2.3 Walking and poetry

My use of text, often incorporating poetry, is an important element of my practice. Individual poems tend to be short, distillates of some essence of my act of walking, being in a place and my being in the world and are often a combination of prose and verse. In seeking to contextualise my writing I look to two closely linked Japanese poetic styles—haiku and haibun—specifically in the context of the works of Matsuo Bashō; I also look to contemporary poets who have worked with these poetic styles; and to contemporary poets who have worked with time, specifically duration, in the presentation of their poetry.

2.3.1 Matsuo Bashō, Haiku and Haibun

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is regarded as one of the finest haiku poets of Japan and is best known for his works based on a series of epic-scale walks made during a ten-year period from 1684 to 1694 recorded as: The Record of a Weather-exposed Skeleton (Bashō, 1966, pp. 51-64); The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel (Bashō, 1966, pp. 71-90); and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (oko-no-hosomichi) (Bashō, 1966, pp. 97-143; Bashō, 1998, pp. 3-36). It is in this third work that Bashō is regarded as writing some of his finest poetry. Words like simplicity, distance, impermanence, aloneness and solitude seem to be those that hint at the distinction of Bashō’s mature writing. Bashō strove to ‘place his reader within an experience whose unfolding might lead to revelation, the eternal wrested from the phenomenal world’ and ‘he was intensely alive to the preciousness of all that shared the world with him’ (Stryk, 1985, pp. 17-19). Although summarized in such terms, it seems that the spirit of Bashō’s mature style is difficult to describe across language and culture. Like earlier Japanese poets Chōmei and Kenkō (Kenkō and Chōmei, 2013), Bashō studied Buddhism, and it is unsurprising that Zen thinking shapes his poetry and is seen as a major influence on Shofu, his mature poetic style. This brings a western reader directly up against both the opacity of Zen Buddhism and the challenge of translating from Japanese language and Japanese culture.

In its classic structure haiku consists of seventeen syllables across three phrases set out as five, seven and five syllables. When presented with accompanying text, as in the context of Bashō’s travel poetry, it is termed haibun. There are a series of general intents in a haiku. In writing that is clear and direct, using strong images, it offers an observation, of a single moment, often of the natural world. It can be thought of in two parts, one that creates an image and one that offers a connected, perhaps more general image, a reflection or a broader context. These two can be separated by a breaking-word, or punctuation, intended to produce a moment of pause (Stryk, 1985, p. 11). The formalized five, seven, five syllabic structure of haiku assumes Japanese syllables. Imaoka offers a general discussion about haiku structure and the syllabic issues within Japanese and English, suggesting that a shorter structure of about 11 English syllables (three, five, three) is roughly equivalent to the brevity contained by 17 in Japanese (Imaoka, 1996). In discussing his translation of Bashō, Yuasa suggests the opposite, describing translating Bashō’s haiku into longer, four-line stanzas in English, in order to preserve its Japanese colloquialism and to maintain the dignity of the verse (Yuasa, 1966, p. 49).1

Translators of Basho, tackling the linguistic and cultural task of translation, write about important attributes of haiku that they attempt to bring to their translations. All agree on the two key attributes of sabi and wabi. Stryk reflects sabi and wabi in this way—‘Sabi implies contented solitariness … Wabi can be described as the spirit of poverty, the appreciation of the commonplace’ (Stryk, 1985, p. 10). Considering these same ideas, Hamill suggests that while moving away from dense Chinese diction, Bashō was ‘turning toward wabi, an elegant simplicity tinged with sabi, an undertone of ‘aloneness’ … from the purer “loneliness” of sabishisa’ (Hamill, 1998). Stryk also describes Bashō placing great value on karumi (lightness) ‘the artistic expression of non-attachment, the result of calm realization of profoundly felt truths.’

Referring to the four basic moods of Zen ‘taste’ and its perception of the aimless moments in life—sabi, wabi, aware and yugen—Watts, whilst describing them as ‘extremely untranslatable’, suggests that sabi is the mood of a moment that is solitary or quiet and wabi is a mood of sadness or depression catching something ordinary in its ‘suchness’ (Watts, 1999, p. 182). He also offers aware as the moment evoking a more intense nostalgic sadness, a sense of autumn and yugen, a glimpse of the mysterious and strange, never to be discovered.

Yuasa offers a slightly different view suggesting there are elements of the symbolic quality of the poems ‘called by Bashō sabi (loneliness), shiori (tenderness), and hosomi (slenderness)—depending on the mode of symbolic manifestation and of its saturation.’ He goes on to suggest ‘sabi is the subjective element, deeply buried in the objective element of the poem, but giving it a profound wealth of symbolic meaning’ and that together these three attributes are what distinguish Bashō’s mature style from that of his predecessors and his own earlier works (Yuasa, 1966, pp. 40-43).

