CORE QUESTIONS:
How is it that the classical Japanese haiku has become a model for poetry written by Americans? What interests link the American sensibility with this poetry? How have classical Japanese haiku poets incorporated philosophical themes from Buddhism into their sensibility? To what extent can Buddhism be understood as a philosophy or as an attitude in life, rather than as a religion? Do the themes of haiku poetry represent universals in human experience? Have American poets who have used the haiku form imitated the cultural themes of this poetry, or have they made something new of it?

TIME REQUIRED: Three weeks.

SUGGESTED GRADE LEVELS: Grade 12.

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS: Social studies; art. For an extension lesson on the creation of Japanese side-bound books, please click the link.

NEW JERSEY CORE CONTENT STANDARDS: 3.1 D 2 and 3; G.4, 5, 8 and 13; H 4, 5; 3.2 D 3, 6 and 8.

OBJECTIVES:
<1. Students will read classical haiku to learn their special sensibility and form.
2. Students will learn about the Buddhist philosophical background of this poetry, its rootedness in Japanese culture, and the cultural and social-political history of the era in which the form was invented.
3. Students will read haiku from selected American poets and compare with the Japanese tradition and sensibility.
4. Students will learn about the Japanese tradition of hand-made side-bound books.
5. Students will write original haiku using themes learned from this study and write these in books hand made in the Japanese style.

STRATEGIES:
Reading the Japanese Haiku Poets
1. Present selected haiku from the Japanese masters Basho, Buson, and Issa (in Robert Hass' The Essential Haiku or other texts) and guide students in recognizing their classical themes. Read selected poems aloud in the class, a few each day for the first week, and ask students to tell what they notice and imagine as they listen. Guide students in paying special attention to the poems' rustic imagery, their human situations, their objectivity in expressing emotion, etc. For each of the poems studied, see how many of the following themes and technical devices students can recognize with a minimum of prompting:

·---Seeing the world as suffering
·---Feeling compassion for all things
·---Asceticism
---Mistrust for wordiness and logical explanation
---Sense of transience and contingency in all things
---Interest in wholeness and the unity of all things
---Respect for the ordinary, the small, the despised
---Honoring the ordinary, even the unpleasant commonplace
·---Distancing the ego from things of perception
·---Objectifying emotions as things in nature
·---Sensitivity to nature's rhythms and distinctions
·---Part-for-whole thinking
·---Using the written image as a "snapshot" to reveal a moment in time
·---Preference for autumn and winter scenery, and for the rustic
·---Inviting the reader to complete the poem's thought
·---Startling the reader into attention to the world
·---Including in the haiku poem some reference to the season (called a kigo), whether direct, oblique, or implicit
·---Creating a poetry of temporal-spatial-emotional, rather than analytical, relations.
This may take some time. Students will have to get familiar with these themes gradually and learn to recognize them in the poems. The teacher should demonstrate the kind of interpretation called for here by reading a few poems aloud and pointing out their uses of the themes and devices listed here. Invite students to try interpreting a few more poems on their own, first as volunteers speaking before the class and then individually, working out interpretations from the list of themes in their notebooks. The teacher should intervene where necessary to help students understand the themes and their roots in Buddhism and classical Japanese artistic culture. Robert Hass' introduction will be helpful here. [Students should come to understand, from their teacher and from readings in Hass or other research sources, that the classical haiku evolved from a parlor game of cards; its ascetic philosophical sensibility served as an antidote to worldliness and gave expression to its first writers' desire to live somewhat apart from the corruption of the social-political scene. Parallels might be drawn-later-to moments in the American experience when writers and others have expressed a similar mistrust of the public scene.]

2. Now reread a few of the poems studied thus far to ask students how they should sound. Demonstrate how alterations of rhythm, speed, emphasis and emotion give different readings of the poems, suggesting different aspects of their meanings. Have students work out their own best readings experimentally by doing this on their own or in small groups and then have in-class presentations of these.

3. At some point, the teacher should give a brief lecture or assign reading on Buddhism as a philosophy and as a cultural influence in Japan, helping students understand the nature of Buddhist thought as part of the sensibility in these poems. In addition (and if possible in collaboration with an art teacher in the school) the teacher should give students some background understanding of Japanese pictorial art from the period of haiku poetry's development. Some examples appear in Robert Hass' anthology, but an art teacher could provide more. Have students study these pictures for their thematic content, testing whether some of the haiku themes listed above are discernible in them. The selectivity, sense of transience and contingency, sensitivity to nature's rhythms, compassion, and contextualization of life we hear about in classical haiku poetry should not be too hard to detect in such pictures.

