Poem: Spring of Life

the snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children

Issa


(Photo courtesy of Ben Wicks and Unsplash.com.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

Bashō's Frog

Matsuo Bashō (芭蕉) was a wandering Zen hermit of the Edo period, as well as an accomplished poet. Popularly considered the father of modern haiku, many of his verses are accepted as teaching in Zen circles today. The readily-memorised haiku format may drive some of this posterity, but there's no denying that Bashō's work often encodes palpable koanic insight.

Interestingly, his status as a self-trained free-range monk is rarely mentioned in our discussions of him, though we're happy to claim Bashō as the "Zen one" of Japan's Four Great Haikunists.

Thus do conservatives lay claim to the dissenters of yore.

Yet the eremitical nature of Bashō's practice is clearly evident in much of his work. Particularly his most famous poem, which is not merely lauded as Bashō's best, but in fact as the most awesomest haiku ever written, by anyone.

Feel up to it?

OK, clear your mind.

Ready?

the old pond
a frog jumps in
plop

That's it.

That's the poem.


Stuff to Notice

To begin with, this translation (Alan Watts, this time) is only one of dozens if not hundreds available; about which, more later. But I especially value Alan's take, emphasising as it does the humour that's central to Bashō's perspective.

Note also that while haiku – at least the classic kind – is supposed to contain references to nature, this one has nature coming out of its ears. I mean, there's no moonlight or cherry blossoms or summer rain or drifting snow. Nothing pretty, you dig. But nature? Yeah. It's got that in spades.

In his sardonic hermit way, Bashō seems to be saying, "I got yer nature, RIGHT HEAH!"

And then there's the Zen.

You may be thinking, "Big deal. Frog jumps in water. There's a noise. Nothing to see here."

And you may be right. I mean, you can get that kind of stuff anywhere, for cheap or free. Nothing unique is going on here. Nothing special.

Scared frog jumps in water, goes splash; not a headline you're likely to see in the Times.

Meanwhile, concentric circles are expanding in the water, lapping at the edges, returning through other circles approaching from behind. Frog resurfaces, climbs out. More circles. Wet frog drips, log gets wet, water runs off into pond.

The concentric circles expand and retract forever. The whole pond is implicated. And also its environs. And their environs. And all the environs beyond that.

And that's just one possible response. Maybe there's some suchness in there. Maybe some satori. Some admirers see all seven Zen principles of composition in these three banal lines.

Which is why they're sometimes called the most perfect haiku ever penned.

But not by its author, of course. We should also bear that in mind.


Language Matters

While we also remember language.

To start with, Bashō never wrote the poem reproduced above. And if by chance he had happened on it, none of that chicken scratch would have meant a thing to him. Because his text (per this source) was actually this:

古池や
蛙飛こむ
水の音

Which works out to:

furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

You don't need any Japanese to feel the visceral difference between this and literally anything it might have inspired in English. In fact, if you want to see just how thoroughly we anglophones can mess something up, check out the 32 translations catalogued here.

Robert Aitken's commentary on that page is also well worth the read, as is his stab at the source material:

The old pond has no walls;
a frog just jumps in;
do you say there is an echo?

And if you really want a plunge into the abyss, try Geoffrey Wilkinson, who starts with an acerbic comment on this whole frog thing, and then… well…

Go see for yourself. By the time Wilkinson's done he's taken you on a fascinating street tour of the haiku form and this one in particular, including several parodies by Japanese monks and poets over the past 500 years.

For example:

Old pond—
Bashō jumps in
the sound of water

– Zen master Sengai Gibon, 1750–1837.


Master Bashō,
at every plop
stops walking

– Anon, 18th century.


...while fellow hermit Ryōkan (1758–1831) had this to add:

The new pond—
not so much as the sound of
a frog jumping in


To say nothing of the fellow who wrote a limerick. (Yes, really.)

So if you're a fan of haiku, or hermits, or haiku-writing hermits, take a good surf into the lore of Bashō's frog. By the end of the evening you will have visited many corners of Zen, Japan, poetry, and history, and learned a great deal about the practice value of small bodies of water.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

July Haiku

even one-penny
fireworks...
ooo! ahh!

Issa


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Inevitable Spring

The warbler
wipes its muddy feet
on plum blossoms

–Issa


(Plum Garden, Kamata, by Utagawa Hiroshige, courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

Autumn Valediction

to passing autumn
the pampas grass waves
goodbye, goodbye

Shirao

Curriculum Vitae

No board, no checkers
Calligraphy worth nothing
Round-eyed hermit monk

Poem: The Frog Sutra

Could they be sutras?
In the temple well
frogs chant

Kansetsu


(POV photo of well courtesy of Gary Meulemans and Unsplash.com.)

