haiku tsurezure

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haiku tsurezure - #36
A dialogue between art and haiku
Marisa Culatto + Yuzo Ono

Yuzo Ono

YO: You have created a series of photographs titled Haiku. This interested me a lot, and today I am very honoured to have this opportunity to talk with you about the relationship between art and haiku.
Generally speaking, Westerners tend to pay attention to several unique elements of haiku, such as brevity, shortness, incompleteness, ephemerality, being beyond the frame, freezing the moment, and the connection with the natural world. These are the features of haiku that tend to interest Westerners and this might be because these elements look quite mysterious to them.
Also, it is often said that photography and haiku are quite similar in some respects and one of them is to freeze the moment.
However, in your series titled Haiku, I think you focused on the structure or formality of haiku because you were conscious of the two elements in one piece and the connection between them.

In short, you have set three parts in a single photo, with the landscape at the top, and the inverted landscape at the bottom, and these two are connected by digital editing. The relationship between these three parts is strongly relevant to the haiku form, which usually consists of three lines. Your interest in formality is seen in some of your other works, such as a series of sections of man-built constructions titled Untitled (BTW, I love this series very much). In this series, you said you adopted a self-imposed structure.
Moreover, other works remind me of different aspects of haiku. For instance, the series titled Fearless, which consists of close-up photos of the surface of roadside guardrails, makes me think of the theme of being beyond the frame, which is very haiku-like. Also in this series, you put together two pieces side by side, mentioning you are interested in a dialogue between two images. This notion is quite haiku-like as well.

Fearless
So, to start this conversation, I will begin with this question: When and how did you first learn about haiku and at that time, what did you think of haiku?

MC: Most of my life I've been coming and going between Spain and the UK because part of my father's side of the family is British, and my mother's is Spanish. So I have had a relationship with both countries all my life. When I first encountered haiku, I was living in Barcelona. I went to university there and then stayed for a long time. Around that time in the 80s, there was a cultural magazine that was printed in Madrid, but was very international. Each issue was almost like a book and very beautifully edited, and one of them was completely dedicated to In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki, and there were haiku in there. It was the first time that I actually looked at haiku in a focused way. Since the Japanese were closed to the world for so long, aesthetically Japanese culture is very unique, and this is why I was totally fascinated. An aspect of Japanese culture, which is completely opposed to Western culture, is the notion of restraint: enough is enough. And in the Western world it seems like nothing is ever enough. So in that issue I learnt about the culture of restraint, the culture of just so, and the culture of allowing imperfections to be part of beauty. All of that was a shock to me in the 80s. I thought that was a very good way of looking at the world, life, and culture. That is the beauty of restraint.
You have to be very disciplined to write a good haiku in an old-fashioned way. I have the feeling that things are changing, and even Japanese haiku writers are a lot freer now and they interpret the haiku rules in a much looser way.

YO: That’s right. Japanese culture has been strongly influenced by Western culture, and haiku was no exception. For example, in the 60s, there was a haiku movement called Avangard Haiku, and they neglected the rules of haiku such as the 575 syllables or the seasonal words.

MC: What do you think about that?

YO: Actually, my haiku master Tohta Kaneko was one of the leaders of Avangard Haiku. So, in the beginning, when I was young, I tended to think that I wouldn't follow the traditional haiku rules just because I was young.

MC: My opinion is that if you do away with all the rules of what makes a haiku a haiku, then it's not a haiku anymore. It's just a short poem.

YO: It depends on the definition, and there has been an ever-lasting controversy about that. Some people stick to the strict rules and others don’t. On this point, I can say one thing. After the 60s, many haiku poets came back to the tradition. In my view, the reason is very clear: without those rules, in the end, their style came to wither away.

MC: Yes. That is what I think.

YO: We have many seasonal words and also dictionaries called Saijiki, which are dedicated to seasonal words. Those dictionaries are very thick and each of them contains tens of thousands of seasonal words. Generally speaking, when we look at the reality in this world, we often find it difficult to describe it in a very detailed way because we cannot think of corresponding detailed words to depict it so accurately. However, in terms of seasonal words we have tens of thousands of words that make it possible to describe the reality in front of us in a very detailed way. I have been creating haiku for decades, but even so, there are still many seasonal words I haven't used yet. Those seasonal words left unused are unknown and a kind of mystery to me. I think that is why the haiku style without seasonal words withered away. Without seasonal words, those authors consumed all the possibilities of haiku as far as they could imagine. Haiku tends to be considered to have a strong relationship with the natural world, but more precisely, I think the point is not only the natural world itself but also those tens of thousands of seasonal words.

MC: So you could be interested for the rest of your life and never exhaust the possibilities of haiku.

YO: That must be true. So, this is the next question: do you have any favourite haiku or haiku poets? If so, please tell me about them.

This really spoke to me. It's a way of really acknowledging the beauty and power but also ephemerality of nature in a way. And that's exactly what my work was about.

YO: So, what made you decide to create your Haiku series?

