Make Haibun New through Chinese Poetic Past: Basho’s Transformation of Haikai Prose

Basho believed that the poet had to work along both axes. To work only in the present would result in poetry that was fleeting. To work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai, which was rooted in the everyday world.

- Haruo Shirane

In the narrow sense of the word, haikai, which gave birth to haiku, originally referred to the humorous poems found in the first imperially commissioned anthology of poetry. It was later used to describe popular comic linked verse (haikai no renga), distinguishing itself from the more refined, classical linked verse (renga). Broadly speaking, it is used to “describe genres deriving from haikai or reflecting haikai spirit, such as haiku, haibun, renku, and haikai kikobun, literary travel account”.1 During the second half of the 17th century, there were innovative movements within Japanese haikai circles, and they had transformed haikai from an entertaining pastime to a respected poetic form.2 Furthermore, haiku, originated from hokku which was the opening verse of a haikai sequence, has flowered for four centuries and established itself not only as an autonomous genre of Japanese short verse form, but as a globalized verse form in many languages. As the putative founder of haiku, Matsuo Basho made enormous contribution to the refinement, success, and popularization of Japanese haiku and its related genres.3

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Summer, 2010 issue of Simply Haiku

Three Readings of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Haiku”

Throughout the history of English poetry, there seldom is a poem like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (hereafter referred to as “metro poem”) that has been endlessly researched by scholars, literary critics, and poets alike 1. Most of his readers are familiar with at least two versions of his metro poem: the original version published in the April 1913 issue of Poetry as follows:

The apparitionbbbbof these facebbin the crowd :

Petalsbbbbon a wet, black bough.

and one of the revised versions published in his 1916 book entitled Lustra as follows:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Everyone may have his/her own reading of this ever-famous poem from different perspectives. But due to the limited space of this article and for Magnapoets readers who are interested in the Asian poetic traditions, I will discuss two major popular readings – the haikuesque and ideogrammatic ones -- in the following sections.

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first published in the January 2010 issue of Magnapoets and reprinted in Haiku Reality, #4