I can't shake the image of Shiki's lampshade covered in feverishly written haiku verses. How beautiful. I appreciated how he characterizes himself in A Drop of Ink as powerless to his creative impulses and a mere repository for divine inspiration. In his telling, the act of writing, or producing art in any capacity, is imbued with a kind of providential potency that allows the artist to become "a second Creator" along the way. As a fiction writer myself, I found Shiki's argument for mindfulness to be especially refreshing and persuasive: a reminder not to get too caught up in the parameters and pressures of my craft, but rather to appreciate the abundance of "raw materials in nature" and take pleasure in the process of mining those materials, repurposing and defamiliarizing them through my sensory experience of them.
Many of this week's readings emphasized how the minimalist form of haiku (or that of tanka) is often liberating—unassuming in its expansiveness—and can thus serve a variety of poetic intentions, from the sweeping, suggestive scale of Matsuo Bashō's poetry (e.g., "The sea darkening—") to the playful expression found in Kobayashi Issa's verse (e.g., "The peony's petals / s / c / a / t / t / e / r"). I think Yosa Buson's haiku about the sleeping butterfly on the temple bell offers a rich metaphor for considering haiku's generosity as a form. Each word in a haiku is like that perched butterfly (or "moon-moth" as translated by X.J. Kennedy): it sits atop a wealth of suggested connotations and meanings, preserved in fragile stillness, a resonant silence, the force of which lies in the depth of interpretations that it invites.
Sawyer Tennant
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