SOURCE: "Takahashi Shinkichi," in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 335-79.

[In the following essay, Ueda presents an overview of the literary career of the twentieth-century Japanese poet Takahashi Shinkichi, in whose writings he observes one of the few modern Japanese representations of Zen Buddhist poetry.]

Takahashi Shinkichi (b. 1901) is a Zen poet, the only poet of major stature in modern Japan who can be so designated. A few other poets have shown an interest in Zen Buddhism, but none has followed its rigorous discipline with such dedication and persistence. Shinkichi's connection with Buddhism began in childhood, for his father's family religion was Zen and his mother had a profound faith in the teachings of the Shingon sect. When he was twenty, he spent eight months as an acolyte in a nearby Shingon temple. Six years later, after meeting with Master Ashikaga Shizan (1859-1959), he embarked on a serious training program in Zen. Although he did not become a Zen monk as he had initially hoped he would, he continued to attend Zen lectures, participate in Zen meditation, and study under various Zen masters. By age 51 he had received from Shizan "The Moon-on-the-Water Hall," a testimonial certifying completion of the entire course of Zen training under the master. He himself has recorded the experience of attaining satori, or enlightenment, more than once. He has read extensively in Buddhist literature and has himself written four books on Zen. In terms of activities and attainments in Zen, no other poet in contemporary Japan comes even close to him.

And yet Shinkichi is a modern poet baptized by Western civilization. He specializes in free verse, a form imported from the West; he writes neither haiku nor kanshi, the two poetic forms traditionally associated with Zen. In fact, he was considered one of the most daringly experimental poets in the Western style when he made his poetic debut in 1923 with Dadaist Shinkichi's Poems, whose title indicates its indebtedness to Tristan Tzara and others associated with dadaist movements in Europe and America. Although notices about dada had appeared in some newspapers, Shinkichi's book was the first work to attract much attention to the movement in Japan. If modern Japanese poetry is an amalgam of East and West, Shinkichi epitomizes that blend in a highly individual manner.

Shinkichi first learned of dada through two articles published in a newspaper on August 15, 1920. Under the headlines "The Latest Art of Hedonism" and "A Glance at Dada," the articles reported on the current state of literature and the arts in Europe and America, with a focus on recent dadaist activities. Although the articles were largely descriptive and showed no special enthusiasm for dada, they made a profound impression on nineteen-year-old Shinkichi. To borrow his expression, he was hit over the head and knocked out cold. He was particularly attracted to three comments made in the articles. The first was a citation from Tzara's "Dada Manifesto of 1918": "I proclaim opposition to all cosmic faculties that squirm in the putrid sun.… Dada is an abolition of the future." The second was Walter Serner's assertion "The world view is a confusion of words." And the third was the report that dadaists often printed words horizontally, vertically, and diagonally on the same page. Shinkichi was not to see the articles again for the next forty years, but he was to recall diese comments over and over.

For young Shinkichi, then, the appeal of dada lay in the aggressively assertive attitude with which it pointed out and ridiculed the meaninglessness of things. He had been leading a wretched life for several years before his encounter with dada. His first love affair had ended in frustration and sadness when the woman he loved married another man, and in his ensuing depression, he had dropped out of secondary school just before graduation, much to the chagrin of his parents. Leaving his home in Shikoku, he had roamed restlessly from one job to another; then, penniless and undernourished, he contracted typhoid and came close to death. Afterwards, he spent two months in a rehabilitation center in Tokyo as a charity patient, waiting to become well enough to return to Shikoku. The articles on dada, read at this juncture in his life, gave him hope that he might be able to rebound from despair by asserting it to the world. Recalling the significance dada had for him at this time, he wrote, "The word 'Dada' refers to a wooden horse in French; in Rumanian it is equivalent to the French word oui. Inherent in Dada, therefore, is a positivism that affirms all after denying and destroying all."

It took some two years—he called it an "incubation period"—for Shinkichi to begin writing dadaist poems. In August 1922, he made his first serious attempt to write free verse. The result was a poem entitled "Dagabaji's Assertion." Since Dagabaji is a corruption of Shinkichi's family name, the poem's title implies an assertion by the poet in thin disguise. "Assertion" here must mean an existentialist assertion by which to turn all negatives to positives or, more precisely, by which to eliminate all distinction between positives and negatives. The poem's two stanzas are:

DADA asserts and denies all.
Infinity or nothingness or whatever, it sounds just
like
a cigarette or petticoat or word.
All that oozes up in imagination exists in
actuality.
All the past is included in the future of fermented
soybeans.
Things beyond human imagination can be
imagined
through a stone or a sardine's head—so imagine
a
ladle, a cat, and everyone else.
DADA recognizes ego in all.
It recognizes ego in vibrations of the air, in a
germ's
hatred, and in the smell of the word "ego."
All is one and the same. From Buddha's
recognition
there appears the remark " All is all."
All is seen in all.
Assertion is all.

The universe is soap. Soap is trousers.
Anything is possible.
To a Christ pasted on a fan, jelly wrote a love
letter.
All this is true.
How could it be possible for nonsmoking MR.
GOD to
imagine something that cannot be asserted?

Tzara's all-negating manifesto is echoed in such lines as "DADA… denies all" and "All the past is included in the future of fermented soybeans." Serner's assertion about words resounds in many nonsensical comparisons, such as those between infinity and a cigarette, between the ego and vibrations of the air, and between the universe and soap. Although Shinkichi did not have the poem's words printed in a drastically unconventional way, the orthography does include some unorthodox deviations. The words "petticoat" and "true" are written in katakana syllabary instead of ordinary hiragana, for no apparent reason. Roman letters are used for "DADA" and "MR. GOD," the former printed vertically and the latter horizontally. The traits of dada, as understood by Shinkichi, are unmistakably present.

The tone of the poem, however, is surprisingly affirmative. Whereas Tzara proclaimed opposition to all cosmic faculties, Dadaist Shinkichi asserts and denies all in the very first line of the poem and goes on to make more assertions than negations. He accepts infinity, imagination, the past, religion, the ego, the whole universe. His negations, on the other hand, are all eliminations of distinctions. He denies the distinctions between the finite and the infinite, between reality and fiction, between past and future, between self and others, between part and whole. Indeed, he is able to accept all because he denies all distinctions. The remark "All is one and the same" in the eighth line sums up the meaning not only of the first stanza but of the whole poem.

Undoubtedly the positive tone of the poem led Shinkichi to entitle it "Dagabaji's Assertion." The word "assertion" was retained when the title was changed to "Assertion Is Dadaist" upon its re-publication in Dadaist Shinkichi's Poems a few months later. The same assertive tone pervades other poems included in the anthology, although in degree it differs from poem to poem. It is less pronounced, for example, in such short pseudolyrics as "Three Dada Poems" and 66 verses collectively called "Poems of 1921," which make use of broken syntax, chance association, and arbitrary lineation. Still, behind the audacious pose and carefree style we sense a poet who believes in the interrelatedness of all things, no matter how disparate they may appear on the surface. The image of this poet becomes clearer in the longer pseudonarratives included in the anthology. "ShinDA Renkichi," for instance, introduces a poet who comes to feel, while watching another poet die, that the past has merged with the future. "Voice-copying Gramophone" portrays a sexologist who has ostensibly destroyed all the old myths about sex but who nevertheless follows a routine, everyday life with his wife and child. "Nosebleed" depicts a destitute Bohemian poet who finds no meaning in life and dreams of draining himself of all his blood, but whose suicide attempt turns out to be a mere dream. In these and other pseudonarrative poems the plot is muddled and the characterization sketchy, yet there always emerges a main character who perseveres in living on, even in a world that he knows is chaotic and hostile.