Some 300 years after Bashō, a free-verse haiku school (the Soun) was formed (Sanktōka, 2003), arguing that Bashō had not been bound by rigid structural rules (Stryk, 1985, p. 11). Whilst still adhering to essentials of simplicity (wabi) and solitude (sabi), these poets gave up the traditional structure and obligations (such as the inclusion of the ‘season word’) and introduced concepts of freedom (jiyu), self-expression (jiko), naturalness (shizen), strength (chikara) and brightness (hikari) (White, 1992, p. 212).

2.3.2 Text and poetry; the haibun

As he wrote on his epic journeys Bashō preceded his haiku with a short piece of text and together they constitute a haibun. As described above, at his poetic height this text was regarded as completely complementary to the haiku, describing something of the journey, rather than seeking to explain it.

On the first of Bashō’s long walks Yuasa suggests the balance between text and haiku is uneven as, on occasion, the prose merely explains the haiku or the haiku stand apart from the prose (Yuasa, 1966, p. 30). On subsequent walks Yuasa feels Bashō begins to achieve greater distance between himself and his materials and in so doing better integrates prose and poetry though, according to Yuasa, he still writes too much ‘about the travel—why he has taken to the road, how he wants to write a travel sketch’ (Yuasa, 1966, p. 35). It is on his last long walk, handling both the wide variety of unfamiliar places and people yet introducing a sense of unity that Bashō produced what has come to be regarded as a classic of Japanese literature. It is in oko-no-hosomichi that he had ‘mastered the art of writing haibun so completely that prose and haiku illuminate each other like two mirrors held up facing each other’ (Yuasa, 1966, p. 39).

2.3.3 Contemporary haiku-writer-walkers

Three contemporary poets who have used, or been inspired by, the Japanese poetic style of the haiku and haibun as used by Bashō, are Alec Finlay, Kenneth White, and Nancy Gaffield.

In his collaborative work with Ken Cockburn the road north, Alec Finlay draws inspiration from Bashō’s oko-no-hosomichi as the two poets walk a route around Scotland, guided and anchored by Bashō’s route, but imagined and walked out in the Scottish landscape (Finlay and Cockburn, 2014). Using Bashō’s route they replicate the stages of his walk to create a contemporary poetic reflection; much of the poetry approximates to the style of haiku. An earlier set of writings, Finlay’s Shared Writing is written in the Japanese poetic style of multiple haiku, the renga. Though each renga was associated with one place, the writing reflected movement as the platform on which the rengas were written moved and the rengas often reflected their place of origin (Finlay, 2005).

Describing himself as ‘first and foremost a pedestrian’ (White, 1990b, p. 7), Kenneth White, in his travels in Japan, is tracing Bashō’s walks and, whilst the book is predominantly a prose work, he also responds to his experiences in haiku (1992, pp. 177-247). In a possible nod to Bashō’s desire to write a travel sketch, in his books about places and moving within them (1990a; 1990b; 1992), White describes them as ‘“way-books” (alias transcendental travelogues)’ and ‘a new space-art, a new spatial movement, which means new mindscape’ (1990b, p. 8).

Nancy Gaffield published Tokaido Road (Gaffield, 2011), an ekphrastic work responding to Utagawa Hiroshiga’s set of woodcut prints The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō.2 In 55 verses (for the 53 post stations plus the end points of Edo and Kyoto) she weaves interpretation of the prints with history and memory using a variety of poetic forms including haibun (Lewis, 2017) as she moves along a route that Bashō travelled in the course of his 17^th century walks.

2.3.4 The concurrent presentation of the duration of walking

A final poetic dimension that relates to my practice is poets who have used walking and duration in the form of their poetry, writing long works that take time to read and which attempt to present something of the physical and time dimensions of their creation. I have already discussed two of Nancy Gaffield’s works3 and add Mark Goodwin and Sean Borodale.

The Footing is an anthology of the poems of seven poets (Ayers et al., 2013), organized around walking as a psychogeographic act and as an embodied action (Goodwin, 2013). Many of the poets walk inspired by historical events but Mark Goodwin’s poem, based around his walk in north Cornwall, offers an example of a real-time contemplation of a route walked. Based around sequential points of the walk, the observations are immediate and ‘of the walk’ and also sequenced and spaced in a way that invokes the act of walked movement.

Taking the idea of the real-time presentation of walking to a further level, Notes for an Atlas by Sean Borodale (2003) is a 370-page prose poem written whilst walking in London. His method of writing is opaque; is he writing notes, dictating into a recorder, or memorising and committing to paper on reaching a suitable place? Whatever method he uses, the writing has a striking sense of immediacy and presence in the world and provides a view of the experience of his movement. There is no break in the writing; this is real-time walking apparently in its entirety. Dealing with what is seen, heard or read, the reader is walking as Borodale, as he makes his way along the streets of London.

On to 2.4 Place 

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