4. Ask students to write response papers on a few haiku poems that interest them especially. This should be expressive writing, in which the students describe their experience with the haiku, relating their interpreted meanings to other readings, to personal experiences, to questions they have about life, etc. These should be shared with other students and the teacher; questions arising from this writing experience and related to the nature of haiku or of poetry in general should be discussed in the class.

5. As students read and interpret the poems from Hass' anthology, have them collect their favorites in their notebooks, writing notes on their themes and devices. Each student should make a personal collection of poems. Allow time for students to read new poems in class, make original notes on their themes, and discuss these with their peers. Encourage them to read the poems aloud, too, listening for nuances of meaning. The following activities might help. A) Ask students to imagine the poems as snapshots and speculate on elements of scene, character, and action that have been deliberately left out by the poets' descriptions; discuss the canniness of these descriptions, their expectations that the reader will supply what is missing. This should reveal the realistic knowledge of the world that inspires much haiku poetry. Discuss the cryptic nature of these poems, which this exercise focuses on, as evidence that the haiku poet mistrusts words (a theme from Buddhism). B) Students might better appreciate the brevity of haiku poetry by rewriting several haiku poems as dialogues between persons embedded in the scene depicted by the poem. What would each speaker spell out as he or she observes the scene? What thoughts, reactions, impressions might people note in conversation that the haiku poet merely implies in the poem's description? This exercise should make students more aware of the tacit dimension in haiku poetry. C) Ask students to collect haiku that work on the principle of large and small---a common technique in this poetry. Discuss with them the implications of wholeness this principle brings into the poems. Explain the Buddhist view of the world as a wholeness people are usually blind to in their partial attentions to the myopic business of their lives.

6. Haiku poetry exhibits various themes that might have a natural interest to American adolescents, including: separateness and isolation; contemplative gazing; interest in nature; recognition of incongruity; learning to be critical and discriminating; sensitivity to emotional aspects of situations; concern over personal limitations; moodiness; a critique of hierarchy; etc. As the students read the poems, the teacher might prompt discussions of these themes where they appear in the readings. This would provide more interpretive clues and help build the students' identifications with the poems.

7. A special lesson might be done on ego as a regulatory concept in this poetry. The Buddhist sensibility underlying much haiku poetry evinces a constant wariness about ego; haiku poetry's outward attention to the things of the world, allowing little personal or self-centered expression, mimics this.

8. Following Hass, we might see that certain haiku focus deliberately on gross bodily functions and embarrassments. These follow in a vein of the Japanese classical tradition known as senryu, vulgar haiku named for a particular master who devoted himself to this interest. Read a few of these with students and discuss their bluntness and unprettiness, getting reactions. These might be compared with lavatory grafitti or scatological jokes; if they are, key differences should be noted. The senryu evokes compassion through its emphasis on embarrassment and the quaintness of bodily comfort. Its refusal to be decorous makes the senryu particularly challenging to our sense of taste and politeness, interests that the haiku sensibility seeks to transcend.

Reading American Haiku
9. After studying the haiku of Basho, Buson and Issa, the class should now consider how their form might have meaning in writing poetry about American life. Point out that many American writers have taken up the haiku form (internet sites and books available in libraries attest to this). Speculate with students on reasons for this interest. Ask them to review the list of haiku themes and discuss which of these might be especially accessible or appealing to Americans writing poetry. Perhaps teachers and students could find correspondences in American literature for the haiku poet's sense of transience, respect for the ordinary, sensitivity to nature, "snapshot" writing form, and startling of the attention. But a lesson on Beat poetry of the 1950's, or on Transcendentalism of the 1850's, would show that American writers have been much taken with Asian (and particularly Japanese) concepts of the ego and of wholeness. Here the teacher might introduce some short pieces by Gary Snyder that show the influence of Japanese artistic sensibility and regard for nature, though not in the haiku form. Many other examples would offer themselves.

10. Richard Wright's Haiku: This Other World collects poems Wright composed during the last 18 months of his life, with a biographical introduction by his daughter, Julia Wright. Many of these poems describe country scenes that belong either to Wright's rural memories of growing up in Mississippi (described in his autobiography Black Boy) or to his experience living in the French countryside. (Wright lived in France at the time he wrote these poems). Help students piece together details of Wright's biography from his daughter's memoir-introduction to This Other World, and from other sources they might find through research, for instance on the internet. Discuss Wright's story in the class along with a few samples of his haiku.

