A haiku workshop led by Ms. Geethanjali Ranjan was organised at the department on October 11. Ms. Ranjan teaches Japanese and is a noted haijin (seasoned haiku practitioner).
She began the session by walking the audience through terms and concepts in haiku and other Japanese poetry. Haiku is a form of short, unrhymed poetry with origins in Japan, but now written across languages. In Japanese, it is written in seventeen onji (phonetic sounds) in three lines in a 5/7/5 division. Haiku in English is written in a maximum of seventeen syllables, often lesser. The defining feature, however, is not the number of syllables but modesty and economy of language. Haiku should be one breath poetry; the language frank and unembellished, as expressed by the Japanese term wabi.
Haiku is the poetic equivalent of landscape photography; it is the poet capturing nature in a frame. Every haiku will contain a kigo, a season word. The association of a kigo with a season is often obvious in temperate climates as of Japan, which has distinct seasons. Seasons and their symbols are evocative of emotions. The kigo thus serves the dual purpose of economy of words, and ambiguity of meaning, sufficient enough to allow personal interpretation by a reader.
Haiku is the juxtaposition of two frames, different enough for the reader to step in between them and contrive a meaning for herself. In Japanese, the two images are separated by the kireji, a word indicating a pause. In English, a colon, hyphen or a dash is used. The kireji performs the mutually paradoxical functions of cutting the verse into two and of joining the two parts, implying a correspondence between them.
Consider a haiku by Basho:
The ancient pond
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water
Each line read horizontally, the poem presents only concrete images of a pond, a frog and the sound of water. There are no abstract concepts. It is when it is read vertically across lines that the poem acquires an abstract meaning. Note also that the poem is in the present tense, another common feature of haikus. Personal pronouns are usually not used, since haiku are about nature rather than humans. However, haiku masters themselves have broken the latter rule. What is perhaps more important is not to use a first-person pronoun, for the poet is to be at a distance capturing the moment.
These rules of haiku mean that every short poem should not be labelled as one. It is even misleading to use haiku as a synonym for Japanese short poetry; it is, in fact, only one of its many forms. Senryu is another form, similar in structure to haiku, but centered around human nature and emotions. The tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally exchanged by lovers. The haibun combines prose and haiku, suitable for journal entries. Haiga is both a literary and a visual art, a haiku and a picture together.
The second part of the session was poetry writing. Short poems (both haiku and senryu) were written and some read out by the participants, with Ms Ranjan suggesting edits.
Report by Swati C. Suman
Pictures by Sathyapriya
Article 19 