Shinkichi's concept of poetry during the dadaist phase of his career can be summed up in one statement: poetry is assertion. He had discovered that denouncing can also mean accepting, for through exposure to dada he had learned that a word meaning "a wooden horse" in French can mean "yes" in Rumanian, that things seeming meaningless on the surface can be meaningful in another sphere. Poetry gave him a means of presenting an all-inclusive, all-assertive world in which disparate things coexist, in which disorder becomes order simply by being what it is. To rephrase Serner's dictum, poetry for Shinkichi is a confusion of words that presents a world view.

Dadaist Shinkichi's Poems appeared in February 1923. In July 1924. Shinkichi published a long pseudonarrative entitled Dada. But the very next month, from aboard a boat bound for Korea, he threw the book into the sea as a symbolic act indicating his determination to part with dada. Three years later he did just that.

Shinkichi has repeatedly explained why he decided to forsake dada. According to his explanation, it was because he discovered dada to be merely "an imitation of Zen." Even while he was an eager follower of Tzara, he had noticed some similarity between dada and Buddhism. "Dagabaji's Assertion" includes more than one reference to Buddhism; in fact, its thematic statement "All is one and the same" uses a Buddhist idiom. Shinkichi's interest in Buddhism intensified as his fervor for dada cooled, until in 1927 he decided to become an acolyte at a Zen temple. Later he was to recall, "Because I did not know French, my dada was philosophically a Buddhist dada." The comment implies that Shinkichi, unable to read about dada firsthand, tried to interpret it in his own way; inevitably he did so in a Buddhist way.

What were the elements common to both dada and Zen, as seen by Shinkichi? He pointed out several in "Dada and Zen," an essay written more than fifty years after his dadaist phase. They can be summed up as antirationalism, indivisiveness or "oneness," dissolution of the self, absolute spontaneity, and mistrust of language. In Shinkichi's view, Tzara's staunch opposition to abstraction and conceptualization is like Zen, which does not teach a single "law" to its followers. Tzara's realization that "he existed nowhere" seems an echo of what is known as nonself in Zen; his effort to abolish all logical distinctions shares a common goal with the Zen ideal of oneness; his faith in spontaneity has its counterpart in Zen's "now-ness"; and his insistence on "the dislocation of language" appears to echo nonverbalism in Zen, which teaches that five thousand volumes of surras amount to nothing more than the noisy cries of crows and magpies. The similarities between dada and Zen were not immediately apparent to young Shinkichi; hence his initial enthusiasm for dada. But as they gradually dawned on him, he chose to return to the Buddhist tradition. In Europe dada paved the way for surrealism; for Shinkichi, it cleared the way for Zen.

In October 1928, Shinkichi embarked on his first serious Zen training at a temple in central Japan. At first the rigorous program proved too much even for this young man with a strong physique, and he had to return to his home in Shikoku for several years to recover from physical and mental exhaustion. He had to give up his plan of becoming a Zen priest, too. But he never wavered in his determination to pursue Zen, and that determination has continued. His deep faith in Zen is reflected in most of the books of poetry he has written since his departure from dada—Gion Festival (1926), Words in Jest (1934), Solar Eclipse (1934), Rain Clouds (1938), Kirishima (1942), Father and Mother (1943), The Body (1956), The Bream (1962), The Sparrow (1966), Afterimages (1976), and The Hollow (1981)—as well as in several editions of Takahashi Shinkichi's Collected Poems. Since 1924 he has been a Zen poet, with the exception of a short period during World War II when he wavered between Buddhism and Shintoism. "I don't care how other people may criticize me for this," he once said, "but I know of no way to live except by articulating my cosmic view in poetry. My life would lose its meaning if I were to stop trying to preserve the tradition of Zen."

The cosmos that Shinkichi has endeavored to depict in his later poetry is a world of Zen and all that is held to be meaningful and true in Zen. With him, poetry presents—or represents—less nature than Zen-nature. This assertion, however, contains a basic paradox, for Zen disparages language and favors nonverbal communication, whereas poetry uses words as its medium. Recognizing this contradiction, Shinkichi once asserted, "My poems deny language; they deny poetry." How has Shinkichi resolved the dichotomy?

Shinkichi has addressed this question in several of his essays. In "Modern Japanese Literature and Zen," for instance, he stressed the uselessness of words in capturing the inexpressible essence of Zen and described existing literary works as "rubbish piled on the surface of our society." He did add, however, that at times pure gold was buried under the rubbish, and he concluded, "One might be able to enter Zen by way of literature, although inevitably it is a roundabout way." In an essay entitled "The Unsung Poet," he again disparaged the function of language and criticized poets and philosophers who believe that reality can be expressed in words. He then observed, "Poetry comes closest to truth, but it is not truth." The most direct expression of his view of the relationship between poetry and truth in Zen is found in an essay called "Under the Tower of Babel." Once again he begins his argument by minimizing the value of language, saying, "Words, whatever kind they may be, are forever incapable of expressing truth. We, the human species, who created words arbitrarily in our brains, have put up with expressions that do not exactly correspond to truth. Just as we are content with television, which merely shows images of people and things, we let our brains take care of daily life by using language because it is simpler to do so." He goes on to disparage literature because it is built on words, then reflects on the fact that he is himself a man of letters. The essay almost becomes a soliloquy at this point:

What, then, do I want to say when I write? I want to transmit truth. I know I have just said truth cannot be expressed in words. Truth is inexpressible. And yet I write because I want to convey that very fact to readers.

One might tell me that it is also impossible to convey the inexpressibleness of truth. To that remark, I would respond as follows.

It is impossible to transmit truth to readers, but it is possible to make them verbally understand it. To those readers content with verbal understanding, one is able to present in writing something similar to truth. Because what lies in the presentation is not truth itself, those who try to understand it are wasting their time. The experience, however, may help them some day in some way. It may help them to grasp truth when they have a chance to do so.

From these comments one can gather that Shinkichi considers verse writing a waste of effort from a purely Zen point of view but recognizes in it some pedagogical value.

In brief, Shinkichi believes poetry is a verbal substitute for truth. In his view, truth itself can be grasped only by intuition, after a long period of meditation and other Zen exercises. As he has been fond of pointing out, all Bodhidharma did to attain satori was to sit and meditate facing the wall for nine years. Yet a beginning student of Zen needs advice and direction; consequently a number of books on Zen have been written in China and Japan over the centuries. The Rinzai school, in particular, has long utilized koan, questions to which there are no rational answers, as an important means of inducing trainees to break away from logical patterns of thinking. Shinkichi, whose Zen training was in the Rinzai school, is aware of the merits of koan and once observed that they contain something delicate and indescribable that helps students. Possibly he considers his poetry a kind of koan or a popularized version of koan. Most Japanese seldom have a chance to come in contact with koan today; even when they do, they do not gain much out of the koan because it is written in classical Chinese and intended for the use only of serious Zen trainees. In comparison, poetry has a better chance of being read by the general public. An attempt to approach Zen by way of poetry is, in Shinkichi's words, "a roundabout way," but few people in modern times have the time, motivation, or physical and mental toughness to undergo the rigors of Zen training. Shinkichi thought poetry might fill the gap.

