What Is Real?

Haiku is the poetry of images. That is why Imagism, the movement that catalyzed modern English and American literature, chose haiku as its principal inspiration. Precision with language. Economy with words. The ability to isolate what Ezra Pound called “the luminous detail.” These provided a reset for modern poetry by focusing on concrete images drawn from life. In 1913, the journal Poetry published a summary of the group’s core principles:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Imagist poets aspired to capture the physical experience of objects through words, but there was a problem from the start. Words have no reality in the physical sense, just as an image, from the Latin imago, provides only a “copy” of the original.

A century later, the image has become the God of postmodern culture. Yet we are no closer to the truth of those “things”—subjective or objective—that the Imagists sought to express. Lost in a double mirror of digital simulations, we ask one another constantly, What is real? It’s the question that haunts all of our discourse.

A common misconception about haiku states that it seeks to express “suchness”—a term used in Buddhism to refer to the true nature of reality. In fact, haiku aspires to a much more modest goal: to acknowledge other beings, animate or inanimate, as having a reality as real as our own. In haiku, that acknowledgment is described as a form of “greeting.” We may greet mountains, rivers, flowers, birds—or anything else, for that matter—as long as we are willing to meet them on an equal footing. Everything from a pebble to a star.

This season’s winning haiku speaks directly through images, contains nothing extraneous, and preserves “the musical phrase” of poetry. But it is not an Imagist poem. What it offers is not a copy of reality, or reality itself, but an invitation to encounter another being by greeting it on its own terms. As a spring evening settles over the landscape, the poet finds herself walking beside the river with a butterfly. The words of the poem are so simple that we might feel tempted to dismiss them as lovely but inconsequential, if not for the luminous detail. A spot of color sailing along in the last sunlight, the butterfly moves on the currents of its own invisible river. A river made of air.

Symbolically, the butterfly represents the companionship we experience on our journey through the seasons once we realize that we are not making that journey alone. But its real message is the strangely steadying, clarifying effect of an authentic encounter with the natural world. Whatever questions we have about the world we are living in now, which so many of us feel trapped in and others are simply enduring, this is the answer. Step outside and see for yourself. Virtual reality is not reality. There is no such thing as a deep fake butterfly.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku.