The luxury of constraint

Haiku, simplicity and synaesthesia

✵ I have a few UK live appearances coming up:

Monday 20th May: Backstory Books, Balham - no booking link yet, will keep you posted

Saturday 25th May: Cooking, Eating and Feeling Through the Seasons with Angela Clutton, part of the British Library’s Food Season (weekend passes are available and it looks great)

Wednesday 5th June: Dulwich Books with Alice Vincent

---

Now, for your stray attention this weekend…

At primary school, we were taught to write haiku by our Japanese exchange student, Rika. I liked Rika a lot; she was an adult, but not an adult-adult. Once a week, she would teach us something from her culture, like making an origami crane or singing Happy Birthday in Japanese. Best of all, on Friday afternoons when we went outside to play rounders, she would sit with me on the outer edge of the field, and not scold me for making daisy chains. 

When I first wrote haiku, I could only think of the syllables. Five-seven-five: I counted them out of my fingers, thinking they were impossibly technical, a way of obscuring what you wanted to say. Later, in my twenties, I returned to the haiku when looking for a way to combine movement with writing for a workshop I was running. Haiku, I learned, was supposed to be extemporised, composed on the fly. Those oppressive syllables were better imagined as a felt rhythm, a container waiting to be filled. Their rigid rules could be bent in favour of flow and meaning: what was really needed was a short natural image and a revelation. 

The haiku is more a matter of attention than of writing. They can be composed while walking, thrown back-and-forth as a kind of conversation. To some extent, they flip the Western understanding of poetry on its head: the haiku is not an individual pursuit, worked intensely in private in the hope of attaining timeless gravitas. They are, instead, a social, almost collaborative pursuit that find their transcendence in the small and the fleeting. There is a lightness to the haiku, a freedom. Take, for example, this one from Issa, translated by R. H. Blyth:

O snail

Climb Mount Fuji

But slowly, slowly!