://inquiringmind.com/article/0302_12_nisker_haiku/] Joanne: Oh, poor fleas. Poor, poor, poor poetic speaker. Poor poetic speaker. Abram: Alright, so we don't have the same kind of surprise of joy in this, in this haiku as we just had in the last one. We have something very different going on. So what do you see happening in this haiku? Joanne: Okay, now here's the thing that interests me here. The poetic speaker is addressing the fleas, not something that we often see. In order to enjoy this poem, you have to think about the dramatic situation in which it's uttered. They're on his mattress. They're on his mattress, he's seeing them on the pillow, on the sheet, and they're just jumping around, right? But he's alone, and being alone is a little different from being lonely, right? It means that he wants to be alone. To be with someone who isn't there. So it's a poem about absence. Not only is he lonely, but there's this desire for him to find camaraderie or kinship with the only thing in the room, which is the fleas. Abram: Yes. What strikes me about this poem is the power of those little words. And again, this is a translation, so I don't know what the original Japanese is, but in Robert Haas's translation here, it's the power of that word to also write this, this idea of being together with. We had that poem by Robert Hayden where it says “Sundays to my father woke up”, you know, that poem, this poem, they, they manifest a certain power in the simplest of words. And so here it's for you, fleas. Two, the nights must be long, they must be long without that word, the poem doesn't really work, but it's the bondedness. It's the being together. It's the feeling the same way that the fleas feel that makes the whole poem work. Joanne: Okay. And also embedded in the poem, even though it isn't framed as a question, it is a kind of rhetorical question because of the repetition of the word must for a poem, this small, to repeat that word twice is very interesting. Interesting. Right? They must be lonely, right? Because first of all, the fleas can't talk back. Second of all, you know what? Maybe it's not lonely for the fleas. I mean, they're, they're the tiniest of, of beings. I mean, what do they care about loneliness? But in his mind, he's just looking for anyone to recognize what he's feeling in his solitude. Abram: Mm. I love that. Joanne: Me too. Abram: So should we read a third? Joanne: Let's read a third. [you know the drill: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50983/selected-haiku-by-issa] Abram: I love this one. This is my favorite of the three that you sent my way for this podcast episode today. Joanne: Yeah, why is it your favorite? Sounds familiar, no? Abram: Yeah, well, first of all, it sounds a little too familiar with the way that we keep house. Joanne: Yes. Abram: But also just the kind of wittiness of it. It's a wink. It's a smile. And it all turns on that last word again. I mean, the lines here, for listeners, “don't worry spiders” is one line. “I keep house” is the second line. And the third line “casually”. Yeah. I had a grad school prof once who told me this was writing expository prose, right? You're writing a dissertation. And the first chapter I turned in, he crossed out every adverb I used and he said, “adverbs are lazy”. That if you want to use language precisely, you choose a good verb and every time you use an adverb, it means you haven't chosen a good verb. And he said, if you want to be concise and write clear prose you should not ever use adverbs. This was his advice to me in graduate school. And so he crossed out all my adverbs, but here the adverb is what makes the poem. Joanne: You see, by your grad student advisor doing that to you, you could have been the next Kobayashi Issa. I mean, look what, look at all the dreams that he dashed by getting rid of those adverbs. This is shameful. I think you need to send this haiku to that advisor. Really shameful. Well, I take his point, which is maybe that's a bit extreme, but let's put it this way. You don't want to overdo the adverbs. And if they're placed well and placed strategically as this cut is in this poem, that can really produce a powerful effect. So tell me this, Abram, what do you think the first two lines are doing? What do those first two lines do? Abram: There's a couple different ways to read it. You know, similar to the first haiku that we looked at, you're setting up a kind of expectation that gets overturned. And here, one way to read it is menacing, almost like, don't worry, spiders, I'm coming for you. Like you're talking to the spiders and there's a kind of menace or a kind of sarcastic menacing to it that then gets overturned in the side of joyful. Like, you know what, actually you're good. And, actually I keep house casually, so you could keep spinning away. Joanne: I love that. That's a beautiful example of how that third line is essential. That surprise occurs, but also again, to get back to the philosophical qualities of the haiku form. Humans are not distinct from nature. They're simply another part of nature. So in both of these last two haiku that we've read, you've got a human speaking to insects. Not a typical situation. But wonderful because why wouldn't you treat a spider just as you would a neighbor or a guest in your home? It's attending to the small and creating a sense of wonder and joy and humor in that smallness. Abram: Just to build on that point, another way to read those first two lines is a sympathetic sort of “don't worry”. Like, I understand what it means to keep house and I keep house too and and you're good. You keep house. I keep house. We all do this, right? So there's a way in which another reading of those lines is to say I get it, I get it spiders. We're all doing the same thing here; we're all building houses and keeping houses. Joanne: But I keep my house casually, which means you don't have to worry about my broom hitting you on the way out. You can set up your little house in your web, I'll live in my little house and just watch you spin, you know? Abram: Because first I'd have to find my broom, which is literally something I should probably do. Joanne: Yeah, it's under a pile of papers that I don't even want to look at, because it is summertime. You know, before we re read these poems, Abram, could you just remind our readers of who Kobayashi Issa was and anything we ought to just know about him or be aware of? Abram: Sure. Very, very briefly, Kobayashi Issa, his life was 1763 to 1828. He grew up in a difficult house. His mother died young. He never got along with his stepmother, to put it mildly. He was sent away at 14 to study in Edo, I believe that's how it's pronounced, but it's present day Tokyo, and eventually he took the pen name Issa, which is not his birth name, and Issa means cup of tea. But he had a pretty tragic life. When he married, his four children all died in infancy, and his wife died in childbirth. A second marriage was unsuccessful, and the third marriage, he died shortly before his daughter was born. And so some people connect all that tragedy of his life to his movement of sympathy in these poems, talking to fleas, talking to spiders, but a broader way to conceive of that motion of sympathy and all of these haiku is that it's just part of the Zen Buddhist sensibility that informs a great deal of haiku poetry. And so as one commentator put it, this principle is linked in with Zen, that humans are not rulers of nature or even a part of nature, but we, along with everything else, simply are nature. And so to not have this sort of subject object position, but in fact, to make all of that pretty blurred through the process of haiku so that there's a kind of indistinction between us and them, that, that results from this very compressed form of poetry, that was part of the goal. And he wrote 20,000 haiku. Joanne: Wow. I don't think I knew that. Abram: Yeah, it's 10 times as much as Basho. And so he's got a huge output. And I was doing just a bit of research. I loved it. Because one of the commentators said something along the lines of, you might think it's easy to write 20,000 haiku because there's such short poems, but actually there's a difference between good haiku and bad haiku. You try to write one, and then we'll see if we want to read 20,000 of them. Joanne: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it takes insight, it takes focus, attention, precision, but also wonder and awe and joy, you know? It's a very, very difficult poetic form, but also truly magnificent. Abram: Absolutely. So with that said, let's read these three again. [You can read them too by using those two links from earlier. Remember those? The tabs are most likely still open] Joanne: Nice! Oh, those are so great. Abram: To learn more about Kobayashi Issa and the haiku form, you can visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. You can find these haiku that we read aloud on the Poetry Foundation website, but don't stop there. Check out Robert Haase's magnificent translations in his book titled The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Bousson, and Issa. And thanks to HarperCollins Publishing for granting us permission to read these English translations today. Joanne: And please remember to subscribe to Poetry for All wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you follow us on social media, maybe you can share some of your favorite haiku, or perhaps some haiku that you've written yourselves. Abram: Thank you for listening. Joanne: Thank you.