Reading “Variations on ‘the short night’” :
I asked my friend, “Do you think a poem can just be a single image?” She’d been reading a book I sent her, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa translated by Robert Hass. I’d read it about a year earlier, in search of some small, quiet poetry, and became entranced. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. Issa would become my favorite; I love his poems that are equally wrought with the relentless tragedy that was his life, but woven with a playful humor. He loved the small and meek things on the earth, with bugs and spiders and snails featuring heavily in his roughly 20,000 recorded poems.
You have to be careful reading haiku, though. With three or four poems printed per page, it’s easy to just plow through twenty of them, their pictures fluttering by, without really allowing any to sit with you for some time. But I was fascinated by just how small these poems could get, not just in their length but in their sparseness of image, hence my question to my friend. It wasn’t that I was doubting if these were poems; I just assumed there was some greater significance lost in the translation or across the centuries.
As an example: If people know one famous haiku it’s this one by Basho:
old pond
frog jumps in
sound of water
That’s just one particularly sparse (and rigid) translation, there are countless more that vary wildly. But that’s the entire poem, a frog jumping into a pond! It’s a single instant, but one that carries some significance, especially to Zen Buddishm, of which I’m mostly ignorant. But it got me thinking about what might and might not be a poem. Could any image be an entire poem? It was an imposing idea, that poetry was just constantly existing around me. My friend, in response to my question, prompted me to consider: Were I a photographer, could I take a picture of anything? Yes, of course, and when you do, it invites the question why this? just by the nature of its existence. But it’s in what you choose to capture where the significance of poetry begins. I could just wildly snap pictures / write haiku about anything (one of the advantages of haiku is that you can fairly easily compose an entire poem in your head), but if I pay attention to what strikes me, and begin there, I can save myself a lot of time.
***
There’s a re-use store on Telegraph ave in Oakland where they have aisles of junk (clean junk) that you can buy practically by weight. It’s a great resource for artists and teachers, and I used to like digging through the bins of old photographs they have there. For many of them, the composition is clear: it’s a birthday party, a new car, Christmas eve. Others are a bit stranger: why are there a dozen polaroids of various angles of this football field at dusk? Who was taking pictures of what looked like an unfinished basement, or snapshots of a parade on a television surrounded by stuffed animals? They were eerie or compelling precisely because I didn’t understand the intent, like many of the poems in The Essential Haiku. Many of these poems seemed so plain, so unremarkable, just flowers blowing in the wind, or leaves falling.
Now comes Buson. Working and living between the periods of Basho and Issa (early-middle 1700s), he was also a painter, so his love of the image comes as no surprise. I chose these haiku not only because I felt like memorizing a single haiku is not much of a feat (I already have a handful of Issa’s with me) but also, because they are part of a series, a string of images, connected through a common line, that tells a story. In the book, Hass mentions that, though haiku generally do not concern sexual themes, that this series could be a love story, detailing the walk home after a night of passion in the height of summer (the longest day of the year, which would also be the shortest night). But even beyond that, the images that Buson chose to preserve here are incredible: crab froth, the small shop opening (I can almost hear the shutters going up, the boxes being laid out), the beating waves and the smoldering fire (beginnings, endings, the eternal). But especially:
the short night--
a broom thrown away
on the beach
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully explain why, or how much, I love this one. Of all the things the narrator could have mentioned--the color of the sky, the air, the shells in the sand--no, instead, it’s a discarded broom. Even with some context (it wouldn’t be uncommon to dispose of a wooden broom after spring cleaning on a beach), the strange yet commonplace-ness of it astounds me every time. I’ve talked before about the interplay between surreal/reality with James Tate before, and this strikes me in a similar way, where something is ordinary and odd at the same time, with one facet strengthening the other, until you’re not sure if it’s too normal to be weird or too weird to exist. Maybe this is the 18th century version of that. It reminds me somewhat of the images in Harmony Korine’s films, where things are ugly, strange, and yet, somehow make sense. I read once that apparently, he makes many of his films based around a single picture: A guy with a mullet wrestling a chair? Nuns falling from an airplane? A kid eating spaghetti in the bath, shampoo dripping out of his cone of hair? Of course, of course, of course.
The broom also makes me think of the “plastic bag blowing in the wind” thing from American Beauty, but without all the pretense of beauty emerging from an unlikely source. Buson (or his narrator, at least) passed by a broom on a beach and noted it, nothing else. It’s not beautiful or full of significance beyond its image—it’s garbage, but, as strange as it might seem, it belongs. It belongs in such a perfect way that its belonging is beautiful---like a collage made of photos in the reuse store, or the kid eating spaghetti in the bath, it’s something that has (surely) taken place and yet has been cut out from the fabric of life and displayed so that it seems utterly unique, just like every other moment that has ever occurred in time. And I love it. I love it because it means that poetry is possible anywhere and at all times, and all you need to do is sit with it long enough until you understand why you decided to sit there in the first place.