POETRY ALONG THE WAY

Some people enjoy reciting poetry, others enjoy listening to it being recited, whilst some simply enjoy reading it quietly to themselves. Then again, some of us like to write poetry, whilst the vast majority of people neither listen to it nor write it. Since both reading and writing poetry can be therapeutic, we should never not write it because we think no one will ever read it. If what we write helps us to cope better, it will help others through our better coping. In any case, most poetry does get read by someone somewhere, and many people often find simple, largely unknown lines more helpful than some of the 'greatest' poetry ever written. We grow up believing certain poetry is 'great' because that is what we have been told from an early age.
On being shown some Japanese poetry which had been translated into English, someone once remarked: That's not poetry; it's nothing more than a statement about the weather. To which came the swift reply: But don't you see? Weather is poetry. The poet is recording the poetry of a unique moment in time. This shows the main difference between Eastern and Western attitudes towards poetry. Happily, certain styles of Japanese poetry have now become popular in the West, which has developed its own versions of both waka (tanka) and haiku.
Because both Chinese and Japanese use similar ideographs for writing, it is easy to assume that their respective languages are closely related. Whereas Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, Japanese has no known relatives. Whereas Chines is monosyllabic, Japanese is polysyllabic.
Chinese and Korean scholars brought the art of writing to Japan towrds the end of the Fourth Century AD. A learned Chinese scribe, known as Wan'i, gave lessons in the Chinese language to the Emperor Ojin, whose successor, Nintoku, adopted Chinese as the official language of the imperial court. Although, at this time, the Japanese vernacular was still pure and spoken by the rest of the nation, Chinese phrases soon began to be adopted in elite circles as a form of mild snobbery.
Up to this time Japanese had never been written down. Attempts were now made to do so using Chinese characters. However, since the characters are merely representative of certain objects or concepts, they have no phonetic value. Although the ideographs were universal in China, each of them was pronounced differently in the various dialects. Only after a long struggle were they adapted to fit in with the Japanese language. A limited number of Chinese characters were ruthlessly simplified and made to fit the component sounds of Japanese words.
It was near the end of the Seventh Century AD before Japanese words could be faithfully written down, largely due to the parallel development of two phonetic scripts known as hiragana and katakana. Hiragana, a beautiful script, became known as 'women's hand', because written communication between elite males was exclusively in Chinese. However, since their womenfolk could not speak Chinese, they were obliged to write short poems and love messages to them in hiragana. Katakana was a shorthand devised by Buddhist monks, who used part of a character to represent the sound of all of it. Like hiragana it is still in common use, mainly to represent foreign words and for military communications.
Since hiragana was mainly used by women, it meant that they were the first to begin writing stories in Japanese. A court lady, Murasaki Skikibu, gave us the world`s first novel, The Tale of the Genji. Later on, during the reign of the Emperor Ichijo (986 to 1011), another court lady known as Sei Shonagon kept a diary of her experiences as a lady in waiting at the court. Since she kept the book under her pillow it became known as the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The fact that many other aristocratic women also whiled away their free time writing romances and keeping diaries ensured that women dominated Japanese literature in mediaeval times, especially during the Heian period (794-1191), a relatively gentle and peaceful period of Japanese history preceding the age of the samurai and civil war. For instance, there was no capital punishment during the Heian period.
It was during the Heian period that a form of court poetry known as waka (sometimes known as tanka) developed. Waka consists of 35 syllables written in five lines with the syllables distributed thus: 5:7:5:7:7. It was a form of poetry particularly suited to emotive expression and refined description of nature. Courtiers also employed it in a playful mood as a medium for witty conversation, diving it into two parts. Here is an example composed by an anonymous lady at the Heian court.
At Nigitazu,
The moon launches our vessels.
Why do you wonder?

Moonrise arouses the tide!
Unfurl your sails and embark!

Princess Nukada

This broken style may well have been the origin of haiku, for as we see, the first three lines 5:7:5 have their own meaning apart from the last two 7:7.
By the end of the Heian period and more universally in the Kamakura period (1192-1392), writing long chains of linked verse came into fashion. This was achieved by splitting up the waka into two parts as in the Princess Nukada example and then alternating the two sections in a chain of verses as in this example:
It does my heart good
To explode in a whirlwind
Of fire and smoke.

Her innocence set the spark
Of joyous conflagration.

What do I do now?
How do I descend a peak
That I didn't scale?

Come my mother! Come O Night!
Make a star shute to slide down!
In the Muromachi period (1393-1602), with the coming of the poet Sogi (1421-1502), the art of linked verse reached its perfection in his masterpiece entitled Minase Sangin.
Snow-capped as they are,
The gentle slopes of the mountains
Fade into the hazy mist
At twilight on a spring day.

