Reading my writing in English is somewhat depressing. To someone who is reading this: I write way more beautifully in Japanese.
I should not lose heart, though. Some day… some day… if I keep writing…
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This morning I read The Materialist, a book of poems by Rick London, which my husband ordered. The poet came to our house once and we had dinner. Our dog liked him.
When I saw the title, the first thing that came to mind was my own criticism of the materialism in this country; but as I read the haiku portion of the book, “lonesome dog”, it soon became clear that the title was probably more likely placed here to show the poet’s taciturn resolution to focus only on material. In that sense, it is quite appropriate for the poetry to have a haiku form. Haiku is about objects, needless to quote from Uedfa Miyoji, a Japanese tankaist, writing by comparing tanka and haiku, that “Haiku has to be something tangible,(Haiku niwa mono no tezawari ga nakuteha ikenai).”
I wrote “resolution”. Ueda wrote that it was haiku’s decision to focus only on objects when it decided to depart from tanka. That differentiates haiku from all other poetic forms. Haiku in that sense is closer to paintings of still-life like works by Giorgio Morandi who painted only still life such as bottles, boxes and vessels. I also remember the words of a Japanese female painter, Yoshiko Soga, who, late in life, painted only scrapped vessels. In answer to a question about what kind of spiritual reflection she tries to put in her paintings, she said, “I’m attracted to the structure of an abandoned vessel”, deliberately rejecting to connect her paintings to something spiritual.
However, “lonesome dog” is not completely objective. Some kind of subjectivity is peeked in various lines.
light breaking into the room
a soft word turning hard
green eyes taking one blue
One may wonder if two figures were arguing all night until sunlight broke into the room at dawn. In that situation, the subject is looking at the other person’s eyes. It is the moment of detachment from a situation.
man in a pink shirt
leaning against a wall
on indifferent yellow
Who is deciding here that the yellow wall is indifferent? Or the word, “indifferent” may be selected here only for the sake of tone. The colors pink and yellow reminded me of Mark Rothko’s painting, “White Center.” (When I looked at that painting on the internet, the painting had a different yellow than the one in my memory.)
sitting in a room
listening
like it’s all you’ve ever done
This is Asian (or sorry to bore you, it is zen.) This poetry comes after the poetry about beans in a bag spilled over the table. This makes me feel like peeking at a quiet page of his life.
As long as the poetry only focuses on the object, the depth of the poetry depends on the depth of a poet’s internal world. That is the test of haiku. Rick London seems to have passed that test.
