Favor of Crows Read online

  NEW AND COLLECTED HAIKU

  Gerald Vizenor

  Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut

  WESLEYAN POETRY

  Wesleyan University Press

  Middletown CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  © 2014, 1999, 1984, 1964, Gerald Vizenor

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

  Typeset in 11pt Arno Pro

  Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

  The paper used in this book meets their minimum

  requirement for recycled paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vizenor, Gerald Robert, 1934–

  [Poems. Selections]

  Favor of Crows : New and Collected Haiku / Gerald Vizenor.

  pages cm.—(Wesleyan Poetry series)

  ISBN 978-0-8195-7432-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-8195-7433-6 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3572.I9F39 2014

  811'.54 — dc23 2013037645

  5 4 3 2 1

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the illustrations by Robert Houle.

  Cover illustration by Rick Bartow, Crow’s Mortality Tale, pastel on paper, 2001.

  Courtesy of the artist and Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR.

  In Memory of Six Poets and Teachers

  Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa

  Ezra Pound, Eda Lou Walton, Edward Copeland

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound

  I would be free of you, my body;

  Free of you, too, my little soul.

  “Beyond Sorrow,” Eda Lou Walton

  The first to come

  I am called

  Among the birds.

  I bring the rain

  Crow is my name

  “Song of the Crows,” Henry Selkirk

  Haiku Scenes

  An Introduction ix

  Spring Scenes 1

  Summer Scenes 33

  Autumn Scenes 65

  Winter Scenes 97

  AN INTRODUCTION

  The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and original moment. Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation, an ironic manner of creation, and a sense of motion, and, at the same time, a consciousness of seasonal impermanence.

  Haiku scenes are tricky fusions of emotion, ethos, and a sense of survivance. The aesthetic creases, or precise, perceptive turns, traces, and cut of words in haiku, are the stray shadows of nature in reverie and memory.

  The original moments in haiku scenes are virtual, the fugitive turns and transitions of the seasons, an interior perception of motion, and that continuous sense of presence and protean nature.

  Haiku was my first sense of totemic survivance in poetry, the visual and imagistic associations of nature, and of perception and experience. The metaphors in my initial haiku scenes were teases of nature and memory. The traces of my imagistic names cut to the seasons, not to mere imitation, or the cosmopolitan representations and ruminations of an image in a mirror of nature.1

  PINE ISLANDS

  Matsushima, by chance of the military, was my first connection with haiku images and scenes, the actual places the moon rose over those beautiful pine islands in the haibun, or prose haiku, of Matsuo Bashō.

  “Much praise had already been lavished upon the wonders of the islands of Matsushima,” Bashō writes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. “Yet if further praise is possible, I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan…. The islands are situated in a bay about three miles wide in every direction and open to the sea…. Islands are piled above islands, and islands are joined to islands, so that they look exactly like parents caressing their children or walking with them arm in arm. The pines are of the freshest green, and their branches are curved in exquisite lines, bent by the wind constantly blowing through them.”2

  Matsushima and the pine islands are forever in my memories and in the book. I was there, in that same haibun sense of presence and place, almost three centuries later in the motion of the seasons, and tried my best to envision the actual presence of Bashō at Matsushima.

  water striders

  master bashō wades near shore

  out of reach

  The United States Army, by chance, sent me to serve first in a tank battalion on Hokkaido and later at a military post near Sendai in northern Japan. I was eighteen years old at the time. Haiku, in a sense, inspired me on the road as a soldier in another culture and gently turned me back to the seasons, back to the traces of nature and the tease of native reason and memories. The imagistic scenes of haiku were neither exotic nor obscure to me. Nature then and now was a sense of presence, changeable and chancy, not some courtly tenure of experience, or pretense of comparative and taxonomic discovery.

  Haiku scenes are similar, in a sense, to the original dream songs and visionary images of the anishinaabe, the Chippewa or Ojibwe, on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. I was inspired by these imagistic literary connections at the time. The associations seem so natural to me now. Once, words and worlds apart in time and place, these poetic images of haiku and dream songs came together more by chance than fate, and later by intuition and consideration.

  Many anishinaabe dream songs are about the presence of animals, birds, and other totemic creatures in experience, visions, and in memory. The same can be said about haiku scenes, that the visions of nature are the perceptions and traces of memory.