The bulk of Shinkichi's later poetry seems consistent with such a view of verse writing. He does not write poetry with this view in mind; more often, the view comes to permeate his poetry as a natural outcome of his being a Zen Buddhist. Still, by way of poetry he has tried to give a verbal semblance of truth in Zen. His poems deal with such themes as nonself, timelessness, the Zen eye, nonattachment, nondivisiveness, enlightenment, and mistrust of language. They no longer show the explosive energy or the rebellious spirit that dominated his dadaist poems; rather, in a reflective tone and restrained style they try to activate the reader's mind by way of surprise or irony.

One can cite any number of Shinkichi's poems to illustrate those characteristics; a composition entitled "Death," which first appeared in the 1952 edition of Takahashi Shinkichi's Collected Poems, will serve the purpose. It consists of just one line:

Nobody has ever died.

In terms of vocabulary and grammar, few Japanese sentences are simpler than this. But semantically the poem resembles a koan because it defies logical understanding. If there is one sure thing in this unpredictable life, it is death, so how can one say nobody has ever died? Shinkichi puts that question to his reader just as a Zen master would pose a koan to his student. No rational answer is possible, so to respond the reader has to try to go beyond the bounds of intellect. Few readers, if any, will be led to satori by pondering the question, but the experience may help them open their minds some day by some chance.

The implications of the poem "Death" become clearer when it is juxtaposed with the climactic scene of an autobiographical story by Shinkichi called "The Eel." The protagonist of the story is a middle-aged man by the name of Takeha Yasuzo, who all through his life has desperately sought peace with the world and with himself. He has tried Buddhism, Shintoism, and other possible means of salvation, but all in vain; people call him a madman, and indeed he has had more than one mental breakdown. Finally one autumn he visits a Zen temple for week-long sesshin—a program of meditation and study under a master. Unexpectedly, he is rewarded with satori. The enlightenment comes one afternoon, just before he faces his teacher in a personal study session. His mind has been especially serene that day, as he sits waiting for his turn outside the teacher's room. When his turn comes he strikes a bell with a mallet twice, following the rule. He cannot believe his ears, for the bell rings out with unearthly beauty, the like of which he has never heard before. In that instant a thought flashes through his mind:

This is what it means to live. Like a sound, like a cloud.

There is nobody who is living. We human beings are allowed to live. Like a sound, like a cloud.

I had read volumes of scriptures and seen the word "nonself" a countless number of times, but I had never understood the true meaning of the word.

We human beings are like that sound. There is no such thing as the self. Only "nonself" exists.

The next moment Yasuzo enters the room and sits down facing the teacher. Later he cannot remember what he said to the teacher, but he does remember what the teacher said to him. "I am no match for you," the master said with a smile. "Go out and have a rest." The strict teacher had never said anything approaching this before, and as he left the room, Yasuzo was filled with incomparable happiness.

The poem "Death" tries to lead the reader to the state of mind attained by Yasuzo in this episode. As Yasuzo came to realize, nobody is living, and therefore nobody has died. To put it this way is nothing more than verbalization, and the reader who understands the truth at this level has understood it merely as a concept. Yet that is all poetry can do.

Shinkichi's longer poems are generally less cryptic and less like koans, but many of them similarly try to awaken the reader to some aspect of Zen truth. They frequently feature an animal: a cat, a mouse, a cow, a groundhog, a rooster, a duck, a pigeon—all are visualized as living in a Zen world. Shinkichi was particularly fond of writing about a sparrow. The poem below, simply called "The Sparrow," is an example:

when the sparrow
took a hop

flowers
withered away

the sparrow's
head feathers are ruffled
and its chest feathers tremble
as it crouches there

the sparrow
blinks its eyes
and in that instant
ten billion years of history pass

It is consistent with Zen that the poem should center on such a plain little bird, for in Zen there is no such thing as profound, esoteric truth; if there is something that comes close to it, it lies in everyday things seen by everyone. The third stanza of the poem, by painting an ordinary image of a sparrow, brings home that point and links other stanzas, which defy our usual ways of conceiving the bird.

Shinkichi's fondness for sparrows seems to have had its roots in a childhood experience:

It happened when my older sister died and I went to the funeral, which was held at her husband's home deep in the mountains. She was buried in a graveyard in a pine forest located at the edge of a pond.

As I was trudging toward home, I came upon a dead sparrow lying in the road. I was struck by the thought that the sparrow was my sister.

I came to believe that my sister had been a sparrow.

Since then, whenever I see a sparrow, I recall my sister who died young.

Note that the young Shinkichi saw a dead sparrow—not a newborn one—on the day of his sister's funeral. This was not a case of transmigration and rebirth, which is rejected by Zen. Rather, the sight awakened him to the oneness of a sparrow and a human being, and of the past, the present, and the future. His sister died with a physical sparrow but is living in a Zen sparrow that exists outside of time. The bird that appears in "The Sparrow" and many other poems by Shinkichi is such a sparrow, a creature that transcends all divisions and distinctions recognized by the intellect.

In technique "The Sparrow," with its clear imagery and indented layout, looks like an imagist poem. A good many of Shinkichi's Zen poems similarly try to suggest the essence of Zen through images. Others, however, do not. A poem on the nature of the human mind, entitled "The Beginning and the End," is representative of this second type. It also signifies a landmark in Shinkichi's Zen training, for it deeply impressed his teacher, Shizan. Shinkichi has not explained the specific circumstances under which it was written, but he did say something about the kind of problem he was having during his Zen training under Shizan at that time. In a short essay entitled "Blend Your Mind with Your Breathing" he recalled, "Once my teacher said, 'Leave your doubting mind as it is.' I did not understand what he meant. I was naive enough to think that he was referring to the idea that both beautiful and ugly thoughts lay in one and the same mind, that there was no distinction between them. Only recently have I come to learn that man's mind has no right or left because the mind itself does not exist."

No doubt it was after a similar awakening that Shinkichi wrote the poem "The Beginning and the End":

One cannot say where the mind exists.
It exists everywhere. The universe is filled with it.
The mind is beyond being large or small.
It never vanishes.
It continues to exist after the body dies. From its
viewpoint, there is no such thing as dying.
This mind was present before we were born.
It is never born.
Nothing exists outside it.
All that exists is the mind.
One cannot say it exists.
But, clearly, the mind is moving.
That is the beginning of all.
The mind always lies in the beginning.
And it is forever ending.
Everything is nothing but the mind.
Between the beginning and the end there is not a
hair's breadth.

When he sent the poem to Shizan, in return the old Zen master gave him a signed piece of calligraphy that read "I have set your mind at peace." As Shinkichi immediately recognized, the words were those of Bodhidharma's reply to Hui-k'o, a Zen trainee, who had asked, "I have been seeking the mind but cannot get it." The moment Hui-k'o heard his teacher's words he attained satori, and he later became the second patriarch of Zen. Shizan's reply to Shinkichi, then, was intended to do what Bodhidharma's reply did for Hui-k'o; it positively verified Shinkichi's attainment and thereby brought his mind to rest. It also indicated that he had correctly understood the teaching "Leave your doubting mind as it is."

Shinkichi has also written poems that are not ostensibly Zen. Generally these seem to be more popular with the reading public, since they are more lyrical and less abstruse. Yet in them one can still see the pose of a Zen poet, unobtrusive though it may be. Here, for instance, is a short lyric called "Flowering Rose Mallow":

What is the rose mallow's whiteness?
Its petals are whiter than snow
as it opens in the warmth of a summer day.
White as a distant cloud
and translucent as tissue paper
the scentless flower blooms with its head
drooping.
What can it be? White and faintly echoing in the
eye,
the dreamlike flower will vanish at a touch.

