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You must have heard about the Japanese poem, haiku. It is the smallest poetry form in the world – seventeen syllables only – but one of the most penetrating. The word ‘haiku’ means ‘the beginning’. This is a tremendous significance – the word haiku means the beginning.
The haiku poets say: We only begin, we never end.
The poet begins, the listener has to complete it. If a poem is complete with the poet then nothing is left for the listener. Then the listener will be just a spectator. Then the act is not creative – in fact, it is dangerous.
The poet, the real poet, never completes. He leaves something incomplete. He gives hints and leaves gaps: those gaps have to be fulfilled by you. Then the transfer is creative. The poet sings a song, ripples are created in your consciousness, and you complete the song in your innermost core of being.
The poet begins it, you complete it.
Then you are joined in one creative process: the painter begins it, then the person who looks at the painting completes it.
Osho, The Divine Melody, Ch 4, Q 2
rupafitz 
Needless to say, the last thing I want to be is pendantic, well OK the 7th last thing, but a haiku doesn’t really have to have 17 syllables; that it just a Western interpretation and apparently an erroneous one at that.
A single leaf
touches earth
the crash of distant thunder
Nor are haiku the smallest type of poem, what about these:
Practical awakening casts theory to the winds
And plunges in
Company in the void
Now you’re talking
The squeal of tyres
Returns the road to silence
The surprise of delight
Intermittent chirping
Punctuates the silence
The fury of a hurricane
From the depths of stillness
Although the above poems may well invoke individual responses/associations are they incomplete? Is the reader’s participation necessarily one of completion?
I think so.
Take for instance one of your poems:
The squeal of tyres
Returns the road to silence.
The completion involved is to actually picture the scene and experience the silence.
If the poet had felt the need to explain that the sudden sound highlighted the silence through contrast it would have stuffed the whole thing up. And to have tried to explain the subtle difference between using the word “returns” rather than some other word would have put the final nail in the coffin of this wonderful little “haikooie type poem”.
By the way, are these all yours?
Beautifully put, Rupa, but I don’t get why a smug poem or a didactic poem is dangerous.
Hi Thea,
As I believe you have understood the idea is that any communication of poetic truth must be open enough to allow for the “Aha!” of completion to come in the mind of the other because this gives more space for the fact that the map is not the terrain, the word is not the thing and that the real meaning /the truth behind any poetic utterance is an experience in the subjectivity of the individual. To box this kind of truth in, or to try to, only turns it into something dead.
Osho’s use of the word dangerous here may be because he was actually talking about the Haiku in the context of the master disciple relationship, where this openness to the subjectivity of the other, this ultimate respect for individual uniqueness is paramount. And the lack of it leads to consequences of which we are all, I am sure, aware.
When he says “The haiku poets say: We only begin, we never end.” It brings to mind an insight I once had about fascism and it’s roots within each one of us in the idea of “a final solution”. That one day we can get everything perfect, complete and neatly parcelled away, when all we can do is live each new moment in truth and see what happens next in this constantly expanding universe.