Although the broader community of poets shares them as common property, the traditional season words of haiku allow for a remarkable range of expression. They can be used to create seasonal feeling, evoke humor, lodge a protest, or explore the inner recesses of our emotional lives—to name only a few possibilities. The winning and honorable mention haiku for last month’s challenge covered an unusually broad spectrum of meanings and emotions, using just 17 syllables and the words “autumn sun.”

• Marcia Burton finds a melancholy beauty in the sunlight “filtering through the nursery” where a baby is falling asleep.
• Nancy Winkler’s humorous image of a low sun giving her “the side-eye” captures the shortness of an autumn afternoon.
  
• Jill Johnson goes for broke in her desperation to get the sun back on a dismal fall day—“no questions asked.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the November challenge here.

***

Fall Season Word: Autumn Sun

WINNER:

soothing the baby
the autumn sun filtering
through the nursery

— Marcia Burton

Our first impression of a good haiku is often that it touches us in some palpable way. That it is beautiful, poignant, or bittersweet—sometimes all of these at once. Because haiku are so short, they naturally invite a second or third reading, and this is where it gets interesting. Nearly always there is some further dimension to a poem.

An infant has been put down for a nap in the late afternoon. The nursery is dim, lit only by the sun filtering through the drapes. The baby cries briefly on being placed in the crib, but soon grows quiet, soothed by the warm light slanting across the walls and ceiling.

Most readers can grasp that much after a single reading. A good haiku presents an image that unfolds easily in the imagination. That image offers a point of entry into the world of a haiku, much like opening the door into a room.

Beyond that doorway another, much larger world appears, as the 17 syllables are shown to contain more than 17 syllables of meaning. In that more spacious world, words take on additional, sometimes unexpected meanings.

The term “self-soothing” was developed by child psychiatrists during the 1970s to describe how babies learn to calm themselves down and go to sleep on their own, unassisted by a caregiver. In recent decades it has come to refer to behaviors used by individuals of any age to self-regulate their emotional state. As such, it has been the subject of widespread cultural debate.

Questions arise about the need for constant emotional self-regulation in negotiating the complexities of end-stage capitalism—from the cradle to the grave. Why must we acclimate ourselves to loneliness and alienation, anxiety, overwork, and stress?

The poem presents none of these concerns on the surface. The scene is peaceful, beautiful, even wholesome. And then, there is the autumn sun itself, a consoling presence reminding us of our most intimate point of connection. There is no alienation in Nature—where everything belongs, no one is forsaken, and nothing exists alone.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

passing by quickly
while giving me the side-eye
aloof autumn sun

— Nancy Winkler

Missing: Autumn Sun.
100 dollar reward.
Gold. No questions asked.

— Jill Johnson

♦

You can find more on October’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Autumn sun”

whatever I think
the autumn sun only cares
about my shadow

As I was walking along, thinking deeply about something, the autumn sun inscribed a shadow at my feet. But that was the extent of its interest in me. It didn’t care what was inside of that outline.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “autumn sun.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “autumn sun.”

Haiku Tip: Master the Turn of Thought—In English!

Japanese and English language haiku are not the same. Their form is similar, and both use season words to explore human experience in the context of the natural world. But the techniques they use to express poetic meaning are very different.

A Japanese haiku usually consists of two images: one seasonal, the other not. As those images “rub up against” one another, a spark of meaning jumps between them, kindling the reader’s imagination. But that meaning must be inferred from the pairing of images. It is rarely made explicit. 

For a haiku to work in English, it must use the techniques of English language poetry, including metaphor and simile, rhyme, personification, allegory, and more. In practice, this means relaxing our notion of what a haiku ought to be. A haiku in English is “whatever you can get away with” in 17 syllables—with the added caveat that it include a season word.

To better understand the difference between Japanese and English language haiku, let’s look at one of the earliest examples of the latter. Published by Ezra Pound in the April 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, it is considered a quintessential text of Imagism, the earliest modernist movement in English literature.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Despite its lineation, this is a formal haiku plain and simple. The Japanese translations Pound had read were typically rendered in two lines with a pause after the first five or first twelve syllables. His haiku follows a 5-7-7 rhythm (The apparition / of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough), which was a common variation on 5-7-5 during Basho’s day.

“In a Station of the Metro” was the first haiku of note to be published in English, but it wouldn’t feel like a haiku to a Japanese reader. It’s not so much the title, which Japanese haiku lack, but the use of an explicit comparison between the faces and the blossoms.

A Japanese version, written in Tokyo rather than Paris, might have read as follows:

faces in the crowd
the petals at the station
on a wet, black bough

The slant rhyme of Pound’s original wouldn’t come through in Japanese, nor would the sense of the poet having entered an altered state of awareness. But if hana (“cherry blossom”) were used in place of petal, the effect would at least be similar. And yet, the Japanese-style version has none of the power of the original. Had Pound published this “haiku” in 1913, no one would remember it today.

A note on autumn sun: Season word editor Becka Chester writes: “As the autumn season catches its stride in October, the character of daylight changes. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun hits the earth at a more pronounced angle. Diffused over a greater swath of the earth, the light seems softer, less harsh, more golden. Plants and animals have a direct biological and chemical response to this changing light. As the sun’s energy hits the earth at an ever-increasing angle, the phytochrome in plants triggers a slowdown in their chlorophyll production causing the leaves to change color. In humans and other vertebrates, the diminishing light causes an increase in melatonin production, altering their circadian rhythms. So the change is light is felt everywhere—even inside of our bodies.”

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (October 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Written after the passing of her father, Phantom Pain Wings is a remarkable achievement from one of South Korea’s most heavily revered and imaginative poets, Kim Hyesoon. While the poems of this collection center on grief and death, they never aim for consolation or an easily digestible sentiment but rather create parallel worlds, separate from reality and simultaneously separate from the memories or images that conjured them into being. In “Korean Zen,” the writer explores grief through a reckoning with her country’s Buddhist traditions as well as the limits of language and poetry itself. In the book’s penultimate piece, “Bird Rider: An Essay,” Kim lays out what can be seen as the thesis of the collection, noting the inability of the medium to comfort or console the reader, as the poet can produce only “failure, grief, and self-erasure.” Kim writes: “Just as there is no geometric or genetic consolation, literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs.”