The poem has been praised for its lyrical beauty and is among the most popular of Shinkichi's works. Critics have said that it catches the pure, fragile beauty of the rose mallow, a beauty approaching yugen. One can appreciate the poem at that level, and many readers have done so. But another layer of meaning emerges when one remembers Shinkichi's remark "Buddhism is a theory that places nothingness behind matter." By "nothingness" he meant the void that contains all. If one interprets the poem from this angle, one discovers in its poet a Buddhist reaching for that nothingness. When the poet asks about the rose mallow's whiteness, he has started his quest for what lies behind the visible flower. He then notes a series of seeming contradictions: a summer flower whiter than winter snow, a distant cloud right in front of him, a flower that has no scent, and a whiteness that echoes in his eyes. Finally, by transcending these dichotomies he reaches the invisible reality behind visible matter, as physical reality becomes dreamlike and vanishes at a touch.

To conclude, then, Shinkichi's concept of artistic representation is a paradoxical one. In his view, art imitates nature, which is ultimately nothingness. In his younger days he often depended on dadaist means to reduce being to nothingness; in dogmatic assertions he denounced all systems by which people ordered the world. In his mature years he has concentrated on verbalizing various aspects of Zen reality, which transcends and yet includes the physical world. However, the essence of Zen cannot be expressed in words, and this creates a dilemma for the poet. Nevertheless Shinkichi has continued to write poems, believing that they may by chance give a clue to those striving for enlightenment. In a poem entitled "Footnotes" he wrote:

Is that white thing a rooster?
All words are imperfect; they are footnotes.

In his view, poetry is a footnote trying, in its imperfect way, to comment on a Zen text that is invisible to common eyes.

The titles of Shinkichi's essays are sometimes deceptive. In a piece called "My Method of Writing Poetry," he merely recalled his early days as a dadaist poet and mourned the alienation of contemporary poets from the general public. In an essay entitled "How to Write and Appreciate Poetry," he did describe how he appreciated three specific modern poems, but he said nothing about methods of writing poetry. His essay "My Poetry and Zen" is largely about the life of a Zen priest who risked his life to save a valuable copy of a Zen classic when his temple burned in a fire. The discrepancy between the titles and the contents of these essays seems due not so much to the author's irresponsibility as to a lack of self-awareness about the creative process. When he wrote down those titles on page one, Shinkichi was quite sincere, yet he simply did not know his own method of writing poetry and therefore could not write about it in the pages that followed. He probably has seldom thought about the art of poetry per se, for abstract speculation is rejected by Zen.

In his voluminous writings, however, there are some passages that touch on the subject in a casual manner and thus shed light on his idea of the verse-writing process. For example, in an essay called "A Talk on Poetry and Zen" he stated:

In the Analects Confucius is reported to have said, "If I am to sum up in one sentence all the 300 poems [in The Book of Poetry], I would say they are free of devious thoughts." A composition written with devious thoughts can never be called a poem. In Confucius' view, a piece of writing that contains devious thoughts is nothing more than rubbish, no matter what strenuous effort may have been expended in its making.

One must prize words that come to mind by chance and without premeditation. When my writing is a faithful record of what floated into my mind like a cloud in the sky, I do not have the self-loathing I usually feel whenever I read my own work later.

Some might say that such a natural, spontaneous method of verse writing may be possible for short lyrics but not for epic poems like Homer's. But there are few long pieces in ancient Chinese poetry or in The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves and The Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems. Confucius' remark on poetry is valid.

The passages point toward three elements of the creative process that Shinkichi held to be important. The first is the need for a specific state of mind, a state free of "devious thoughts." The second is the casual, incidental manner in which inspiration visits the poet. The third is the spontaneous nature of the creative process, which dictates the brevity of the poem produced. All three elements follow along the lines of traditional Japanese poetics, with some noteworthy modifications.

Shinkichi implied that a poet must attain a serene frame of mind, devoid of all impure thoughts, before the verse writing process begins. This, however, is not a Confucian idea, for consciously or unconsciously he misinterpreted the words "devious thoughts." By these words Confucius meant ethically unacceptable thoughts, but Shinkichi used them to designate thoughts that are not natural and spontaneous. Thus Shinkichi's stand is consistent with Zen, which discourages deliberate, willful speculation. As a Zen Buddhist, he wanted to purge all calculated thoughts from the mind of the poet waiting for inspiration. To extend his metaphor, a poet's mind must be as clear as a cloudless sky; when the mind is ready, poetic inspiration will come as naturally as a cloud appears in the sky. Shinkichi once said, "I have written poems as they naturally emerged; there is no other way to make seeds of poetry germinate. One will never be able to produce moving poetry if one uses a method in the same way as one would cultivate flowers in a greenhouse or other man-made environment." Although the metaphor is different, the implications are the same: the beginning of a poem cannot be forced.

In Shinkichi's view, then, a poet is a passive agent who has to wait for the visit of poetic inspiration. He can take no deliberate action to make it come; instead, he must patiently persevere, always ready for the crucial moment. "He must always strive for it, until he finds himself doing so even in his subconscious mind," Shinkichi advised. "When he keeps trying for it, something accumulates within his body without his knowledge, until finally it seeks an outlet and comes pouring forth. Thereupon a seed of poetry germinates." Such poetic inspiration has various ways of manifesting itself, and the poet does not know when or how it will do so. Sometimes it emerges purely by chance in an unexpected place. For instance, one day Shinkichi was waiting for a bus at a bus stop, when suddenly the line "A railway station appeared before my eyes" came to his mind. Inspired by the line, he began composing a poem, which was eventually entitled "The Railway Station." But there are other occasions, too, on which some external stimulus helps trigger an inspiration. As examples of such stimuli, Shinkichi mentioned reading a poem or a book, seeing a movie, and listening to music. He might have added looking at a work of art, for he wrote the poem "Peach Blossoms and a Pigeon Painted by Hui-tsung" after seeing the Chinese painting of that title and "Yakshi" after seeing a statue of an ancient Indian spirit; there are many similar examples. An actual experience can be a stimulus, too. One of his better-known poems, "Dishes," was written while in his youth he worked as a dishwasher in the dining hall of a Tokyo newspaper press. He has also written many travel poems, such as "Mount Fuji," "From Pusan," and "Ruins of Pompeii," all based on actual experiences during his trips in and outside of Japan. In this respect, Shinkichi's theory and practice have been no different from those of most other poets.

Shinkichi's third point about the creative process is more unusual: he feels that a poem should be completed by the force of the initial inspiration and therefore that it has to be short. He believes that not only should the inception of verse writing be natural but the entire process should be spontaneous, too. Referring to the seed of poetry, he said, "Once a seed germinates, the rest is just a matter of waiting for its natural growth." He also explained, "It resembles what a baby goes through in the womb until the time of delivery." Both metaphors stress the naturalness of the creative process and reject a premeditated scheme or correction by afterthought. Shinkichi was more explicit in another comment: "Another method would be to jot down anything and everything as a novelist does and then go about cutting out the unneeded. But I seldom use this 'draft' method." Probably he fears that revision would destroy the spontaneity of the initial inspiration. There are exceptions, but generally he seems to have been faithful to his words in actual practice. Referring to the 1949 edition of Takahashi Shinkichi's Collected Poems, he wrote, "I scribbled those poems in the margin of paper scraps or notebook pages whenever they happened to come to mind. I expended no great pains in writing any of them; in no case did I follow a plan or make revisions by afterthought. To draw a comparison with painting, this is like a collection of rough sketches. But that very roughness may have resulted in a kind of artless beauty." He went on to note that most of the poems were necessarily short.

