writeALONG!

A TUESDAY FEATURE

host: Muskaan Ahuja

guest editor: Srinivasa Rao

Three Elements in Haiku

(Taken from Kenneth Yasuda’s Japanese Haiku, Its Essential Nature and History)

The haiku poet usually attempts to present a speaking object, around which and in which he has had an experience; and this in a breath-length’s space. There are certain basic attributes of an object which serve to identify it and locate it amidst the constant barrage of impressions which impinge on consciousness. Objects, that is to say, are located in time and space. Let’s take an actual experience of a poet. Basho, let us say, was passing through a field one autumn evening and a crow on branch caught his attention. Similar scenes had doubtlessly been seen many people before him, but he is the one who made it a memorable event by forming his experience of it in the following haiku:

On a withered bough

A crow alone is perching

Autumn evening now

For him, a bough (where), a crow (what) and the evening (when) are the three elements that he recorded in three lines

This week, go out and look into the surroundings, find the three elements and write a haiku/senryu. The poet must see how the three elements exist, in one, as parts of a whole without which they do not become an experience but only remain in relationship to each other. If we examine well-realized haiku, we will see that three elements are so unified that they are immovable and that no substitute is possible. Where, what and when need not be in that order as long as the unification creates a memory.

My own published examples:

1.

Indian summer— (when)

the palmist's fingers (what)

on her love line (where)

2.

graveyard watch (where)

the rhythm of winter (when)

in the old man's teeth (what)