Haiku Techniques by Jane Reichhold, part 2 (of 3)

The Technique of the Riddle: This is probably one of the very oldest poetical techniques. It has been guessed that early spiritual knowledge was secretly preserved and passed along through riddles. Because poetry, as it is today, is the commercialisation of religious prayers, incantations, and knowledge, it is no surprise that riddles still form a serious part of poetry's transmission of ideas.

One can ask: “what is still to be seen”.

on all four sides
of the long gone shack

The answer is:

calla lilies

The “trick” is to state the riddle in as puzzling terms as possible. What can one say that the reader cannot figure out the answer? The more intriguing the 'set-up' and the bigger surprise the answer is, the better the haiku seems to work. As in anything, you can overextend the joke and lose the reader completely. The answer has to make sense to work and it should be realistic. Here is a case against desk haiku. So keep it true, keep it simple and keep it accurate and make it weird.

The old masters' favourite trick with riddles was the one of: is that a flower falling or is it a butterfly? Is that snow on the plum or blossoms, and the all-time favourite - am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man or a man dreaming I am a butterfly? Again, if you wish to experiment you can ask yourself the question: if I saw snow on a branch, what else could it be? Or seeing a butterfly going by you ask yourself what else besides a butterfly could that be?

The Technique of Sense-switching: This is another old-time favourite of the Japanese haiku masters, but one they have used very little and with a great deal of discretion. It is simply to speak of the sensory aspect of a thing and then change to another sensory organ. Usually it involves hearing something one sees or vice versa or to switch between seeing and tasting.

home-grown lettuce
the taste of well-water
green

The Technique of Narrowing Focus: This is something Buson used a lot because he, being an artist, was a very visual person. Basically what you do is to start with a wide-angle lens on the world in the first line, switch to a normal lens for the second line and zoom in for a close-up in the end. It sounds simple, but when he did it he was very effective. Read some of Buson's work to see when and how he did this.

the whole sky
in a wide field of flowers
one tulip

The Technique of Metaphor: I can just hear those of you who have had some training in haiku, sucking in your breath in horror. There IS that ironclad rule that one does not use metaphor in haiku. Posh. Basho used it in his most famous “crow ku” (poem). What he was saying in other words (not haiku words) was that an autumn evening come down on one the way it feels when a crow lands on a bare branch. I never understood this hokku until one day I was in my tiny studio with the door open. I was standing so still I excited the resident crow's curiosity causing him to fly down suddenly to land about two feet from my cheek on the tiny nearly bare pine branch. I felt the rush of darkness coming close, as close as an autumn evening and as close as a big black crow. The thud of his big feet hitting the bare branch caused the tiny ripple of anxiety one has when it gets dark so early in the autumn. In that moment I felt I knew what Basho had experienced. It is extremely hard to find a haiku good enough to place up against Basho's rightly famous one, so I'll pass giving you an example of my ku. But this is a valid technique and one that can bring you many lovely and interesting haiku.

The Technique of Simile: Usually in English you know a simile is coming when you spot the words “as” and “like”. Occasionally one will find in a haiku the use of a simile with these words still wrapped around it, but the Japanese have proved to us that this is totally unnecessary. From them we have learned that it is enough to put two images in juxtaposition to let the reader figure out the “as” and “like” for him/herself. So basically the unspoken rule is that you can use simile (which the rule-sayers warn against) if you are smart enough to simply drop the “as” and “like”. Besides, by doing this you give the reader some active part that makes him or her feel very smart when they discover the simile for him/herself.

a long journey
some cherry petals
begin to fall

The Technique of the Sketch or Shiki's Shasei: Though this technique is often given Shiki's term shasei (sketch from life) or shajitsu (reality) it had been in use since the beginning of poetry in the Orient. The poetic principle is “to depict as is”. The reason he took it up as a “cause” and thus, made it famous, was his own rebellion against the many other techniques used in haiku. Shiki was, by nature it seemed, against whatever was the status quo. If poets had over-used any idea or method his personal goal was to point this out and suggest something else. (Which was followed until someone else got tired of it and suggested something new. This seems to be the way poetry styles go in and out of fashion.) Thus, Shiki hated word-plays, puns, riddles - all the things you are learning here! He favoured the quiet simplicity of just stating what he saw without anything else having to happen in the ku. He found the greatest beauty in the common sight, simply said. And 99% of his haiku were written in his style. And many people still feel he was right. And there are some moments which are perhaps best said as simply as it is possible. Yet, he himself realised, after writing very many in this style in 1893, that used too much, even his new idea can become boring. So the method is an answer, but never the complete answer of how to write a haiku.

evening
waves come into the cove
one at a time

The Technique of Double Entendre: Anyone who has read translations of Japanese poetry has seen how much poets delighted in saying one thing and meaning something else. Only insiders knew the secret language and got the jokes. In some cases the pun was to cover up a sexual reference by seeming to speaking of something commonplace. There are whole lists of words with double meanings: spring rain = sexual emissions and jade mountain = the Mound of Venus, just to give you a sampling. But we have them in English also, and haiku can use them in the very same way.

eyes in secret places
deep in the purple middle
of an iris

The Technique of Puns: Again we can only learn from the master punsters - the Japanese. We have the same things in English, but we haiku writers may not be so well-versed as the Japanese are in using these because there have been periods of Western literary history where this skill has been looked down upon. And even though the hai of haiku means “joke, or fun, or unusual” there are still writers whose faces freeze into a frown when encountering a pun in three lines.

a sign
at the fork in the road
fine dining

The Technique of Word Play: Again, we have to admit the Japanese do this best. Their work is made easier by so many of their place names either having double meaning or many of their words being homonyms (sounding the same). Still (there is one meaning “quiet” or “continuation”) we have so many words with multiple meaning there is no reason we cannot learn to explore our own language. A steady look at many city names could give new inspiration: Oak-land, Anchor Bay, Ox-ford, Cam-bridge and even our streets give us Meadowgate, First Street, and one I lived on - Ten Mile Cutoff.

moon set
now it's right - how it fits
Half Moon Bay

The Technique of Verb /Noun Exchange: This is a very gentle way of doing word play and getting double duty out of words. In English we have many words which function as both verbs and nouns. By constructing the poem carefully, one can use both aspects of such words as leaves, spots, flowers, blossoms, sprouts, greens, fall, spring, circles and hundreds more. You can use this technique to say things that are not allowed in haiku. For instance, one would not be admired for saying that the willow tree strings raindrops, but one can get away with making it sound as if the strings of willow are really the spring rain manifested in raindrops. This is one of those cases where the reader has to decide which permissible stance the ku has taken.

spring rain
the willow strings
raindrops


Editor's note: This article appears by kind permission of the author, a respected and accomplished American haijin. You can read it and others on Jane Reichhold's ahapoetry website or in her book Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide (Kodansha, 2003, ISBN:4-7700-2886-5), portions of which may be read at the ahapoetry website.

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