In many ways, this idea of the false reality or afterimage contains echoes of the Buddhist concept of sankhara. Kim’s work is full of paradox, a poetry that disavows Buddhism and yet simultaneously creates and lives within imagined Buddhist worlds. In an interview that appeared in conjunction with the Poetry Parnassus festival in London in 2012, Kim asserts that she was actually raised in a more Christian environment, and yet her poetry is filled with Buddhist references—to samsara, to asuras, to bodhisattvas, and, as is exemplified in the featured poem, Zen. In the same interview, Kim states: “I think Buddhism is more than a religion, it is first a process of discipline, and Buddha is one who has gained wisdom rather than being a god.” Much like the real is never achieved, Buddhism is never explicitly revoked. Rather than give you what you came for—catharsis—Kim is more inclined to let you linger in the pain, in the worlds she creates; alternate realities where the questions that arise open up to multitudes, koan-like in their wisdom, more valuable than the relief they refuse to confer. 

Korean Zen

Even if I don’t blink
my eyelashes write on my face 
(but I don’t have any eyelashes)

I tolerate time
as I lift up strands of hair from the crown of my head 
to write on empty space
(but my head’s shaved)

For how long can humans endure silence?

But I’m listening to the typewriter
of the girl above my pelvis who is typing

(For how long can humans stay inside a poem?)

Bird floats me high up then 
takes off alone

I can’t tolerate the sky
like the way I can’t tolerate poetry

I think of a plump girl called Ego 
Tonight I need to starve her to death

Maybe I’m killing the future before the past 
by killing the girl in order to attain nirvana

But who’s breaking the swishing 
windshield wipers of my heart?

I pick up the receiver of a red phone 
that’s been ringing nonstop
inside a pocket made of bone

It’s that girl

♦

“Korean Zen,” by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi, from Phantom Pain Wings, copyright © 2019 by Kim Hyesoon. Translation copyright © 2023 by Don Mee Choi. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing.

The post ‘Korean Zen’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A season word is a repository for cultural memory as such memory relates to the changing seasons. Each word has a range of associations within that collective memory, but one of those associations is usually dominant. Because it vanishes by midmorning, the most common theme for “dew” is the passage of time. The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge each explored that theme—some with heartbreak, some with humor, and some with a mixture of both.

• Valerie Rosenfeld addresses one of the oldest themes in poetry—the way life vanishes at death, seemingly without a trace.
• Gregory Tullock’s dew finds it expedient to practice nonattachment, given that it lives for “only one morning.”
  
• Nancy Winkler offers a satirical apology to leftover dewdrops for causing them to “miss the Rapture.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the October challenge here.

***

Fall Season Word: Dew

WINNER:

only morning dew
when I come to visit you
but no headstone yet

— Valerie Rosenfeld

In the five decades since I discovered haiku, I have returned to one lesson more often than any other: less is more. But “less” doesn’t mean fewer words or syllables. The point of haiku is not to strip language down to its bare essentials, but to use language to show how full one moment of life can be.

Our winning haiku for the September Tricycle Haiku Challenge employs a classical “hinge” in the final line. Only then does the door of the poem swing open to reveal the scene: a cemetery in the early morning, with the dew still wet on the grass.

A gravestone is more than a marker or a memorial. It serves as a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead—the place we go to pay our respects, to offer flowers or prayers, or perhaps to converse with the dead. But what if the grave is so fresh that no stone has been set in place? Where is the portal then?

One of the oldest genres in Western poetry is a formal lament where each stanza begins with the words “Where are they now?” One can still find those Latin words, Ubi sunt, inscribed on gravestones in older cemeteries. For thousands of years poets have been asking, “Where are they now—the powerful, the beloved, the beautiful, or the wise?” But the question is always rhetorical. The answer is the grave.

Except when it’s not.

The brilliance of last month’s winning haiku lies in its simple, understated refutation of that age-old assumption. Where are they now? The answer is morning dew.

That image strikes a balance between beauty and heartbreak. Standing at the grave, the poet notices the small drops clinging to the grass blades surrounding the fresh dirt. There is no sign of the beloved’s presence apart from these. And yet, in their tiny bodies catching the morning light, is there not also something eternally present and made new?

On the one hand, there is “no headstone yet.” On the other, that stone, once set in place, will eventually wear away. The dewdrops are forever. Such thoughts are unavoidable for the haiku poet who celebrates the endless return of the seasons on their circular journey through time.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

only one morning
the dew refuses to cling
to any future

— Gregory Tullock

an apology
to dew drops trapped in my shoes
missing the Rapture

— Nancy Winkler

♦

You can find more on September’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Dew”

to a blade of grass
the dew has attached itself
using just water

Dewdrops were clinging to an upright grass blade. But, somehow, they didn’t slide down. I found it remarkable that the dew could form such a strong bond using only water.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “dew.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

* REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “dew.”

Haiku Tip: Raise the Bar for Zen Poetry!

Dewdrops have a long history in Japanese literature—especially in haiku poetry. Basho smiled at the sight of a mushroom covered in dew, still young and in its prime; Buson found dewdrops glistening at the tip of each bramble thorn; and Issa mourned the death of his infant daughter with a haiku that nearly every Japanese person now knows by heart:

the things of this world
are like dewdrops…yes, like dew—
and yet…and yet…

The most celebrated modern dewdrop haiku was written by Kawabata Bosha (1897–1941).

like a diamond
drop of dew sitting alone
on top of a stone

A Zen Buddhist monk who devoted himself to the intense observation of nature, according to the translator Makoto Ueda, “Bosha never tired of watching cats, butterflies, spiders and dewdrops; and, as he watched them closely, he sensed the workings of a superhuman will that made them behave as they did.”

In selecting material for his 2018 anthology Well-Versed: Exploring Modern Japanese Haiku, Ozawa Minoru chose Bosha’s dewdrop haiku as his most representative poem. He writes:

Dew of course is made of water, but here it is perceived as being as hard as a diamond, as the Zen priest Dogen (1200–1253) said of the Buddha dharma: “Frozen, it becomes harder than diamonds, who could break it?”

Ozawa cites a modern critic who suggested that Bosha had absorbed Dogen’s way of thinking, only to step beyond it. Anyone can see that ice is hard. To understand the indestructibility of a dewdrop requires a more ecologically-grounded perspective on the world. Perhaps Bosha was thinking of Basho’s advice to his own disciples: “Do not seek after the sages of the past. Seek what they sought.”

A note on dew: In his book Haiku World, William J. Higginson writes, “Autumn dew presages winter frost, and [signifies] the fleetingness of this life since it is usually gone by midmorning.” Season word editor Becka Chester offers a more naturalistic description of the theme: “Dew is like rain because both are formed by condensing water. As vapor cools in autumn’s night air, it slows down and its molecules collect across cool objects, such as foliage. In the morning, after a cool autumn night, we often find dew sprinkled lightly across grass, tree leaves, and other objects outdoors. If we’re lucky, we can find it suspended like tiny pearls in a spider’s web.”

