Performing presence in the haiku moment

ABSTRACT

This essay examines presence as a performed spatio-temporal relationship. It acknowledges Rose and Coonfield’s recent analysis of presence as an “experience of thisness” before employing haiku as an aesthetic and theoretical lens for navigating the performance of presence. The “haiku moment” signals an effort to reconcile aesthetic representation with direct experience through evocative movement across time and space, a movement that emerges in relation to text, context, and audience. Richard Wright’s posthumously published haiku project, “This Other World,” offers a particularly useful case study that demonstrates presence as intertextual, imaginative, and metonymic.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• presence
• haiku
• Richard Wright
• haiku moment

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and Mindy Fenske for their helpful comments, Thomas Nash for assisting in early archival research, Jerry Ward for suggestions on employing Richard Wright’s work, and Julie Morel for accommodations at Incident.res during fieldwork research in France.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ross Louis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and an affiliate professor in the Performance Studies Laboratory at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Notes

1. Each of Wright’s haiku cited in this essay reference the page on which the haiku appears in his posthumously published Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon rather than the number that the editors assigned each haiku in that edition. See Brink and the note below for an explanation of the importance of this citation style. Reprinted by permission of Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

2. I am grateful to Marcyrose Chvasta for suggesting this re-definition of the haiku moment.

3. My thinking here is informed by Chvasta’s analysis of the virtual, especially in relation to its resistance of concretization.

4. See Terry and Wood for an application of Gumbrecht’s distinction between meaning effects (to “make sense” intellectually) and presence effects (to “sense” physically) to the context of audiencing aesthetic acts (181).

5. “Performing Presence: From the Live to the Simulated” is another useful theoretical resource. The interdisciplinary research project was conducted from 2005 to 2009 in England. The project archives can be found here: http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/presence/presence.stanford.edu_3455/Collaboratory/9.html.

6. Waka consisted of five syllabic verses and were written for the entertainment of royal courts as early as the eighth century, with one poet offering an opening stanza of three verses (5,7,5) and another responding with two concluding verses (7,7) (Hakutani and Tener). Renga, a linked verse form from the twelfth century, connected a series of syllabic verses (5,7,5 followed by 7,7), with the most important verse of the renga, the hokku (5,7,5), being reserved for the most accomplished poet (Hakutani and Tener). Centuries later, haikai (now called haiku) developed as a singular syllabic form (5,7,5) with Matsuo Basho as its most influential poet. Haiku’s primary difference from its predecessors is its showcasing of a single poet’s perception of the world.

7. A number of American writers produced haiku or poetry influenced by haiku in the first decades of the twentieth century, including Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Amy Lowell. American scholar Harold Henderson published a number of critical volumes on Japanese haiku in the 1930s and 1940s. A French haiku literary movement also existed in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, after World War II, the West largely learned the haiku form from Blyth’s work. Several beat poets, such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, read Blyth and made connections to Zen Buddhism. Wright was introduced to haiku in Paris through Blyth’s work and was apparently unaware of the earlier French and American haiku publications.

8. Brink has illustrated that the only published version of the haiku, edited by Hakutani and Tener, is deeply flawed, confusing the original order of the poems in Wright’s manuscript and thus misunderstanding the precise categories that he had constructed for their reading. Brink correctly observes that Wright’s final structuring of the manuscript utilized two columns per page, with the expectation that the unnumbered haiku would be read vertically down the left column and continued at the top of the right column. Unfortunately, Hakutani and Tener’s version of the collection numbers the haiku and arranges them by reading from left to right. The result is a drastic reorganization of Wright’s intended structure. While Brink suggests the error is likely accidental, he also notes that the numbering system adds an unnecessary interpretive frame to each haiku, and, in some cases, interrupts an obvious progression that Wright has built between specific haiku. Brink’s finding is supported by evidence in the Richard Wright Papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Wright’s final draft aligns very closely to a series of cardboard broadsides on which he pasted individual haiku in thematic groupings. The 19 broadsides contain nearly every haiku included in the final draft.

9. Ogburn argues that Wright illustrated a haiku aesthetic as early as 1941 in his essay 12 Million Black Voices, citing lengthy descriptions of nature written in the present tense.

10. Toru Kiuchi has developed a database of all 4000 of Wright’s original haiku located in the Richard Wright Papers, tracking revisions that Wright made to each haiku in the four draft manuscripts of “This Other World.” In many cases, the revisions dramatically change the meaning of the haiku, shifting the subject, the seasonal reference, or the result of an action.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Resource Network at New York University through a Scholar in Residence award; the UNCF/Mellon Program through a Faculty Residency Fellowship; and Xavier University of Louisiana through a sabbatical award.