All right, I admit it: I coined the term “bright image.” (I explain below.) But let me begin with a
question: how many volumes of traditional, formal Chinese, Japanese and/or
Korean poetry do you have on your bookshelf? I’ll wager one, maybe, but more
likely none at all. I’ve combed my shelves all morning and have found next to
nothing, particularly when it comes to the older, more traditional poetry of
these cultures, practiced before missionaries, invaders and colonists brought
their own literary traditions to the capitals and courts of the three kingdoms.
What I’m saying is, you and I were raised on so-called
Western poetry, and probably even less than that. We were taught (I know I was,
and in turn I taught it as well) largely American and British poetry. When we
know so little of Continental poetry and of South American poetry, can we
assume anything at all about Chinese, Japanese and Korean poetry? Why, yes we
can . . . and we often do! Here is what I
assumed about the poetry when I was introduced to it in high school or college:
It was all haiku, and had to be rendered in three lines of
5-7-5 syllables. The first thing that
struck me about this sort of poetry, I remember, was that it felt (sounded,
looked, read) thin. I was steeped
already in American English poetry, or I should say, Poetry, which in my
experience was thick, meaty, intellectual, allusive. As a poetic tradition, mine was a poetry that
rewarded study (and meant keeping a good dictionary on hand). This “Oriental” stuff was quiet, kind of
tinkle-y sounding/looking, and its meaning, if it bore any, was inscrutable to
me, probably because it was written by “inscrutable Orientals.” Occasionally,
the short lyrics I read in college came off as wise and insightful, in the kind
of way that made them ideal for greeting cards.
As for those 5-7-5 syllabications, well, that must just be some kind of
American-English bastardization. Japanese and Mandarin don’t have syllables, do
they?
And these so-called poems looked easy to write, which made
them immediately suspect. They had
nothing to hide, and that made them suspect. They were all surface, and THAT
made them suspect.
Then I started listening to people[1]
who said, no, no, no! This poetry is
ancient and difficult and very wise, and practiced mainly by very accomplished
writers who owned fine literary sensibilities. It came from ancient cultures
that make our own present-day, homogenized/consumer-driven culture look
adolescent and crass. And it is
inaccessible to a modern, Western sensibility: you’ll have to recalibrate your
mind if you ever want to understand this poetry, and that will take a complete
life change. Somebody gimme a beer, will
ya? I still run into this sort of culture reverence when I hear somebody read
their “haiku” today.
Here are some perspectives on so-called “Eastern” poetry
that I’ve developed over the years (with the caveat that very little of it sits
on my bookshelf). It is imagistic, heart
and soul. It is not rhetorical (that is,
not based on structures of argumentation: premise, complication, dialectic,
resolution). It is ornamental in the
best sense of that term—ornate, attractive, adding grace or beauty. Japanese and Chinese poetry especially[2]
show off the image in its most concentrated, often surprising expression:
Ants
are dragging a wing of a
butterfly—
See!
it is like a yacht.
This is where the “bright image” term of the title above
takes me. And I think this is exactly
what we in the West can best appreciate in the poetries of Japan, China and
Korea: imagery that constitutes a verbal icon.
Did you know that Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro” started out
as a poem of almost 40 lines? Poems like the one quoted above (written by a
modern poet of Japan, Tatsuji Miyoshi) are models of compression, distillation,
the essence of a moment’s impression. They are suggestive as opposed to
descriptive or narrational or
referential. They are “verbal icons.” They (usually) are acutely visual—“See!”—and
unalloyed, never ironic. They are meant
to convey the “speaker’s” surprise, not his or her intellectual prowess, and
thus they are meant to suggest a relation to the world that is intimate, organic
and momentary.
So traditional poetry of China, Japan, Korea does not
necessarily incorporate wisdom or insight of any kind, other than the surprise
of a moment in a kind of objective-correlative way (to use T.S. Eliot’s famous
term). It’s not written to show off how sensitive, smart or insightful the poet
is, or how “above” the rest of us he or she is in terms of perception and
feeling. (That kind of individual exceptionalism is a product of the Western
Romantic tradition—and another misappropriation of another culture’s
literature.)
Beyond these impressions, I can say that so-called Eastern
poetry is extremely conservative, anti-Romantic. It seeks to preserve traditional, courtly
life and hierarchies. It is highly
rules-bound, or was. And yes, highly
syllabic. It is non-social in the sense that it is either occasional (written
to commemorate), or personal, private, and of the moment. It is class-oriented. At one time, especially in China, writing
poetry was a pre-requisite of the educated class. It is non-democratic, though perhaps not
anti-democratic.[3]
So, how do you write this kind of poem? Let’s find out by trying!
[1]
Such as Prof. Willis Barnestone of Indiana University, Ezra Pound, Kenneth
Rexroth, Gary Snyder.
[2]
Setting aside Korean poetry which, apparently, is constructed more with
sound/song in mind than pure visual imagery. Early Korean poetry was recited
(sung) in the courts and in the fields, suggesting it is traditionally more
social than the poetries practiced in China and Japan.
[3]
Again, this last characteristic seems to be less prevalent in Korean poetry, or
so I am told.
