Haiku Poems by Chris Bullock:

Bowl but no water.
No matter; it's the kneeling
that washes you clean.

I wrote this haiku in response to a Kay Stewart photograph of a stone bowl in the Japanese Garden, Hermann park, Houston, Texas. It's a bowl just before the gates of the tea house, and my first response was to wonder how people could purify themselves before going into the tea house (not that it was open, mind you) if there was no water in the bowl. And then it seemed to come to me in a flash; it was the kneeling and the imagination of washing that were much more important than the literal water. This haiku is important to me because I have such a hard time with "kneeling"-- with stopping my ego chatter and being humble enough to allow other sources of information to come in. I'm prepared to THINK about anything, including being open to spirit, but not to think with my knees. And I think that "kneeling" works whether or not any Great Spirit actually exists. I'm more and more believing that it's the posture we adopt, rather than the objective existence of something, that really counts. My alcoholic friend in England is too "modern" to believe in any larger force, and the result is that his denial of a dimension of himself is crippling, utterly destructive. I think that Hemingway was heading towards making this point in some of his works, but the rituals he shows tend to break down under the acid of scepticism.

To be a good man:
growing a few green leaves
on an ancient trunk.

Another haiku in response to a Kay Stewart photograph, of a vertical trunk, very deeply textured, and a couple of leaves of startling green resting on it. Matthew Vandergiessen reproduces the photo and the haiku in one of the editions of his Somatic Arts Newsletter. It's an unusual thought for me. I don't usually experience masculinity as being an "ancient trunk." Despirte my Jungian orientation, I often don't think very archetypally. But sometimes in a men's group I feel that we're growing new leaves on something old, and I can feel both the pull of the old and the pull of the new. In the picture and Haiku, the old is massively there, but the leaves are the most vivid thing. This seems to me the truth of the haiku.

On Haiku
by Chris Bullock

The haiku is not the kind of poetry I mainly write, but it's an interesting verse form that Japanese poets have been writing in for hundreds of years, and it seemed the natural form to accompany Kay's photographs of Japanese gardens.

Originally the haiku was the first part of what was called a tanka, a five line poem often written by two people; one would write the first three lines and the second would write two lines responding to them. But the three line starting verse, the haiku, became popular as a separate form.

So the haiku is a three line poem. It has five syllables in the first and third lines and seven in the second. The classic haiku is most often based in a season or aspect of nature, but describing that aspect usually also subtly suggests an implication for human life too. This is on the spirit of haiku, which is very mysterious and subtle. I hope to suggests it through some examples, and I'll link them with a bit of history.

The three classic pratitioners of haiku were Basho (1644-1694), Buson (1715-1783) and Issa (1763-1827).

The most famous haiku of all is Basho's about a frog. It goes

Old dark sleepy pool...
Quick unexpected frog goes plop!
Watersplash!

There are many, many translations of this haiku. Here's Alan Ginsberg's, which, in beat fashion ignores the syllable count:

An old pond.
Frog jumps in.
Kerplunk.

Here's a personal favourite from Basho:

Now the swinging bridge
is quieted with creepers....
like our tendrilled life.

Here's a Buson:

As the spring rains fall
soaking in them, on the roof,
is a child's rag ball.

Issa writes often more personally and often of his troubles and griefs. Here's one:

In this windy nest
open your hungry mouth in vain
Issa, stepchild bird

Here's another Issa:

Place where I was born
all I come to-- all I touch--
blossoms of the thorn.

Classic haiku writers tend to be male, but here's a non-male one:

Dancing in my silks
Money tossed itself away...
Pretty, this paper dress

There's obviously a Zen Buddhist, living for the moment, vision behind many classic haiku, as in this one by Hokushi:

Ashes my burnt hut
But wonderful the cherry
blooming on my hill.

But it's also a durable tradition, and recently a whole raft of haiku about Bill Gates and Windows were circulating on the net. I don't have any of these unfortunately, but I hope my haikus on the photographs and other people's readings will suggest this durability.

One last one, written by one of my students on her quiz:

Alas, these quizzes.
Words merge, poets disappear.
All my marks are gone.