Dee Evetts
Essay #23 Sept/Oct 2024
In recent years I have become increasingly interested in an aspect of haiku composition that remains largely undiscussed, even unacknowledged. This could be variously described as fictionalization, or alternatively as a process of creative adjustment or restructuring to a specific end. The acceptability of such alterations to reality (which for some is defined as the event precisely as experienced or as observed) would seem to vary widely. Right off it must be declared that this is a challenging area for conducting any kind of research. Clearly it is not possible to search in the usual way (notably by browsing haiku collections and anthologies) in order to discover examples of what we are seeking. We gain access to such inside information only when a fellow poet — most likely a friend, and usually in the course of casual conversation — mentions that a particular haiku of theirs went through some such transmutation during its progress from first draft (first idea, even) on the way to a final version.
A notable exception to the above general restriction is the context of haiku groups and workshops. There must be many hundreds of these around the world — not least in Japan itself, as well as among the Japanese diaspora in Canada and the USA. These groups vary widely not only in size, but in their methods and their raisons d’être. Some tend towards being a venue for what appears to be a form of rubber-stamping, with poets bringing along what they regard as finished pieces. I prefer the philosophy espoused by one contemporary teacher of writing, with regard to literary workshops in general: “If it doesn’t need work, then don’t bring it!”
In a workshop situation it is not unusual to receive a response from one’s peers — with regard to a haiku draft we have presented for discussion — that the poem does not convey what we had intended or hoped that it would. (Or, it may be, only to a minority of readers.) My personal jargon for this situation — an extremely common one — is that the poem as it stands fails to “carry”. At this point — once the author has explained what she or he originally intended to express — someone in the group may suggest an adjustment, such as substituting “he” for “I”, or maybe a shift from past to present tense. There may even be a proposal for changing the locale or time of year in order to achieve the poet’s aim. In my book, what counts is that the essential quality of the experience is preserved, while being successfully conveyed to the majority of readers. Inevitably, we shall be returning to this question.
To get to grips with some actual examples, I am going to draw in the first instance upon my own stock of published haiku, being by definition the only body of work that I know from the inside. Interleaved with these I shall be presenting a number of contributions that some of my haiku confreres have been generous enough to send me.
I wrote a haiku many years ago at my mother’s home that in its original version read:
unexpected news
I stand staring into
the cutlery drawer
We are all familiar with such moments of distraction or abstraction, when an intrusive thought pulls us altogether away from what we are in the middle of doing. In it’s low-key way, the piece works as is. And yet I remained vaguely dissatisfied with it. I wanted to take a step back from the situation — from the immediate experience — and it belatedly dawned on me that all I had to do was have someone else stand in for me. Thus the poem became:
unexpected news
she stands staring into
the cutlery drawer
What has been gained by this? In a word, I would say universality. Not all would agree perhaps. A comparable example that we could place beside this is provided by Annie Bachini. In her own words:
“I think I only have the one example that I told you about.
breadcrumbs cupped in my hand —
the last notes of an opera
This is how the haiku appeared when it was published. I originally wrote the poem as ‘breadcrumbs cupped in her hand’. The back story being that my mother had recently died and although the breadcrumbs were in my own hand, I saw her hand. (My neighbour happened to be listening to opera at the time.) I later showed this haiku to someone who thought it would work better as my hand, and I went with that.”
A notable aspect of this haiku, we learn above, is that it has a special or private significance for the author, alongside the evocation of a more universal experience for the reader. The shift from “her” to “my” arguably makes the fleeting moment more widely accessible — more readily identified with, I think. On the other hand, the version using “her” does suggest some kind of back story, which naturally is intriguing. We may also bear in mind that it is not unusual for a haiku to be published in different versions over the years in different venues.
Sometimes the change of pronoun could be termed strategic, as in the above examples. Occasionally it can be of profound significance. I am deeply grateful to Tony Pupello for recounting the following experience, where we see the poet grapple with a life-altering circumstance, as well as rising to the challenge of how to write about it.
“Up until my late teens I was a creature of the subways — the underground. Living in lower Manhattan, I went to high school way up in the Bronx, the next to last stop on the “D” train. I was so relaxed that I often fell asleep on the way home and found myself waking up crossing the Manhattan Bridge. Then the ‘sid hit the fan’, life happened, and a bane of my existence emerged — claustrophobia. Fear and panic are strong words — but not strong enough to convey the sense of overwhelming suffocation a claustrophobic can feel.
Columbus Circle stop –
his claustrophobia scatters
into windswept leaves
I wrote this poem thirty-five years ago. I struggled with the third person ‘his’ as opposed to the first person ‘my’. Of course, this is an autobiographical piece. My claustrophobia, my relief upon exiting a subway station, my feeling of exhilaration as wind whips across my brow, my feeling of release and freedom being tossed about like a leaf.
The reason for the transposition? Quite simply: shame, pure and simple. The thought of being looked at, examined, was and is excruciating. It was as hard to write ‘my’ as it is even now to submit this; as it is even now to look another in the eye and say, ‘No, I don’t take elevators; so long as I can walk, even up fourteen flights to a dance studio, I am fine’. ”
There is no doubt that when there is an autobiographical aspect to the work in hand, the poet may face an extra challenge: how much to reveal, how much to suggest. Of all the strategies that may serve to accomplish one’s particular aim, the phenomenon of role reversal holds particular interest for me.
