Dee Evetts
Essay #21 May/June 2024
A regular reader of this series could be forgiven for having looked at the titles of my two previous essays and concluded that their author is floundering desperately in a sea of terminology, while all the time striving to sound coherent and confident. And the truth is — with apologies to Stevie Smith — I was indeed not waving, but drowning. Accordingly, having jousted with a panoply of terms, most of them with overlapping connotations (‘awe’, ‘wonder’, ‘mystery’, ‘mystical’, ‘numinous’) this author has decided to cut his losses — to quit while behind, in effect — and focus quite simply on the Japanese concept of yūgen. It was there waiting all the time, of course, quietly and respectfully, and it took a couple of readers tugging at my sleeve to make me aware of the fact. I am indebted to them, all the more since it is salutary for me to reclaim a concept with which I was once somewhat familiar. That is, I had at least some notion of what it represented. But while sabi and wabi easily enough became part of my vocabulary, I recognized yūgen to be a weightier matter. Thus did intellectual laziness betray me, and with the other two simpler terms tucked one under each arm, so to speak, I left the heavier item there on the platform and boarded my train.
Now that which I abandoned has finally caught up with me, I am forced to ask myself: what is this yūgen after all? Let us not be intimidated, for we are privileged to be alive in the glorious era of search engines. This should be a cake walk — and so it proves to be. My online source offers this: “Yūgen: a Japanese aesthetic sense, usually translated as ‘mysterious profundity’. It denotes the beauty we can sense or feel in an object, even though we cannot literally or physically see it.” As applied to literature, it conveys a suggestion, implication, or aftertaste — that is to say, an apprehension — of a hidden depth or significance.
Thus armed, I feel ready to reappraise some of the haiku that we have previously considered. And I offer no apology for my readiness to revisit poems that in my view serve as exemplars of this particular quality. It is my belief (some might call it a fancy) that any haiku poet worth her or his salt will accumulate landmarks — specific poems, that is — with which to mark their own path towards whatever their concept of the peak may be. Cairns may come to mind, for anybody who has walked or climbed in Wales or Scotland. (This image is doubly helpful, since cairns are made by stacking rocks and stones in a deliberate way, so as to be stable and lasting.)
To shift the metaphor towards a more domestic context, I ask myself which haiku in particular are my own leading lights — my tsuri-dōrō even. And I mean specifically when it comes to yūgen, this being our current focus. In retrospect I would instance these probably by now familiar haiku from Penny Harter, John Wills, Bruce Detrick, and Cor van den Heuvel, as presented once again below. Familiar they may be, but they are surely worthy of many re-readings — and capable indeed of many readings, in that other sense.
distant thunder the moon at dawn
overhead a satellite lily-pads blow white
moves in the dark in a sudden breeze
empty house city street
its great windows the darkness inside
looking out to sea the snow-covered cars
I find a certain felicity, incidentally, in the diversity of contexts that these four poems provide. If nothing else, this demonstrates how the quality of yūgen dwells in no particular subject, and occupies no exclusive territory.
Before I go trawling for further specimens, I propose to do the unconventional (and surely unscholarly) thing, by examining a few haiku of my own that might be considered as qualifying for the appellation. One advantage of this, supposedly, is that I am in a position to lift the curtain on what my intention was, regardless of how these poems are and have been perceived. The fact is I have very little work that ventures into this territory, and I use that verb intentionally. Possibly no haiku poet consciously aims for yūgen, though I suspect this cannot be true. And why is that? Simply because there is amongst the huge pool of published work now available to us — after some seventy years of English-language haiku publication — no lack of evidence that there can be a conscious (and all too often self-conscious) striving for profundity. How do we know this? The answer is of course is that we cannot know. But the result of such striving does tend to have a certain odor. This is hardly scientific; I would stand by it nonetheless. To cut to the chase, here are my own three candidates:
eating a raw mushroom in the sleeping bag
I stare waking to June snow
at the rotten gatepost someone speaking Dutch
morning sneeze
the guitar in the corner
resonates
What, after all, can I say about these? They happened, and I was there. All three experiences generated in me the sense that I was connected momentarily to something far deeper and larger than the fleeting experience itself. I did not dwell upon this at the time; rather, it emerged later as an abiding feeling. These three haiku still give me more satisfaction to revisit than any others that I have written. The first two have never to my knowledge been mentioned or singled out anywhere; the third has been referenced and anthologized many times. I can easily comprehend this. With the third poem it is relatively easy for the reader to identify with the experience depicted. This is clearly not the case with the other two. With regard to the mushroom and the rotting wood, I experienced a momentary glimpse of how diverse and universal fungi and mold spores are, despite at that time having almost zero knowledge of botany. Interestingly, the science in this area has advanced significantly during the intervening years, as even a general reader will know.
