Basho and the Art of the Haiku | Lecture on Nature, Seasons, and Imagery | Close Reading

Welcome everyone to our first lecture on our course Basho in the art of the ha coup. It's wonderful to see you all and to begin this journey with you all. I'm looking forward to how this intense study on the ha coup is going to change me. I don't know about you but spending a whole month with a poet or a particular form really allows me to see things in a different way.

And poetry acts upon our consciousness to transform it. And this is true of every true experience no matter how small. Heracitis could not step into the same river twice he tells us because it's neither the same river nor he the same man and a book of poem is like that river book of poems I should say it's like it's like a river it's you never read the same book twice which is another reason why we could totally do Milton and Yates again um as we've done before and why we're going to do a reprise of the four quartets so each lecture in this month is going to introduce you to a handful of concepts about the haik coup form and On Thursdays, Shiovani will be leading the creative workshops which I'll be participating in and trying to and we'll be learning right alongside you all uh there. So, I'm excited for that.

But tonight's lecture is concerned with imagery, especially the nature of the seasons. I'll introduce you first to Basho briefly, the haiku poet, and closely read a handful of his haiku poems. I want to focus on imagery and nature and then we'll also move into discussion on another haik coup from our assignment and apply what we learned in collaborative close reading there. The whole event is scheduled to last an hour.

So Matio Basha was born in 1644 and he died in 1694. He is the haiku master of early modern Japanese poetry and his work gives us such a beautiful meditation upon nature, the changing seasons of life. He was born in a rural area, grew up amid the serene landscapes of central Japan, which is a setting that features in so much of his poetry. and his early verse or his early years were shaped by his activity in the rigid social hierarchy of the Edo period and this was a time when Japan ...