More on Haiku: Suchness

Suchness. Now hold on a minute, don't you go looking at me rolling them eyes. Yeah, I said suchness and no, I'm not vacuuming without a vacuum bag. Suchness, say the word, let it roll slowly off your tongue, while I figure out what I'm gonna say next about it.

Seriously now, as I alluded in my earlier articles, haiku is something much more than seventeen syllables typed on a page. I even mentioned "suchness" in my article on anthropomorphism. Well now I am asking you to consider suchness. You know, I don't think the word is even in the dictionary, it certainly isn't in my spellchecker, it is lighting up my document like a Christmas Tree.

I'm going to need to get crafty to work this out. Ah yes, here we go: "such" is in the dictionary. I think we can work with that. My dictionary (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1980) defines such as: 1a. of a kind or character to be indicated or suggested. Woah, I'm scratching my head with you on that one. Let me skip on down the page a bit: 2a. having a quality already or just specified. Hmmm, I think I'll try to rope that one.

A quality already or just specified -- okay, something that already exists. Perhaps in other words -- a state of being. Okay, for our purposes we will define such as a state of being. Now let's look at ness, or I should say -ness since it is a suffix. He, he... I think that is officially the first time I have said suffix since I got out of high school.

Anyway, consider -ness. My dictionary defines -ness as: state: condition: quality: degree. So based upon our dictionary definitions, if you have suchness, you are in the state of a state of being. I wonder if that is better than being in the state of Mississippi. Oops, forgive me for that, it's been so long since I got run out of Mississippi. The tar and feathers wore off long ago. I keep talking like this, and they will be cooking up a new batch for me soon.

While I will not call suchness a rule, haiku is something that kind of transcends petty rules, suchness is desirable in haiku. The thought that you are observing something that has always been is kind of the idea. As an example, I refer to a haiku I had submitted, along with the response.

    the fat
mosquito is slow
      and dies

The editor's response: "and what else would we expect? haiku is the capturing of a moment of insight but this is no surprise to anyone, so how are we enlightened? it does have suchness, but that in itself is not enough we seek the suchness that we discover we have known all along, but have forgotten, as r h blyth suggests"

Ah, my haiku has suchness. That is good. Unfortunately, the poem was not accepted. Although it had suchness, it was perhaps too obvious. But dog gone it, the haiku had suchness. Since I had submitted a number of haiku, I still had more for the editor to consider. Well, I was disappointed once again. Here's another example:

    the waves
        again
    and again

The editor responded, "same as above." Wow, although it was not accepted, I got suchness two times in a row. You see, I did find something in nature that was "such," I just didn't find the surprise in the observation. I needed something more. I made note of the editor's comments and was encouraged to continue to strive for haiku.

Looking for inspiration I took my notes and started rummaging through my books. Yes, it looked like I still had a bunch to learn. I think I had worked out anthropomorphism and perhaps suchness, but, based upon the editor's comments, I was still lacking something in my haiku.

Where was I going to find what was lacking in my haiku? The answer was right there at my fingertips as I was grabbing my books. It was my books... and you ask, come on, really ask, "What books?" Well over the years I had been collecting poetry books and more recently I collected haiku books. Some were very good, others... well, not as good. I'll review a few of my favorites, but not right now. Watch for my next article: "More on Haiku: Books". Until then, thanks for reading.