Resources

by Anne Whitehouse

Haiku—The Discipline of Language
Teacher & Writers magazine, Volume 12, Number 2, pp. 14-16 (1982)
Grades: 3-6
Genre: Poetry

Anne Whitehouse is the author of the novel Fall Love and the poetry collection The Surveyor’s Hand. Whitehouse has worked as a resident artist/teacher in the New York public schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and New York State Poets-in-the-Schools. She has also taught at City College of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Marymount Manhattan College, and College of New Rochelle. She graduated from Harvard College, where she was awarded the Joan Grey Untermeyer Poetry Prize and the Leverett House Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Haiku—The Discipline of Language

My 27-week residency at Manhattan’s PS187 was three-quarters over. The anthology of poems from the two fifth and two fourth grades I had been working with was finally revised, edited, and handed over to the printers. I had hoped that, with the work of the book behind us and the promise of it as a finished object ahead, the children would go on to write even better poetry, to fuse imagination and experience into a third eye whose vision might reach into the mind and beyond it.

But as winter was finally giving way to spring, I felt as if a pall had settled over my classes, compounded partly of restlessness and partly of laxity. Perhaps it was due to the inevitable emptiness that follows the completion of a large project; the transit strike that unofficially lengthened Easter vacation may also have contributed to the feeling. I noticed it in the work the children were handing in: so much of it, like their attention, seemed to lack focus. I had spent most of the year working on poems interspersed with short prose pieces, but now I felt dismayed by a looseness in much of the writing. I realized I had still not taught them the discipline of language.

I had assumed that they would acquire this discipline as a natural consequence of applying themselves, week after week, to writing poems. Now I wondered what method would be best to teach them how to convey meaning in their writing, how to be concise and selective, to make their lines taut and clean instead of slack and muddy, to opt for the active construction rather than the passive one. And, consequently, to think in artistic terms: to learn to look for the words which could recreate the experience of an emotion rather than describe it, to suggest rather than to state. And, I wondered, how would I manage to teach these principles in a way that would be a discovery, for them and for me, rather than a lesson in diction and syntax.

Holding these goals in mind, I decided to use the haiku as a means to achieve them. I must confess here that my previous attitude towards the haiku had been one of slightly veiled condescension. I had associated the haiku with the boring 5-7-5 syllabic count and the vague, all-encompassing subject of “nature.” However, I was lucky enough to come across an excellent book that I unreservedly recommend to any teacher or student of the haiku: Hiag Akmakjian’s Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku (Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1979). Akmakjian has placed the haiku firmly within a historical, literary, and philosophical context; he illuminates the multiple concerns behind this most condensed of literary forms, and his translations and discussions of noteworthy Japanese haiku are laudable.

The first day I brought in xeroxed copies of 18 Japanese haiku translated by Akmakjian: in the 45-minute lesson we would go over several of these and return to the others subsequently. “The haiku,” I told the class as I passed out the papers, “is the briefest of literary forms: just three short lines. Yet the haiku gives a picture of an entire scene, of a landscape. There are no words wasted in a haiku.” I asked if any of them had ever looked through a keyhole before. Most children nodded their heads. “Think of a haiku as a keyhole,” I said, “just a chink of light but through it you can see a whole room.”

I asked a child to read one of Basho’s most famous haiku:

on the dead branch
a crow settles-
autumn evening

Then I asked the class to describe the scene. “Even though a haiku is so short,” I said, “you should be able to tell from reading it the season of the year, or the time of day.” (By the way, children love to read aloud; it’s a good way for them to be active participants in the lesson as well as gain experience for reading their own poems.)

One child said, “I see a place like a desert with nothing there but a dead tree and a crow flying down to sit on it.” Another child said, “I see a forest, but all the leaves are down and it’s dark and there’s a crow on one of the branches.”

Because we had often discussed how a poem differs from, say, a math problem since there is no one “right answer,” it was not difficult to explain that both interpretations were “correct.” “Find the clues in the poem,” I said, “and go on from there.” I then asked them what colors they saw in the landscape.

“Black and grey,” said one child. “And orange and brown and yellow because of the leaves,” said another.

“What feeling do you get from the haiku?” was my next question.

“Spooky,” said one child.

“Lonely,” added another.

I asked them if it was quiet or noisy. They’d all felt the silence in the poem. Then I summed up: “See how much you were able to tell just from those three short lines.” We read the poem again, and I emphasized how they were able to detect the feeling in the poem though no feeling was mentioned. “That’s extremely important,” I reiterated. “A haiku always suggests a feeling without stating it directly.”

We read another of Basho’s haiku:

the old pond-
a frog jumps in
plunk!