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (September 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In The Dharma of Poetry, author and poet John Brehm likens meditation to poetry, as both allow us to shift out of our habits of mind and experience a moment of spaciousness. He suggests that a poet can be defined “as one who stops.” The poet steps out of the ongoing flow of experience, looks at it, and helps us do the same. With his latest book of poetry, Dharma Talk, Brehm invites us to do just that: pause and contemplate the dharma of our everyday lives. 

Published by Wisdom in September, this collection of poems explores life’s paradoxes with a blend of warmth and wit. Brehm raises questions about emptiness, consciousness, and the difference between everything and nothing, but he does not pretend to have the answers (“Infinite causes and conditions brought me / to this moment, who can untangle them?”). Instead, he allows the questions to hang in the air, inviting readers to rest in the not-knowing. 

Below is a selection of poems from the collection:

***

Dharma Talk

He said changing nothing changes
everything, which if you change

the words around also suggests
that changing everything

changes nothing,
which further implies

that nothing and everything
are interchangeable, are

in fact the same thing, or
the same non-thing, having

no fixed, unchanging nature,
or a nature that is in constant

change, if change can be said
to be constant, and is therefore

a kind of emptiness about
which it is better to speak

only in the negative, of
what it is not, or not

to speak at all.

Emptiness Is Not Enough

“Emptiness is not enough,” you said,
and we all laughed at that, filling the air
with an ancient human sound.
Funny how we never think
of hunter-gatherers laughing,
but they must have, all that time
lying around singing and fucking,
there must have been laughter, too—
monkey business, Paleolithic slapstick.
Has anyone studied the evolution
of laughter, of humor? Probably.
Is there anything we haven’t studied,
haven’t dragged into the realm of
human comprehension? Even
emptiness: whole books on it,
many talks, six-week online courses,
nine-day retreats. Not that we will
ever know all there is to know
about the empty knowing that pervades
all things. Some neuroscientists
now believe the only way to solve
“the hard problem of consciousness,”
how we get from unconscious matter
to subjective awareness, is by positing
that all matter is, to one degree or another,
conscious, and that human consciousness
is just a scaling up (in some cases
a scaling down) of the consciousness
that’s already present in trees and grass, ants
and antelope. Panpsychism is what such
a philosophical position is called, a modern
version of what our distant ancestors
knew to be true, that everything is alive
with spirit, intelligence, sacredness.
Still, one might ask why matter is conscious,
why is there consciousness at all?
An unanswerable question, also known
as a mystery. But why am I saying all this,
suddenly giving a little lecture on a subject
I can just barely pretend to almost understand?
Infinite causes and conditions brought me
to this moment, who can untangle them?
Last night, just before sleep, I prayed
for inspiration, for a poem to be given to me,
and this is what has arisen from the emptiness,
the shape my wish has taken. That would be
one way to explain it. The other ways
are beyond me.

Something and Nothing

There’s something to be said
for having nothing to say,

though I don’t know what
that is, or isn’t, just as

there’s something to be
known about not-knowing,

which I would tell you
if I could. There must be

something to be gained
by losing, a seed of victory

buried in every failure,
else I would not be here.

Clearly, there’s something
to be desired about being

beyond desire, as the sages
never tire of telling us,

and nothing more fulfilling
than emptying yourself out—

no ground beneath your feet,
nothing to hold onto, no handrail,

no belief, only this bright,
self-sustaining air, and a falling

that feels like floating.

Metta 

The book I’m reading suggests we send
lovingkindness to everyone we see,
silently addressing them thus:
“May you be well, may you be safe, 
may you be happy.” And I do this
for a while, sitting inside a cafe,
watching the foot traffic go by.
It feels good—generous, 
loving, kind. But after a time
I start modifying the blessing:
“May you be well, may you be safe,
may you be happy … and maybe also
lose the frowning-into-the-phone
facial expression I get so tired
of seeing everywhere I go.”
It’s the shadow side of lovingkindness
sticking its nose in, having its say,
and I can’t seem to shut it up.
Someone else walks by and I offer:
“May you be well, may you be safe,
may you be happy … and while you’re at it,
how about some nicer clothes?
It wouldn’t kill you to dress
with a bit more panache, would it?”
I keep on in this way, dishing out 
blessings with a side of helpful advice,
until I notice across the room two young women
sitting side by side, talking quietly,
in no need of either my good wishes
or my corrective commentary.
But then I see that one of them is crying,
nodding her head when her friend
says something, wiping tears
from her cheeks with the palms
of her hands. She pulls it together
for awhile, but then her face clenches
and she gives in, until her friend
lays a hand on her shoulder
and she can talk again—a gentle
rhythm of crying and talking,
waves rising and falling.
It doesn’t look like she’s been
visited by tragedy, a sudden death
or shattering diagnosis.
Ordinary heartbreak would be
my guess, the shock of betrayal,
some painful reversal in the endless
cycle of loss and gain, and now
a new emptiness spreads out before her
and she doesn’t know what to do. 
But what kills me is when she tucks her hair
behind her ear and tries not to cry,
and fails, overcome by this sadness,
so that I feel it, too, a great swell lifts 
and carries me and almost pulls me under—
and then I’m in the thick of it,
wishing her to be well, to be safe,
to be happy, as if my life 
depended on it. 

⧫

© 2023 John Brehm, “Dharma Talk,” “Emptiness Is Not Enough,” “Something and Nothing,” and “Metta” from Dharma Talk. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications, Inc., wisdomexperience.org.

The post Resting in the Not-Knowing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Zen practitioner for nearly fifty years and one of America’s most celebrated poets, Jane Hirshfield has long been fascinated by the power of unanswered questions. When she first arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center as a student, she was instructed that it was a good idea to always practice with a question. She’s been asking questions ever since.

Both in her Zen practice and in her poetry, she is guided by questions that resist easy answers, allowing herself to be transformed through the process of asking. “There’s always the intention of questioning,” she told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “You say to each moment, ‘Who are you?’ You say to yourself, ‘Who am I?’ You say to each other person that you meet, ‘Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?’”

In her new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she takes up the question, “How can I be of service?,” inviting readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing. Shaheen sat down with Hirshfield on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss the questions she’s been asking lately, the role of poetry in the face of injustice, and the liberating power of being no one and nothing. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, along with two poems from her book, and then listen to the full episode.

What are some of the questions you’ve been asking lately? Questioning has always been important to me, and as a practice issue, that goes back to my very first week of Zen practice when I was a guest student at Tassajara. Soto Zen is not Rinzai Zen. One doesn’t work with koans as the main focus of meditation. Stories are told and thought about, but it’s not the central practice. Nonetheless, the teacher suggested that it’s a good idea for you to always have a question in your practice.

