- -Brian
Mendonça
the lamp once out
cool stars enter
the window frame.
-Natsume Soseki
(1867-1916)
Japan is in the
news with a high speed bullet train which will reduce travel time from Mumbai
to Ahmedabad from 7 to 2 hours. The train which will run at a maximum speed of
320 km. per hour is going to be the country’s fastest train on tracks by 2023.
Work on the project will begin in 2018. ‘Take
it fast,’ seems to be the message of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
However ‘Take it
slow’ is the undisputed message when it comes to haiku – the Japanese form of
poetry. Haiku was developed into an art form by Basho (1644-1694). He took his
name from the basho flowers offered
to him by a student. He was a
travelling poet specially in the last ten years of his life where he tried to
take his art to the people.
Haiku is a form
of Zen. It calls for an intimacy with nature and an ability to, as Rochelle
Potkar says, curate it. ‘How many of you are awake?’ she asked her audience
gathered to glean some haiku from her. A few furtive hands went up, smirking at
the seeming absurdity of the question. The thunder was yet to come. ‘That’s
bad,’ she said admonishing the alert. Because haiku is like a dream state, a
semi-conscious mood where one can be most true to ones inner-most feelings.
She dwelt on karumi which means lightness in haiku.
Beauty with subtlety. Basho described it as ‘the beauty of ordinary things
spoken of in a simple way.’
Haiku is an
unrhymed three-line poem of 17 syllables, usually beginning in lower case with a 5-7-5 combination of syllables. There is fragment and phrase, persuaded Potkar. Swept by the delicacy of the lines she was discussing she admitted, ‘I could ensnare in this for very long.’
There is usually
a twist in the third line where apparently two images with no connection are
juxtaposed. Haiku can take anything as its subject. It can weave irony into it.
Senryu is
another form akin to haiku. Only here, the themes are not confined to seasons.
They take as their canvas human foibles and everyday situations. This form is
named after the poet Senryu Karai (1718-1790). Here is an example of his verse:
in the beautiful woman,
the wife
finds some defect.
Haibun is a mix of prose and haiku. ‘Haiku
should contain a link and shift relationship to the prose. But the essential
thing is that neither prose nor poetry should upstage each other,’ read the
sleeve notes of Potkar’s handout ‘Sounds of Silence.’
We meandered through exquisite examples
of haibun featuring Kala Ramesh and Johannes Manjrekar. In her piece ‘Arranged
Marriages’ Ramesh takes us to how women have a go at matchmaking on a hot day
waiting for water:
conspiracy --
moms knitting
their wards in wedlock.
What was left was for me to try my hand
at haiku. Chiselled by Potkar it would read:
breathing room
leaf tremor
rain on water.
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Published in Gomantak Times, Weekender, St. Inez, Goa on Sunday, 10 September 2017. Pic courtesy lernerbooks(dot)com; wikihow(dot)com. Updated 9 May 2020.
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