The sleeping bag haiku is an oddity, even to me as the poet. It essentially wrote itself, and then it languished for more than three decades. It was put away, brought out, fiddled with, went back into a drawer, and drifted to the back of that drawer. I never had the impulse to submit it anywhere for publication, since something about it seemed to me unresolved. I did show it to a few friends — not published haiku poets as such, but a handful of people whom I have come to think of as “the aficionados”, and upon whom I have depended over the years to act as a sounding board for some of my more dubious attempts. Out of the blue, a few years back, I received an email from one of these invaluable referees. In it he declared: just go ahead and publish that haiku the way it is. He then named the feelings and intuitions that the poem evoked for him. He said that he remained as puzzled as ever regarding the connection between the poet waking to see snow (while camping somewhere?) and the voice speaking in Dutch. He said that regardless of that — or possibly because of that — he kept coming back to it. This was good enough for me, and I duly included the poem in my next collection. In conclusion — before I let the veil fall back — I will observe that these two poems somehow get closer to my own core than any others I have written. I conjecture this is because they attempt to plumb an intuition rather than a realization. They come closest to something essential and compelling within me. Such things may ultimately defy expression, but we are impelled to try anyway.
I want to conclude for today by looking at four poems that that have struck me as having possibly a similar provenance. The first of these is from Marcus Larsson:
spring wind
a priest boards the train
at the last second
Inexplicably, I find this an unsettling poem. It also strikes me as very cinematic, for it evokes one of those glimpses given by a director — if in black-and-white then plausibly Hitchcock, if in color then a well-made Le Carré adaptation. The glimpse feels pregnant with possibilities, even ominous. It cannot be merely random. And yet in Larsson’s haiku we understand that it was simply that. Or do we? For me this is on a par with Cor van den Heuvel’s seminal haiku:
high above the city
dawn flares
from a window-washer’s pail
It could be said that the poet simply gives us a picture, and it can certainly be regarded in that way, as no more than a striking image — a distant and blinding flash. I feel immediately that I have had this experience myself. (And since I lived in that city for all of ten years, very likely I did. Though not at dawn most likely — being a reminder that haiku poets are well-advised not to be slugabeds. I am sure there are notable exceptions to this, but I shall desist at this time from further speculation about that.) The larger question is this: if this is just an acutely-observed phenomenon, then why do I keep returning to it — both on paper and in my mind? It must be that something is detected beyond the words, behind the picture presented. And there precisely is the hook — there is the pull.
This would be a good time to remind ourselves that there is no correct way to respond to this or any haiku. What you find in it — how you respond to it — is what you get. This is not inconsistent with the fact that another reader may offer: “But wait, don’t you see how…” And suddenly or gradually you do see it, and it transforms the poem for you. Forever.
We come now to a classic monoku (or “one-liner”, as it would likely have been called at the time of its composition). This is by Peggy Willis Lyles:
before we knew its name the indigo bunting
The wife of one of those aficionados I mentioned earlier declared that she found this to be unfinished — unresolved — and as a result frustrating; when she reads it she feels left dangling. (As I understood it, she was not objecting to the monoku form per se; however, we did not pursue that aspect at the time.) It is not difficult for me to relate to her response, even though for me this poem creates a perfectly complete small universe. Precisely perhaps because it defies parsing, as well as being open-ended. I enjoy wondering who is speaking, and of whom — and even to whom — apart from us. I enjoy speculating about what it is the poet is almost saying but not saying. In part it seems to be about the nature of language, about what happens when we name something, or learn the name of something. How the word takes on the color of the thing — or it may be vice versa. What does it mean, to name something? Does it mean that henceforth we have it by the tail? Alternatively, is this haiku about the purity and the innocence of admiring something that is still untainted for us, unshackled by the established name for it? When a knowledgeable friend takes me for a walk and names every species of flora and fauna that we pass, I find myself yearning for a bit of downright ignorance — a state from which I might better regard the object of my attention with clean eyes.
This may seem a big stretch, but I am going to make it anyway. Buried somewhere in Henry Miller’s Paris Diaries, he has a description of wandering the Left Bank late at night with a pair of friends. This trio have such a close bond that they abandon using each other’s given names on these occasions, and they all call each other Fred. I loved that, sometimes yearning quixotically to experience a comparable form of liberation. If this paragraph seems unrelated to the preceding one, then I must throw in the towel and move on.
How better to close than with the much overlooked New York poet Mykel Board. His perceptive and satirical eye has swept many corners of Manhattan (not least those of his own life there) during the past three decades, bringing forth detritus from which he fashions captivating pieces ranging from the sardonic to the hilarious. Behind it all stands this unheralded masterpiece, which happens to reflect that this Manhattanite has also been a world traveler, in what one might call the old-fashioned sense.
in the Gobi
a single tire
vertical in the sun
I am going to hold back in this case from any kind of commentary, though I cannot refrain from noting how remarkable it is to see that much sand being packed into one short poem without using the word itself.
What these four haiku have in common, in my view, is that they offer us an intimation of connections below the surface, of things that are hidden and inscrutable. If this is not a manifestation of the yūgen aesthetic, I would be at a loss to say what is.
