Beat HaikuJack Foleya talk given at the convention of The Haiku Society of America 12/6/03The beat generation knows all about haikus.... --Jack Kerouac When I was asked to do a talk on the use of haiku by the Beat Generation, I immediately felt that there was one thing I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to enter into the controversy as to whether Beat Generation haiku were “real” haiku--any more than I would want to enter into a controversy as to whether Ted Berrigan’s sonnets are “really” sonnets. It seems to me that, in both cases, what is important is that a particular form is invoked, and that the poet is insisting that, as we read his work, we must keep that form in mind. The question is not whether Berrigan or the Beat Generation poets are observing the “rules” of a particular form; the point is that such a form is relevant to the poetry they produced under its banner. Kerouac and others used what they understood of haiku as a way of entering into a new kind of American poetry. As many of you know, Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, edited and with an introduction by Regina Weinreich, has recently been issued from Penguin. Ms. Weinreich did an excellent job with both her editing and her introduction. I’ll be quoting from some of the points she makes and from some of the Kerouac passages which she herself quotes. Her introduction begins with a wonderful little poem of Kerouac’s, “Reading Notes 1965”: Then I’ll inventKerouac even went so far as to offer a definition. This is from Some of the Dharma: POP--American (non-Japanese) Haikus, short 3-line poems or “pomes” rhyming or non-rhyming dilineating “little Samadhis” if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming towards enlightment. BOOK OF POPS. 1/As the titles On the Road and Naked Lunch--and the phrase “Beat Generation”--suggest, Kerouac was good at naming things, but his attempt to re-name haiku as “American Pops” did not catch on. (His ornate, Latin-based word, “subterranean”--as in The Subterraneans--yielded to the simpler English version, “underground” and, even further, to the dreadful “alternative life style.”) Yet the name “pops” is not without interest. It suggests the way the objects named in a haiku “pop up” in front of us, demanding our attention. And it suggests as well that Kerouac regarded haiku as a popular art, though it may have been a popular art with a classical background (as in the “Boston Pops”). There is an overtone of jazz as well: the great Louis Armstrong--like other hipsters--was referred to as “Pops.” The association of an “Eastern” form such as haiku with jazz is reminiscent of Kerouac’s identification in Mexico City Blues of jazz great Charlie Parker with the Buddha. Indeed, the title of Kerouac’s LP, “Blues and Haikus,” recorded in 1959 with jazzmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, points in the same direction. 2/ What have “blues” to do with “haikus”? What kind of connection is possible between such different modes of expression? (The name “Pop” of course also suggests “Bop.”) “The ‘Haiku,’” Kerouac explains at the beginning of his Book of Haikus, was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines. A “Western Haiku” need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that the “Western Haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language.Above all a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella. Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any Haiku I could ever write in any language: A day of quiet gladness,I want to emphasize two quotations at the beginning of this talk. The first is from an interview I did with Allen Ginsberg in 1996. I had just mentioned that he had been writing haiku--poems of seventeen syllables--and calling them “American Sentences,” probably a play upon Kerouac’s title, “American Haikus.” Ginsberg answered that he wished to “make a distinction” between his work and “imitation Japanese haiku”: It has to be adapted to an American form, and I think that it should be a simple declarative sentence-a beginning, middle, and end, subject, verb, object-otherwise, it depends on taking the attitude of the haiku and writing it in three sections, having “ing, ing, ing,” you know. Sitting at the table. Watching the sunlight coming in. Drinking coffee. Dot dot dot. It’s not a complete sentence, and it doesn’t make any sense. If you can make it into a complete sentence and it still has a spark, that’s where you see if it makes it on its own or if it depends on taking the attitude of a haiku. The second quotation is from a book of poems written by Jack Kerouac in San Francisco in the year 1954. San Francisco Blues was, writes Kerouac, his “first book of poems...hinting the approach of the final blues poetry form [he] developed for the Mexico City Blues.” The lines I’m quoting are from the “35th Chorus,” and are not meant as a haiku, but they certainly have a haiku-like quality: The taste of worms(Kerouac sometimes worked his haiku into prose passages in his novels.) Regina Weinreich points out that “Haiku came to the West Coast poets through Gary Snyder. Inspired by D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927) in the fall of 1951, Snyder spent the early ’50s traveling in Japan, studying and practicing Zen Buddhism. 