Shinkichi's liking for short, inspirational poetry does not necessarily imply that the verse-writing process, too, is short. Of course some poems may be completed relatively quickly, but in many instances Shinkichi seems to have worked on a poem over a period of time. His metaphors for the creative process, already cited, indicate this: it takes nine months for a baby to be born after its conception, and it takes weeks or months for a plant to flower after its germination. We have noted that Dadaist Shinkichi's Poems needed an "incubation period" of some two years after their original inspiration. In Shinkichi's opinion, inspiration can be retained intact in the mind for a long time, especially if it is strong. Of the poem "The Railway Station," he recalled that he wrote nothing for several months after conceiving its first line, but that the initial image was so vivid and powerful that it never disappeared from his mind. Finally he was able to write the second line; after that the words came smoothly, and he was able to complete the poem in several hours.

A couple of examples will clarify Shinkichi's idea of the verse-writing process. The first is a poem called "The Fly":

I wanted to live for an infinity of time.
Infinity was in a fly.

At a flick of my hand
the fly lazily glided away.
Its leisurely manner
awakened a friendly feeling in me.

Late at night
under a bright lamp
and with the sound of rain outdoors
I was reading a book.

On the pages of the open book
a fly
happened to cast a lonely shadow.
Like the fly's leg, infinity
is slender and bent.

Shinkichi explicated the poem in an essay also called "The Fly." As he explained, he was reading a book at home one rainy autumn night when suddenly a fly came out of nowhere and flew over the pages of the open book. He stopped reading and watched the fly for a while. Presently, without being driven away, it flew off with a slow, feeble movement, looking as if its strength were almost gone. The poet never saw the fly again.

This incident inspired Shinkichi to write the poem. He did not say with which line he began to write, but he did mention that the first line expresses something that had been bothering him, perhaps unconsciously preparing his mind for poetic inspiration. "Every human being harbors a desire to live a long life," he said. "Although there are some who kill themselves, most people have occasion to wish that they could live for a thousand or ten thousand years if at all possible. I was no exception; hence I wrote that I had wished for eternal life." But then he had an awakening, after which he no longer wished to live forever. To make that clear, he wrote the second line. This line, he said, is extremely important but difficult to explain. "The more seriously you ponder the line, the more difficult it will become," he speculated. "Even if you spend your whole life studying it, you may not be able to solve the problem. This line demands that much contemplation." In effect, then, the second line is a koan. Shinkichi did not try to interpret it; he just gave some hints, one of which is a line from "Dagabaji's Assertion" that reads "Infinity or nothingness or whatever, it sounds just like a cigarette or… word." What he implied is the Zen concept of oneness: there is no difference between the infinite and the finite, whether in a fly, a cigarette, or whatever. To understand the true meaning of infinity one needs to attain satori; hence the difficulty of comprehending the line.

Shinkichi felt that the first two lines of the poem contained everything he wanted to say. But he did not stop writing at this point because he thought some people might want him to show why infinity is in a fly. In the lines that follow, therefore, he tried to describe the relationship between the fly and himself.

The second stanza defines that relationship as "a friendly feeling." No doubt the feeling was awakened in him because he saw an image of himself in the feeble flight of the late autumn fly. He said he considered calling the poem "The Winter Fly," since he was attracted to the lone fly barely surviving the cold autumn days. The words "lazily" and "leisurely" are significant; he saw the fly accepting its destiny with composure, neither fighting against nor hurrying toward death. There is a bit of fiction: in the poem he flicks his hand to drive away the fly, which he did not do in actuality. That change dramatizes his shift of mood from hostility to friendliness.

The third and fourth stanzas mainly describe the physical setting. The lateness of the hour, the sound of the rain, a man reading a book by himself—all enhance the atmosphere of loneliness and prepare for a climax in the last line of the fourth stanza. Explaining that line, Shinkichi said, "It depicts the lonely figure of a fly hovering, but because I myself cut a lonely figure one might say that the fly is my shadow, or perhaps that I am the fly's shadow." In other words, there is no distinction between the poet and the fly, between his life and its life, or between his solitude and its solitude.

Now that the relationship between the poet and the fly has been established and explained to the reader, Shinkichi comes back to recapitulate the poem's main theme in the two concluding lines. These lines echo the previous line "Infinity was in a fly" and elucidate its meaning through a more specific image—a fly's leg. Shinkichi explained, "Here I may sound as though I had a firm grip on infinity, as though no one else understood it better than I did. But I wrote those lines in view of such things as Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that the universe is mathematically finite." By his reference to Einstein, Shinkichi probably means to imply that infinity is itself a relative term. A fly's leg is tiny, fragile, finite—more poignantly so when the season is late autumn. Yet all that seems so because the fly is viewed from the standpoint of the human species, much bigger in size and longer in life span. From the point of view of the universe, man too would seem tiny, fragile, and finite. And the universe itself might seem tiny and finite in relation to some other cosmic system. One can go on and on in this way, infinitely. Shinkichi has demonstrated, then, that infinity is, and is not, in a fly.

At the end of the essay "The Fly," Shinkichi states that he made almost no additions or deletions in wording once he had written the poem. That is consistent with his idea of verse writing. Yet he made some changes later on. The poem was originally published in a newspaper in January 1951. When it was included in the 1952 edition of Takahashi Shinkichi's Collected Poems, the following version was printed:

I wanted to live for an infinity of time.
Infinity was in a fly.

At a flick of my hand
the fly lazily glided away.

Its leisurely manner awakened a friendly feeling in
me.

Late at night under a bright lamp
and with the sound of rain outdoors, I was reading
a book.

On the open book, a fly
cast a lonely shadow.

Like the fly's leg, infinity
is slender and bent.

A comparison with the original poem shows that the words "the pages of and "happened to" have been omitted in this version. The change is a definite improvement, for it tightens the poem. The number of stanzas has been increased from five to six, whereas the number of lines has been reduced from fifteen to eleven. The result is a more proselike poem, creating a greater sense of calm and contemplation. The change, however, has reduced what Shinkichi has called "a kind of artless beauty."

The making of the poem "The Fly" reveals how a trivial incident may strike a chord in the poet's mind and set off the creative process. In the next example, the cause-and-effect relationship is more pronounced. The incident that sparked the creative process occurred shortly after the end of World War II, when Shinkichi was near physical and mental exhaustion in the chaos of war-ravaged Japan. Without wife or child and with hardly any money or other belongings (his apartment had been destroyed in an air raid), he barely managed to keep himself alive. Trying to gather the courage to live on, he began reading the Lotus Sutra, even though he had read it several times before without understanding its meaning. This time, however, he was deeply moved. He felt he understood something of the surra's profound meaning, and he wanted to record the experience in words. "I was anxious," he recalled, "to sum up my feelings within myself and make a note of them for my later use. So I wrote the poem." The poem, called "Not Home," consisted of just three lines:

Tell them I am not home.
Tell them nobody is here.
I'll be back in five hundred million years.

Shinkichi did not say how long it took him to write this poem or whether he made any changes after its first draft. He probably wrote it in a spontaneous manner because it is short, colloquial, and, to use his word, like a note. It also belongs to the group of poems he said he expended no great pains in writing. Perhaps its "artless beauty" appealed to Japanese readers, since it gained popularity with the passage of time. The people in his hometown even erected a stone monument with the poem carved on it. Shinkichi is quite fond of the poem himself and once boasted that a poem of this calibre has been rare in modern Japanese poetry since Hagiwara Sakutaro.