Over the years, that central practice question has evolved. For a very long time, it was a question that I actually ended up writing about in a special section for Tricycle, which was “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” I looked at that question for many years until I felt that I had saturated myself in it and come up with my own answer. And then I had to find a new question. The new question of the last quite a few years is one that I think is widely shared, which is “How can I be of service?” How can I serve? How can I help? What can I do? How can I add my one molecule to the tiller of change?

You write that from your earliest work, you have investigated justice. So how do you understand justice? And how do you view the role of the poet in the face of what you call failures of justice and compassion? Poetry can be used in many ways for many purposes. I don’t want to pretend that it is an act that always includes interconnection and empathy and all of the values that those on the path of practice are trying to raise in one another and in ourselves. There are war poems. There are angry poems. There are silly poems, which might be more neutral. But for me, when I look at how poems work in our lives, I see that in their very fabric, there is empathy and interconnection. The very act of entering another person’s language and hearing it inside yourself as if it were your own is an act of permeability and a recalibrating sense that we are not separate from one another.

If you read a line about a mountain, you cannot understand the mountain without becoming it for an instant within yourself or becoming the creature walking on the mountain and feeling that steepness in your legs and seeing the sharpness or smoothness of the surfaces and seeing the many beings who are inhabiting the mountain with you. To actually participate in any work of art is to lower the barricades between yourself and other beings. And so poetry, by its own fabric of what it is and how it works, is already an act that moves the psyche toward the values of practice, the hopes of practice, the vows of practice.

For me, every poem I write is an act of trying to discover a larger and changed and new way of seeing in the face of the evidence and experience of existence. Many poems are written when I feel inadequate—they’re written out of grief and the sense of my own impotence before the disaster that we are all witnessing. The question is, “What can I do?”

Because I am a poet, I can do a few things. My daily practice for many years was to take some political action every single day having nothing to do with being a poet: donations, sending letters, sending postcards. But then sometimes I get to do something as myself, not just as one more set of hands pitching in. And when I’m doing it as myself, this is what I am: I’m a poet. I’m not a union organizer. I’m not a giver of speeches or recorder of TikToks. And so what I can do is write a poem and make that poem available and say that poem when the opportunity arises and hope that because the poem changed me first, it might help change someone else once it’s been written.

I write poems to change myself. I write them to see more clearly, largely, compassionately, less from the small self and more from the large self. And so those changes are in the poem because they are why it became a poem in the first place, and perhaps someone else reading the poem will go through the same experience and move, for instance, from anger or incomprehension to compassion.

Some of your poems read like imagined rituals or liturgies, like “Spell to Be Said Before Sleep” or “Invocation.” How do you think about poetry in relation to ritual and prayer, and are there any Zen rituals that inspire your writing? A poem is very much akin to a ritual for a rite of passage. I’ve been interested in rites of passage ever since I took an anthropology course in high school and read The Ritual Process [by Victor Turner]. That was kind of a life-changing book for me, not least because it talks about how in any rite of passage, there is a moment when a person is no longer the old self and not yet the new self. They are in a state of threshold and liminality. That idea has informed my life ever since.

The strongest experience of this particular kind of liminality I have known in my own life was a Buddhist rite of passage. When you go to Tassajara to stay there as a practicing student, you do five days of what is called tangaryo. Tangaryo is a ritualized reenactment of the earlier practice where a monk would arrive at the monastery gate and simply sit outside until taken in. There is no form. When you are in the zendo sitting your five days of tangaryo, the only requirement is that you not leave. You stay on your zafu. There’s no kinhin, or walking meditation. There’s nothing but you sitting there, and you are so no one that the year that I was there, they continued to do construction projects in the zendo while we were sitting there.

You just didn’t count. You were no one and nothing. And it was physically almost unbearable because I don’t have a body that was meant to sit with its legs crossed. In all my years in the monastery, I don’t think I sat more than three periods of zazen when I wasn’t in pain. But I adored the experience of being no one. This is a paradoxical thing to say, but it felt such a deeply human thing to not be Jane—to just be this ignored intention, the intention to manage to stay to practice. That was informing and life-changing.

“I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.”

From the ritual of tangaryo, I learned that no matter how hard the pain is, you can survive it. In any period of zazen, part of what is being learned is that whatever your experience is, you can simply stay with it. You need not run away. You need not be frightened. You need not reject it. Your only job is to stay on the meditation cushion and be with it and notice that eventually, something will change because something always changes. I think that was a very good instruction to me for practice and for what it is that I am interested in as a poet, which is to not turn away from anything.

There is a famous sentence from the Roman poet Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think sitting on the zafu and seeing who visits in all of those hours and weeks and months and years is identical to the practice of writing poetry: you see what arises, and you notice if there’s anything you might want to do to help what arises unfold into something larger and deeper.

And so there’s always the intention of questioning. You say to each moment, “Who are you?” You say to yourself, “Who am I?” You say to each other person that you meet, “Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?” I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

⧫

Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, 
fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. 

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. 

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised. 

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something. 

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, 
bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking 

Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting

Each morning
waking
amidst the not-ever-before,
dressing inside the not-ever-again. 

Under sunlight or cloud,
brushing the hair. 

Not yet arrived
at the end-crimped finish,
drinking coffee
and buttering toast. 

Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,
I go out,
I count myself part, 

carrying only
a weightless shadow,
whose each corner joins and departs
from the shadows of others. 

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile. 

And with luck—
for days even, sometimes—
this luxury, this extra gift: 

able to even forget it.

From The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Penguin Random House 2023)

The post Abiding in the Asking appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Toward the end of his life, the Japanese poet Kaneko Tota (1919–2018) wrote: “In today’s world of haiku, it seems to me that old-fashioned labels such as new or old generations or traditional or modern styles are disappearing, and that a new criterion of classification has emerged instead—that is, animists or non-animists. In my opinion, genuine haiku poets will eventually find themselves animists.” The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge reveal a world where everything we see is playfully sentient and alive.

• Michael Flanagan explores a liminal space where the myriad beings of the natural world are always “greeting” one another. 
• Kathy Fusho Nolan’s ducks “have worked enough to relax” for the remainder of a summer afternoon.
  
• Kelly Shaw finds a dynamic lifeforce in the jumble of sandy footprints next to the “blue eternity” of the sea.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the September challenge here.