We decided that the poem was set at summer sunset, the time when frogs come out. The class described with great relish a pond lined with rocks and moss, with green plants waving in the water, the sound of the frog hitting the pond and the water drops splashing all around, the feeling of peacefulness broken by the sound of the water, the humor.

In the same manner we discussed other haiku of Basho from Akmakjian’s book:

stillness everywhere
the cicada’s voice
pierces rocks

first winter rain
the monkey too seems to want
a little straw raincoat

there is no one here,
the road is empty,
and evening is falling

how nice to take a noonday nap,
feet planted against the wall,
how cool the wall

In every case the children were able to describe with increasing excitement and intensity the seasons and times of day, the setting, the sounds and sights, and the feelings evoked by the haiku.

I worked some historical information gleaned from Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf into the discussion. Basho (1644-1694) was the father of haiku poetry and the most famous of haiku poets, even in his own day. I told them the well-known story of Basho’s “Biwa haiku.” Biwa is a mountain lake in Japan noted for its beauty, particularly its eight fabled views, one of which is Mii-dera, a temple overlooking the water. Someone challenged Basho to put all eight views into the three short lines of a single poem, and Basho did the impossible:

seven of the views
were obscured by mist.
the eighth? I heard Mii-dera’s bell.

The children elaborated the scene: the blanket of mist over lake and mountain and, heard in the distance, the pealing of a bell.

After we’d discussed several haiku, I called their attention to the fact that each haiku is about one thing: one frog instead of a chorus of them, one crow instead of a flock of crows, one dog instead of a dog and a cat. And, even more importantly, the subjects of the haiku are usually ordinary instead of exceptional. For instance, I asked, would a haiku be more likely to be about a rainbow or a weed?

As far as form goes, I avoided the question of syllabics when possible. In the cases where either a teacher or a student asked about the 17-syllable length, I told them that I was not requiring them to count syllables because the English language has more polysyllabic words than the Japanese (according to Akmakjian) and because even in Japanese you find haiku from 12 to 25 syllables. It was more important, I added, that they try to write haiku which conveyed all we had discussed. I also noted that they did not have to write titles for their haiku or worry about capitalization or punctuation except where necessary, that they did not have to write in sentences. Most important of all, they were to try to use the fewest words to express the most, to suggest feeling instead of stating it, to try and write as many haiku as possible, and not to worry because the more they wrote the easier it would get.

In the subsequent lesson we reviewed the principles of haiku, with class reading and discussion of additional haiku and then writing. Some children caught on quickly; others had more trouble. I found it helpful to suggest that they picture a scene in their minds before writing the haiku; I advised the use of verbs and active language. After three lessons with three classes (and two with one particularly attentive fifth grade that I taught first period when all of us were still fresh), nearly everyone had grasped the principles of haiku, and some had written lovely poems.

With a form as brief as the haiku, I was able to work individually with a substantial number of students even in a relatively large class. My approach was similar to the one described above: I would ask the “writing-blocked” child to describe to me the image he had in mind while writing and by questions help him to form a more precise vision. Usually this was enough to spark the language, but sometimes I would suggest a word or image. I found that the limits imposed by haiku made the children focus intently on finding the few words that would embody their conception: they were at last acquiring discipline in their use of language.

The Children’s Haiku

Some of the children’s haiku succeeded in distilling the essence of a season, for example:

Winter night
snow falls quietly
on people’s tall hats

-Miles C.

An autumn day
a discarded can
rolls in the wind

-Guy S.

First summer drought—
even the leaves cower
trying to get some shade

-Daniel D.

Others caught a feeling entirely in a landscape:

Animals wandering
trees standing tall
everything is silent

-Andrew E.

in the dark field
a wolf howls
at the moon

-Ikuko M.

Slipping through the forest
freshly showered with rain
branches like bats slithering by my face

-Chris S.

the pond rippling
green, swaying, cat lilies
a soft rain has passed

-Jessica S.

In a tunnel
people cry out
to hear echoes

-Rebecca L.

Others got close to the life of animals:

The worm looks down
and sees an ant so small
the ant sees a giant

-Rachel S.

On a rotten log
a frog sticks out
his tongue for flies

-Rebecca L.

cockroach used for science
it dances
when rain comes

-Adam L.

A crow
hovers over the cornstalks
flies away

-Molly O.

Other haiku were remarkable for the range and intensity of the feelings they developed:

A silk dress
flowered pink and yellow
slipped on a hanger

-Jessica S.

Through the keyhole
my grandfather ages
slowly

-Leonor C. and Vicki G.

Birthdays so short
take so
long to come

-Daniel D.

A pair of sneakers
lying on the rug-
empty

-Linda G.

And, in closing:

Martha Washington
Splinters in her lips
George files down his teeth

-Alison D.