3/ Philip Whalen and Lew Welch became avid haiku practitioners through his influence. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Whalen spent time together in Berkeley in 1955 talking, drinking, and trading their own versions of...haiku translations.” As Ms. Weinreich suggests, many Beat writers--though not necessarily the ones in Venice, California, such as Stuart Perkoff--produced haiku in various circumstances. In fact, the Beats may be principally--or at least initially--responsible for the immense popularity of haiku in America. There are of course a number of reasons for this popularity, but I will mention only a few. A haiku is distinctly a form--whether or not one follows the rule about seventeen syllables. This form is by no means as simple as it may first seem, but it is probably easier to write a haiku than to write, say, a traditional English sonnet. Three lines rather than fourteen; no worry about rhyme. Nevertheless, a haiku is a definite poetic form: having written a haiku, one has written something recognizable as a poem. The poem is, however, not the kind of poem one finds very often in the English literary tradition. A haiku may be deeply felt, but it is quieter, less assertive than a sonnet or an ode: it is, as Kerouac writes, “Like the sea, / Or tears.” Many Beat writers, including Kerouac, were reading William Carlos Williams with great approval, and one remembers Williams’ vehement opposition to the “English” tradition in poetry and particularly to iambic pentameter, which he called in a letter to Harold Norse “the last stand” of “the Establishment.” Even a “counted,” seventeen-syllable haiku does not sound at all like iambic pentameter--but it is not quite “free verse,” either: it is a form. Williams’ not always fully lucid endorsement of what he called the “variable foot” suggests that he wished to find a “definite form” which was also--indefinite, “variable.” Haiku, particularly in its American versions, is like that: it is a form, but, “Like the sea,” it can take many shapes. 4/ Nicholas Virgilio’s stunning, minimalist piece, lily:is deeply moving, yet, from the point of view of the complex organ music of English literature, it scarcely seems a poem at all. (Another word Kerouac used to characterize his generation was furtive--secret, surreptitious, covert: there is a furtive, sotto voce quality to Vergilio’s poem--though I am not accusing him of being a Beat writer.) At this point, certain aspects of Beat style have been assimilated into the mainstream of American culture, but for the Beats themselves, to be was to be other. Haiku answered the need for a poetic form which was simultaneously traditional and other. R.H. Blyth’s monumental, four-volume book, Haiku appeared at the end of the 1940s, from 1949 to 1952, at exactly the moment when the Beat movement was beginning to stir. Harold G. Henderson’s An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki appeared in 1958, the same year as the appearance of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, which featured as its hero the haiku-writing Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder: the first three letters of Japhy’s name suggest “Japanese”). Japhy, Kerouac remarks, had a slew of orange crates all filled with beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D.T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume of Japanese haikus. All discussions of the Beat Generation begin with Jack Kerouac, though they do not necessarily end with him. Kerouac’s early biographer, Ann Charters, writes that “In the six years it took Jack to publish On the Road, he wrote twelve books”:
But in 1953 after writing The Subterraneans, he entered a different phase of his life, his most melancholy period. The furious energy that had gone into Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, October in the Railroad Earth, Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans found a new outlet for a time, a new absorption. It was Kerouac’s discovery of Buddhism, an enthusiasm that began early in 1954 at a time when he was feeling most lost and alone. One of the deepest gestures of American literature is the ecstatic attempt to transcend absolutely everything--and particularly to transcend that extremely problematical state of suffering, history. In an ecstatic moment of his essay, “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Standing on the bare