Haiku Banjo Blue, A Poem By Ian Inkster Poem by Dr Ian Inkster

Some words in defence of Haiku Banjo Blue, a Poem by Ian Inkster, which takes the technical form of 4 haiku independent of each other, but with a fifth haiku that designedly relates them together.

In many ways this both over-specifies the haiku form and under-develops it. On the one hand, each Haiku here accords strictly with the technical requirement of encompassing only one mood or feeling or moment. three lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables exactly, and with each haiku nominally independent.


But by putting them together into one song with one melodic structure, and then commiting a crime of a 5th haiku that brings them rather intuitively into a story or meaning, I stick to some outward form whilst conflicting with the criteria of one mood and strict independence for each haiku. Why?

First if we are considering Haiku in English-language then the notion of the 5/7/5 syllables makes far less sense, after all if translated into Japanese formally, the lines would retain neither their rhyme nor their syllable value. In addition, in Japanese, of course, the words would be written in characters that have syllable strength only vocally, not as written as such because no alphabet-style letters are involved.

But this is also an experiment in whether we can take verse or poetry composed of independent meanings of seperated structures (ie 4 haiku in a row) and make a story of them, either naturally or with the help of my device, the 5th verse. Are they still really haiku? By arranging as is, then we have a simple story, the threat of the foreign or the alien encroaching on a small situation, over the course of the 5 nominally independent haiku. I quite like that!

A bit more. This song is meant to allude to the Meiji period of initial Japanese industrialisation 1868-1912. It is very often argued that Japan succeeded in this because its underlying culture supported the new - it was in contrast to the West in its view of nature and of man, it was in contrast to China in its neo-Confucianism - which asserted the importance of hierarchical social relations over the more 'Chinese' horizontal relations. This meant that it could retain its complex difference from Europe whilst succeeding through the activites of an elite whose status and culture meant that commoners and citizens would follow in its lead - that is, towards modernisation.

In this the haiku is often invoked as an exmaple of how Japan was very different from Europe in its relations with nature. Thus, Masao WATANABE, a most distinguished historian of Japanese science who focuses on the manner in which culture allowed the Japanese to borrow Western ideas and technologies whilst retaining their cultural distinctions, has argued such as case. - M. Watanabe, The Japanese and Western Science. On p.108 of that book he reproduces this classic hailku:

A morning glory took my dipping bucket
I went to my neighbour for water

He then reflects that - because of the very differing conceptions of nature involved - this 'would never have been produced in Europe'.

Here I have a problem, as I am sure is true also of other members of Poemhunter! We may find many instances of this sort of formulation in England, mever mind throughout Europe, even during the so-called later scientific revolution. Its impossible to claim that European culture was simply materialist and pragmatic and treated nature objectively in contrast to Japanese alertness towards the sympathies of nature and man. Take Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) and his very haiku-like structure and focus -

And glimmering fragments of a broken sun
Banks trees and skies, in thick disorder rule.

Perhaps a hundred years too early to evoke the images of the painter W.M. Turner, but you see my point? And of course the later Romantic tradition throughout Europe would scorn to make such a contrast between East and West. That which ascribes Western material progress and victory (and at the same time distinguishes it from Japan) to a culture of nature's order, objectivisation of natural life, or a view which states that nature is necessarily subordinate to man, is far too simplistic.

Just a little more as I ride my global history hobby-horse. In an international forum such as Poemhunter we can perhaps most easily see that any literary form can not ever be settled as fully representative; it was an American, Thornton Wilder who concluded that 'literature is the orchestration of platitudes' whilst, in opposition, our own T.B. Macaulay generalised that no 'person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind'. The latter is lovely and probably applies to lots of us!

Dr Ian Inkster 10 November 2016.