Monday, June 27, 2016

LETTERS FROM HAIKUISTS: H.F. NOYES



LETTERS  FROM  H.F. NOYES


               I came in touch with Tom Noyes , born in 1918 in Oregon, USA,  when he was already past 80. Very knowledgeable about the Japanese tradition of haiku and tanka, and critical of the Western, including American understanding thereof, he practiced psychotherapy for 25 years, published seven books worldwide, won the Heron’s Nest award for some of his haiku, and died  in Attikis, Greece in 2010. He read my haiku and tanka with interest and offered comments from time to time. Simplicity and selflessness were his watchwords for haiku. I respect his critical opinion. 






1.
 

4/20

Dear Dr. Singh,

I am so grateful that you shared with me your fine publication, Creative Forum (a splendid title).  I have read it through with real pleasure, and I believe it to be a project that will promote the “one world” haiku feeling and international interest and participation.  India seems to be a prime leader in this sort of undertaking.  Bravo!

I have written a short piece for AZAMI’s first spring issue -– no., it will be the second—about the booklet and my enthusiasm for the haiku therein.

I greatly admire your spirit, and I cherish your words, “There is God’s abundance to feel in the brief three lines…” and “The briefer I become, the nearer I am to silence.”  Haiku is but a sketch of a moment’s experience, to be filled out  by the reader.  It does not use sentences, as does prose.  It also does not use the devices of Western poetry, nor share its use of the sentimental and simile—preferring always contact with the real—the things of Nature and the spirit of Nature herself.

My good friend, in thinking of me and writing to me, remember that I will be 81 in May and am beginning to fail—slow but sure.  My spirits are still high, but my work capacity is naturally diminished.

I wish you godspeed with Creative Forum and your other undertakings.  I sense that you’re a man of great energy and great good will.


                                                                                    With my warm thoughts,
                                                                                    Tom Noyes


 





2.          

                                                                          Good Friday – (our Easter is the 30th)

Dear R.K.—

I do so appreciate your warm, friendly letter and your sharing of your poetry.  Last night I thought about what you said, that people were helping you to understand haiku better, and I’d just read the recent KŌ magazine.  It seems more and more clear to me that “East Meets West” is one of the great truths of  our times. I’m no expert, but I’ve followed the trends quite closely in Japan and the West—esp. America, of course; and I’m more and more convinced that Frogpond and Modern Haiku are among the best representatives of the haiku of Bashō and his contemporaries, and that most Japanese publications are not paying any sort of strict attention to the old guidelines. As much as I admired Ikkoku San and  his friends who contributed their “vernacular haiku” to AZAMI, though those efforts had charm and something of the haiku spirit, at least in the English translations, they fell far short of genuine haiku.  The translations from Croatia and Yugoslavia are equally  far from being the real thing, and they seem to me strongly influenced by Western poetry.  Kōko Katō is far too “romantic” in her feeling expression—even sentimental. And I don’t usually see any relationship between James Kirkup’s poetry and haiku.  It’s mostly mental and very close to Western poetry.  So my general conclusion is that not only East met West, but they have changed places in the   haiku world.  We in the West learned so well from the Japanese masters that it is we who not represent them,   more than the Japanese themselves.  An exception is Kohjin Sakamoto, a professor like yourself; he writes some of the very best  haiku being written today.  Your own soul is highly poetic, and I feel intensely the struggle you’ve gone through to try to bring your haiku down to earth.  May I suggest that you try at a library to find a copy of F.S.C. Northrup’s East Meets West – an old book, but truly great one, written from a solid and scientific point of view. Haiku have their roots in Zen, and when you mix in Christianity, as Kōko Katō and some of her contributors do, it just doesn’t work.  Zen and haiku are completely reality-oriented. Their concern is what is – what you see and hear and touch.  Another romantic is Marijan Čekolj, pres. of Croatian Haiku Assoc. and editor of Sparrrow. His latest book is mostly 3-line love poems that have no relation to haiku whatsoever. After all these years of experience, he’s created what I view as a sacrilege. (He calls them HAIKU!)

I like your “Crouching out of the bath.” It’s like one of mine from years ago, in reference to the Holocaust:

                                In  the queue to die:
                                a desperate clutch at modesty—
                                hiding naked sex.
and
                                Her photograph
                                ever mysterious
                                haiku moment

           is splendid.   
                      
               To shorten one’s haiku is a profitable discipline.  “Haiku moment” is the great   secret.  “Chicken pox” has a  feel of sabi’s sense of loneliness. Thoreau wrote:

                                Why be lonely?
                                Is not our planet, too
                                In the Milky Way?                           

Congratulations on your haiku in Greek.  A fine achievement. I’m amazed at how few syllables the translator uses, because Greek language is overflowing with syllables.  Zoe Sabina is a very nice person, married to an artist, and talented; but she, too, is overly influenced by Western poetry, its beautiful description and metaphor.  Of your 3 beautiful haiku that I commended and really love, only “drowned in dreams not seen” seems overly poetic in the Western sense. The third – “peddling dreams”—has the true haiku spirit.  Reminds me a little of Ion Codrecu’s wonderful haiku:

                                Easter evening—
                                the old woman gathers
                                her unsold flowers

By the way, this is Good Friday, and our Easter will be the 30th.  Orthodox Easter is never on the same date as the other European and American.

It’s a good aim to try to express sensuousness in haiku, and most of the time I think you do it well.  After all, it’s not just seeing and hearing that offer us reality, but touch as well.