11. Using ideas from the lessons now already done on Japanese haiku, the teacher should work with students to interpret more of Richard Wright's haiku and to consider the question:
Has Richard Wright, an American, written authentic haiku poetry, and what does your reading of Wright's haiku tell you about the possibilities of meaningful imitation of this classical Japanese form by American writers? Work with students now in collecting in their notebooks and annotating examples of Richard Wright's haiku, including in their notes references to Julia Wright's memoir-introduction (or to other available sources on Wright as a haiku writer). Make sure students have a sense of how these poems fit into Wright's life and give expression to his American memories.

Writing Original Haiku
12. Once students have understood something of the classical sensibility that makes haiku poetry unique, they should be ready to write some original poems in this form. The following prompts and suggestions might be helpful in getting students started in writing their own poems, though the spirit of imitation itself, working from poems we have read, might be sufficient to generate some very good poems, too. Here are some suggestions for getting students started, or for helping them revise their poems to make them more authentic:
---Think of nature; write about things in nature that have stirred your compassion.
·---Your haiku images can be from the present or from memory.
·---Consider writing your images (descriptions) as sentences first, and then edit them into the three-line haiku form, cutting words to make them as brief as possible.
·---Make your poem have a kigo, or seasonal term, mimicking the Japanese use of this device.
·---Write about scenes in which you observe something very large and something very small at once (the stars and a barking dog, a car parked near the ocean).
·---You might make the first line of a haiku as a scene, and the rest about an action happening there.
·---Try making poems in which the second and third lines serve as comments on the first ("May morning / so many busy people / neglecting the birds").
·---Try taking a nature image from a birthday card or calendar and turning this into a haiku.
·---Try turning a snapshot you have at home into a haiku.
·---Write some images of suffering or embarrassment you have observed in school as haiku, being sure to add some note of compassion.

13. Students will probably have questions about syllable-counting as they write their haiku. Some will have heard before that the Japanese form allows just five syllables in the first and last lines and seven in the middle one. Advise them not to worry about this, on the advice of Robert Hass, whose translations in The Essential Haiku for the most part are briefer than 17 syllables. If students insist on a justification, tell them that most syllables in Japanese speech are more curt than many English syllables; English versions of 17-syllable haiku will sound longer than Japanese ones, effacing some of their effect of brevity. For this reason, American haiku poets have often written poems shorter than 17 syllables (although Richard Wright stayed with the original number). [Remind students here that the minimal syllable-count is not the essential feature of haiku; rather, its special sensibility, indicated in the themes we are studying here, makes it what it is. Its special syllable-count and line form express this sensibility and become part of it.]

14. Introduce the Japanese side-bound book with a demonstration of how it is made and a talk on the artistic and social standards it expresses. Emphasize symmetry, balance, the minimal, the natural (the use of rice papers and natural-fiber string), the skill of cutting and punching by hand with an awl, etc. Describe these books as objects remaining close to nature because of their natural materials. Students might research one or another of the classical Japanese poets to learn about their books, how they were made, how their contents were arranged, how they were published, etc.

15. Have students select their own best haiku poems and examples from the classical poets of Japan to make into side-bound hand-made books using materials reminiscent of Japanese art.

RESOURCES:
Hass, Robert (ed.). The Essential Haiku: Versions from Basho, Buson, and Issa.
Introduction and verse translations by Robert Hass. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994.

Wright, Richard. Haiku: This Other World. Edited and with notes and afterword by
Yoshinobu Hakatuni and Robert L. Tener. Introduction by Julia Wright. New York: Arcade Press, 1998.

Keene, Donald. Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers. New York:
Grove Press, 1955.

Giroux, Joan. The Haiku Form. Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1974.

ASSESSMENT:
1. Students' original haiku can be assessed for the richness and complexity of their use of classical Japanese themes and writing techniques.
2. Students' hand-made side-bound haiku books can be assessed for their authenticity and richness of meaning.
3. Students can be assigned essays comparing the haiku of Richard Wright and the classical Japanese haiku poets and bringing this knowledge to bear on the question: Can American writers create authentic haiku from their own observation and experience of the scenery and actions life in the United States?