In a Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals, on a wet, black bough.

In a Station of the Metro - Analysis

Ezra Pound is most well known for his infamously impenetrable Cantos, however I brought him up today so we can have a look at another quasi-haiku. Like Salinger's haiku, which would appear almost 50 years later, Pound sought to represent something like a haiku in English. However, Pound was content to start with the haiku as his inspiration and interpret it through the artistic school of Vorticism. As he explains in his own words: "Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that - a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. . . . "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." 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." -Ezra Pound from Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916

Untitled Haiku --- by J.D. Salinger

The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
To look at me.

Untitled Haiku by J.D. Salinger --- Analysis

J.D. Salinger is not generally thought of as a poet. His only attempts at publishing poetry, 15 poems he submitted to the New Yorker, were rejected and never saw the light of day. All the same, this being the one year anniversary of Salinger's death, it feels appropriate to say something about the late, great Salinger.

Like many people, I was introduced to Salinger through The Catcher in the Rye in high school, and only later in life came across his other works. Salinger is one of my all time favorite authors, and his prose knocks me out like none other. In fact, in a certain sense you could say that all of Salinger's writings are but extended works of poetry. In another more accurate sense, however, you could say that original poetry only appears two times in his books.

The first would be the haiku published as part of "Zooey" in 1957, the slim novella about Seymour's younger brother Zooey Glass. Later on in "Seymour - An Introduction" we are told by Seymour's brother that Seymour, “probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes . . . in Japanese, German, or Italian).”

In fact, Buddy claims that the haiku published above is one he found written in Japanese on the desk blotter of the room Seymour occupied in "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and that it was written in “straight, classical-style haiku”.

Buddy was, he claims in the story, the one who translated the poem from Japanese to English - which raises an unusual issue. One of the essential features of classical haiku is the use of "kigo" or language that denotes the season the poem is taking place. These are often difficult for foreign language speakers to pick up on, since these terms are often only tangentially related to the season itself (for example, "frog" in a haiku connotes Spring, and "moon" connotes autumn). What we can be certain of, is that none of the words Salinger uses in his haiku are "kigo" which implies either that either Buddy isn't very familiar with classical haiku structure, or that Salinger isn't. Reading on through "Seymour - an introduction" raises further issues of Buddy's reliability as a narrator, but that is the topic for another day.

The other short burst of original poetry in Salinger's prose is much more elusive. In 1947 Salinger published a short story called "The Inverted Forest" in Cosmopolitan magazine. Salinger subsequently blocked the story from ever being reprinted and it was only available on microfilm in library archives up through the decades before some enterprising soul uploaded it to the Internet. The story regards the life of a brilliant young poet named Ray Ford. Although Ford's poetry is lauded as incredible throughout the story, we never get to see any - except for one couplet.

“Not a wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all the foliage underground.”

It's a beautiful line, made all the more beautiful by the context - the wasteland, or forest rather, is the main character of the piece, a young woman named Corinne.

Even though both these poems are very short, they convey in their brief lines the depth, melancholy and approachability of Salinger's prose. They are also both tantalizing parts of a suggested greater whole - the copious haiku's of Seymour Glass and Ray Ford's body of work - which the reader will never be privy to. In that way perhaps they represent J.D. Salinger's works most of all - works which, even before his death, were barred from readers by all means save through the tantalizing power of imagination.

A Dream Deferred --- by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Democracy --- by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

Analysis --- Democracy by Langston Hughes

This poem is another great example of Langston Hughes' deep reading of America, and another cry for it's enfranchised citizens to not simply sweep the disenfranchised into the gutter. This was a particularly bold stand to take in 1949, when Hughes released the poem, but remains relevant today in its cry for freedom.

I chose this poem because it continues on the theme of yesterday's poem, not to mention that it fits nicely with framing of the president's State of the Union address last night.

Let's look again at the universality of Hughes declaration. We know that he was a black man, born into unjust times, but though that is the source of his poem's emotion it is not bound by it. This poem's narrator stays clear of identifying himself explicitly as black, or any other minority group, and in doing so the poem becomes a rallying cry for freedom that echoes through the ages.

His language, again, is as strikingly strong and direct - so much so that there is little need for analysis. The simple lines "I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. / I cannot live on tomorrow's bread," is so simply put, and with such spare beauty, that it is surprising it has not been co-opted by hawks at large as a stirring justification for, say, military intervention in Iraq.

Just as with yesterday's poem, there is little to be said about the scansion. Hughes is primarily a writer of the vulgar, in subject matter as well as form. For meter he favors the uneven vocal patterns of everyday speech and for his verses blank rhyme interspersed with simple rhymes that lend strength to the key lines. This was a particularly unusual style to have during the time that Hughes first began to be published - in the 1920's when many modernist poets and authors were writing from the extreme opposite pole of esoteric obtuseness and high pretension (a la Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot).

We'll look at another Hughes poem tomorrow as we continue to explore his bold take on America and his position as a poet vulgarian, writing for all, that served to displease so many.