  Yosa Buson wrote haiku scenes that suggested a longing for home. These poems are so “poignant that he has come to be known as ‘the poet of nostalgia’ in recent decades,” wrote Makoto Ueda in The Path of Flowering Thorn. Buson, who was born some seventy years after Matsuo Bashō, traveled to the pine islands and wrote at least one poem about Matsushima.

  in matsushima

  a man gazing at the moon

  empty seashells

  There, at Matsushima, “Bashō was so overwhelmed by the moonlit scenery that he was not able to compose” observed Ueda. “The moon view in Buson’s hokku may well be Bashō, who became ‘empty’ like a pair of seashells on the shore and could not write. Or the man may represent all visitors to Matsushima, Buson himself included, who are too dazzled by its scenic beauty to find words to express it. And those speechless admirers are numberless like seashells on the shore of Matsushima.”3

  The poetic forms of waka, tanka, haikai no renga, hokku, and haiku are interrelated by artistic entitlement, manner, means, and practice in the literary history of Japan. Waka, for instance, a classical form of poetry, is related to tanka, a five-line poem of thirty-one sounds or syllables. The first and third lines are five syllables, and the second, fourth, and fifth lines are each seven syllables. Tanka poems were included in the Kojiki, the oldest collection of literary narratives, and in the great Man’yōshū, the oldest collection of poetry. These two anthologies were compiled in the eighth century in Japan.

  Haikai no renga is the customary style of linked seventeen syllable poems. Hokku is the name of the first poem or scene in the series, and later the distinction became a haiku scene. Renga or the creation of linked images was a significant literary practice in the early literature of Japan.

  “Renga is important because it is the origin of haiku, and because it continued to be composed for the next eight hundred years, side by side with the later haiku. Bashō, Buson, and Issa were teachers of renga; it was their art and their livelihoo
d,” R. H. Blyth pointed out in A History of Haiku. “Haiku have no rhyme, little rhythm, assonance, alliteration, or intonation,” and in haiku, “two different things that are joined in sameness are poetry and sensation, spirit and matter…. The coldness of a cold day, the heat of a hot day, the smoothness of a stone, the whiteness of a seagull, the distance of the far-off mountains, the smallness of a small flower, the dampness of the rainy season, the quivering of the hairs of a caterpillar in the breeze—these things, without any thought or emotion or beauty or desire are haiku.”4

  HAIKU MOMENT

  “The essence of all nature poetry is animism,” observed Blyth. “Haiku is an ascetic art, an artistic asceticism. Of the two elements, the ascetic is more rare, more difficult, of more value than the artistic.”5 Likewise, anishinaabe animism, that sense of natural presence, totemic association, and imagistic moments in a dream song, is an artistic union of nature, intuition, and emotion, or natural reason of the seasons and native survivance.

  Kenneth Yasuda writes in The Japanese Haiku that haiku is an aesthetic experience, and the sense of a “haiku moment” is eternal. “Every word, then, in a haiku, rather than contributing to the meaning as words do in a novel or sonnet, is an experience.” That moment is natural reason in a haiku scene. “A haiku moment is a kind of aesthetic moment—a moment in which the words which created the experience and the experience itself can become one.”6

  Haiku scenes and anishinaabe dream songs are moments of creation, and, in that sense, the actual experiences of nature are survivance. The anishinaabe dream songs are imagistic visions of motion and, at the same time, a personal tease of nature. Haiku scenes and dream songs are created by natural reason, a sense of presence, and not by aesthetic theories.

  Many haiku scenes, even in translation, aroused in me a sense of natural presence. That intuitive moment, a haiku moment, is natural reason: the image of leaves floating silently beneath a waterfall, sunrise on the wings of a dragonfly, the slow march of a blue heron in the shallows, the great shadows of sandpipers on the beach, cracks of thunder in the ice, tiny blue flowers in a vein of granite, the return of the juncos to the bare birch trees, and the favor of crows. These are scenes of motion, the totemic traces and unities of natural reason and survivance.

  Haiku scenes are accessible in nature and culture, the subject and object of perception and experience, and that alone was more than any poetry had ever given me in the past. Haiku from the start turned my thoughts to chance, ephemerality, and impermanence, the very traces of a creative tease and presence in nature.

  WORLD OF DEW

  “I knew well it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return, and blossoms that are scattered are gone beyond recall,” Kobayashi Issa writes about the death of his daughter in The Year of My Life. “Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not cut the binding cord of human love.”7 Sato, his daughter, is remembered in this poignant haiku scene translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa:

  the world of dew

  is the world of dew

  and yet …

  and yet …

  Stephen Addiss observed in The Art of Haiku that tsuyu no yo wa, “this world of dew,” is the “most quoted of all Issa haiku.” The poem was written after his infant daughter Sato died. “It perfectly captures the moment when sincere religious understanding meets the deepest feelings of the heart.”8

  I first read haiku as evocative memories of the motion of seasons, and yet the scenes, the perceptive, emotive moments, connections, and associations, were ironic traces of my own transience and impermanence in nature. Haiku created a sense of presence, and, at the same time, reminded me of a nature that was already wounded, desecrated, removed, and an absence in many places on the earth. Nature is a presence not a permanence, and a haiku moment is a sense of presence, a perceptive moment of survivance.

  My very first literary creations were haiku scenes, and since then, that imagistic sense of nature has always been present in my writing. I may never know if my haiku are right by nature, only that the scenes are my best memories. In this way, my sense of presence, haiku creations, and survivance is in nature and in the book.

