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

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

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Page 17: Representational and Non-Representational Iterative Haiga

We can run the gamut between representational and non-representational iterative haiga as well.

Consider, at the front end of that spectrum, Jeanne Emrich's work entitled winter moon.

If the poem was calligraphed in Japanese instead of English we could believe this was a work from the Edo period. It has a beautiful control of the image, suggestive but not overblown, and it links directly with the poem,

"winter moon . . . / undisturbed snow / on the cabin steps."

The untrammeled snow, and the uprising of the steps, is a direct invitation to the viewer to enter the world of the painting.

If this sort of work has a flaw, and it's big if, it is that both the painting and the poem draw primarily on the same store of images, and so the one doesn't appreciably enlarge the other.

This example escapes this problem, however, by leaving what's at the upper reach of those steps availabe to the viewer in imagination.

In short, a beautiful and satisfying work.

A bit less direct a connection is made in Borivoj Bukva's haiga daljine me zovu.

The figures in the picture, wanderers of the sort we imagine Basho to have been, or more recently, Santoka, might be found as well in Bukva's native Croatia, though probably without this sort of hat.

The text of the poem translates to,

"distance calls me / and I'll disappear / into it".

The use of watercolor and blurring the images as he does here is effective in this work, producing an echo of the same fading before the vanishing point which the poem suggests.

The looking does not eliminate the seeing here either: the two figures are engaged in conversation, a moment's pleasantness along the way, but the poem communicates a much more solitary position, where such human contact seems far removed, a luxury rarely to be had.