Uncharted Territory: Haiku in Noigandres Poetics
Matsuo Bashō’s preeminence as haiku poet casts his shadow over any codification of haiku poetics or practice as the critical work of Kōji Kawamoto demonstrates.[1] Bashō did not theorize but defined haiku through practice—his disciples interpreted his practice.[2] However, there is a passage in Oku no hoso michi in which he refers to a meditative practice, Tendai shikan, which was translated by Donald Keene as Tendai ‘concentration and insight’.[3] Dictionaries define shikan as ‘speculation’, a two character noun compound of ‘cessation’ and ‘view’. Cessation of viewing or partial visibility equates to the medieval aesthetic of yūgen. What is clear in the passage is that Bashō explicitly related shikan to his haiku compositional technique. Makoto Ueda, compiling Bashō’s contemporary interpreters, refers to hosomi as a dissolution of self to enter the poetic object, comprehend its essence, and describe it ‘from the inside’ with haiku composition. Hosomi is a preliminary step in the shikan process, to ‘get inside’ an object, comprehend it, and incorporate it in poetic expression.
In the Japanese tradition Bashō took his parodic haikai back to medieval aesthetics with the verse: kare eda ni / karasu tomari keri / aki no kure. This incorporation of the medieval aesthetic with Buddhist resonance connects to yūgen, wherein our ‘veiled’ perception in the ‘causal realm’ allows a glimpse of things as they are, sono mama. Starting with Bashō’s medieval, Zennist practice of shikan and its incorporation into orthodox haiku composition, the poetic object is encountered, entered, comprehended, and its essence transmitted. For a visual representation of ‘Kare eda ni’ which demonstrates the inherent synesthesia in the aesthetic, see Bashō’s contemporary’s illustration of ‘On a bare branch’.[4]
Many twentieth-century poets from Ezra Pound onward, were fascinated with Japan and many composed haiku and/or tanka, as did the poets in London who had introduced Pound to Japanese poetics.[5] From those early years of the twentieth century through the 1920s and beyond, many dabbled in haiku and Japoniste poems as haiku practice spread virtually everywhere. Haiku resonated with ‘short form’ poetry in Spain especially with its natural imagery. This was one connection to the poetry of Antonio Machado, who fused Spanish playeras and haiku.[6]
In the Latinate language world, highly visual experimentation was coupled with haiku. Important figures in such experimentation include the Spaniard, Guillermo de Torre, and the Latin American poet, Rafael Lozano. Lozano was in Paris in the early 1920s and published his book Haikais in 1922. Haikais took the form of a traditional Japanese publication: made of washi paper, bound with twine at the edges of doubled back pages. Poems are written vertically from top to bottom of the page. Books open, as many Japanese books still do, at the ‘back’ to read from right to left. Lozano’s Japoniste publication not only consisted of translated haiku but was itself a Japoniste artifact in paper, binding, vertical reading and had kanji on the cover. Lozano’s book is a marker of how deeply haiku practice, even if marked by Japoniste trappings, had reached into the world of poetry, into the Parisian heart of avant-gardism. Lozano’s rendering of the Bashō ‘Old Pond’ appears here with the limitations of word processing:
q L L B
u e A a
i s
b M h
s r A o
e u R
i E
p t :
l
o d’
n u
g n
e e
d g
a r
n e
s n
o
l’ u
e i
a l
u l
. e [7]
In the world of poetry haiku was considered ‘pure poetry’ by many practitioners in the early decades of the twentieth century. Such pure poetry referenced concision, immediacy and suggestiveness. These characteristics were conflated with avant-garde characteristics: the embodiment in performance, sensual portrayal, and an ongoing process of becoming. By the 1930s, wars had truncated internationalist experimentation, and avant-garde vogues were looked upon with suspicion or derision. Yet, haiku along with other experimentation resurged in the post war years. One of the most outstanding examples of 1950s experimentation was concrete poetry, a phenomenon that sprung up in various places independently. Among the most creative and influential poets were the Brazilian Noigandres poets.[8] For the purposes of this argument, their poetry is an excellent example of the insight into the poetic-object by the poetry-creating subject.[9] The pressing of haiku into artifact will be examined in the poetry of two Noigandres poets: Haroldo de Campos and Pedro Xisto.
Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari formed the ‘Noigandres’ group, a term taken from Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and began publishing a magazine of the same name. They took the position that Pound’s ‘ideogrammic technique’ was intended for both eye and ear, and they also understood that The Cantos operates very much like linked verse, as Allen Ginsberg characterized it: leaping across ‘stepping stones’ from image cluster to image cluster. The Latin American concretists also employed visual aspects such as colours and luminosity, like the neon of street advertisements—and like DADA subverted the language of advertising, and emphasized performative qualities as means of bringing poetic artifacts into being.
Augusto de Campos first used ‘poesia concreta’ in a title. Their ‘pilot plan’ advanced a critical evolution of forms from Mallarmé through Joyce-Pound-Cummings. In Un coup de dés, space and typographical devices are employed as components of meaning.[10] Noigandres poets also made connections to Apollinaire’s Calligrams, andthe montage technique of Eisenstein. Eisenstein indicated he had derived his montage technique from haiku.[11] The Noigandrespoets conceived of Pound’s ideogrammic method as word-ideogram as an organic interpenetration of time and space. Their ‘pilot plan’ included this poem that embodies form-content, albeit the original is circular.
forma
r e f o r m a
d i s f o r m a
t r a n s f o r m a
c o n f o r m a
i n f o r m a
forma
‘Form is content is form’ is apparent here. Noigandrespoets turned their backs on linear form and replaced it with ‘space-time structure’ which potentiates movement. They equated their poetry with Pound’s ideogram—an appeal to nonverbal communication, an object, not an interpreter of exterior objects. They emphasized its materiality, the word, sound, visual forms, and semantics are problems of function-relations.[12]
In blending various artistic streams into an object that works across media: architecture/gardening/calligraphy, Haraldo de Campos’s Yugen poetry collection creates a haikai verse of Kyoto’s Ryoan (peaceful dragon) Temple. ‘Ryoanji’ is a contemplation of Kyoto’s famous karesansui garden.
RYOANJI
el silencio
ajardillado
susurra un
koan de piedra
caligafiado
en la arena
¿son
dorsos de tigre
estos
que asoman
en la espuma
de la arena blanca?
quince piedras
pero tú
nunca las ves
todas
imaginar
las que faltan
alegra
la mente
de ausente
presencia[13]
Indeed this poem owes a significant debt to haiku in condensation, vertical movement, and extremely compact lines. It runs vertically without the obvious exoticism of Lozano’s 1922 poem. Most lines consist of one word, compressed ideograms—it is his stated ‘approximation between Oriental and Occidental languages’. The subject matter both constitutes an important enactment of shikan and yūgen, and the concretist ‘content inseparable from form’. The poem demonstrates that haiku aesthetics had fully entered into western poetic practice.
In the manner that Bashō employed the aesthetics of shikan and yūgen to connect his haiku to the medieval tradition of Nō warrior plays, de Campos’ haiku engagement fuses shikan and yūgen with the postmodern formulation of ‘presence in absence’: one cannot see all 15 rocks at once, no matter your viewing position in the temple. The poet contemplates the kōan puzzle of the rocks and the sand, and depicts the garden: ‘calligraphied in sand’ and ‘silence gardened’—both synaesthetic enactments, crossover sensual perceptions which ‘delight the mind imagining those that are … absent presence.’ The Noigandresconcept of the ideogram is that the word is a three-dimensional: verbivocovisual expression that nonverbally communicates without sacrificing the virtualities of the word. The result is ‘metacommunication: coincidence and simultaneity of verbal and nonverbal communication’. Poems ‘deal with communication of forms, structure-content, not with the usual message communication’.[14] The concretists inhereted post-symbolist poetics, and part of the ongoing process is Pedro Xisto’s joining the cause.
