Simply Haiku: An E-Journal of Haiku and Related Forms
September-October 2004, vol. 2, no. 5

| Contents | Archives | About Simply Haiku | Submissions | Search |

Reprint: Jim Kacian, "Looking and Seeing: How Haiga Works."
Previously Published in Haigaonline

Pages: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ]
[ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] [ 20 ]

Page 5: Haiga & Haiku

At the same time, haiku is the most painterly of poetries, given as it is to images. Yet haiku are constructed, not of pictures, but of language. They perforce must utilize the artifices of language to communicate their images, their content. It is something of a miracle that language can be so seamless as to permit readers to enter an experience at such a distance from the actual event (or at least to permit us the fiction that they do). And this, of course, is what we, as poets who write haiku, are constantly seeking--a transparency of medium which does not distract by its presence from the greater purpose of the poem; or, as the famous anecdote has it, we strive to have noticed, not the pointed finger, but the moon.

Art, at least the art usually employed in haiga, likewise seeks to communicate seamlessly. But a picture, especially a simple and suggestive picture, though it may require the understanding of the syntax of space and line and color to understand how its effects are achieved, can have an immediate and non-mediated effect on the viewer. That is the goal of each piece of art, to create the world anew, containing its own way to value it. Which brings us to the focus of difficulty in haiga: haiga is, by definition, a combinational art involving both pictorial and verbal elements. The level of complexity in interpreting the interaction of these mixed elements jumps immeasurably. Though we may aim at simplicity, simplicity turns out to be a very complicated matter.

It is the control of complexity to achieve the simplicity of direct seeing which is the challenge of haiga. The way haiga works is the visual equivalent of the functioning of haiku itself--it seeks a comparison between its image(s) and the image(s) of its attendant haiku, which, too, is what the haiku is already attempting in its own right. All of which is mediated by an initial response to the visual material of the art itself. What we have is an extremely complicated range of interplay. To keep these elements in balance and in such a way that each part is integral to the whole is no easy task. How can we accomplish it?

The answer resides in the degree of closure available in the comparative elements. What this means is, how much the degree of complexity of the poem and illustration permit interaction; that is, how much looking versus how much seeing. The more objective, or realistic, or closed the image or poem, the less likely it will be able to interact sufficiently with its counterpart.

Consider, for instance, this haiga composed of a poem and a photograph. The photograph is by Graeme Matthews, the poem, written to the photo, by Ernest J. Berry.

Here the poem feels tacked on, more a caption than a co-equal partner in creation. Part of the reason for this is that the photograph is completely closed: it draws us powerfully to the "real" objective world, and away from our subjective world of imagination.

The photograph, while it conjures things within us, does not require us to go beyond it for greater depth or interest and so we stop there. The poem, coming after the fact of the impact of the visual element, has a great difficulty in holding its own, and in fact fails to do so.

This is not simply a matter of the calibre of the poem, either; any poem paired with this photograph would have difficulty competing with or complementing it, because of this closed nature of the visual image. It's not too much to say that haiga is, by its very nature, anti-photography.