“Water to the Brim, Please”: Notes on the Haiku of Maxine Hong Kingston

Some years ago, in the aftermath of a PEN New England panel on the post-9/11 Patriot Act, I asked Howard Zinn what good there was in participating in small demonstrations. Zinn acknowledged that such a protest might not change a terrible policy, but taking direct action against it might change the protestor. You could, he said, become even more steadfast in your commitment to a cause. I thought of Zinn’s remark as I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s selection of haiku for Poetry. I thought of how a poem of any length is so often an act of discovery, a revelation for both poet and reader alike. I thought of how a serious engagement with a poem (and maybe too with a political demonstration) can make an internal difference, as Dickinson said, down deep where the meanings are.

I also thought of the elegance of the haiku as a poetic form, the swift action of mind it dramatizes, the compression and concision of language, the way these short poems have a long, long half-life in the mind thereafter. Most of all, however, I thought of a traditional Buddhist meditation practice known in ancient Pali as “metta,” which in English is most often translated as the practice of “loving-kindness.” It is a practice summed up in its foundational, mantra-like prayer: “May all beings be safe from harm and danger. May all beings be happy.” Yes, it is a wish. Yes, it is only a prayer. But to say this to oneself and to practice wishing it may indeed change you. Loving-kindness practice has the capacity to nurture and expand the empathic imagination. Or to put it another way: it is a practice in extending the horizons of compassion. It is about the growth of what some might call the soul.

Rightly revered for her prose writings, Kingston has also had poetry in her life from the start. In To Be the Poet, the record of her Massey Lectures at Harvard in 2000, we learn how her father wrote poetry in China. In fact, he made his own ink for the calligraphy and left Kingston enough of that ink to last the rest of her life and beyond—enough to pass on to her grandchildren. Kingston also tells us how her mother would set her on a windowsill as a child and have her sing a poem to her grandfathers passing by in a horse-drawn wagon. Here is Kingston’s translation from the Chinese of that first poem:

Hey, Third Grandfather.
Hey, Fourth Grandfather.
Where are you going?

Horse shoes clippity-clopping
    four feet, then four feet,
Where are you going?
 

The poem is not only charming, but also I can’t help but read that second stanza as a prototype of a haiku. Perhaps Kingston has been intermittently writing haiku or near-haiku throughout her life. She has indicated she would like to publish a posthumous collection of them, much in the manner of the African American novelist Richard Wright. In the meantime, we have this selection of twenty-nine haiku, plus a coda from another of Kingston’s poems. These haiku explore the many ways in which we might discover or realize dimensions of loving-kindness in our lives. The practice of metta is the unifying thread that runs throughout this selection.

Take, for example, what I call “the coyote haiku” (number ten in the sequence). The poet has seen a coyote on its hind legs drinking from a backyard birdbath. That image alone, with its precise sense of the coyote’s hind legs, gives me pause. The poet is seeing this animal as itself. She responds to what she sees by saying to herself, or to the weather gods, or to the person who owns the spigot: “Water/to the brim please.” In that space between the two sentences of the poem, Kingston acknowledges kinship with this creature, and we, along with the poet, are perhaps silently thinking of all the many creatures who thirst—be it for water, or love, or justice, or a thousand other needs. Wishing there be enough for all to drink is an expression of loving-kindness, or at least one aspect of it.

For other aspects we can look to the first few poems in the sequence and find the poet weighing the “debts” incurred by friendship and care: how we so often feel we owe phone calls and letters, or we pick up the tab for our friends, be it in dream or at the local pub. This is true also for those we care about in sickness or in health. And then there are the haiku that take on matters of war and peace. There is a haiku about the eerie feeling of holding a rifle that has been handed to us, the barrel facing outward. There is another haiku that reminds us of the beauty of lapis lazuli and how nearly all of it comes from Afghanistan. I have to remind myself that the haiku are neither abstract arguments nor instruction manuals on loving-kindness. They are moments of mind, when small but trenchant experiences suddenly open up a wider imaginative space, both for the poet and the reader. Nowhere is this more evident than in Kingston’s haiku that focus on children. She notes in one haunting poem how children can get lost or fall from a window. Then she notes there are children who are snatched from their families crossing the border, and we know the latter to be a harm wrought by the fiat of the powerful.

The last ten poems in the sequence are based on Kingston’s observations of her toddler grandchild, Hana Mei. Some of these haiku revel, for instance, in the exuberance of a child discovering the world: Hana Mei is so elated by piano music that she decides the keys must be yummy and tries to eat them! But as this sequence of haiku unfolds we see the child’s mind growing more and more aware of the others who inhabit her world. For me, the climax of this theme comes in what I refer to as the “alphabet haiku.” Here the poet/grandmother is practicing the alphabet with Hana Mei. The letter T seems to be absent from an alphabet puzzle. Kingston must have said out loud we are missing the T. I don’t want to spoil the charm of this poem, but instead ask if, after you read the haiku, you too have the feeling that we are witness to the first glimmers of Hana Mei’s empathic imagination, her own loving-kindness.

As in this poem, the moment of metta seems to open up vistas of time and space. One imagines the child’s act of generosity is predictive of the future. That spirit of generosity also comes from somewhere, maybe from within, but also from a cultural inheritance, from parents and grandparents for instance. If this is true at the individual level, it is also true in terms of the poetic form of the haiku. Let us remember that haiku is a Japanese form that Kingston has adapted to her English and vice versa. Haiku has roots in classical Chinese poetry, and this is probably one reason why Kingston invited Chun Yu to translate this poetry into Chinese. Chun Yu is an eminent bilingual poet in her own right, and an emigre from China. Placing the English and Chinese side by side does, among other things, remind us of  how this poetry is connected to a lineage of artistic expression. This is similar to haiku’s connection to Zen and other aspects of Buddhist thought and practice with roots in China. These poems together affirm and celebrate their historical kinship.

In 2012, Kingston published a book-length poem, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. The book is a combination of narrative and meditation. The title comes from Thoreau’s Walden, and in this book the broad margin allows for family stories, visits to villages in China, accounts of close friendships, and tales of Kingston’s work as a peace activist. All of these are held together by her own sense of personhood, one that is not a static identity but a growing, widening, more inclusive consciousness. As in the book-length poem, so too the haiku sequence: these short poems enact moments of expanding consciousness, moments wherein the poet and the reader alike recognize greater kinship with others. “May all beings be free from danger” is ultimately an expression of love, or at least our capacity to love. Perhaps an expanding capacity to love is why Kingston offers a final haiku, this one about another and newer grandchild, Malu. And she gives the entire sequence a coda in the form of a set of lines from I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. As you will see in that coda, and in these haiku overall, the spirit of loving-kindness transcends boundaries of time and place.