almost dusk
our neighbour tilts
his Venetian blind
The context here: I was staying with my niece in north London, her terrace home having towards the rear a mere eight feet of space between her house and the next, each with a largish window facing directly across from one another. During the daytime this is of little consequence, but at night the brightly lit rooms feel rather exposed, and a bit too intimate. Thus it is commonplace for the blinds to be drawn on both sides as darkness approaches. In actuality it was I who on this occasion made the first move. Feeling inexplicably self-conscious about this, I chose to tilt the blind just slightly — provisionally, as it were. I no longer have my original draft of the resulting haiku, but I recall that I failed to make it work. On the brink of abandoning the idea, it occurred to me that I had only to switch the roles of observer and observed, and things would fall naturally into place. A situation more complex — and far more interesting — has been instanced by Tom Zille, who writes as follows:
“Here, at last, is my response to your appeal. As you know, this haiku:
our old sofa
my brother breastfeeding
his baby doll
transposes the act of breastfeeding the doll from myself into my brother. This was because the temporal construction seemed to offer difficulties. If it had been, say,
our old sofa
breastfeeding
my baby doll
I would have been troubled by an ambiguity regarding voice — is this my childhood self talking? Or is this a grown-up speaker breastfeeding a baby doll? But I also did not want to explicitly state that this was a memory, which might have sounded clumsy. Ascribing the action to my brother and turning myself into the observer (or, if you will, taking on the voice of my brother observing me) seemed to solve that problem. The fact that this is a childhood memory now simply emerges from the poem.”
The above example presents a strong case for what I would like to term creative transformation in haiku writing. We might choose to go further in this direction, and retain the core experience but modify the circumstances surrounding it. I have one such poem, whose development straddled almost three decades. In its first incarnation I adhered very closely to the actual circumstances:
in the sleeping loft
we wake to June snow
someone speaking Dutch
This derives from the experience of being met by an old friend at Calgary airport, and driving half way to her home in British Columbia before overnighting with some friends of hers (originally from Holland) whose home was in the mountains. I felt the poem had some unresolved problems, which caused me to hold back from submitting it anywhere. One of the issues was that “sleeping loft” is not a widely known term — or feature, come to that. Eventually I substituted “in our sleeping bags”. (Which indeed we were using.) This had the effect of moving the location out of doors, for the majority of readers. I had no problem with that. However, this removal from the domestic context also had the effect of the voice now being that of a stranger. At this point I decided to make myself the solitary waker/listener, in this new context. Eventually the final version appeared thus:
in my sleeping bag
waking to June snow
someone speaking Dutch
These are in a way quite different poems, one having a lonelier (more exposed?) feel than the other. For myself, I am content to have both — with neither version being essentially more true than the other, as I see it. As I feel it, I should probably say.
I speculate that we are bordering on territory here where not all haiku poets or readers will feel entirely comfortable. Accordingly let us take a step back and consider the fact that journal editors will not infrequently propose a small change in order to make a haiku clearer or more effective. John Stevenson writes:
“Early in my haiku days I submitted the following poem to Bob Spiess at Modern Haiku:
old shoes
the comfort
coming apart
Bob suggested, and I readily agreed, that the superior reading would be:
old slippers
the comfort
coming apart
And so it appeared in Modern Haiku. As an editor, I have often made similar suggestions. One example involved suggesting the word “grit” in a poem by Bill Cullen. He has written about this in the past, and might be willing to offer it for your use if you contact him.”
So far we have been looking at what most haiku poets would consider to be minor textual or contextual changes. I want to examine now two distinctly more radical strategies. On one occasion in the past I adopted as my own, in its entirety, an experience recounted to me by some friends who had been driving down the West Coast:
on the freeway
discussing the chocolate bar
in the trunk
I identified with this humorous situation immediately; it felt to me as if I had been right there in the car with them. Of course I had the option to make the middle line: “they discuss the chocolate bar”, but this did not appeal to me, since the poet and the reader then remain outside the vehicle, and some vital immediacy is lost. It is a lightweight piece and needed to be handled accordingly.
Roberta Beary has contributed an intriguing account of the way a deeply embedded memory was triggered for her by the sight of a van on the street, followed by a process of selection and adjustment in order to achieve the haiku she conceived.
cul-de-sac
the knife-grinder rings in
summer’s end
The Heron’s Nest, Vol. X, No. 3 Sept. 2008
“What actually happened:
Street was not a dead end.
Season was early summer.
The knife grinder was a guy in a van whose side-paneling featured images of knives and scissors alongside the words ‘sharpen’ and ‘like new’.
My thoughts:
I aimed for a strong haiku that evoked nostalgia. I immediately settled on the neighbourhood knife-grinder of my remote past as my starting point as I had thought of him when seeing the van guy on my street.
I hoped my haiku would evoke thoughts about the past and things ending. So I changed things up a bit. Street became ‘cul-de-sac’ and early summer became ‘summer’s end’. To my mind, the motif linking lines one and three strengthens both.
I discarded scissors as unnecessary clutter.
I was pleased with the overall effect of my haiku. It accomplishes what I hoped it would.”
When I ask myself how I feel about the above account, the first thing that comes to mind is that I consider the resulting piece to be successful — and very satisfying — as a haiku per se. (It strikes me that it would also serve as a wonderful renga link — or even better as the hokku itself.) It touches all the bases: concision, immediacy, resonance; the poet carries us with her to share an authentic moment. In that sense I am transported; the conjuror has totally succeeded. Do I care what method has been used to accomplish this — what creative sleight of hand or imaginative dexterity has been deployed? Is there not an argument to be made for a poetic truth that transcends the slavishly literal? Haiku is after all a form of literature. What then are the demands that we make of this genre? That it be strictly autobiographical? In that case I would pose the question: whose everyday life and experience is not informed by imagination, memory, association? I would like to throw these questions out to readers, and hope to receive back some opinions — as well as more examples to place alongside those we have so far considered.”
[Please send any thoughts/feedback on this essay to the Editor, who will ensure they are passed on to Dee: editor@tsuridōrō.org]