***

Summer Season Word: Summer Afternoon

WINNER:

summer afternoon
the silhouette of my chair
runs to greet the oak

— Michael Flanagan

A good haiku is like a magic trick that leaves us wondering how the rabbit got into the hat. How could the poet pull so much nuance and emotion out of a 17-syllable poem?

The length of a summer afternoon. The heat of the sun. The relaxed, somewhat drowsy torpor that sets in as the day goes on. The poet hasn’t mentioned any of these directly. Nevertheless, he implies them through figurative language: the silhouette of my chair runs to greet the oak.

It takes a moment to realize that the “silhouette” is a shadow. Skewed by the slant of the afternoon sun, it covers the distance between the chair and the oak. The acceleration of time implied by “run” provides the haiku humor of the poem.

Has the poet dozed off in the heat, waking to find that the day is nearly over? The suddenness of that perception might account for the “quickness” of the shadow. But there is a deeper magic at work.

We humans are busy, headstrong creatures, ruled by purposeful, productive activity that often distracts us from what is happening in the natural world. A summer afternoon when it is too hot to do anything but lounge in a lawn chair opens doors of perception that we normally keep shut.

The Japanese haiku master Takahama Kyoshi believed that the true purpose of haiku was son-mon, or “greeting.” According to his granddaughter, Teiko Inabata, Kyoshi believed that “haiku poets can have son-mon with any being in nature from pebbles to mountains, rivers, clouds in the sky.” But to have that experience requires that they enter a realm where, not just human begins, but all beings are constantly greeting and interacting with one another.

Drowsing in his lawn chair on a summer afternoon, the poet falls into a liminal state where, as the Lankavatara Sutra puts it, “things are not what they seem, nor are they otherwise.” There are no objects in that realm, only subjects. And everything—even a shadow—is alive.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The ducks on the dock
Have worked enough to relax —
Summer afternoon

— Kathy Fusho Nolan

a ruckus of sand
next to blue eternity
summer afternoon

— Kelly Shaw

♦

You can find more on August’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “summer afternoon”

it can lift a cloud
but it cannot lift a stone
summer afternoon

According to the National Weather Service, a fair-weather cumulus cloud weighs on average around 1.4 billion pounds. Picking up a beach pebble, I was struck by the obvious paradox: the sky that could lift a cloud was powerless to lift a stone.

That thought seemed consistent with the feeling of lassitude brought on by the heat, so I chose the season word “summer afternoon” for the last line, rather than the more obvious choice of “summer sky.”

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “summer afternoon.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “summer afternoon.”

Haiku Tip: Enjoy The Challenge of Working In a Fixed Form!

Working in a fixed poetic form like haiku offers unique challenges and rewards. The challenges are enough to keep people interested in haiku for decades on end. The rewards are such that even poets who mostly write longer free verse poetry find that the satisfaction of crafting a successful poem in 5-7-5 syllables keeps them coming back for more.

One of the greatest challenges of working in the haiku form is that, because of the season word, one always has FEWER than seventeen syllables of freedom. With a word like “summer afternoon,” the first or last line of your haiku has already been written, and so it remains only to decide what to do with the other two.

Because there are so many five-syllable season words in the vocabulary of traditional haiku, this is an issue that Japanese poets run into all the time. But you won’t find Japanese haiku poets complaining about five-syllable season words like semi no koe (“locust cry”). They know from the start that the challenge is to find a meaningful juxtaposition for that image.

If I had one piece of advice to offer for this month’s challenge, it would be this. Take a sheet of paper and write the words “summer afternoon” at the top. Then experiment with ten to twenty different beginnings or endings of a haiku using those five syllables. You may even find a way to sandwich them into the middle line and still come up with an effective haiku. The trick is to be persistent, but also playful. If you tire of this exercise after five or ten minutes, set your “haiku scratchpad” to one side and come back to it later.

If you keep at it, I can guarantee that you will eventually zero in on one or two really good ideas. When that happens, take out a fresh sheet of paper and write your best version of that poem at the top. Continue playing with it until the syllables line up to express the thought or feeling you were after.

A note on summer afternoons: In his book Haiku World, William J. Higginson writes that summer afternoons relate to the “general slowing of activity” during the hottest months of the year. It belongs to a category called “the season,” which includes words descriptive of the general climate, qualities of light, and the length or shortness of the day. In haiku poetry, summer afternoons suggest a feeling of drowsiness, torpor, boredom, or the pleasant feeling of not having much to do but relax and enjoy the day.

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (August 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Season words like “lotus” can be difficult to write about because they also function as religious symbols. A word with that much weight can capsize the 17-syllable vessel of a haiku. The winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge took a playful approach to the seasonal theme, working with the lotus as a symbol of the enlightened mind, but without becoming overwhelmed by that idea.

• Marcia Burton finds in the lotus symbol imprinted on her yoga mat a much-needed serenity in the midst of daily life.
• Nancy Winkler’s pure white flower displays a wisdom that, ironically, could only be found in the murky depths. 
  
• Lorraine A. Padden contrasts the unscathed beauty of the lotus with Orpheus, a mythical hero whose journey through the underworld left him broken and alone.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the August challenge here.

Summer Season Word: Lotus

WINNER:

on the yoga mat
lotus flower opening
and closing again

— Marcia Burton

Haiku are inherently playful—after all, the word means literally “humorous verse.” But that doesn’t mean that haiku are light on meaning or lacking in nuance. There are many levels of play.

The following verse, which was also submitted by this month’s winning poet, plays off the notion of the lotus as a symbol of the enlightened mind.

keeping her shirt clean
despite playing in the mud
a lotus flower

Religious symbolism tends to be ponderous or heavy-handed, for which reason a haiku poet will usually find some way to lighten it up—as when Issa describes a swallow flying out of the nostril of the giant bronze Buddha at Kamakura.

Here the poet compares the lotus to a young girl frolicking in the mud who, nevertheless, somehow manages to keep her shirt immaculately clean. The image is delightful, if not mildly satirical. Without a sense of humor, the quest for enlightenment can devolve into a punishing, joyless affair.

All that being said, this month’s winning poem employed a deeper, simpler style of play.

There are no real lotuses in the poet’s life—no actual flowers growing from the muddy bed of a nearby lake or pond. The only lotus she can think of is the logo emblazoned on her yoga mat, its weekly “blossoming” confined to the length of a class. She unrolls the mat, and the flower opens. At the end of the class, it closes again.

To find a lotus “opening and closing” on a yoga mat is the essence of haiku humor. It is the poet’s way of acknowledging that her life has too little space for contemplation—and, at the same time, expressing gratitude for the single hour of serenity she can find in the midst of an otherwise stressful week.

