Edited by Stephen Addiss, Angier Brock, Angela Detlev, Josh Hockensmith, Phil Rubin, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev; published by The Richmond Haiku Workshop.
With thanks to the editors.
A slender pamphlet (current is 36 pp.), each issue of SxSE invariably contains some fine haiku. One “Editor’s choice” from this issue:
stray dog
my tongue chases ice cream
around the coneLynne Steel
. . . who also has an elegantly simple haiga on p. 16. One more I particularly enjoyed:
Labor Day
the full cheeks
of chipmunksMichele Root-Bernstein
This issue also contains an interesting interview of Tom Noyes, who says, speaking of today’s English-language haiku, “There is too much emphasis on juxtapostition, which requires a priori thought and anticipation, obviating spontaneity and immediacy.” Wow! I thought it was just the other way around, that too much grammatical tying down of the various parts of a haiku results in stodgy, statement-like things, not poems. In fact, juxtaposition, or “cutting” (J. kire) is one of the three non-negotiable features of classic haiku, all too often obscured by translators such as R. H. Blyth, who don’t seem to realize their importance to the original authors and poems, making too many of their translations seem like warmed-over prosaicisms. (Henderson, for all his unwanted riming, knew better!) Well, de gustibus non disputandum est, if I spelled that correctly. One man’s trash another’s treasure. I do agree with Tom that strictly applied the “sketch from life” approach yields too many “so-whats” for healthy haiku.
Most issues, like this one, include a sheet of anonymous haiku on themes, which subscribers may vote on. Top contenders appear, with authors identified, in a later issue.
An excellent read, SxSE is well worth any haiku fan’s attention:
SxSE
3040 Middlewood Road
Midlothian, VA 23113 USA
Current subscription rates: $16 (in US), $25 (outside US).
I too was surprised by that comment by Tom Noyes when I read it in SxSE, so I’m glad you called it out (in an otherwise fine interview). Perhaps, giving Tom the benefit of the doubt, he was decrying formulaic (and thus failed) attempts at juxtaposition. But that’s not really what he said, is it?
Thanks, Michael! And yes, you’re right that this interview with H. F. Noyes (“Tom” to us) is otherwise fine. His frequent short articles under the rubric of “favorite haiku”–often one page or less–have been a source of enjoyment for readers of several haiku publications over the years, as well as a help to many new to the art of appreciating haiku. There’s even one in this issue of SxSE.
Thanks for the info on SxSE. Note, though, that the zip code you provide (“2313”) is missing one number. Two other web sources I checked give the zip as: 23113. I wasn’t able to find a web page for the journal itself, though.
Btw, at the risk of dissenting from the view of some very learned authorities, I actually don’t equate juxtaposition with cutting. A haiku can contain an internal juxtaposition without a cut. As you know, in classic Japanese haiku, the kireji (particularly “kana”) sometimes appears at the end of the poem, as in Basho’s:
kumo oriori hito o yasumuru tsukimi kana
I don’t know Japanese, so please correct me if I’m wrong!, but I believe the only kireji here is “kana”. Henderson gives a literal translation of this poem as:
clouds time-to-time people-to give-rest moon-viewing
The “kana” at the end just expresses wonder, I believe (I learned that from The Haiku Handbook!).
More idiomatically, the poem might be rendered as:
from time to time clouds give moon viewers a break
with “break” understood as something like “a chance to rest their eyes”.
Since the cutting word is at the end, there doesn’t seem to be a cut–in terms of a sudden shift from one object or scene to another–in the poem; but there are still several objects brought together or juxtaposed: the moon, clouds, and watchers.
Buson even more frequently, I believe, uses this technique. And this technique (w/o a cutting word at the end, of course) was also widely used by early practitioners of English-language haiku such as Hackett, Southard, Virgilio, Hoyt, etc. (and Richard Wright). I’d like to argue that their conception of haiku was not based simply on erroneous translations but instead has a justification within the classic Japanese haiku tradition. By focusing too much on cutting, we may be limiting our conception of what haiku can be and mistaking one prominent and highly useful technique for the essence of the genre. To me, haiku is more about capturing the essence of a resonant moment than about following any specific technical procedure–means vs. ends.
