Sprague’s Haiku

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Sprague, the hero of my novel, Mara, Marietta, is a poet and a rock song lyricist. It is entirely natural, then, that he resorts to haiku (and poetry and lyric-writing) whenever he is reliving, during the process of writing—he is the narrator of the novel that turns out to be a long love letter to the heroine, Marietta—emotions and thoughts that overwhelm discursive language. The haiku intermingle with the prose and poetry as Sprague passes organically from one mode to another. As Mara, Marietta aims to sustain a heightened sense of being from the first word to the last, the reader will therefore find no sharp distinction between poetry, haiku and prose, but rather a continuum.

Touch me, fatal sister.
Come, possess and destroy me:
Infect me with love.

Bite me, pollute me,
Mingle your blood with mine:
Take the stone from my mouth.

Your diamond-dust shoes—
Hand them down to me, big sister:
I’ll be your bridesmaid

Dreamfall, the dagger
Between your teeth: Fervent,
The rose flaunts its thorns

Starlight! Out of the rose
Cold brilliance takes the spectre:
You give it back the ghost

Enough! The horror
Of being incomprehensible: Love me
Till I’m intelligible

Algae bloom
In spring frost: A hint of green
In your fingernail gloss.

In wisps of blonde
Earrings sway: From the treadmill of events
Time breaks away.

Fall of hair, lake through leaves:
Sifting what she knows
From what she believes

The tremble of lust,
Gold leaf on squirrel brush:
My lips on your lips

Blowing your hair, the wind
Hides your face: Into the open
My ardour is driven

Parted, poised to spread,
Your lips pause: The eternal
In the instant

Vertigo, recall—
Your prophetic dignity:
You are leaving me

Drawing on the notion of two visual images that unite to create an image that is different to both, Ezra Pound invented the term ‘Imagisme’ in the summer of 1912. The Imagiste manifesto’s exhorted poets to ‘Go in fear of abstractions’ and not to use ‘an expression such as dim lands of peace because it dulls the image by mixing an abstraction with the concrete’. Pound’s demand, likewise, that poets ‘Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something’ is aimed at the habit of writers of fixed forms to ‘put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush’. In haiku, strictly fitting the words to the 5-7-5 syllable pattern goes against the Imagiste tenet ‘to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’. Pound gave an account of the composition of ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Unable to put into words his experience of getting out of a train at the Concorde metro station and seeing ‘a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another’, he wrote, ‘only the other night it struck me that in Japan, one might make a very little poem which would be translated as follows’:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound’s reception of haiku was influenced by the analogy of this poetic form with painting. While describing how he struggled to put his ‘beautiful experience’ into words, Pound ‘could get nothing but spots of colour’. The transition from ‘beautiful faces’ to ‘spots of colour’ is a visual abstraction that allows for the ambiguity of the spots to resemble both faces and petals. This recalls the ambiguity of the ‘spots of colour’ in a Whistler painting. Whistler was on Pound’s mind when he wrote ‘In a Station of the Metro’. In his ‘Vorticism’ essay, Pound sought to explain the group’s approach. The article opens with Whistler’s statement comparing the conveying of emotion ‘by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours’ with that of music. Pound goes on to note Whistler’s assertion that ‘the picture is interesting because it is an arrangement in colour.’ He then expands his account of the composition of ‘In a Station of the Metro’: the new school of painting that he thinks of founding upon the emotion of seeing the faces at Concorde is now a non-representative one: painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour. It is from Whistler and the Japanese, Pound claimed, that the world learned to enjoy arrangements of colours and masses.

By the arrangement of visual detail to constitute the non-visual image, Pound also emphasized the importance of avoiding the decay of images into figures of speech. ‘All poetic language’, he argues, ‘is the language of exploration’; that is, exploration for the new metaphor that ‘arrests your mind’. After offering the example of a child who uses ‘the language of art’ by asking to ‘open the light’, Pound writes that ‘the Japanese have had this sense of exploration. They have understood the beauty of this kind of knowing’. He then cited his version of the Moritake ‘butterfly’ haiku:

The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.

For Pound, the haiku is an original metaphor: it is an arrangement of two comparable elements. Its ability to achieve this effect of originality, however, depends upon its appearance in translation: it can only do so when shorn of its allusions to its literary and religious contexts in Japanese. Moritake’s haiku refers to a passage from a medieval Zen text which it playfully reverses. A more educated reader would not read it as merely a visual comparison. In much the same way, Pound’s view of Japanese prints as ‘arrangements in colour’ rather than allusive works that refer to a network of antecedents is based on their removal from their Japanese contexts. In this way, translation—whether from literary texts or visual art—became an essential vehicle for Imagist and Vorticist poetry to achieve their aim of metaphorical originality. Haiku functions, then, as an important model for Pound’s Imagist poetics of concision, concretion and arrangement, as well as for his Vorticist superposition. However, the originality of such metaphors for Pound was generated by their translation into a different cultural context.