ground...all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all....” In “How to Meditate,” a poem written for Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac describes his version of the meditative state: --lights out--As an Eastern discipline unpolluted by the West, haiku gave Kerouac an immediate connection to a power source--to the “emptiness” he felt to be at the very heart of things. “I saw heaven,” he writes in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, In it nothing had ever happened, the events of a million years ago were just as phantom and ungraspable as the events of now or of a million years from now, or the events of the next ten minutes. It was perfect, the golden solitude, the golden emptiness....At the same time, however, haiku grounded Kerouac. His Japhy Ryder says, Walking in this country you could understand the perfect gems of haikus the Oriental poets had written, never getting drunk in the mountains or anything but just going along as fresh as children writing down what they saw without literary devices or fanciness of expression...A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes “The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.” By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles. Such “haiku moments” are powerfully epiphanic and often of considerable complexity--but they also tend to be a-historical. Kerouac remarked that “everything takes place in the present tense” and insisted that the immediacy of haiku involved “the discipline of pointing out things directly, purely, concretely, no abstractions or explanations, wham wham the true blue song of man.” In the “simple” form of haiku, Kerouac could find a kind of double escape from “suffering.” As he merged with the object before him (haiku as immediate description, “the real thing...without literary devices or fanciness of expression”), he lost the ego sense which was the major feature of his suffering--yet, as a meditative form (as in the example from Nicholas Virgilio), haiku was also capable of transcending the world, of escaping it entirely. Indeed, haiku offered Kerouac the pleasures of a religious practice blissfully free of some of the deep problems of Western spirituality. “To the Japanese mind,” writes R.H. Blyth, “there does not exist that tremendous gulf between us and God on the one hand, and animals, trees and stones on the other”: Haiku shows a democracy among its subjects...Take the following as an example. [Blyth quotes Tairo: “The frozen brush / Was burnt / In the flame of the lamp.”] The brush and the poet, all have their own “personalities”; the spirit of life is working in all of them. For Kerouac this “spirit of life” would surely be the Holy Ghost. Asked about his method of composition, Kerouac answered, “[I] just sit down and let it flow out of me”: It's a spontaneous flow that comes, and nobody could understand what I was talking about when I said you should just open up and let it come out. It's the Holy Ghost that comes through you. You don't have to be a Catholic to know what I mean, and you don't have to be a Catholic for the Holy Ghost to speak through you.For haiku, Kerouac wrote in a notebook, “Keep the eye STEADILY on the object.” “WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM!” Regina Weinreich points out that Kerouac “likened good haiku to good painting. The best haiku gave him ‘the sensation I get looking at a great painting by Van Gogh, it’s there & nothing you can say or do about it, except look in dismay at the power of looking.’” 5/ Surprisingly for this advocate of “spontaneous flow,” Kerouac remarked in the Paris Review that “haiku is best reworked and revised.” The form is, however, nonetheless “the poetry of a New Holy Lunacy like that of ancient times (Li Po, Han Shan, Tom O Bedlam, Kit Smart, Blake)....” “It takes a powerful ego, “ remarked Eric Mottram in his introduction to The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, “to plunge without irretrievable damage into a scripture of selflessness”: The Word which the beats of On the Road awaited did not come from the form they shaped...The Word of Silence in fact came from the East but not as an ancient guru. It came through the old invitation taken up from Confucius, Thoreau and Pound, “Make it New,” through direct study of the Buddhist path. That field of power vibrated for Emerson and for Whitman and still invites the young in America. Kerouac spent his mature life in that field.... It is precisely this “field of power” to which Beat Generation haiku points and of which--no matter how trivial any individual example may seem--it is a visible manifestation. Haiku for Beat Generation writers was not only a poetic form but an emblem of their problematical quest for freedom. Mottram goes on to speak of Kerouac’s and others’ “refusal to be held captive by the history of the West”; Kerouac, he insists, “lived