Well, my 2c (in defense of Mr. Noyes). Feel free, anyone, to correct any errors I may have made. Again, I don’t know Japanese, so I could certainly be missing something…
First of all, Allan, my apologies for not attending to your comment sooner. It’s been a little hectic around here, and I’m still learning the ins and outs of this blogging business, while trying to handle a substantial workload offline.
Thanks much for the Zip code correction. I fixed it in the main entry, above. (My keyboard sometimes stutters on repeat keys–I need to change the repeat rate in my system, I guess.)
Now, to the main points you raise, about cutting. As I stated in the main article, there are only three things agreed on by all J. haiku masters today:
1. Form: 5-7-5 or variations on it. Even those advocating “free-form haiku” address this as an issue, dissenting.
2. Structure: kire, “cut” or break. Think of it as similar to what we call a “turn” in Western poetry. A formal cutting word is no longer required–and in fact most modern masters avoid the more common cutting words, such as ya, -keri, and kana. However, the more subtle cutting words, for example the grammatical inflections of verbs and adjectives that indicate a “sentence-ending” function in Japanese, are much in use. In fact, any technique that creates a sense of cadence, a point where the poem hesitates and then goes on, may be employed. In Japanese, as was just a few days ago pointed out to me by a co-translator, simply using a kanji in a place where a phonetic kana might be expected can have that effect.
3. Content: kigo, “seasonal term” or, as we usually say in English, “season word”. Many bytes have been already spilled about this elsewhere, so no need to go on about it here, except to note that there is a modest proportion of Japanese haiku poets and readers who are relatively insensitive to the use of kigo, and don’t care whether they are present in their haiku, or haiku that they read, or not. That “modest” is the correct word here is born out by the fact that the vast majority of haiku poets in Japan, even today, still see the inclusion of a kigo as the main defining characteristic of haiku, though even such prominent poets of the past as Bashô and Shiki may have allowed some 0.02% or less of their hokku or haiku to appear in print without kigo. (Yes, the percentage is real. Two of Bashô’s generally accepted 950 or so hokku; for Shiki the percentage is much lower.)
Regarding the cut, certainly there are some classical haiku that do not exhibit this feature. But in the original Japanese these are few and far between. Most early translators, and even many of today, are insensitive to this feature. Hence, they either “over-cut” their translations into three separate phrases, a la Blyth, or they create run-ons that seem to read as one sentence.
My first translations were anti-Blyth, because his were the first books I read about J. haiku, and I could clearly see that he was not in most cases mimicking the structures of the originals in this respect. Typically, he either put in too much cutting, or, more commonly, connected things up in one neat grammatical package, when in fact the originals featured single, dramatic cuts.
If you see a translation of Bashô’s most famous “old pond” poem that breaks the poem into three lines each ending with some kind of punctuation, you know something is wrong with that translation!
If you see a translation of Bashô “old pond” poem that reads as one continuous sentence, you know something is wrong with that translation!
These same caveats will apply to almost all classical Japanese haiku.
Now, to take up the special case of the cutting word in a Japanese haiku coming at the end of the poem, there is some discussion of just what this means even among Japanese haiku poets and scholars.
Some would agree with you, that the poem thus written, say with kana at the end, should be read through as a single statement, absent some other form of “cut” elsewhere in the poem–a very unusual situation.
All well and good, some would say, but this undercuts (pardon the pun!) the meaning of that kana. For, what kana does, in fact, is it terminates a kind of exclamation, which may actually be the whole poem, but much more often consists of either the final phrase of the poem–just the two preceding “sounds” (J. on) plus the kana itself–or some longer unit short of the first phrase.
(to be continued with examples)