Writing with wu-shih

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I ran a workshop at the Wise Words festival in Canterbury a couple of weeks ago. This is an excellent community arts event with an ambition to “inspire wonder and engage curiosity.”

People were certainly curious about my writing with constraints session. I’d hoped that maybe eight people might turn up. Two minutes before start time I had just one. But then a stream of people flooded in. There were so many that I joked about how we might want to barricade the doors. And then when even more came I thought I might have to start turning them away.

In the end, I counted 23 writers, which was great. Many of them had never been to a writing workshop before, which was lovely.

I read a book about Zen philosophy over the summer – Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen – and some of the ideas I encountered there bubbled up when we started to write some Haiku. Watts has a wonderful chapter about Zen arts, where he discusses archery, kendo and bonseki, as well as poetry. Haiku, he says, quoting the great Japanese master Basho, should be written in the spirit of “wu-shih” – the thought that the poem is “nothing special”.

If you call yourself a poet – never mind a writer – you take on a weighty burden of cultural baggage. I’m inspired by Basho’s belief that poetry – and Haiku in particular – can be written by ordinary people, for ordinary people. Yes, some people are gifted writers, but that shouldn’t discourage other people from having a go and using a form like Haiku to examine their experience of the world. As Watts says:

“The point of these [Zen] arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.”

Yep, that kind of sums up the approach I’m trying to encourage with these workshops. Watts also says: “A good Haiku … invites the listener to participate instead of leaving him dumb with admiration while the poet shows off.” People in the workshop participated, wrote words and shared them with each other, if they felt like it. That makes me very happy.

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