Haiku of Flowers

The Haiku of Flowers

The haiku of flowers is the culmination of over twenty years work photographing flowers on black and white film with my panoramic cameras. I have paired seventeen images (five single images, seven diptychs, and five single images) with seventeen selected haiku I had written to reflect the structure of the haiku.

The haiku has always been a favorite form of poetry for me as it encapsulates a moment in a way words seldom can. Whether Basho’s sound of a frog or Issa’s yellow hole, haiku’s ability to strip a moment away to its essence, and through this reduction, create a world and a moment to inhabit with all the ineluctable feelings preserved, is remarkable. I remember the first time I read Kobayashi Issa‘s haiku.

“A world of grief and pain, flowers bloom even then”

It filled me with a sense of life and beauty continuing in the face of suffering. I sensed the transcendence of the moment and in the midst of our temporary transit the ability to relish beauty.
I found this too in e.e. cummings

“the mightiest meditations of mankind are cancelled
by one merely opening leaf.”

Seldom have words stripped bare all the facades of scholastic learning to reveal the essence and nature of being. The heart and soul or as the Japanese put it - kokoro- is what haiku is for me.

So it was that I embarked on a journey to write haiku on the ephemeral nature of life distilled through flowers and their brief but beautiful life. Over a year I amassed a large collection of flower haiku that I then reduced to fifty one.

I asked my mother, Sanae Yamazaki, to choose which ones resonated with her and that she felt comfortable translating. I asked her to translate not literally, but with the kokoro or nature of them and the haiku structure preserved (no easy task). I knew she would do a sensitive translation and I was intrigued to see how a mother would translate her son’s haiku. I also knew that her calligraphy was exceptional and unique .

When I was at the Seitanji temple in Ueno Hara, my roshi remarked on my mother’s calligraphy. He was not only a master of Budo but was one of Japan’s great calligraphers, and his remark always left an impression on me. Impressions are the only things we can experience, and keeping ourselves open to the moments when they manifest themselves has been a mantra to me.

After she translated the haiku and did the calligraphy, I chose the seventeen I liked most and felt best captured my sense of the true nature of flowers. I also meditated on which images would best accompany the haiku. This process took several months. A year later I changed three of the photographs.

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