The river descends far and distant,
Plum fragrance filling the village.

In a soft river breeze
Stands a single willow tree
Fresh in spring colour.

At early dawn every push of the oar
Is audible from a passing boat.

There must be a moon
Dying in the morning sky
Wrapped in a heavy fog.

The ground is covered with frost,
The autumn is drawing to its close.

In a sorrowful voice
A cricket is heard singing
Beneath the withering grass

I paid a call on a friend of mine,
Taking a desolate lane by the hedge.
Each verse is a whole poem in its own right, but together they become one poem because each verse builds on the suggestion contained in the previous one thus creating a theme. Lilian Calder has achieved something similar to this with her four superb haiku, showing that haiku can be just as effective when composed with English as the mother tongue.
Here it needs to be remembered that, in the original Japanese, the visual expression of a poem is equal in importance to its content. The calligraphy of the poem is lost when it is translated into English. Literal translation also loses the syllabic sequence of 5:7:5 for haiku and 5:7:5:7:7 for waka. To retain these the poems have to be rewritten.
Haiku is now very popular in the West, where haiku clubs and societies have developed in many countries. Some westerners no longer adhere either to the strict 5:7:5 pattern or to the traditional nature content of the haiku, thus creating a whole new Western haiku concept. However, many of us, especially in Zen circles, prefer to adhere to the traditional forms.
One of the greatest and most loved of all Japanese poets was Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Basho made wide use of haiku, building its short verses into long poems. He is also famous for making long journeys through the Japanese countryside and recording his experiences in a mixture of prose and verse. In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism and his travel sketches reflect attempts to achieve non-attachment. Not enjoying the best of health, he was only 50 when he died.
The best known Japanese poet in Western Soto Zen circles is the monk Ryokan (1758-1831). He made wide use of free verse in his compositions and did not always adhere to the 17 syllable pattern for haiku or the 31 syllable one for waka. Preferring the waka pattern, he wrote only a limited number of haiku. He also wrote in other styles including what is known as Chinese poems. In Japan a Chinese poem is one of four lines. A subject is introduced in the first two lines, a second subject in the third line, with the two subjects being brought together in the fourth line, a discipline readily adapted into English, and well worth trying to achieve as a meditative discipline. Ryokan`s poems are full of gentle observations of the natural world around him and of the part people play in it. For a large part of his life he lived alone in a simple hermitage. He sometimes mentions a bird called a hototogisu in his poems. This bird, receiving its name from the sound it makes, is sometimes known as the Japanese cuckoo. Content to follow in the footsteps of the Buddhas and the Ancestors, and speaking only through his poems and by example, Ryokan never preached sermons or rebuked others.
Composing poems in the English version of waka can be just as rewarding as writing haiku. Waka verses can be strung together into a long poem in the same was as with haiku. We hope to include such a poem in the next edition of NOW AND ZEN.
Traditional English verse forms can also be used when composing poetry with a Buddhist flavour. Early English poetry of over 1,000 years ago made wide use of alliteration. It dealt widely with natural phenomena and some of it was very beautiful. Only a few attempts have been made to write this type of poetry in modern English. If any reader would like to attempt this kind of verse, please send us your efforts. Short line, free verse poetry can also be very effective for expressing everyday experiences in a telling manner as we see from Rosie Pemberton's poems in this edition and in the previous one.
Assonance, where we have a series of matching vowel sounds, can be just as effective as alliteration, besides which the two can be combined to become even more effective. Here it should be said that not all verse is poetry, and that poetry is not always expressed in verse. It is comparatively easy to make up rhyming verse about all kinds of things and some such verses are very good, but that does not make them poetry. Verse and poetry in verse are both creations of the mind and we can also create poetry in prose and so on, but the poetry itself does not have to be created; it is simply THERE. Whereas creating useful artifacts is very much a Yang thing, poetry is essentially Yin. Poetry is a womb thing in which every single particle is related to every other single particle without need for the existence of anything apart. Seeking to express poetry is like taking up on the echoes emanating from the UNBORN and seeking to express them in the best way we can, and such expressions cannot be measured in terms of success and failure.
The unpretentious quality of traditional Japanese verse makes it a particularly useful vehicle for expressing Buddhist principles. Great cultures produce great poets and playwrights. The English produced Shakespeare and the Japanese produced Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who is sometimes known as 'the Japanese Shakespeare'; but poetry is essentially an art for ordinary people waiting for them to use it as an expression of their otherwise inexpressible inner comprehensions.
Tony Weedon

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from Now And Zen - August 2000