“The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters”, by Stephen Addiss

 

358 pages, Shambhala Publications, ISBN-13: 978-1590308868

So, as I may have mentioned before, I have no ear for poetry (‘cept for Edgar Allan Poe). Rather than take in a poet’s words and phrases and meanings and what have you, I am mostly impatient for the damn thing to be over with. Don’t know why. But while doing a tour around the Clinton-Macomb Public Library I came across The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters by Stephen Addiss and thought, hell, it’s free to borrow. So I did. Addiss is a Professor of Art at the University of Richmond in Virginia and the author or coauthor of more than thirty books and catalogues about East Asian arts. Which implies that he knows what the hell he is talking about and, having read this book, I guess this is so.

Because of the author’s background what we have here is a rather dry, academic parsing of an art form that goes back centuries. While reading, I was put in mind of that scene in Dead Poets Society in which John Keating (played by the late, lamented Robin Williams) tells his students to rip out the introduction of their poetry books in which a mathematical formula is used for rating poetry. And that’s the vibe I got from The Art of Haiku; an intellectual tackling of a subject – haiku poetry, but it could be any art form – that takes its inspiration not from the heart as it should, but from the mind. That does not mean that this book is bad, it’s just lacking…something. As an intellectual enterprise I suppose it is worthwhile, but poetry is meant to be felt, not explained.

One area in which The Art of Haiku excels is in noting that haiku poems were as much a visual as an auditory artform, and the book is filled with several reproductions of haiku poems-as-paintings. No doubt this dualism is due to the fact that the Japanese alphabet, like most Far Eastern languages, has a plethora of symbols in which an entire thought can be expressed with a single character. This lends itself to the ways in which Japanese artists could incorporate these symbols into their work and make a complete work of art, if you will, in which the spoken and written words complement and support one another. Which, if you are a foreign barbarian like me, is a damn shame, as only part of the beauty of these poems can be appreciated by the illiterate.

The Art of Haiku is not a bad book, it just lacks soul. As an academic and visual history of this ancient art it is laudatory, but as an exploration of a Japanese art it is dry as dust.