This is playful, too, no doubt. But it is play of another order. I read this poem as a subtle but honest commentary on the challenges of spiritual practice in modern life.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

what the lotus found
in the dark watery depths
is on full display

— Nancy Winkler

another lotus
unlike the poor Orpheus
arises unscathed

— Lorraine A. Padden

♦

You can find more on July’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “lotus”

there must be something
living in the dark water
that eats lotuses

I saw white lotus flowers floating atop a pond on my visit to a Buddhist temple. I asked a monk what became of them when their season was over, but he didn’t know. “They just disappear,” he said.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “lotus.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

* REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “lotus.”

Haiku Tip: Return To The Spirit Of Play!

Haiku evolved from a popular game in which poets took turns adding “capping verses” to one another’s poems. By the 17th century, this game had become a series of weekly contests held throughout Japan. A referee would issue a “challenge verse” of 7-7 syllables and participants from all walks of life would submit 5-7-5 syllable “caps,” hoping to be selected as the winner.

These 17-syllable verses ran such a broad gamut that it is hard to categorize them today. They could be sublime, profound, witty, funny, dirty, or even scandalous. At the turn of the 20th century, the literary reformer Masaoka Shiki abandoned this freewheeling approach to haiku in the effort to establish it as a serious artform.

Shiki and his followers advocated “objective description,” producing haiku that were grounded in concrete images drawn from nature. Many of these poems are considered masterpieces today. But they were rarely playful. By the mid-20th century, poets had begun to rebel, reintroducing elements of haiku that had been suppressed by the Shiki School.

Haiku has rebounded since then. We live in an age of short-form digital communication that encourages spontaneity, diversity, and freedom of self-expression—values that are reshaping haiku for the 21st-century. Ironically, today’s haiku are closer in spirit to the type of haiku that Shiki rejected.

Humor, melancholy, joy, grief, provocation, celebration, satire, longing, revulsion, philosophical musing—there are no limits on what can be communicated in 5-7-5. At its most basic, a haiku is whatever you can get away with in 17 syllables. This is the only rule that holds true across the entire history of haiku.

—from #5 in the series Haiku in English: 17 Essential Points, by Clark Strand & Susan Polizzotto

A note on lotuses: The lotus is a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, because its roots grow from the mud of a lake or river bottom, but the flower that opens atop the water is a spotless pink or white. Lotus seeds can lie dormant for years in silt or dry mud before germinating during a flood. The oldest seeds to germinate through rehydration were 1,300 years old.

There is something transcendent about the lotus in Buddhist literature, even though it remains firmly attached to this world. But the word can be used in other ways. In the poem below it expresses the “Other Power” doctrine of Pure Land Buddhism, which states that sentient beings cannot attain Buddhahood through their own effort.

the lotus rises
but it’s the water that does
the heavy lifting

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (July 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To go barefoot is to return to our original nature. That is why divine incarnations like Buddha or the Virgin Mary are nearly always depicted without shoes. Through bare feet we draw wisdom, vitality, and spiritual sustenance from below, like the tree that can reach to the heavens because its roots are anchored in the soil. Each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge found unexpected depth in this simplest, most primal of gestures: removing our shoes to experience our sacred connection with the earth.

• Jackie Chou uses a surprising juxtaposition to state the core truth of Mahayana Buddhism: that samsara and nirvana are one.
• Thomas McCrossan discovers the rhythm of life itself in his sandy footprints filling up with sea water only to wash away.
• Marcia Burton experiences a sudden intimacy when she accidentally brushes elbows with her barefoot companion.

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the July challenge here.

***

Summer Season Word: Barefoot

WINNER:

barefoot on the sand
pain from the splinter lingers
after it’s been pulled

— Jackie Chou

Haiku is the art of juxtaposition—the placing of two images side by side so that they inform one another in a surprising way. There are other techniques for producing what Bashō called “surplus meaning,” but juxtaposition is the most common. A good haiku pairs two elements that, taken together, add up to more than the sum of their parts.

On a trip to the shore, the poet has put the endless details and demands of daily living behind her to take a barefoot stroll on the sand. To go barefoot at the beach is to come back to our most primal connection. To meet life on its simplest terms. 

The relief in such moments is palpable. The white noise from the surf washes over us as our minds relax into the rhythm of walking. We begin to think with our feet. To introduce the lingering pain from a splinter into such an idyllic scene feels intrusive at first—until we realize that the poet has said something profound.

In his Winter 2020 article for Tricycle, “What’s in a Word? Dukkha,” Andrew Olendzki explains that the First Noble Truth of Buddhism (usually translated as “Life is suffering”) doesn’t mean what most people think:

This central term [dukkha: “suffering”] is best understood alongside the related word sukha. The prefix su- generally means “good, easy, and conducive to well-being,” and the prefix du- correspondingly means “bad, difficult, and inclining toward illness or harm.” On the most basic level, then, sukha means pleasant while dukkha means unpleasant.

Dukkha is much lighter in concept than suffering, which is derived from the Latin “to hold up under.” In Buddhism, one doesn’t hold up under suffering so much as one wanders through it. That samsaric wandering is the subject of the poem.

On her way to the beach, the poet slips off her sandals . . . and immediately gets a splinter. This is how civilization works: it reduces the abrasions of life, but it can’t eliminate them. Beneath our clothes, inside of our shoes, we are all naked. Take away those protections, if for only a moment, and we are facing the pointy end of some stick.

The poet stops to remove the splinter, then continues on to the shoreline. The wound stings because of the saltwater, but the surf is the best thing for it. The water that causes her pain is also the cure for it.

The juxtaposition has too many layers to touch on all of them here. There is the movement from pleasure to pain/pain to pleasure that inspired early Buddhists to compare samsara to an ocean with rising and falling waves. And there is the splinter itself: a symbol in miniature for sickness, old age, and death. Not an accident so much as a simple fact of life.

Below these is a final layer which expresses the essence of the poem. Mahayana Buddhism ultimately teaches that samsara and nirvana are one. There is no escape from this world because there doesn’t need to be an escape. “This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,” says the Zen master Hakuin. “This very body is the body of the Buddha.”

That the poet has managed to say all of this with a splinter is the “haiku humor” of the poem. The tone is detached, but not indifferent. Somewhere behind the words themselves is the lightest trace of a smile. 

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

this constant heartbeat
barefoot thumps left in sand
fill up wash away

— Thomas McCrossan

accidentally
we brush each other’s elbows
barefoot at the lake

— Marcia Burton

♦

You can find more on June’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Summer season word: “barefoot”

when we step outside
we call it going barefoot
though nothing has changed

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the summer season word “barefoot.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word and try to stay close to that.

REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the word “barefoot.”

Haiku Tip: Get Yourself Free!

In Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson devotes only one sentence to the season word barefoot: “What better symbol of summer than feet’s freedom from shoes and socks?”

At first glance, that might seem enough. In climates where shoes and socks are necessary much of the year, the summer weather can bring a feeling of liberation. But season words are complex entities with long histories.

The English travel writer Bruce Chatwin explored the design and function of the human foot in his book The Songlines. Our ancestors were made for yearly migrations, Chatwin concluded—journeys made barefoot because bare feet were evolutionarily designed for them over millions and millions of years.

For modern people, the feeling of ease that comes from going barefoot in summer is, therefore, more than freedom of not having to wear socks and shoes. Is it not, in some sense, also the freedom of returning to our evolutionary roots?

In The Vegetable Root Discourse, the recorded sayings of the 16th-century Chinese sage Hong Zicheng, we find the marriage of Higginson’s and Chatwin’s point of view:

When in the mood, I take off my shoes and walk barefooted through the sweet-smelling grasses of the fields, wild birds without fear accompanying me. My heart at one with nature, I loosen my shirt as I sit absorbed beneath falling petals, while the clouds silently enfold me as if wishing to keep me there.

As a season word, “barefoot” belongs to the human affairs category, which includes summer clothing, customs, holidays, sports, and so forth. As an experience, however, going barefoot calls much older memories to mind. Our feet remember a time when there was no indoors or outdoors—although, granted, there may not have been a word for it then. Who needs a concept like barefoot when there is no such thing as a shoe?

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (June 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The best haiku find something unique or meaningful in the poet’s encounter with the passing seasons. In springtime, as the rains penetrate the roots of flowering plants and trees, the life of the planet begins to stir. Moisture rises up from the ground over the course of a day, giving a hazy tinge to everything, and in the evening blurs the edges of the moon. Each of the winning and honorable mention poems for last month’s challenge found emotional resonance in this purely meteorological phenomenon, demonstrating our deep connection to nature.

• Marcia Burton’s “childless couple” puts their hope in the hazy moon after fertility treatments have failed.
• David Landy discovers a place of refuge and reflection in the “blueness” of the blurry moon.
• Dana Clark-Millar finds consolation in the fact of the spring moon, like her aging eyesight, “being blurry too.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the June challenge here.

***

Spring Season Word: Hazy Moon / Blurry Moon

WINNER:

a childless couple
testing the fertility
of the hazy moon

— Marcia Burton

The Japanese critic Kenkichi Yamamoto (1907-1988) once suggested that the best haiku strike a balance between humor and existential isolation. “Loneliness in life and the comical elements of life are two sides of the same coin,” he wrote.

On a mild spring night, a childless couple is “testing the fertility” of a hazy moon. The euphemism is humorous, the situation is not. It seems that conventional fertility treatments have failed; otherwise, the poet would not have identified the couple as “childless.” Now they are at the mercy of the moon.

According to haiku master Mayuzumi Madoka, the season word “hazy moon” expresses one of the most essential attributes of spring: the way the world “thaws, warms, and grows suffused with softness.” It’s a beautiful image that carries within it the hope for regeneration and renewal. Why, then, is that not the dominant mood of the poem?

The essence of this haiku lies not in the possibility that the couple may, against all odds, conceive a child aided by the hazy moon, but that they may not.

The global fertility rate for humans has fallen by more than half since 1950. The reasons for this decrease are complex, involving factors like advances in gender equality, women’s education, and reproductive rights. In some regions, environmental pollutants may also play a part. But a global trend is no consolation for the couple unable to conceive.

Is there something funny in all of this after all, even something wise? Yamamoto would say there is. For better or worse, human beings are driven by desire, and desire is life force. The couple has not given up, in spite of everything.

I am reminded of the Zen story about the monk pursued by two tigers. One tiger chases him over the edge of a precipice, where he hangs precariously by a vine. The other waits below him, should he decide to let go. As the vine begins to give way, the monk notices a berry hanging right at eye level. With his free hand, he plucks it . . .  and pops it into his mouth.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

After we parted,
I lingered in the blueness
of the blurry moon.

— David Landy

my aging eyesight
finding comfort in the moon
being blurry too

— Dana Clark-Millar

♦

You can find more on May’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Spring season word: “blurry moon” or “hazy moon”

during the blackout
alone in the kitchen, but
for the blurry moon

—Hattori Nami (b. 1947)

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the spring season word “blurry moon” or “hazy moon.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word and try to stay close to that.

REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “blurry moon” or “hazy moon.”

Haiku Tip: Explore the Range of a Season Word

From the beginning, the moon has been a favorite subject for haiku poetry—especially the full moon of autumn and the “hazy” or “blurry” moon of spring. The Japanese haiku master Mayuzumi Madoka writes of the latter:

Meteorologically, the blurring of the moon in spring is explained as a consequence of the approaching low atmospheric pressure. In Japanese poetry blurriness has been regarded as one of the attributes of spring when the world thaws, warms, and grows suffused with softness.

Because of its long history, there are many examples to draw from in exploring the range of this season word.

Basho approached it humorously in 1692:

the cats have finished
making love   hazy moonlight
spreads through the bedroom 

The peacefulness of the moonlight after the caterwauling has ceased suggests a comical parallel to human lovemaking and its aftermath.

Buson used the same season word to craft a comical self-portrait in 1773:

such love for myself
the arm that cradles my head
by the hazy moon

And in 1814, Issa produced a delightful haiku in his unmistakably simple, heart-felt style:

balanced on a pole
I set out in the garden
stands the hazy moon

We find a more modern approach in the early 20th century. Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) was an artist who gave lectures on painting in Europe and the United States. His hazy moon haiku, translated by Janine Beichman, offers a daring treatment of the traditional theme:

The mole at the nape of
her neck spells danger
under the hazy moon

Writing about this haiku, the critic Ozawa Minoru observed wryly that Yumeji, who was famous for his paintings of beautiful women, must have been standing very close to his subject to have noticed a mole at her neckline by the light of a hazy moon.

Finally, our sample haiku for this month’s challenge, written in 2011, uses “blurry moon” to express a uniquely 21st-century emotion called solastalgia—a term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005 to describe the emotional distress felt by people experiencing negative change as a result of environmental or climatological disruption.

during the blackout
alone in the kitchen, but
for the blurry moon

—Hattori Nami (b. 1947)

As reported by the poet in So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms: Haiku from the Year of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami, edited by Mayuzumi Madoka:

On the night of March 11, my town, assaulted by the tsunami, had lost all the life lines, everything left in mud and darkness. Anxious in the continuing aftershocks, I thought to cook rice on a kerosene stove and went into the kitchen and saw a blurry moon was out. That had a soothing effect on my heart.