Pedro Xisto’s Haikais & concretos had predecessors in at least two Spanish language poetry collections: José Juan Tablada Li Po 1920 and Guillermo de Torre Hélices 1923. Like these two predecessors, his collection included visual poems and ‘haikais’. The following spatial arrangement of words on the page breaks words into syllables. Playfully, syllables arrange and rearrange like the presention of the score of a composition, or word sounds in semantic-ideogrammic relationship. The poem is ‘espaço’ (space):
p a ç o e s
p a ç o e s p a
ç o e s p a
ç o e s p a ç o
e s p a ç o
The creative play in the juggling of the syllables creates space, evokes sounds, and creates a cycle of integration, disintegration, and reintegration, spatially. It is what it says.
Xisto has also created his own version of a Japanese garden. Areia (sand) is also concerned with space and uses just three words: sand, rocks, moss; to create a Japanese garden.
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
PEDRA a r e i a a r e i a PEDRA a r e i a
PEDRA a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
PEDRA a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a PEDRA a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a musgo
a r e i a a r e i a PEDRA PEDRA a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a
a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a a r e i a [15]
This concrete poem deconstructs words, deploys them to operate in the physical realm, pure semiotic expression free of bifurcation into signifier and signified. The poem incorporates sounds in a visual presentation. The act, the verses invite the dissolution of East-West cultural antinomies.
Xisto’s poems extoll a poetry of sound, imagination, and typographic design focused on perception and capriciousness—chance—a throw of the dice. Poetry, according to Concretist innovators, should be a mosaic of disparate fragments of reality, a collage, the direct presentation of the object, or mere deployment of word-objects. These verses promote sensual qualities inherent in haiku and the ideogrammic qualities of earlier language experimentation.
The Noigandres poets made clear their debt to Pound while Pound extolled the virtues of haiku. The Latin American poets discussed here certainly understood haiku and deployed it. The movement and individual poets brought the tattered threads of a “new” poetry across the ruins of two wars into the heart of a globalizing creative poetic activity.
Jeffrey Johnson
[1] Kawamoto, Poetics of Japanese Verse (University of Tokyo Press, 1999).
[2] Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters (Stanford University Press, 1992); ‘Bashō and the Poetics of Haiku’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21 (1963), 423-431.
[3]Oku no hoso michi translated by Donald Keene, The Narrow Road to Oku, 1996.
[4] Johnson, Haiku Poetics in Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Poetry, 2011, 173; print is at Idemitsu Museum of Arts.
[5] Ueda, Zeami, Basho Yeats and Pound, doctoral dissertation, 1960, and Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme, 1960.
[6] Diez Canedo, ‘Antonio Machado, poeta japonés’, Sol (June 20, 1924).
[7] Lozano, Haikais, 1922.
[8] Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, ‘plano-piloto para poesia concreta’, Noigandres 4 (1958). De Campos, Pignatari eds., Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 1987. English: ‘pilot plan for concrete poetry’, Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View.
[9] Phrasing from Izutsu, ‘Far Eastern Existentialism, Haiku and the Man of Wabi’, Personality of the Critic (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973).
[10] Walsh Hokenson, Japan, France, and East West Aesthetics (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 2004.
[11] Eisenstein wrote ‘Cinematography is first and foremost montage … [haiku are] … montage phrases. Shot lists’ in ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form.
[12] “A Obra de Arte Aberta” (1955); Teoria da Poesia Concreta, 1987; Editoria Perspectiva, 1969; Teoria da poesia Concreta: Textos críticos e manifestos 1965; Brasiliense, 1987.
[13] De Campos, Yūgen,Islas Canarias: Revista Syntaxis, 1993, pp. 11-12. ‘Ryoanji. the silence / gardened // whispers a / koan of rock / calligraphied // in the sand / are they / the back of the tiger / these / that manifest / in the foam / Of the white sand? // fifteen rocks / but you / can never see / all // imagine / those missing / it gives joy / to the mind / of the absence / present’. Translation, J. Johnson.
[14] ‘Ideogram’ is consistently employed by the de Campos brothers, Ideograma: logica, poesia, linguagem, 1977; also see Eisenstein above, and Laszlo Géfin, Ideogram: The History of a Poetic Method (Univeristy of Texas Press, 1982).
[15] Haikais e concretos (Livraria Martins, 1960).