out strategies of survival for the changing self”: How could he, a man of overflowing boundaries, live in a world of boundaries held rigid with coercion from the State and its educational agents?In a recent article published in the 3Penny Review, Michael McClure writes of Kenneth Rexroth’s “talk about The Pacific Rim”: he told us that we were part of the West Coast and we had more in common with Japan, China, Korea, than we did with Paris and London. New Yorkers related to the capitals of Europe; we could relate otherwise and be natural with Asian religious and philosophical ideas and ways of seeing and making art. As a person of the Pacific Rim, I could experience history in a different way...A description of McClure’s own haiku--like much of his work centered on the page, not limited to three lines, simultaneously playful and experimental--would require a paper as long as this one. Here are two examples, both from his book, Plum Stones: Cartoons of No Heaven:
HOVERS before the chunky cat’s eyes then !GONE! And this for the late Philip Whalen:
THE BLACK CUSHION is compassion. The use of haiku allows the poet to experience poetry “in a different way.” But I should give the last word to Jack Kerouac. In this haiku, one of his finest, he tells of the utter futility of human endeavor--doomed from the start to fail--and yet also suggests the unending impulse to talk about that endeavor, to achieve consciousness. “The Way of Haiku arises from concentration and lack of distraction,” wrote Basho. “Look well within yourself.” Kerouac adds, Useless! useless!1. In his article, “Samadhi,” Michael Comans writes, “The word Samadhi became a part of the vocabulary of a number of Western intellectuals toward the end of the 1930s and from there filtered down into the general lexicon...[T]he technical meaning of Samadhi [is] a meditative absorption or enstasis”: Samadhi has two stages, samprajana-samadhi, or an enstasis where there is still object-consciousness, and asamprajata-samadhi or nirbija-samadhi, where there is no longer any object-consciousness...The point to be noted about yoga is that its whole soteriology is based upon the suppression of mental fluctuations so as to pass firstly into samprajana-samadhi and from there, thrugh the complete suppression of all mental fluctuations, into asamprajata-samadhi, in which the Self remains solely in and as itself without being hidden by external, conditioning factors imposed by the mind...Duality, such as the fundamental distinction between subject and object, is obliterated in deep sleep and in Samadhi, as well as in other conditions such as fainting, but duality is only temporarily obliterated for it reappears when one awakes from sleep or regains consciousness after fainting, and it also reappears when the yoga arises from Samadhi. In The Way of Zen, Alan J. Watts writes, This nonduality of the mind, in which it is no longer divided against itself, is samadhi, and because of the disappearance of that fruitless threshing around of the mind to grasp itself, samadhi is a state of profound peace. This is not the stillness of total inactivity, for, once the mind returns to its natural state, samadhi persists at all times, in “walking, standing, sitting, and lying.” But, from the earliest times, Buddhism has especially emphasized the practice of recollectedness and contemplation while sitting.2. Kerouac’s readings of haiku point towards another issue. Many haiku writers read their poems twice so that people will “get” them. I find myself wanting to respond, “I get it, I get it.” In fact, I suspect, most audience members could immediately recite the haiku back to the speaker word for word: we’ve just heard it. I think the practice of reading the poem twice proceeds from a quite false idea of the nature of people's attention--and makes for a very boring reading. Kerouac doesn’t do that at all, yet the poems come across quite well. 3. Kenneth Rexroth’s opinion of Zen monasteries was recorded by Lew Welch: “Shit, Snyder,See Jack Kerouac, Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, Trip Trap: Haiku on the Road. 4. James Broughton’s delightful, sometimes hilarious “high kukus”--written under the influence of Alan Watts as well as various substances (“high kukus”)-- are still another special case: They keep cutting me off,5. The quotation suggests that Kerouac is thinking more specifically of Van Gogh than he is of “good painting” as such. Van Gogh is famous for his capacity to render the is-ness of his subjects, the sense of presence. Cf. Martin Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the nature of knowing consists in aletheia, that is, in the uncovering of beings.” Cf. also William Carlos Williams’ “red wheelbarrow” poem and Pound’s notion of “Imagism,” both of which contribute to the interest in haiku.
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Jack Foley