Again, the making of "Not Home" is consistent with Shinkichi's idea of the creative process, perhaps more so than the making of "The Fly." He held that poetic inspiration can result from reading a book, and the Lotus Sutra sparked it for him. From the surra he learned that "our life is not so simple or shallow as to fade away in five hundred million years or one billion years." To most readers, something like this is bookish knowledge. It had been so to Shinkichi, too, each time he read the Lotus Sutra before. But this time the book hit him hard, penetrating through the intellect and reaching the deepest part of his being. What he found in those depths, he did not spell out in the poem. One can surmise, however, that it was similar to a childhood experience he described in an essay called "Nothingness." One day when he was a young boy, he was walking along a path that paralleled a stream when suddenly a thought flashed into his mind:

I am currently strolling alongside a brook lined by wax trees. Imagine a long string stretching from my present location to a spot in the past several hundred millions of years ago. Then imagine another string that similarly extends into an infinitely remote future. The two strings would be the same length.

I am always at midpoint between the past and the future. If I walk a little over thirty minutes along this embankment, I shall leave the countryside and arrive in a city. But if I try the same experiment again in that city, the lengths of the two strings will remain the same. This is because both the past and the future have the same infinite length. The situation will be unchanged in fifty or sixty years, although I shall be an old man by then.

I am, then, always at the same spot. Minute by minute the time I experience vanishes and is reduced to nothing. Both the time that has passed and the time to come crumble minute by minute, and there always exists nothing but my own self, located at midpoint.

This mystical childhood experience points toward the Zen concepts of timelessness, the void, and nonself. It echoes the words of Master Rinzai (d. 867), which Shinkichi was found of quoting: "There is neither Buddha nor the human race. There is neither the past nor the present."

In the end, however, Shinkichi seems to have remained unwavering in his belief that verse writing is a waste of effort from the point of view of Zen, even when it is done in a natural and spontaneous way or provides a record of inspired moments. He was not completely sure until one day he asked his Zen teacher Shizan to write Confucius' words "free of devious thoughts" for him. Apparently he thought to keep the calligraphy by his side as a constant reminder of the proper manner in which to write poetry. Shizan obliged, but on handing over the finished calligraphy he whispered to Shinkichi, "You don't need 'thoughts,' either." Shinkichi did not quite understand the meaning of the teacher's words at the time, but as he reflected on them afterwards he came to know what they meant. As a Zen poet he had believed he should get rid of all deliberate, willful ideas until his mind was filled with nothing but spontaneous thoughts. Yet Zen demanded that he eliminate even those spontaneous thoughts. The mind had to become completely vacant. Could a person with a completely vacant mind ever write a poem? There, again, is the paradox of the Zen poet.…

As we have noted, the literary expression of Zen took two major forms in Japan, kanshi and haiku. The connection between Zen and kanshi goes back to China, where Zen originated. Following the example of Chinese monks, Zen adherents in Japan wrote verse in classical Chinese; this type of poetry reached its peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Zen-inspired poems known as gozan bungaku or "literature of the Five Mountains." Then in the seventeenth century haiku became associated with Zen. The most admired master of haiku, Basho, practiced Zen in his youth and incorporated it into his poetry and poetics. For many poets who followed him, writing haiku was a spiritual discipline not unlike Zen. Haiku, in turn, came to be considered a literary form capable of suggesting the essence of Zen.

Why, then, did Shinkichi not write kanshi or haiku? Why did he choose to write in a poetic form that was imported from the West and that, according to Seisensui, embodied a clearly anti-Japanese attitude toward nature?

Shinkichi was born a little too late to obtain the kind of education that would have enabled him to write Chinese with ease. If he had received a good education in nineteenth-century Japan, he might have gained enough proficiency in classical Chinese to compose poems in it. Natsume Soseki, born one generation earlier, could and did write kanshi. Shinkichi was able to read classical Chinese, and by all indications he read a large number of Chinese poems. His admiration for ancient Chinese verse, such as the poems in The Book of Poetry, has been mentioned earlier. He also read many Chinese Zen poems, as any Zen trainee is expected to do. But apparently he did not like gozan bungaku; to him, the Japanese Zen monks who wrote it seemed too concerned with the art of poetry. "Their works seem worthless in comparison with the verses of Chinese Zen monks," he observed. By reading gozan bungaku he undoubtedly learned the futility of trying to write a good poem in a foreign language.

Shinkichi has said why he did not become a haiku poet. He wrote haiku as a young boy, and he even had a haiku name, Makuwauri ("Melon"). Yet in a couple of years he stopped writing in seventeen syllables, for two reasons. First, his interest in writing haiku was vitally connected with a local haiku group of which he and his father were members. When the leader of the group, an employee of a large organization, was transferred to another locale, the group became inactive and Shinkichi lost his motivation for writing haiku. Second, in one of the haiku gatherings he heard an older poet predict the invention of a haiku-producing machine. The prediction shocked young Shinkichi. "I felt," he recalled, "that if a machine could compose every conceivable haiku, there was no sense in racking my brains to write one." Years later he realized that his argument was invalid, but he still could not completely drive misgivings from his mind.

Interestingly enough, Shinkichi has written more tanka, a verse form traditionally less close to Zen, than haiku. He does not know how many tanka he has produced, but he estimates the total to be fewer than three hundred. Below is an example, written one day in 1945 after an air raid had devastated a famous mausoleum in Tokyo:

Trampling the hot
roof tiles, I push my way
through a bombed area:
lying dead in my path,
a blue sparrow.

As this example shows, the imagery and diction of many of the tanka have Shinkichi's stamp, yet his tanka are generally more incidental in theme and more lyrical in overtone than his shi. They give the impression of having been written in a more spontaneous manner and with a less serious intent. Except for a few that are tacked onto shi, Shinkichi has not included any of them in his collection of poetry. Apparently, like Takamura Kotaro, he does not regard his tanka as serious poetry.

The main reason Shinkichi has not tried seriously to write tanka or haiku in his mature years appears to lie in their brevity. He is not lacking in respect for these forms; as we have noted, the two poets he admires most are Basho and Shiki. He is also quite appreciative of The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves and has said he recognizes "unparalleled beauty" in those poems. Yet he continued, "I look at them in the same way as I look at antique paintings; I do not feel like composing my own poetry in imitation of them." To his sensibility, tanka and haiku are archaic or are rapidly becoming archaic. "To be competitive with the poetry of the rest of the world, tanka and haiku are too short," he said, and then added, "I suspect tanka and haiku will be absorbed into free verse in the future." On another occasion he was more impatient and declared, "Tanka and haiku are already things of the past."

Shinkichi does not favor short verse forms for modern use, basically because he feels the psychology of a modern man demands a poetic form that is longer, more flexible, and more inclusive—a form that allows more than lyricism. In his view, human life has become considerably more complex than it was in Basho's time or even in Shiki's time, and many problems have emerged that cannot be solved by taking refuge in nature. Shiki's followers tried to modernize tanka and haiku, but they were not entirely successful. As an example, Shinkichi cited the following modern tanka written by a resident of Okinawa. The poem was inspired by an unfortunate incident in which an American soldier stationed in Okinawa shot and killed a local woman:

A mother
of three little children
was shot to death.
Perish, America!
Perish, America!

About this tanka, Shinkichi observed:

In this instance, the mother in the poem may stand for all Okinawans, who share the same ideology, or she may represent the whole Japanese race. But what kind of response did the author expect from the readers by screaming "Perish! Perish!"? I can understand how the author, on hearing about the callous slaying of a mother, was angered by the lawless situation and had to cry out in protest. Yet if that cry amounted to nothing more than this single tanka, it might be taken for the mumbles of a sick man in delirium.

