haikaiTALKS: a saturday gathering! 27th July

haikaiTALKS: haiku aesthetics | a saturday gathering_under the banyan tree

host: Lev Hart

27th July 2024

haikaiTALKS: a saturday gathering_under the banyan tree

HAIKU AESTHETICS: Sabi

marilyn ashbaugh’s verse has sabi. It finds a melancholic beauty in the passage of time:

          the soft shuffle

          of her card deck

          autumn deepens

          (haikaiTALKS, Sept. 17, 2023)

In Japanese culture, Autumn is associated with loneliness, suggesting that the card game is Solitaire. Autumn is also associated with aging, so the player is perhaps an older woman, who has been alone for a long time. Autumn leads to Winter, which is associated with death. With a shuffle of the deck, a woman prepares "to deal" with her mortality. We can hear the seconds pass in the shuffling of the cards. By extension, we can imagine the deck being shuffled repetitively, as cards usually are, and the game being played repetitively, as Solitaire usually is. The length of the “haiku moment” becomes endless. The passage of time is enhanced by the kigo, “autumn deepens.”

Sabi, like blues music, evokes loneliness, sadness, serenity, or even happiness. In this week’s ku, the loneliness seems tinged with tranquility, Solitaire being a meditative and enjoyable pastime.

marilyn expresses the beauty of sabi through her kigo and juxtaposition. The many possible meanings of “autumn deepens” are narrowed in the context of "the soft shuffle." The moment, which might otherwise seem banal, is deepened by the choice of kigo. (If the ku were, “the soft shuffle / of her cards / spring morning,” it would be meaningless.) The juxtaposition distills the spirit of Autumn into the moment, while the moment is subsumed into the perpetual cycle of seasons. Everything we have learned about kigo through the last seven weeks is evinced by marilyn’s mastery of craft. Similarly, through kigo and juxtaposition, you are invited to write two haiku with sabi.

“sabi (patina/loneliness): Beauty with a sense of loneliness in time, akin to, but deeper than, nostalgia” (Higginson, William J., “The Haiku Handbook,” p. 293).

“sabi: Derived from words that mean wane, lonely, still and desolation. . . . It seeks beauty and poetic depth in solitude and tranquility” (Qiu, Peipei, “Basho and The Dao,” p. 212).

“sabi --- aged/loneliness --- A quality of images used in poetry that expresses something aged or weathered with a hint of sadness because of being abandoned. A split-rail fence sagging with overgrown vines has sabi; a freshly painted white picket fence does not” (Reichhold, Jane, “Basho The Complete Haiku,” p. 417).

Your host for haikaiTALKS Lev Hart

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Thank you for doing this for us, Lev.

Members,

Please give your feedback on others' commentary and poems too. _()_

This is an exciting phase for haikaiTALKS! Have fun! Keep writing and commenting! _kala