The Heart of Haiku Read Online Free Page B

wash-tub (possibly outside, but more likely catching water from a roof leak) is near, precise, and intimate; yet its purchase on the attention is as large as the storm’s. Bashō tree leaves tearing in wind were a long-standing image in classical Chinese and Japanese poems; dripping roofs and ordinary metal basins, less so. The balance of the minute and the vast, of the personal and forces that care nothing about the personal, of idealized and “poetic” experience and the actual living through of a major storm, is registered in each drop of water striking iron.
    In January 1683, a year after Bashō moved into his Fukugawa hut, a fire swept through much of Edo. Bashō survived only by jumping into the river, using a soaked reed mat to shield his head from the heat and smoke. He was forced to move into a patron’s house, far from the city. Then, that summer, his mother died. In the fall, his students found him new lodgings in a run-down house not far from his burned one, and supplied him with household items, a few clothes, and a large hollow gourd to hold rice, which they regularly filled. When the New Year (early spring, in the traditional Japanese calendar) arrived, Bashō marked it with this haiku:

    I’m wealthy—
    going into the new year
    with 20 lbs of old rice

    waretomeri shinnen furuki kome gosh ō  

    Bashō later replaced the self-description of the haiku’s opening line with something plainer. Bashō revised his haiku, haibun, and journals throughout his life. Not infrequently the direction was toward a diminishment of self, but there are also poems in which he experimented with various alternative verbs or subject lines to feel their effects. Should a poem be about “loneliness” or “stillness”? Should a sound “soak,” “pierce” or “stain”? These alterations show that even his most seemingly unstudied and artless works were often produced by a method quite unlike what is sometimes described as a “Zen” “first thought, best thought.” The revised poem:

spring begins—
going into the new year
with 20 lbs of old rice

harutatsu ya shinnen furuki kome gosh ō       

    A few years later, another haiku seems to recall that rice-storing kitchen gourd, though here it appears to be empty:

    My one-possession
    world,
    a lightweight gourd
    monohitotsu waga yo wa karoki hisago kana   

    The words do not reveal the poet’s attitude about the situation. I myself lean towards the interpretation of a liberating portability of existence: this poem was written during the time of Bashō’s travels, by a man used, by then, to many losses.
    Not long after the fire, Bashō published the first collection holding the work of his followers.  Its title, Shrivelled Chestnuts , points towards Bashō’s aesthetic of valuing the valueless; he said of the book’s “shrivelled chestnuts,” “they may be small, but their taste is sweet.” Yet along with his increasing success as a poetry master, Bashō grew, it seems, increasingly unsettled. When he received an invitation to visit some former students, he began preparing for a lengthy trip. He shaved his head, put on the robes of a mendicant monk, and in the fall of 1684 set out with a friend on a seven-month-long journey by foot, horseback, and ferry. The trip would include a visit to his mother’s grave before going on to places made famous by earlier Japanese writers. It was the first of five such trips, each recorded in a published journal mixing poems written during his travels with prose descriptions of places, people, and events.
    Bashō called his account of this early trip The Journal of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton , and its first sentences and opening haiku set the tone:

    I set out on a trip of a thousand miles without any supplies, my walking-stick the staff of an ancient said to have vanished one night under a midnight moon. […]          As I left my run-down hut, the wind’s sound over the river was odd and