Shinkichi was referring to the complex political and social reality that existed in Okinawa before its reversion to Japan in 1972. There was a great deal of tension between the American occupation forces and local residents; incidents like the one mentioned in the tanka made the issue more emotional. Shinkichi understood the situation and the feelings of people involved, but he was critical when those feelings took a form like this tanka. In his view, a tanka can powerfully express a simple, straightforward emotion but is too short to do justice to the totality of a complex psyche responding to a complex reality. He feels that because of this fact modern tanka poets tend to write rensaku. "But," he has said, "a verse form that requires thirty poems to make a point clear is not a suitable vehicle of expression for a busy poet. Doesn't it save our energy if we write free verse? I may seem to be promoting my own cause, but that is what I think." He said nothing about haiku in this connection, but the same statement can be applied to it as well, or even better, since it is shorter than tanka.

Shinkichi once made the same point from another angle, presenting a free-verse poem of his own that he thought could never be written in tanka or haiku form. It is called "The Turtle":

The turtle has no basic doubts.
He is on the side of the status quo.
When confronted by a principle, he breaks down  and shows his belly.
Look at the turtle paddling slowly in the waters of
morality.
His muddy webs push aside the waves of culture.
His head looks masochistic, yet it is too short for
self- sacrifice.
His shell resembles a feudal castle.
That amphibian fellow, always ready to
compromise and
wait for a chance!

The turtle sneaked into a yard overgrown with
weeds.
He plucked bashful white flowers, only to throw
them away.
He trampled dark shadows the wilting grass had
craved.
When a flower opens, the turtle spits on its
redness.
He hates the depth of earnest love among the
verdant trees.
He has a savage mouth.
When he exhales, he does not think of the air he
will inhale—
not in the way the earth thinks of evaporating
water when it lets the rain fall.
With what peace of mind he spends his days, not
knowing there is no such animal as a turtle!

One morning the turtle forgot his coat
at the Dog Star's.

He must lead an indomitable life.
Turtle, forsake those petty, loachlike pleasures!

Would that happen if he denied life by death?
Death is built on the foundation of life.
All that is distant from the earth supports the
earth.
If his shell is broken, the turtle will lose his life.

War is a speed.
A great speed is needed.
Where there is no speed, there is death.
Slowness is not the turtle's virtue.

Will the turtle fight with the sun?
Won't he be slain by sunset?

Referring to this poem, Shinkichi said, "In order to go beyond the realm of haiku and tanka (which specialize in nature poetry) and create a new form, I felt a need to write this kind of poem, which is intellectual in expression." One does not need his statement to see the point. "The Turtle" could never be made into a tanka or haiku, for its main theme, an attack on Philistinism, is too complex a subject to be effectively articulated in 17 or 31 syllables. If a haiku (or its comic counterpart, a senryu) were to treat the subject, it would merely smile at people content with the routines of daily life. If a tanka were to do so, it would cry out in protest at their follies as emotionally as did the Okinawan poet. In either case there would not have emerged a reflective, metaphysical poem like "The Turtle." Haiku and tanka are too short to develop a set of images as fully as Shinkichi did in this poem or to probe into a theme as deeply. The poem is longer and more intellectual than the average Shinkichi poem; the theme demanded that. It is a satirical poem, looking at people and society from a transcendental point of view not unlike a Zen Buddhist's. Free verse is a poetic form flexible enough to include all those elements.

Basically, then, Shinkichi has wanted maximum freedom of poetic expression. He rejected fixed verse forms because they seemed too restrictive and favored a verse form that could be long or short, lyrical or intellectual, traditional or radical. His general stand on the question of poetic form is revealed in a short poem entitled "Words":

Words can be of any kind,
form can be of any kind, for
what must be captured is only one;
it has nothing to do with words or form.

If the poem captures truth, Shinkichi couldn't care less about words or form. Because truth is difficult—ultimately impossible—to capture, he has wanted maximum freedom of choice in his attempts to set it down.

Shinkichi has had very little to say about the form and structure of free verse itself. He chose to write shi precisely because of the freedom of expression it afforded him; he would not want to restrict that freedom by favoring a certain form or structure within free verse. Nevertheless, when one reads his poems and essays one is tempted to make a couple of tentative generalizations. First, he seems to prefer relatively short poems. Second, his lines tend to be more assertive than suggestive, more philosophical than mystical.

In spite of his declared dislike for the brevity of tanka and haiku, his poems, excluding prose poems, are relatively short. In fact, he once observed that "the length of a poem would do best to remain within fifteen or sixteen lines, or twenty lines at most." He mentioned two reasons. First, he had read poems in the New York Times and noticed that they were all short. Second, he was too poor to produce a long literary work; he would starve to death if he were to write a long one! Clearly Shinkichi was not completely serious when he made these comments. The main reason his poems are short probably has to do with his high regard for an inspirational creative process. As we have seen, he believes that a poem must be composed by the force of inspiration; he considers a poem to be primarily the spontaneous record of "what floated into my mind like a cloud in the sky." Presumably inspiration, an intuitive insight into truth, is of short duration. Referring to the poems in the 1949 edition of his collected works, Shinkichi himself stated that "the diction is lucid and most of the poems are short." He was right on the last point, at least: of the 134 poems included in the collection, only one has more than twenty lines. Although the ratio of long poems to short is larger in other of his anthologies, most of his poems are shorter than twenty lines, and he has written a sizable number of poems that consist of only one or two lines. A one-line poem called "Death" has been cited; here are two more examples:

The Sun
The sun is shrinking every day.

Potato

In a potato
there are mountains and rivers.

That these are inspirational poetry is evident. The first poem records an inspired moment in which the poet transcended the limits of the ordinary human senses and acquired a cosmic point of view: measured on the astronomical clock, the sun is shrinking visibly every day. In the second poem, he went to the other extreme, viewing things with a microscopic eye. At one inspired moment, he thought he saw the world in a potato.

The poem "The Sun" consists of seventeen syllables; "Death," of twelve syllables; and "Potato," of twenty syllables. As far as syllable count is concerned, they may seem less like free verse than like haiku; certainly they are well within the standard syllable count of free-style haiku as proposed by Seisensui. Yet these short poems by Shinkichi differ from free-style haiku in grammar and syntax. The language of haiku deliberately destroys ordinary relationships between words, so that it can transmit truth that cannot be expressed in logical statements. Shinkichi's short poems do not; by and large they retain the normal grammar and syntax of Japanese prose. Each of the three short poems mentioned above comprises a complete sentence, with all its normal linguistic relationships intact. There is no way to mistake them for free-style haiku. The same applies to Shinkichi's longer poems: his lines usually make grammatically complete sentences. The only major features differentiating the language of his poetry from ordinary prose are frequent line changes and the omission of punctuation. Nevertheless, his lines strike the reader as being poetic because the statements he makes are striking. He shocks his readers by stating, in a grammatically perfect sentence, that the sun is rapidly shrinking or that nobody has ever died. He tosses out an enigmatic idea and hopes it will awaken in readers thoughts to which they have never been exposed before. This is fundamentally different from the method of haiku, which stimulates a reader's imagination by presenting a grammatically incomplete sentence. Shinkichi's method is more intellectual. It appeals to modern Japanese readers, who have been exposed to too much Western literature and philosophy to have complete faith in an anti-intellectual approach to truth. Ultimately, Shinkichi is anti-intellectual; more precisely, he wants to go beyond intellect. But he goes through the intellect to reach for the realm beyond it, and he knows many contemporary readers cannot bypass intellect as some haiku poets seem to do. A lifelong concern with the dichotomy between science and religion also stems from his refusal to underestimate the achievements of intellect in modern times. He wants to write poetry from the perspective of a modern man, a man well aware of the potential of human intellect. The language of his poetry reflects this fact.

