False Optics: Keiko’s Haiku Rules (Part Three)

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Haiku in the West has always had a minimalistic bent. Japanese Haiku is inherently a minimal form, but it always has been an even shorter form in English because the early translators who became famous in the West presented it as being something that was both philosophically minimal in its essence and translated it into a truncated language.

R.H. Blythe translated and wrote about haiku as always being about "zen enlightenment" and Kenneth Yasuda distilled this down to haiku always being "an aesthetic moment" that presented precise imagery and nothing else. These are both Minimalistic positions because they are boiling down the whole 250 years of haiku history into only being about one style of writing. Sure, some Japanese haiku was written in this vein, but most wasn't because in Japan haiku is thought of as a poetic form, not a philosophical vehicle.

As for the language they used when translating, Blythe ignored counting syllables and spun out translations with brevity and with such a small specific focus that he ignored a lot of what was written in the originals. As engaging and gregarious as his prose is, there is no argument about him being a minimalistic writer when it came to translation.

Yasuda did write 17 syllables out, but he also rhymed the first and the third lines all the time which doomed him to have little influence how western haiku would be written on the page, but he did have a huge influence in what the poets would write about because he did coin the term "haiku moment" which came to be the defined mindset of what mainstream haiku became.

A "haiku moment" is where the writer concisely writes in the present tense about something in the world around them that they had experienced without any showing what they felt or thought about it. Hence, you just wrote clear imagery and left it up to the reader to decide what it meant. Imagery is an important part of creative writing but deeming that the only thing you can write is imagery is a minimalistic view of writing.

The avant guard in West picked up theses minimal views of haiku and, mixing them in with theories from other writers who explained the philosophy of zen, came to the conclusion that, following the Japanese, they too could only write haiku that presented imagery without any subjective emotions by the author, and also, because Japanese writers never used any, they should never employ any of the poetical devices that western poets traditionally use.

These positions were popularized and enforced by magazine editors who were either determined that haiku in English must remain true to the Japanese prototype or else committed to making sure haiku remained a minimal poetic form. A "prototype" that was a huge misrepresentation of haiku in Japanese. 

The impetus for any list of haiku rules that you run into, past or contemporary, is to keep haiku scaled down so it is written to a preset mindset where how you write, and what you write about, is shoved into something that has a nominal range of human experience. 

The rules on the Haiku Society of America's webpage are just a set of instructions that demand you minimalize the scope of your writing to conform to the set of conditions they've presented, and if you don't follow them, then the cry comes that what you've written really isn't a "haiku." "Pseudo haiku" is generally the term you run into. Any poet who tries his hand at writing haiku generally gets thrown into the bin of "not really writing haiku" because they don't follow the prescribed style. It's monolithic.

The problem with minimalistic writing is that it can never be more than what it already is. Once you expand your style you no longer are a minimalist. So you are always in a self made box. This is the reason why since the beginnings of it all the haiku magazine editors have fought tooth and nail to keep western poetic devices out of what they publish. They can only be ideological zealots.

People had hid behind the idea that haiku must be written "exactly" in the same style of the Japanese as shown by the early translators, and the myriad of translators that came after that copied them, but in the late 1990s, Haruo Shirane, a professor of Japanese literature, began publishing books and articles that showed how the imbedded western ideas about Japanese haiku were for the greater part wrong. 

The main thrust of Shirane's writing was that this unassailable position held by the haiku community that Japanese haiku poets historically never used any established literary devices like western poets did was totally false and that the “haiku moment” idea, now so prominent in the west, was something that had been picked up as a skewed version of Masaoka Shiki’s influence on Japanese haiku in the 20the century.

This sparked an existential crisis in mainstream haiku, the minimalistic approach to writing that had been established had always been argued as a true style of literature because it was under the rubric of following literary conventions from a different culture, thus making it an intellectually valid pursuit. With this cover blown away by Shirane, the question of how haiku should go forward was a hot topic. Should western haiku start allowing the usage of metaphor, allusions, etc… and was it alright if “moments” were imagined rather than experienced directly??

This article by Brian Tasker is a touchstone into how the haiku mainstream wove an argument that would let them keep their intellectual integrity. The rationalizing cornerstone beneath this is that it doesn't matter what the history of Japanese haiku was, or if western writers had ever gotten any of the scholarship about it wrong, the fact was western haiku on its own had made its own traditions. 

