Dark Wings of the Night: Ezra Pound's View of Hokku/Haiku

All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

One is tired of ornamentations, they are all a trick, and any sharp person can learn them.

The Japanese have had the sense of exploration. They have understood the beauty of this sort of knowing. A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku.

    "The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

        A butterfly."

That is the substance of a very well-known hokku. Victor Plarr tells me that once, when he was walking over snow with a Japanese naval officer, they came to a place where a cat had crossed the path, and the officer said," Stop, I am making a poem." Which poem was, roughly, as follows: --

    "The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:

        (are like) plum-blossoms."

The words "are like" would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.

The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --

    "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

        Petals, on a wet, black bough."

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. I a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

-- excerpted from Ezra Pound's A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916, pp. 88-9.


Note: For more information about Pound's "metro poem," see To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Poem,” and Poetic Musings: Ezra Pound’s "Metro Poem" as a Yugen Haiku . And for more information about Pound's conception of  super-position, see To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position

Poetic Musings: The Oldest of Basho's Datable Poems

Because spring started on the twenty-ninth

was it spring that came

or was it the year that went?

the Second Last Day

According to Makoto Ueda, this poem is the oldest of Basho's datable poems, which was composed on February 7, 1663 (29th of the 12th month, knows as the Second Last Day). It includes a prefatory note, which indicates that the spring of 1663 arrived two days earlier. Without this note, Ls 1&2 are confusing. It's because spring would normally start on the lunar New Year's Day. However, “in a rare year, as was the case here, the first day of spring arrived one or more days earlier” (p. 19) This unusual occurrence had inspired a lot of Japanese poets to write poems that could convey their feelings or thoughts. Below are two examples included in classical Japanese literature:

Before the year

is gone, spring has come.

Those remaining days --

What shall we call them,

the old year or the new year?

Ariwara Motokata (888-953)

Was it you who came

or was it I who went?

I do not remember ...

Was I asleep or awake,

was that dream or reality?

Ise (speculated)

(“a poem sent by a woman to her lover after their night together) (p. 19)

Armed with this intertextual knowledge, we can appreciate Basho's skill in parodying the temporal sense of the first waka and the form of the second one (p. 20). More importantly, even without this knowledge, we still can see that through the opening question, Basho encourages readers to see time from different perspectives. This poem is our today’s food for thought.

Note:

The second waka (ancient name for tanka) is included in The Tales of Ise,  a collection of waka poems and associated narratives, dating from the Heian period. The current version  is made up of 125 sections, with each combining poems and prose.

Below is excerpted from Section 69 of The Tales of Ise

From midnight until three in the morning they stayed together there, but in the end she returned to her quarters without exchanging vows of love. The man felt extremely sad, and could not sleep. The next morning, while wondering if he might not send one of his own attendants over to her, sat, feeling extremely empty and forlorn, waiting for her message. A little while after dawn, her poemcame, but without a message.

Was it you who came?
Or I who went?
I donʹt know if it was a dream or reality,
If I was sleeping or awake.

The man, sobbing in profound grief, sent this poem.

I am lost in the gloom of my darkened heart
Whether it was dream or reality
Let us find out tonight.

He then set out for the hunt. Although he was in the field, his heart was in the sky. He thought that he must send everyone off to bed and at least meet with her tonight. But the governor of the province, who was also the administrator responsible for the shrine, had heard that the imperial huntsman was there.

 

Reference:

 Makoto Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Poetic Musings: Basho’s First Hokku in the Karumi Style

under the tree

soup, fish salad, and all --

cherry blossoms

On April 10, 1690, Basho wrote the hokku above to start a 36-verse kasen at a blossom-viewing party in Ueno. When he wrote it, Basho said, "Having learned something about writing a verse on blosssom viewing, I gave a tone of Karumi ("lightness") 1 to this hokku (Ueda, p.286)

The middle phrase -- "soup" and "fish salad" -- of this hokku suggests "a realm of haikai that is alien to waka." (ibid.) Basho uses mundane words to suggest, not the gazing at cherry blossoms constantly found in classical poetry, but the festivity of eating and drinking, and his hokku  reveals "[his tendency to seek poetry in things familiar" (ibid.)

In the last years of his life, Basho experimented with the karumi style that “emphasized simplicity and ordinary language and situations,” (Shirane, p. 23) and the verse anthology, Charcoal Sack, was considered by some of his followers, called Rural Shomon poets, as the “epitome of good haikai.” (ibid., p. 28)

Note: Like so many of Basho's critical terms, karumi defies easy definition. In its most general form, as a salient characteristic of Japanese art from cooking to painting, "lightness" is a minimalist aesthetic, stressing simplicity and leanness. For Basho, it meant a return to everyday subject matter and diction, a deliberate avoidance of abstraction and poetic posturing, and relaxed, rhythmical, seemingly artless expression (Shirane, p. 26)

References:

Makoto Ueda, Bashō and his interpreters: selected hokku with commentary, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1991,

Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.