By now I am convinced that haiku can handle whatever epiphanies or peak experiences may come a poet's way and express practically any genuine human feeling. Brief, immediate, and open-ended, they juxtapose images from nature and everyday life to create sensory surfaces charged with what is deepest and most evocative in readers and writers alike. At their best they leap from heart to heart.
Successful haiku are full of wonders—little shocks of recognition and connection, ripples of expansion, links and shifts. They do not grow stale. Rather they remain vital and true, holding the essential sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells of particular times and places ready to touch human consciousness again and again. Take Basho's travel haiku, for example. For centuries now they have startled readers with an intimate sense of "being there" and brought them empathy and understanding.
Poets can be freshly moved by their own haiku years after composing them. It is an old chestnut of literary response that a college sophomore and his forty-year old professor bring such different experiences and priorities to the study of Hamlet that they could be reading two different plays. I know personally that the poet's relationship to the images of her haiku change as time passes. The initial response remains intact, but new insights and feelings develop, so that even the author reads more than one poem in the same few words.
I have watched readers or listeners become co-creators as they experience a haiku in their physical bodies and spiritual depths, reacting with visible tingles. I have seen their eyes widen, shine, warm, and close as they absorb particular haiku. Audible or not, the classic response to a superb haiku is an "ah" of recognition and empathy. Of course, there are other valid responses, too: "oh"s in many tones, an occasional "wow" or "ouch."
Clearly, I think haiku are exceptionally versatile and pretty wonderful. Why the emphasis on humor in haiku, then? What's so funny?
While I certainly do not consider haiku "light verse" in any trivial or dismissive sense, I welcome the smiles and laughter many of them bring. Some haiku poets carefully search out humor and deliberately employ the various tools of craft that foster and convey it. I have enjoyed haiku that use hyperbole and litotes, irony of situation or language, and startling similarities and differences. Such devices though —and broad humor in general —lean toward the senryu side of the continuum. Softer, lighter, more diffuse tones of humor are more likely, I believe, to inform haiku. Pure delight and childlike wonder permeate many of the finest ones. Those convey a special joy of perception and appreciation. Haiku poets and their readers are often "startled by the familiar," suddenly seeing mundane things from a new perspective. They catch unexpected glimpses of themselves, too, and laugh at what they see.
Haiku have a way of removing barriers between self and other. In a delightful but impermanent synthesis the poet becomes both observer and thing observed, moving back and forth between the two positions. The same thing can happen to the involved reader. Even when the situation is not "funny" in any traditional way, there is a lively germ of humor in the concurrent duality and unity. Sometimes there is empathy with another human being. Other times poet, reader, or both may identify with a creature or thing of nature: a tropical fish or furled hibiscus, a rush of snowflakes, or a dragonfly.
For renku I am likely to construct a humorous verse purposefully. I may even try to elicit a particular flavor of laughter. Balance and variety require an instinct for changing the mood and pace. A little analysis is in order, and fabricating something boldly, ridiculously, or tenderly humorous can add value to the linked poem. Humor in my haiku, though, is almost never deliberate or contrived. When I am genuinely awake to my surroundings and alert to specific details, it is simply part of the whole.
The "heightened awareness," openness, and participation necessary to experiencing, writing, and reading haiku can hurt as well as amuse and delight. The pain of haiku experience, though, is the keen-edged pain of being alive. It is to be faced, accepted, and valued. The very act of writing is a testament against despair and an affirmation of human experience. It is worth noting, too, that haiku's open-endedness makes it a poor container for bitterness or for preserving fixed intellectual positions. Haiku are lively and enlivening poems. They begin in perception and lift us out of ourselves while touching what is deepest in us. Haiku activate our senses and can continue far beyond their few words, rewarding us with ongoing discoveries. One image links to another and then another, tapping rich lodes of association and energizing connections that expand from the particular to the general, the local to the universal, the sensory to the unconscious, the commonplace to the archetypal, the inner to the outer, and around the world and back again! Test the waters for yourself, but in my experience going the distance with haiku will bring a full range of discovery, feeling, and expression. And there will be smiles and laughter along the way. Haiku are about all of life, and humor is part of the mix.
