Review of Review of The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern
By: Michael A. Arnold

Those boozers
With the most perverse quirks
Compose verse!

(author unknown)

This is marketed as a collection of Haiku, but after reading it feels very wrong to describe it as such. The Penguin Book of Haiku is not a lot like many of its contemporaries. Really, this is more like an academic essay with a long selection of poem appendixes, trying to demonstrate the argument of introduction. This feeling is not typical, especially from penguin.

With most books in Penguin's World Classics line you can expect a fairly scholarly introduction that can be ignored if you do not care about such things. Unless you are very interested in a basic run down of the scholarship around the book, or want something that illuminates major aspects or points about the book, they can be treated like nice extras. A good standard for this is probably Bernard Knox's introduction to Robert Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid, which gives biographical details of the author (as much as they are known) a few traditions around the book, a general description of how the book has been received over the years, and a little personal story about Knox's relation to the Aeneid. It is not at all necessary to read Knox's introduction, but doing so will help you contextualize and appreciate that book a lot more. With The Penguin Book of Haiku this is not really the case. Reading the introduction is vital to understanding the goals and choices, and even the order of this book (if you are the sort of reader that cares about that sort of thing).

There is a lot to learn from this book about the haiku as an art form, but this sometimes comes across like a book to study rather than enjoy. Of course, you could enjoy the poetry. But after the introduction there was always the sense that what you were reading is in support of an argument, and you find yourself asking what one or another poem is proving. This totally changes the way the whole book feels. This was not necessarily a problem, but it did mean that at no point did you feel like you can relax into another world – like you can when reading a collection of Matsuo Basho, traditionally recognized as the premier and original Haiku master.

Or was he?

The important point about this book is that it is asking us to reassess everything we commonly think we know about the Haiku. In fact, it argues, that Basho (often thought to be the originator, or at least the most popular author of haiku literature) never once actually wrote a haiku poem in his life. The argument they make for this is quite convincing in theory, and it does explore a number of ways our common, western view of the haiku is lacking both in detail and cultural context. However, I imagine that a lot of people who feel at home with the form will find the argument made here very strange: that the man who wrote what is perhaps the most famous haiku:

An old pond
A frog leaps in
Water's sound.

Never actually wrote a haiku, and this is not an example of one – instead, it is a hokku, which is a related but different form of poetry. Instead, so the argument here goes, the haiku was an invention of the later 1800s, as Japan industrialized and westernized. Essentially, the Haiku was part of a broader attempt at nationalism, and nation building. For a country to seem as reputable as the western powers, like the US, Great Britain, and Spain on the world stage, it was thought to need a modern present and a traditional past with its own customs and modes – and the haiku was invented as an example of ‘traditional' Japanese poetry. This is not unlike the idea of Scotland being kilts, bagpipes and whisky, which was an invention of Walter Scott.

We often think of haiku as being quite a solitary art form, but it was actually very often the basis of a poetry-writing game. Players would write Haiku in response to some kind of prompt, and Haiku competitions were held to find the best response to that prompt. In this way, the Haiku fits nicely into the Japanese poetry tradition – which has a strong affinity for competitions and games like this. As such, many haiku sequences found in this book are not the result of any one poet but are instead the result of many authors creating a single work, which has quite a postmodern slant to it – and could (the book argues) be revived online quite easily.

The other major thing that the book is aiming to reassess is the typical content of Haiku. Very often, especially in the west, Haiku is seen as primarily focused on nature, and might have some philosophical idea it is introducing through clever use of image or wordplay, but the descriptive focus is always on the natural world (take for example the Basho poem above). Instead, that idea only comes from one genre, or style, of haiku heavily associated with the Japanese upper-class. On the whole, haiku as an art form is more egalitarian and varied than this. When it was first formulated it became a craze, and the haiku form was used to express things from the witty and urbane to the lowbrow and the urban. Some haiku poets that this book draws attention to, poets outside of the traditional ‘Haiku masters' like Basho, wrote a body of work that jumped between the different styles, and could be as at home with jokes and drink as it could be with beauty and meditative contemplations, such as Karai Senryu.

All of this is not to suggest the poems in this book are not good, but they are not structured in a way that makes any one easy to find. The haiku are not separated into a very noticeable parts, like time of writing, poet, or genre. This does actually make a kind of sense, more sense than might be suggested here, but still some kind of more obvious order would have been appreciated. There is also a lot of variety here, and a reader is not able to predict what poem or haiku sequence might come next on any given page. It feels like a grab bag of poems that come from many different voices with many different ideas. This does give an impression of the sheer amount of haiku that exists and is not often read in the west.

This is not a bad book, but strangely it is a hard book to get excited about. It does feel more scholarly than literary, and it would be hard to call it a good book in a pure enjoyment sort of way. If you were really interested in the haiku as an art form then this book will probably be a vital purchase – it can teach you a lot. If you are wanting a book of haiku to read every now and then, this book will serve, but there might be other books more fitting to your tastes out there.

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