The Heart of Haiku_Jane Hirshfield_2011

Upon Finishing, Freewrite:

I've finished up this book and it really isnt even something I knew about before coming across it. I've been enamored with haiku for a couple years now, saw the book, downloaded and thats that. Both this one and Haiku- An Anthology of Japanese Poems_Stephen Addiss_2009 mentioned Bashō but honestly i only had a vague recollection that his poetry was mentioned in the latter. I felt so connected to Bashō as I was reading both his poetry and his journals. I want to see if I can get my hand on any copy that has a collection of them, hopefully translated.

To see wabi-sabi mentioned, to hear about his austerity reminded me of the ostentatious austerity i had written about or collected a year ago at this point. All those little moments of synchronicity just make my heart flutter.

And then to hear his thoughts on impermanence, the beauty of the every day things so often forgotten… he was a believer of the the poetic mundane!!! can you believe it? what a gift ! what a gift. and also hearing about his walking practice, which is another thing that I've been interested in learning about ever since the course with Cody Cook-Parrott about Joanne Kyger and her relationship with movement, having started to read the book on Wanderlust which covers the history of walking as a practice. Which, also! beat poetry was mentioned in the book when talking about the impact of Bashō in comparison to the western world of poetic history. Connections! Threads of attention! They are all just ways that I see what my soul is called towards and what I value and find comfort in. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart_Braiding Sweetgrass.

Annotations

Page 6 @ 24 August 2025 10:18:34 PM

In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

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found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion

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Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: "If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace."

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He wanted to renovate human vision by putting what he saw into a bare handful of mostly ordinary words, and he wanted to renovate language by what he asked it to see

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He has fallen into a world in which there is no walker, only path.

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poet-wanderers

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"The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home."

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Bashō's first home was Ueno, a castle town thirty miles southeast of Kyoto. Born there in 1644,

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The traditional form of Japanese poetry for a thousand years had been the five-line tanka (also called waka), written in the syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7

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The second, more widely practiced variation was the writing of renga. A renga consists of a series of three and two-line stanzas, continuing for 36, 50, or 100 verses, in which each stanza both completes and initiates a five-line tanka, when joined with the stanza that precedes or follows.

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The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving.

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When Bashō was twenty-two, Yoshitada, his boyhood friend, supporter, and possibly lover, died.

Page 19 @ 24 August 2025 10:31:39 PM

Clouds come between friends
only briefly—
a wild goose's migration.

Page 20 @ 24 August 2025 10:32:33 PM

Instead, at 35, he took the vows of a lay monk, committing to a Buddhist practice undertaken within the context and circumstances of ordinary life.

Page 20 @ 24 August 2025 10:32:54 PM

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes. Poetry can be thought of in much the same way, and the recognition of impermanence, ceaseless alteration, and interdependence—the connection of each person, creature, event, and object with every other—need not be "Buddhist."

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The fidelity of Zen is to this world, and to how we see and taste it in our lives and our lives in it

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Zen's experience of thusness

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particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes

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the echo of a Buddhist question addressed throughout Japanese poetry: what in life is real, what is illusion

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penumbra, not umbrella

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can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making

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That the specialized lumbering word that means "sawn tree trunk" also means "source," in an ontological and metaphysical sense

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Bashō was influenced by the rapidly changing aesthetics and schools of poetry of the time. It was a period as volatile as that in American poetry between the 1950s, when most poets were working in formal meter and rhyme, and the late 1970s, when some poets turned to using language in the way the abstract expressionists had used paint. Between these aesthetic periods come both the revolution made by the Beat poets and the "deep image" poetry of Robert Bly, James Wright, and others.

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a poetry in which almost anything could be said.

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deep image poets of America

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On a leafless branch,
a crow's settling:
autumn nightfall

Page 30 @ 25 August 2025 10:23:14 PM

Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as sabi—a quality at the heart of much of Bashō's mature writing. The noun sabishi is generally translated as "loneliness," or sometimes "solitude," but the word originates in associations very close to those found in this haiku: it holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of essence

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feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand"—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.

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wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

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feudal-era Japan, "town teachers," as they were called, lived by the support of students and wealthy patrons

what if i became a town teachee?

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Like the famous ancient tree of the mountains, the bashō's useless nature is itself the reason to admire it. A monk caressed that mountain tree with his brush to learn its ways; a scholar watched its leaves unfold to inspire his studies. But I'm not like either of them. I just rest in the shade of the leaves I love because they are so easily torn.

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Taoist austerity

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Bashō revised his haiku, haibun, and journals throughout his life.

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This transparency of boundary is one of haiku's most basic devices and instructions, and the permeability of self to non-self

how can this relate to journals? self to non-self

Page 54 @ 26 August 2025 06:31:09 AM

on a journey, ill,
dreams scouring on
through exhausted fields

Page 55 @ 26 August 2025 06:33:22 AM

His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer. As with so many of his images, the statement can be taken in more than one way. It can be read as a praise of uselessness, saying that poetry, like the bashō tree, is a thing to be loved precisely because it has no utilitarian purpose—by Bashō's own account, that is what he meant. But the description can also be read as an advocacy of intensification: whatever a person's experience, bringing it into a poem will strengthen it more. In some subtle way, these two ideas are not so disconnected as they at first may seem.

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even the briefest form of poetry can have a wing-span of immeasurable breadth

Page 56 @ 26 August 2025 06:34:01 AM

Bashō's seventeen-syllable haiku, looked at closely, are much like Emily Dickinson's poems: they are small but many (both poets left behind over a thousand poems), and the work of each of these poets crosses implausibly variable and precise terrains of mind and world.

Page 56 @ 26 August 2025 06:34:26 AM

Bashō's poems also instruct in an alternative possibility of being. One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside

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wild seas—
sweeping over the island of exiles,
heaven's river of stars

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the necessary permeability of all to all

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Awareness of the mind's movements makes clear that it is the mind's nature to move. Feeling within ourselves the lives of others (people, creatures, plants, and things) who share this world is what allows us to feel as we do at all.