The structure of Shinkichi's poems often follows the line of his philosophical speculation, and as a result the poem looks like a philosopher's monologue. The poem's unity is attained through a progression of thoughts expressed in a sequence of complete sentences. Unlike Hagiwara Sakutaro, who tried to verbalize feelings before they became ideas, Shinkichi waits until feelings harden into ideas and then speculates about them. In this respect he is more a philosopher than a poet, and some of his poems indeed look like aphorisms. On the other hand, he is distinctly a poet in relying on images, metaphors, and symbols in giving form to his thoughts. He could be said to be a metaphysical poet, although he has never called himself such.

On the whole, however, no generalizations about Shinkichi's structural method hold true, for it is too diverse. He rejected tanka and haiku because of their formal restrictiveness, and he would not like to be confined to any specific method of unifying a poem. With him, a poem is the outcome of meditation, and its structure and wording must be free to follow the way in which his meditation progresses. The structure can be logical, associational, or narrative, depending on the way his cogitations evolve at the time. He conceives shi to be an all-inclusive verse form freely allowing him to do all these things; that must be part of the reason he thinks free verse will in time absorb both tanka and haiku. The language of his poetry is as flexible as free verse can be.

A good deal has already been said about Shinkichi's view of the use of poetry. In general, it is not very favorable. At times, when provoked, he has even conceded that poetry is not only useless but harmful. As we have seen, poetry seemed to him nothing more than "rubbish" at one time, "footnotes" at another. Similar derogatory words abound in his writings. The most disparaging of all appear in the essay "The True Nature of the Poet," in which he called poets liars, thieves, and father-killers. Although much of this abuse is rhetorical, there is no doubt that he assigns a secondary importance to poetry in his scheme of things. Of prime importance to him is religion. For a brief period of his life that religion was dada; then it was replaced by Zen Buddhism.

During Shinkichi's dadaist phase, poetry functioned as a vehicle for making assertions and thereby transforming negatives into positives. Believing with Serner that "the world view is a confusion of words," he found poetry useful because it provided explosive power with which to destroy existing systems of thought and reduce them to more primordial, preintellectual matter. Presumably he could have done the same in prose, yet poetry is more pliant in form, more capable of being loaded with intense mental energy. It can express the spirit of rebellion in a freer, more immediate, and therefore more forceful form. As Shinkichi portrayed himself in "ShinDA Renkichi":

I write with a finger.
I write with snot.
I write on a piece of soiled toilet paper.
For those who drink seminal discharge with a
tobacco pipe
my poetry has no use.

His poetry was useless for the genteel middle-class, but served a function for a youthful rebel.

In this concept, poetry is ultimately a means to an end. Young Shinkichi was trying to find a way to come to terms with himself and the world; he thought dada showed him one such way. To him, dada was more a mode of thinking and living than a literary and artistic movement, and unlike many European dadaists, he made almost no effort to propagate dada among his fellow poets and artists. He was content that it help him in his own spiritual quest. Writing poetry provided him with an effective means of making dadaist assertions and thereby striving for the end he sought. Thus it was relatively easy for him to give up being a poet and become a Zen trainee in 1928, because he was first and foremost a seeker for a better spiritual life. He had been a poet only secondarily.

The role of poetry became even less significant in Shinkichi's thought after his serious commitment to Zen. Indeed, his earlier exposure to poetry came to seem a draw-back when he began his Zen training. He recalled:

I continued to write poetry and prose fiction only to make a living; my heart was not with literature but with Buddhism. I read a great deal of Buddhist literature indiscriminately, trying to search out the essence of Zen by way of literature. All that was a waste of time and energy; many times I stumbled, hurt myself, and had to beat a retreat.

He was implying that his orientation as a poet was a disadvantage in his quest for satori. When he was a dadaist, poetry was at least of help in pursuing his goal, but as a Zen student he found literature harmful.

Poetry can be harmful in Zen training because the poet uses words; thus he may be deluded into thinking that he can express truth in words. From a Zen point of view, seeking truth by means of language is as hopeless as trying to complete the Tower of Babel. After all, words are a product of the mind, and the thinking mind represents only one—and a nonessential—part of human life. "I do not believe," Shinkichi said, "that the functions of my mind are related to the whole of my being. I believe my mind is performing its functions on its own within just one part of my being." In his view, there is another, more essential part. That part can be reached, he thinks, only through Zen exercises.

Zen and Buddhism have lost much of their popular appeal in modern times. Since Japan under the Meiji government decided on wholesale Westernization, people have become believers in science instead of religion. "It would not be an exaggeration to say," Shinkichi once observed, "that due to the Meiji government's anti-Buddhist policy, as well as to the invasion of Marxism and Leninism, virtually no Japanese has continued to believe in Buddha or to study Buddhism." His assessment of the situation is basically correct, although he has indeed exaggerated, despite his protestation to the contrary. Buddhism has become only a nominal religion for many Japanese, no longer providing them with a way of coming to grips with their existence.

Here Shinkichi saw a potential use for literature in general and for poetry in particular. Many Japanese have stopped going to temples in search of salvation, but they read novels, short stories, and poems. Shinkichi sees much contemporary literature as nothing more than "rubbish piled on the surface of our society," yet sometimes, he thinks, pure gold may be buried beneath the rubbish. To quote his words again: "One might be able to enter Zen by way of literature, although inevitably it is a roundabout way." It is a roundabout way because literature is dependent on words. But literature has a universal appeal. For the general public, it is more approachable than Zen.

For Shinkichi, then, literature is most useful when it helps readers in their quest for religious truth, even though it can do so only in an indirect way. Literature can be no more than a verbal substitute for truth, but it may serve as a catalyst in their quest some day. Poetry, in particular, is capable of functioning as a Zen koan because of its capacity to be more illogical, more provocative, and more removed from everyday reality than prose. To Shinkichi's way of thinking, poetry is most useful when it acts as a koan—when it plunges the reader's mind into a Zen type of meditation. Shinkichi has written many poems of this kind in his later years. His poem "Death," for instance, tries to open readers' eyes to the eternity of cosmic life. "Flowering Rose Mallow" leads them to see the nothingness hidden behind physical being. "The Fly" makes them begin to contemplate the questions of infinity and relativity. "The Turtle" shocks them by letting them see how meaningless are their daily lives. One can go on and on citing such examples.

It is no wonder that almost all of Shinkichi's later poems feature a Zen Buddhist either as the poem's speaker or as its main character, with or without disguise. Only on rare occasions can one sense the voice of a poet per se. "The Eastern Sky" is one of those few poems. Based on an experience during Shinkichi's Zen training, it will serve as a fitting conclusion to this discussion of his view of poetry:

Early in the morning a rooster is crowing.
I want to get a chisel
and carve that living rooster.
With the sharp, stainless blade
I want to gouge its throat.
The distant crow of a rooster
is what I want to carve.

The rooster's crow is like the elusive moment of satori. A poet's task is to capture mat moment and present it to the uninitiated reader, who is unable to hear the crow by himself. There is a problem in doing so, because the moment dies as soon as it is verbalized; it is like the image of a rooster instead of a live one. Yet the poet keeps trying to capture that precious moment. Even if he fails, he will still present a semblance of the moment or at least a record of his efforts, and his attempt may help the reader in his own spiritual quest. In Shinkichi's view, therein lies the only usefulness poetry can claim.