Hattori was 64 at the time of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, which caused the deaths of nearly 20,000 people and the permanent dislocation of 116,000.

So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms contains 126 haiku written by survivors under Madoka’s guidance as a way of healing from trauma. The poems contain traditional season words, some of which, like “blurry moon,” have been in use since Basho’s day. Which proves that the themes of haiku never go out of fashion. They remain current because poets continue to use them to record their experiences and to express their deepest feelings about life.

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (May 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The above poem, by Li Ye (c. 732–784 CE), a poet and Daoist priest, is one of many, many gems in Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, a collection of poems by three female poets recently translated from the Chinese by Peter Levitt and Rebecca Nie. The project is not only remarkable for its artistic merit but also for the political, historical, and spiritual revelations it unfolds for the reader. The collection introduces the English-speaking world to the lives and poems of three Tang dynasty women, Li Ye, Xue Tao (758–832 CE), and Yu Xuanji (843–868 CE). Li Ye and Yu Xuanji were Daoist priestesses, and Xue Tao was a courtesan who, in her later years, retired to lead an eremitic life dedicated to poetry and Daoist practice. 

The Tang dynasty has long been regarded as the golden age of classical Chinese poetry, and while its male poets are well-known, the names of its accomplished women poets, such as these three, are hardly known at all. Fascinatingly, all three women, as Levitt and Nie told me when we spoke, are representatives of the Daoist goddess culture of the time. They explained how priestesses were seen as embodiments of goddesses and women as embodiments of sacred Daoist principles like primordial Yin. Gender-specific women’s neidan (internal energy cultivation) was widely embraced, one-third of Daoist clergy were female, and female Daoists were exalted as healers and caretakers of divine revelations. However, patriarchal elites considered the goddess culture a threat to their power and actively tried to supplant it and devalue the work of women. In presenting their poems, Levitt and Nie are both lifting up the voices of women disempowered by patriarchy and helping to renew awareness of the Daoist goddess culture of the past.

Levitt and Nie are both recognized Zen masters, being lineage holders of the Shunryu Suzuki lineage and Korean Jogye Order, respectively. Levitt is a published poet and has worked as a translator and editor of works by Thich Nhat Hanh, Dogen Zenji, and Han Shan, and Nie is an award-winning new media artist. Together, they bring considerable erudition, artistic capability, sensitivity, and their own spiritual practices to bear on this work, and it shows.

Levitt had previously translated some poems of Li Qingzhao (1084–1155), who is widely considered one of ancient China’s greatest poets, male or female, which sparked a desire to translate the works of more women. He then reached out to Nie to ask if she would be interested in helping to translate more female Chinese poets. Once Nie discovered the three poets of Yin Mountain, the two delved deeper into these women’s lives and realized they had made a significant discovery that needed to be shared with the world. All three translated poets were practitioners of Daoism, and two of them were Daoist priestesses, who at this time in Chinese history, were considered living demigoddesses. Their poetry weaves together allusions to Chinese literature and history, Daoist philosophy, and aspects of the Daoist goddess culture they lived in.

Tragically, two of the three poets were executed. A “poetic hero among women,” according to Nie, Li Ye was a Daoist priestess famed for her calligraphy, poetry, music, love affairs (Daoist priestesses were not celibate), and friendships with male poets. Invited to be a teacher at court, she was kidnapped by rebels and then, after order was restored, defamed and executed falsely as a collaborator. Later, Confucian intellectuals demonized her as a model of toxic femininity, portraying her sexuality as promiscuous and manipulative.  

Yu Xuanji, born to a family of commoners, was unhappily married to an elite man as his second, or lesser, wife. By the age of 17, she had been cast off and was living apart from her husband in a convent as a Daoist priestess. Xuanji had multiple lovers and was viewed as an embodiment of divinity, both facts she amplified in her own poetry. Sadly, Xuanji was executed at the young age of 25 for allegedly murdering her maid, a charge she was likely innocent of and which typically was not a capital crime. One poem by Yu Xuanji poignantly expresses her rage at the growing exclusion of women from serious artistic recognition. She rails against seeing the brutal restrictions of society and the publicly posted lists of honored male poets:

Cloud peaks fill my eyes, banishing the light of spring—
Clear, brutal hooks form beneath their fingers!
I hate that my poems lie beneath my woman’s robes—
I lift my head in vain and envy the names of the honorees.

“These female poets were tolerated as long as they were ‘good,’” Levitt told me, “but when they soared away beyond what the culture could tolerate, they were punished, as is described in the poem ‘Hawks Soar Away.’” This poem describes the aftermath of the dissolution of a love affair between Xuanji and Yuan Zhen, a literary giant and government minister. In it, Xuanji compares herself to a pet perched on Yuan Zhen’s arm, an image that was traditionally seen as a self-humiliating expression of regret. Levitt and Nie, however, argue that the poem is more of a protest than an admission of remorse: 

With my talon spears and bell-like eyes,
my capturing of hares is praised by all,
but since I soared above the blue clouds for no reason,
you no longer let me perch on your arm.

Our third poet, Xue Tao, was one of the most celebrated of the Tang dynasty and lived into her 80s, perhaps because she was able to make her home far from the halls of power. The subject of an opera and historical monuments, she designed an artisanal paper that is still used today. In her later years, she retired to a hermitage where she focused on poetry and internal cultivation:

I moved my immortal quarters to this place,
where shrubs blossom everywhere without being sown.
Spreading out my garments on the yard’s small tree,
I sit above the fresh spring and float cups of wine.
From my balcony railings, there’s a hidden path through deep bamboo. Fine woven silks embrace my messy pile of books.
Freely, I ride a painted boat and sing to the shining moon,
trusting the light breeze will circle me back around.

Through their translations, Levitt and Nie have excavated the voices of women whom the patriarchal culture of the time, and historians since, tried to bury. As a Chinese American woman artist, Nie felt that exploring these three poets was a process of mutual liberation. “Working on this volume has helped me to overcome a sense of distance from my own heritage as a woman working in the West,” she shared. “Working on the poems of these women has helped me to find a sense of liberation and healing for myself. By sharing this work, I hope to extend my hand to my sisters all over the globe, including those in the Asian cultural sphere where the liberation from patriarchy is just beginning, but where there is hope.”

Levitt and Nie are now working on a new collection of classical poems by Chinese Chan masters, which they assured me would contain many women. 

The post Living Demigoddesses, Immortal Poetry appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.