  Yosa Buson, the son of a farmer, was born more than two centuries ago, and yet we met by chance and by nature in the book. He was a cultural dilettante and, at the same time, a brilliant haiku poet.

  Buson writes with wit about the seasons and teases his own sense of transience in the world. He was never devoted to the actuality of nature, and yet he created memorable haiku moments and a marvelous sense of presence. R. H. Blyth translated this haiku scene by Buson:

  winter rain

  a mouse runs

  over the koto9

  I imagined the natural ironic music of that scene two centuries later and wrote this haiku back to the poet one early winter in Bena, Minnesota, on the Leech Lake Reservation.

  cold rain

  field mice rattle the dishes

  buson’s koto

  Blyth noted that the “aim of haiku, according to Buson, is to express in ordinary language the inner poetical philosophy of all sublunary things. That is to say, the most delicate feelings and profound meanings of things are to be portrayed as though they were every-day occurrences.”10

  Buson was born near Osaka, and later moved to Edo, now Tokyo. Stephen Addiss pointed out that a “number of painters have written poetry, and a smaller number of poets have been painters, but it is exceedingly rare to have one person become a truly major figure in both arts.” Yosa Buson “is regarded as one of the greatest literati and haiga painters in Japanese history, and is considered second only to Bashō as a haiku master.”11

  A haiku is “not explicit about what has been going on in the mind of the author,” Daisetz T. Suzuki writes in Zen and Japanese Culture. “He does not go any further than barely enumerating, as it were, the most conspicuous objects that have impressed or inspired him. As to the meaning of such objects … it is left to the reader to construct and interpret it according to his poetic experience or his spiritual intuitions.”12

  Donald Keene observed in Japanese Literature that a “really good poem, and this is especially true of haiku, must be completed by the reader. It is for this reason that many of their poems seem curiously passive to us, for the writer does not specify the truth taught him by an experience, nor even in what way it affected him.”13

  DREAM SONGS

  The anishinaabe dream songs and tricky stories of creation that bear the totemic nature, elusive ironies, and tragic wisdom of natives were traduced and depreciated by the hauteur of discovery, the cruelties of monotheism, and the pernicious literature of dominance. The anishinaabe, my paternal ancestors, were removed to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, and named the Chippewa. They were wounded in spirit, but always dynamic, and in the early years of the reservation my relatives published The Progress, a newspaper that was critical of federal policies. The visions, oral stories, and dream songs of the anishinaabe, however, had already been translated and compared as static, passive cultural evidence, for the most part by ethnographers, rather than as the creative and ironic imagistic scenes of nature by native storiers and artists.

  “The sky loves to hear me sing,” is one heartened invitation to nature in an anishinaabe dream song. The poet singer listens to the turnout of the seasons, and then puts the words of his song directly to the wind and sky. The gesture, in part, is ironic, a delightful native tease of nature.

  “With a large bird above me, I am walking in the sky,” is the translation of another avian vision by an anishinaabe poet singer who was heard more than a century ago in northern Minnesota.

  Frances Densmore, the honorable recorder of native songs and ceremonies, translated these anishinaabe dream songs at the turn of the twentieth century. “Many of the songs are taught only to those who pay for the privilege of learning them, and all the songs are recorded in mnemonics on strips of birch bark. This record serves as a reminder of the essential idea o
f the song and is different in its nature from our system of printing. The Indian picture preserves the idea of the song, while our printed page preserves the words which are supposed to express the idea but which often express it very imperfectly,” observed Densmore.14 The songs are creative, reverie, perceptive moments, similar to the traces of nature in haiku scenes.

  as my eyes

  look across the prairie

  I feel the summer

  in the spring

  overhanging clouds

  echoing my words

  with a pleasing sound

  across the earth

  everywhere

  making my voice heard15

  The anishinaabe “ability to dream was cultivated from earliest childhood,” writes Densmore in Chippewa Customs. Dreams were a source of wisdom, and children were encouraged to remember the stories of their dreams. “Thus the imagination was stimulated, and there arose a keen desire to see something extraordinary in sleep.” The anishinaabe “say that in their dreams they often returned to the previous state of existence.” Some dreams had such great power “that a man had been known to assume the form which had been his in a previous existence, and which had formed the subject of his dream.” The stories of great dreams secured a sense of “protection, guidance, and assistance.”16 Clearly, the perceptive moments of native dreams, in the sense of the anishinaabe, were stories of natural reason and survivance, not possessive, reductive, or a passive absence. Native dreams were visionary and created an active sense of presence.

  My introduction to haiku, by chance of the military, made it easier to understand natural reason and the survivance of native dream songs and literature. How ironic that my service as a soldier would lead to a literary association of haiku, and an overture to anishinaabe dream songs. Truly, haiku enhanced my perception and experience of dream songs, and my consideration of native reason, comparative philosophies, and survivance.