As Tasker puts it "we've chosen to write haiku as a kind of poetry that stands apart from other kinds of poetry....Even though haiku elude a specific definition, there is still a haiku tradition. A Western haiku tradition and particularly a tradition of haiku in the English language."

Whether or not how sound you find this argument to be, he really isn't talking about haiku per se here, he's is talking about a minimalistic tradition that must be maintained no matter how inherently risky its intellectual foundations are. Again, this is the intrinsic problem with minimalism, it can never expand into something else, it can never grow bigger, it can only shrink smaller. So it's no surprise when towards the end of the article he writes "If we need to experiment, we could experiment by writing less for a change."

Keiko Imaoka gave what these confirmed and committed minimalist craved: a shorter way to write haiku. There's no surprise that her argument about how whittling 17 syllables down to around 11 syllables was necessary to match the content in Japanese haiku was like manna to the haiku community. Besides arguing for shorter writing, it also told them that they would be writing "like the Japanese" as well. Why else would you argue about content per syllable unless you wanted to duplicate the original language? One stone, two birds. 

Of course, this is a bit problematic. Japanese people can have trouble getting through sentences in English because their natural breathing during speech is different from English speakers, and this is more so when they encounter longer speech patterns and patterns that have a lot of diction in them. 

The only way they can get through them without stumbling is to break their speech pattern into segments that use beats to mark where the speakers takes breaths. Her writing about "writing in 3-5-3 syllables or 2-3-2 accented beats" is symptom of this. It doesn't mean that if you follow this beat pattern you are "writing like a Japanese," it means you are writing like a Japanese who is communicating in English.
 
You only have to look at her comments in the section titled "Relative Ease In Segmentation" where she clearly doesn't understand how English speakers navigate line breaks or punctuation breaks in the middle of lines. The reason why she can't navigate the second version of the haiku with a comma in the middle of the line is because she doesn't know how to breath words into speech without having a pattern of beats running through it. This is prevalent in her prose too.

The effect that "writing less" has had on the haiku community is that it changed a lot of haiku writers away from the 17 syllables that they were writing out to produce a shorter style of haiku. Shorter haiku means that the language becomes snappier and imagery is lit up more, but when you write "in the vicinity of 11 syllables" you kill the linguistic flow of your words and you flatten out speech to the point where you can't produce diction and everyone has same the tone in their words.

Imaoka wrote about how she was captivated by English language haiku and found that it was "just plain and simple language that even grade school kids could understand." Her call for shorter haiku just compounded this situation because it means longer words would be harder to include in haiku. Again, an automatic limiting that mainstream haiku writers were more than willing to accept.

Imaoka honest appraisal of western haiku as being "plain and simple" and understandable by "grade kids" is the very reason why mainstream literature has never accepted haiku as a serious form of writing. Tasker explains that “At their best, haiku are truly subversive: they question all the notions of creativity which poets hold so dear” as a salient point, but English language poets have historically been subversive and questioning about their creativity too. That's why there are different eras. It's not about being different, it's about how you use language in being different and presenting moments in grade school kid language isn't going to impress many people into believing that what you're writing is worthy literature.

By the 2010s the rise of the internet led to the situation where people from different language backgrounds could co-mingle, which has led into a giant influx of English as a second language writers into the haiku world. There wasn't much self reflection about how this was possible, i.e that the language bar was at such a basic level that non-native speakers could excel at the same level as a native speaker. So foreign writers flourished, were praised, and were published in numbers. 

Given that a second language speaker only has to follow this minimal style of haiku, it shouldn't be surprising that it happened. Haiku is so short now that grammar no longer matters. If you go through the online archives of the longtime e-zines you'll see how this is true. Sentences have evaporated into simple phrasing. The reason of it: Minimalism can only go one way: simpler and simpler. 

Just to show how monolithic minimalism is in haiku, some people are now arguing that Keiko Imaoka's rules are the standard of what haiku is in English and that all haiku written in 17 syllables really aren't haiku. I hope that these three essays about this subject show how these are suspect rules that deserve inspection before you accept them.

Also, I think it's important to know that all the information the mainstream haiku establishment gives you about their genre is really instruction on how to practice minimalism. It's something you should understood and the reason why, if you ever decide to write a haiku, it is OK to write any style, or any device, you want, just follow the form of 17 syllables with one break in it. This is the one true definition of haiku you'll ever need.