Nick Curry • Nick's Haiku •

The worldwide haiku community has grown by leaps and bounds in the last century or so. Traditionally considered a symbolic and spiritual Japanese art form, the genre haiku has gained popularity and notoriety with many groups, including English-speaking cultures all over the world. As with any bit of foreign culture, haiku has not been (and cannot be) merely imported. Native English-speakers can only know the haiku of Basho, the well-known and loved Japanese haiku master from the 17th century, as it has been transliterated and translated (often lacking in poetics), but many American haiku authors have embraced the form and studied the essence of haiku in an effort to remain faithful to its traditional roots in their work while adapting it to their language and culture. In addition to being one of the founders of the Beat movement in literature in the 1950’s, a novelist whose popularity abounds, and a practitioner of other, more Western forms of poetry, Jack Kerouac was among the earliest American haiku poets. Kerouac was introduced to haiku through his study of Buddhism, but he rejected the rigid formal structure (5-7-5) that some Westerners applied to the (17 syllable, one line) Japanese inspiration. In his American Haiku (1959) he said, “The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don’t think American Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be packed with Void of Whole) should worry about syllables because American speech is something again…bursting to pop.” Kerouac rightly realized that haiku is closely connected with the language in which it is written and that the Japanese language is fundamentally different than English—especially in the realm of use and counting of syllables. His rejection of an overly rigid structural requirement allowed his haiku much freedom. Nightfall, boy smashing dandelions with a stick. Though the second line of this haiku does contain seven syllables, the alpha and omega lines (a phrase borrowed from Bill Pauly) are, respectively, nowhere near five syllables. And yet this haiku is effective in conjuring images of a mischievous lad slashing vegetation at dusk. By grasping the essential nature of haiku, Kerouac worked to literally translate the idea of the form into another language and culture. In the quote above, Kerouac describes haiku as “short three-line poems intended to be completely packed with Void of Whole.” This statement can serve nicely as Kerouac’s view on the essentials of haiku. Lee Gurga and George Swede each have their own views on that fundamental question, and the three do agree on at least one front. All three men characterize haiku as “brief” or “short,” perhaps the most obvious, intuitive, and universally agreed upon aspect of the form. Gurga insists upon the inclusion of a seasonal element based upon his study of traditional Japanese haiku; Swede approaches this element more broadly calling for the use of “some aspect of nature other than human nature” in his essay “Towards a Definition of the English Haiku” printed in Global Haiku. The seasonal and natural aspects are noticeably absent from Kerouac’s brief description of the genre, but Swede’s notion of “nature other than human nature” is utilized in many of his haiku. A quiet Autumn night and these fools Are starting to argue This is one of Kerouac’s haiku that does contain an obvious seasonal reference ala Lee Gurga. Kerouac uses the “Autumn” reference effectively to establish a sense of place for the haiku’s images. Providing a clear location within a haiku is one of the common challenges of writing in that genre, and the inclusion of such can make the difference between a good haiku and a bad one. But “place” is not on any of our three lists of the essentials of haiku. That which Jack Kerouac calls “Void of Whole” is an element perhaps as universally included in definitions of haiku as the element of brevity. Kerouac, though, articulates the idea (in three words) more clearly than Gurga or Swede. By negating “whole” Kerouac characterizes not merely as incomplete, but as decidedly and confidently lacking plenitude. But there seems to be an implicit understanding that just because a haiku is without wholeness, it is not lacking in profundity or depth. A haiku, then, must be rich and deep, but economic, in its unwholeliness; it must be complete in its incompleteness. This is an idea fundamental to the very nature of haiku. Because of its brevity and the quality of its content as a moment captured, haiku are geared toward a kind of postmodern interpretation: the author is aware that, though a haiku can literally present itself through the course of everyday life, the reader will naturally interpret the haiku through the filter of her or his own experiences and memories. Haiku exist in a realm void not only of “Whole” but also of context. Writer and reader each apply context to a particular haiku, but, more than anything else, it is context that a haiku is missing in order to render it “Void of Whole.” Missing a kick at the icebox door It closed anyway. This haiku, printed in The Haiku Anthology (p. 97), is one of Kerouac’s most famous and anthologized haiku. It clearly is a part of daily life, and presumably can be conceived of as one of those haiku that just present themselves while perpetuating routine. Though not overtly humorous, this selection could easily be considered a senryu rather than a haiku because it does, on some level, deal with human nature. One revels in its simplicity and the seeming elucidation of truth within. In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. This is another of Kerouac’s widely popular haiku, and it is an excellent example of his sentence-like haiku. One of the elements that Lee Gurga considers essential to haiku is the “split” or “cutting technique.” This is the division between the two distinct images that make up a haiku: a place for pause when reading or a breath when speaking. The above haiku is totally focused upon one image, in the way that a simple sentence is, so the split exists in a different way. Rather than being the separation of two disparate ideas, a pause (practically indicated by the comma) naturally occurs between the two clauses. So it makes a good sentence. But it also makes a good haiku, for it has been arranged just so by the author. The adjective “winter,” used to describe the dead fly, is probably included for the sake of referencing season, but it allows the haiku to be about seasonal transition. Many of Jack Kerouac’s haiku can be criticized with the ubiquitous “sentence” objection, that is: the haiku is too much like a sentence. And one characteristic worth noting is Kerouac’s use of capitalization and punctuation—he uses them in exactly the same way that one would to form a grammatically correct sentence. Kerouac believes that, just because Japanese haiku are not sentences, the American haiku community need not rule out the use of a complete thought—especially because some haiku can be expressed effectively in the form of a sentence but maintain the status of being, “Void of Whole.” Kerouac’s importance to haiku in English is based in his work to incorporate American culture and vernacular into the Japanese art form. His rejection of rigid standards blazed the way for current American haiku poets, though his entries to the haiku canon may not be recognized among the very best.