MC: I can't remember exactly what the process was. But this happens often, that there is something going round in my head for a long time, and then it suddenly comes to materialise. There is something that is a very recurrent backdrop of my work. Particularly when I was doing exclusively photography. I'm not a purist photographer, but for a long time I was making work with cameras. At that time, I was interested not so much in photography itself, but in the crossover of languages between photography and other disciplines, mostly painting and drawing but other things as well. In the case of the Haiku pieces it was a way of trying to express visually something that you write. It is literature in a visual image, so that was the initial motivation.
It lends itself to another recurring aspect of my work. In all the other bodies of work that you cited, there is some kind of underpinning structure. Sometimes you could call it constrictions, but for me it is the opposite, because once I have a structure and I am contained, I feel free. If there’s no structure and no containment, I feel overwhelmed because it is difficult to know where to start and where to stop. I need to have a focus. So I think the fact that haiku have structure was something that appealed to me because I could take it on and start being free within that structure.

YO: Why did you choose photography as the means for this body of work titled Haiku?

MC: When I was really young, my work was mostly mixed media and works on paper and so on. I trained in photography and at the time of the Haiku series I was only using digital photography for my work in general, but, also, because I wanted to reference the seasons, photography provided an automatic way of doing it. I stayed in the same area, so I captured the same landscape through the seasons to make the reference happen automatically. In digital photography, you can do endless postproduction and manipulation including cutting, mirroring, distorting and so on. So it was an obvious thing to do for the structure that I had in mind.

YO: It is actually January, to be precise, but it is true that in Saijiki, we have five seasons or five chapters. The additional season is the New Year season.

MC: So when I was doing my haiku series, I thought about doing that, but there would have been no difference between the winter haiku and the New Year haiku. I did try but it just didn't make any sense because there was no visible difference.

YO: Let’s go on to the next question. It is sometimes said that some characteristics of photography and haiku are similar. For example, the act of freezing the moment. What do you think of this?

MC: I agree with what you said at the beginning, that photography inevitably chooses to show just a fraction because you always know that there is a context around the photograph of the expanding world. So it's condensing a wider context into a smaller fraction. That's what I think haiku and photography have in common, but I also think you can do that with anything because even when you paint, you do know that there is a wider world that you could imagine around it. So I don't think it is exclusive to photography. But in the case of photography, it's completely automatic.
Although having said that, because haiku is an entity in itself, you could argue that there is nothing else around it because the haiku is the haiku, exactly what the artist intended to do. So are you looking at haiku as a fraction of something bigger than itself, or are you looking at each haiku as an entity in itself?

YO: What characteristics of haiku can be most effectively applied to photography or art? I think the framing is one of them, but what else?

MC: I think that when you try to do haiku in disciplines other than writing, it is practically impossible to follow all the rules. You find yourself having to choose some and leave some out, but the framing, in the sense of condensing an image, is the obvious one to follow.

YO: This is the last question. Are there any artists whose work gives you a haiku-like feeling?

MC: John Cage is the obvious one because he also attempted to do haiku with music. I think he really captured their essence, and his haiku pieces are really haiku. Inevitably he completely ignores the seasonal aspect of haiku, but he plays with the syllable count, although he fabricated his own interpretation of what the syllables would be. But even if you didn't know any of that, when you listen to these pieces by John Cage, they definitely feel like haiku.
But, since you ask, there are two visual artists that immediately spring to mind. One is a British artist called Roger Ackling. His pieces are made with found weathered driftwood, and then with a magnifying glass he directed sunlight to make lines and patterns on the wood. Another one is a Korean artist called Lee Ufan. His works are not necessarily small, but they are brief and very restrained.

YO: Lee Ufan belonged to the movement called Mono-ha in Japanese, which means School of Things. He has written some books in Japanese, and in one of them, he mentioned Basho’s haiku. In my opinion, the sensibility of Mono-ha is somewhat close to that of haiku.

MC: I think the work of these two in visual art, and obviously Cage in music, feel very much like haiku. In the case of Cage, he was intentionally making haiku. And in the case of the other two, they are just doing what they are doing. But to me, the results convey this same feeling.

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Marisa Culatto
Marisa Culatto is a multimedia artist born in the Canary Islands and based in the UK. Nature, constraints, domesticity and daily rituals, materiality and the notion of reality being a construct are at the centre of her practice. And because of her ambivalent relationship with the photographic medium, she has often explored photography itself as subject.
Culatto has exhibited her work internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, has won prizes and mentions, and her work is in many private collections around the world. Her book Flora: A Frozen English Garden was published in 2023 with Black Dog Press.
website : https://marisaculatto.com/

Yuzo Ono
Yuzo Ono is a haiku poet and writer based in Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MRes, fine arts pathway) in the UK. He won the Modern Haiku Association Award for Criticism in 2002 and the Modern Haiku Association New Talent Award (honorable mention) in 2005. He is a councillor of the Haiku International Association and a member of the British Haiku Society.
website : https://yuzo-ono.com/