On the weekend of October 10–12, 2008, Christopher Herold gave a workshop at Haiku Northwest’s first Seabeck Haiku Getaway in Seabeck, Washington, titled “Feathering the Moment.” This exercise asked everyone in attendance to think deeply for five minutes about what was happening at the moment, and to write down impressions or points of sensory awareness. This produced dozens of impressions, such as “hearing silence,” “jiggling legs,” “throats clearing,” and “I inhale what they exhale.” Christopher passed a feather to each person in the group in turn as a signal to share an awareness that he or she had written down. As the feather passed from one person to the next, these impressions were jotted on a whiteboard for everyone to see, creating a list of seeds for haiku. The next step in the exercise was for everyone to take a few moments to put haiku together based on the seeds written on the whiteboard. Then, while passing the feather around the room again, everyone shared the poems they put together. Because of this process, no poems were considered to be authored by any one person, but were more of a group effort. Under the heading of “Remarkable?” at the end of his Feathering the Moment booklet produced to commemorate the workshop, Christopher wrote the following: “Three poets penned these nearly identical haiku” (15), and here are the poems. We might consider them to be déjà-ku, although in this case produced by hive mind, starting with seeds common to all participating writers at the same time, rather than being written independently at different times or places:
I inhale
what they exhale
the circle unbroken
I inhale
what they exhale—
the circle unbroken
I inhale
what they exhale
the circle unbroken
What this spontaneous arising has to say about déjà-ku is that each of the three “poets” (if they may even be said to be the authors of these poems) recognized the common poetic beauty not just in the phrase “I inhale what they exhale” but in pairing that phrase with “the circle unbroken,” which was another one of the seeds written on the whiteboard. Each poem presents the juxtaposition in the same order, too. Only the punctuation or indentation varies.
Similarly, it seems that when several poets independently witness a common experience, they may independently come up with similar words to express that experience. Indeed, certain experiences will lend themselves more readily to being haiku than others—and certain phrases will lend themselves to haiku expression more readily than others too. The consequence, it seems, is that particular experiences, more likely than not, are going to use similar words and similar word orders in poems that express the intuitive poetic moment (one danger, of course, is that the most intuitive expression may be too obvious, thus suggesting possible reconsideration, and a second danger is merely recalling what someone else has already written about the same experience). These situations may make déjà-ku inevitable for certain subjects or experiences (déjà-ku is not a pejorative term, please note).
Christopher Herold referred in his booklet to “the intuition of universal interconnectedness, what Buddha Shakyamuni called ‘dependent co-arising’” (7–8). Of particular interest here is not that similar haiku may arise “independently,” but that they may arise in a dependent way—because the experience of life is interdependent rather than independent. In this sense, we may wish to celebrate our commonality of experience, even while notions of intellectual property and originality may chafe against the seeming similarity of one poem with another.
Deja-ku Diary 