024 · Haiku

24 Jul, 2026

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The poetic form now called haiku developed from the hokku, the opening verse of linked forms such as renga and haikai no renga. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), now best known for haiku, was first and foremost a master of haikai, a communal practice of linked verse. His hokku belonged to that collaborative practice, even when they could stand as poems in their own right. In the late nineteenth century, Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) denounced linked verse and recast haiku as an individual poetic form.¹

Bashō also wrote haibun, a form that brings prose into relation with hokku. Narrow Road to the Interior is an extended example.² Prose and verse alter one another. Each disturbs or redirects what came before.

Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) pursued the autobiographical possibilities of haibun in The Spring of My Life.³ In haiga, haikai verse enters into relation with painting and calligraphy. Sparse imagery, calligraphy and verse act upon one another.⁴

In my view, a related coupling of image and text appears in the critical and personal works of the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, with photographs in place of ink paintings. He refers directly to Japanese poetics in Empire of Signs and Camera Lucida.⁵ Haiga and haibun provide names for structures he leaves unnamed in the latter. I read both forms at work there.

Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes places photographs beside brief passages of his own prose. In my own work, I use photographs more sparingly. Sometimes I pair one with a haiga-inflected, Barthesian caption to draw out subtext, add context or inject a thought. Elsewhere, I leave the image alone. The reader’s gaze remains on the visual. Text waits at the periphery.

On page 58 of Camera Lucida, Barthes’s words direct Robert Mapplethorpe’s Young Man with Arm Extended and extend its narrative.⁶ The excerpt beneath the photograph forms a stylistic wedge. It ‘hijacks’⁷ the image from the neutrality of its attribution and returns it to Barthes’s prose.

How much of this wedge belongs to concept, and how much to the ordinary demands of attribution? Was it Barthes’s intention from the start? Did the page discover itself during typesetting? Or did I discover it through reading?

In my copy, I drew a horizontal line above the attribution. The printed page already separates the two textual registers through type. The attribution appears in uppercase roman lettering and carries the formality of a label. Barthes’s words appear in lowercase italics, enclosed by ellipses. They carry a voice still in motion. Barthes speaks through the photograph.

The page does something stranger than caption the image.

The italicised words are a fragment of a sentence that has not yet arrived.

On the following page, Barthes returns to the hand. A few millimetres more or less would alter the body’s offer. The exact openness of the hand becomes evidence of the photographer’s luck. Mapplethorpe has found the ‘right moment, the kairos of desire’.⁸

The printed excerpt withholds that explanation. It divides the phrase across three lines, surrounds it with ellipses and places it above the formal attribution. Prose becomes a small poem. The phrase reaches the reader first as an image, then as an argument.

The photograph catches the right moment.

The page catches the phrase.

The caption’s three lines contain three, five and five words. They depart from the familiar 5–7–5 model. Their haikuity lies in temporal severance, motion, brevity, and a recognition of what precedes and follows the cut.

The photograph crops the body.

The caption crops the sentence.

The page makes a case for contemporary photographic haiga.

In Empire of Signs, Barthes writes:

The text does not “gloss” the images, which do not “illustrate” the text.⁹

The text brings something new to the image.

The image brings something new to the text.

A semiotic equation might be:

Meaning(Text + Image) > Meaning(Text) + Meaning(Image)

The greater-than sign proposes that the meaning produced by text and image in interaction exceeds the meanings each produces alone.¹⁰

Full-page photographic plates recur throughout Camera Lucida. Read as haiga, these compositions help Barthes stage the punctum¹¹ on the page.

The second half of Camera Lucida turns around the Winter Garden Photograph.¹² Barthes describes its discovery as ‘a sudden awakening, outside of “likeness,” a satori in which words fail’.¹³

In my reading, the Winter Garden Photograph functions as a Lacanian objet petit a, the object-cause around which desire continues to move.¹⁴ A Žižekian reading gives the absent photograph a sublime function within Barthes’s account of loss.¹⁵ The photograph becomes a promise of recovery fixed to an absence.

Barthes discusses the photograph at length and withholds it from the reader. Its absence is structural. I read his narrative around it as haibun, with the unseen photograph occupying the place of haiku. Bruce Ross describes haibun as a ‘narrative of an epiphany’. Haiku ‘offers us an epiphany’.¹⁶

The hidden object drives the text.

In moments of satori, I come as close as possible to it.

Then it relocates itself.