Poem: The Sound Of Colour

Winter solitude—
In a world of one colour
The sound of wind.

Bashō

Trash Talk

In killing my Self
The monster is defeated
Eat my Zen, dickweed


("Enrag'd Monster" courtesy of John Hamilton Mortimer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Grass Haiku

Sitting quietly.
Not giving a single fuck.
Grass grows by itself.

– Posted online by a fellow Zen hermit; identity unknown.


(Photo courtesy of Anis Ur Rahman and Wikimedia Commons.)

North Coast Christmas Meditation

the mountain hermit's
fire is rising
winter rain

Issa

(Photo courtesy of Edal Anton Lefterov and Wikimedia Commons.)

Remembering Ango

Today's top headline:
"Free-range Buddhist Eaten By
Health-Conscious Cougar."

– Haiku written eleven years ago, in anticipation of my 100 Days on the Mountain.

(Photo of Katsushika Hokusai painting courtesy of the British Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Long Game

The final line first
Flow most gracefully when you write
As in life, haikus


(Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

WW: New Year's Day

a good world
even from the quince thicket:
"Happy New Year!"

Issa

Autumn Anatta

Leaves fall gently down
Like rain into autumn pools
Who writes this bullshit?



(Photo courtesy of Robert Wnuk and Unsplash.com.)

The Easter Effect

spring breeze...
packed with people
the mountain temple

Issa

(Photo courtesy of Maria Yamaguchi and Wikimedia Commons.)

Seedling Year

just a foot long, but it'll do
New Year's pine

Issa















(Pine Tree by Pan Dawei courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Ride

Down the banister
The wild schoolboy I was slides
To enlightenment


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Issa Nails The Thing

Kobayashi Issa is my all-time favourite poet. Regular readers will find this tediously typical, for though he's one of Japan's Four Great Haiku Masters, Issa is not "the Zen one". (That would be Bashō. I like Bashō too, but he doesn't "hit" for me nearly as often as Issa.)

Issa annoys modern Zen on many levels. He was ordained in the Jōdo-shū sect, a Pure Land Buddhist denomination that Zenners (including myself) find a bit futile. Worse yet, he was a hermit, and on the contemporary model: he had a family, and socketed his stick dead-centre of the Red Dust World.

Yet his descriptions of hermit practice, and his distillations of eremitical insight, are the most concise, most incisive, and most accurate I've found.

Witness his most famous lines, written hours after his baby daughter died:

This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet.
And yet.

That simply can't be improved. If you take anything out, it falls short. If you put anything in, it collapses.

Non-Buddhists may miss the sad satire here. Our teachers often compare human existence (mistakenly but universally called "the world") to dew: it comes from nowhere, sparkles for minutes, and goes back to nowhere. Attachment to same – craving permanence in the eternally temporary – is the origin of suffering.

Accepting this sets us up for cushion error: proudly declaring that we're liberated, because we know the truth.

And yet.
And yet.

Starting to get why this middle-aged suburban church-boy so troubles Zenners?

He's also easy-going, an affront to Zen's samurai puritanism, and accepting of his own nature. His perspective is, in short, eremitical.

Exhibit B:

Napped half the day
no one
punished me.

On the eremitical path, you do what practice suggests. This is different from monastery life, where you do what order demands, what tradition demands, sometimes what the current master demands, whether it makes sense or not.

Life inside requires that kind of discipline; life outside, another kind. Issa's poem suggests that on this day, this was the right call.

And as always, his trademark self-mockery. "If only I were half the monk I claim to be."

Word.

Note the same theme, with a different conclusion, here:

Napping at midday
I hear the song of rice planters
and feel ashamed of myself.

And then there's me on ango:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

And what of those elegant Zen dilettantes, as hip in the West today as they were in 18th century Japan?

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

I gotta stop there or I'll copy and paste every poem my brother ever wrote. (I've literally never found one – not one – that isn't my favourite.) If these crumbs have whetted your appetite, you may binge at will here.

OK, one more. Until next week, here's Issa's take on being a haikunist. (Essentially, the blogger of his time and place.)

Pissing in the snow
outside my door
it makes a very straight hole.

(Photo of Kobayashi Issa's monument courtesy of 震天動地 and Wikimedia Commons.)