Yes, if you’re a poet, writing haiku too much can suppress some of your true poetic instinct. They are very different. I too find the cost of getting published very discouraging, as I live on a pension from the Navy.  

I do now have chronic bronchitis, so there isn’t much hope of its going away.  But if I can swim in the ocean this summer, I will surely feel much better for a while. Good luck with your allergies. The Greek Stoic school believed that we shouldn’t let anything affect the Self (the inner self). While we’re creating something, it does seem to work – “Mind over matter.”  Poetry and prayer and “love-thy-neighbor” can help.

My warm thoughts and friendly good wishes always,
Tom






3.

                                                                                                June 5  [2000]
Dear R.K.—

I must say I feel some agreement with Lyle Glazier’s commentary on haiku in general.  There is a “mutual admiration society” and it’s true that haiku poets are  moving toward self-expression and away from the perception experience, which haiku of the old masters almost invariably was.  Also the old Japanese haiku of Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki was SIMPLE, and Bashō particularly in his  older years aimed to reflect the values of karumi or lightness: “Let your haiku be like a willow branch waving in the breeze.”  

I don’t agree with Glazier that haiku “has little worth” outside the inner circle of mutually admiring poets. I believe if there can be another shift – this time away from mere self-expression (and as Glazier says, back to “concentrated objective visual/auditory/sensory revelations” from “virtually didactic” or clever manipulations of the simple truth of nature’s wonders, haiku can be a major and world-respected form of poetry. People already make pilgrimages to the haunts of Bashō out of reverence for what he stood for and what he achieved.

As for your own best way, you’ll find it for sure, because you’re “committed.” But just considering the 6 poems you sent me, it does seem to me that the tanka is the best and that your preference is for expressing ideas, thoughts, and on a different, more literary level than haiku was intended to be.  The “cobweb of years” is a mature literary expression. “he breathes Kamini” is also, and isn’t a true fit with haiku.  Even “waltzing ripples” is Western poetry, though I  wouldn’t actually fault it in haiku. In haiku we offer the thing itself, not a poetic or literary or philosophical view of it. “flowers inviting” is what flowers seem to you to be doing. A haiku in their own voice would likely be quite different, as they they themselves have  a life utterly different from ours.  

 If you want to write authentic haiku, let the flowers, the water, the night and the sun speak for themselves. I think a good example is:

                                Night washes the sky
                                for the sun to shine freshness
                                at my window

                but don’t attribute a purpose or aim to the night. Just

                                night washes the sky—
                                the sun brings morning freshness
                                to my window

and let the reader make the connection.  In haiku, we don’t elaborate or explain, only sketch our experience of the moment.

Thank you for Poets International. “Small waves/growing into perfect tides/without warning” is a perfect haiku, WITHOUT “An uncertain life” which is Western poetry. Obviously the editor of Poets International is look for “sublime” poetry, rather than haiku.  There’s no law against India establishing its own genre, but it’s NOT HAIKU. Cekolj’s Here and Now has no relation to haiku. 

For continuing in the Japanese tradition and expressing yourself, TANKA is your best bet.
I deplore the American influence in literature, cinema, business (“free trade”) and politics—it’s disastrous.

I feel profoundly how difficult it is for you to conceive of your son having to sacrifice himself  “for the foolishness of petty politicians.” One should LIVE for his country, not DIE for it, to be a hero. 

Tom




4.


                                                                                                           July  8    [2000]

Dear R.K. –

Your #2 tanka is very deeply felt.  The tanka tradition is in general a romantic one. I wish I could afford to send you The Country of Eight Islands  with the great old Japanese tanka of earlier centuries.  I admired your haiku this time, but I am not familiar enough with your subjects to comment.  “on a sheet of ice” paints an amusing picture. There is sabi in “waiting for the flight” – loneliness but without the important element of beauty, (“the beauty of loneliness in time”).

I totally agree that simplicity and lightness should be the aim of all haiku, and detachment is desirable in our way of looking at things—detachment, selflessness, and a sense of our oneness with all of life.  Spinoza wrote that the highest understanding is of the union of our minds with nature.  The Bible says, “Though shalt be in league with the stones of the field.”

I deplore the Western influence – its power over adult minds and even children.  When I practiced psychotherapy in N.Y. I used never to miss seeing the wonderful Indian films. (Now I understand that India puts out more than Hollywood!) I loved Tagore’s poetry and plays, even at college age.  I’ll never forget his writing: “The purpose of life is the pleasure of living.”

I’ll be on holiday soon.  Hope you, too,will have time off from “the grind” of your workload.

Warm thoughts,
Tom

P.S.: At 82 I am having to cut down on my correspondence. Please forgive.

A favorite waka (tanka):

This long bridge:
pausing to gaze
at the willows,
I forgot which way
I’d thought to go.

--Clark Strand

sun behind the hills
the fisherman ships his oars
and drifts into shore

                 Nick Avis, Dragonfly, Vol. XII, No.1, Jan., 84

“Haiku,” wrote Lorraine Ellis Harr, Dragonfly editor, “is like an iceberg….It is the unseen   part that is important….What floats within the depths is the universal oneness of the experience.”  (Dragonfly, Vol. XII, No.4, October ’84). When the sun goes behind the hills, it’s the signal all over the world for working people to let down, to call it a day—for fishermen to rest the oars, to drift in peace.  It’s a hallowed hour, a time of special blessing, of rest well earned.  A time for the  mind too to drift—to the haven of that emptiness—fullness which revives our hopes and dreams.





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