Student: (Allen, what about the sound in (haiku) poems?)
AG: Oh,
sure. There's a whole sound (presented) in
certain of these books, if you want the sound. These books by (R.H.) Blyth, he'll give you the Japanese lettering, he'll very often
give you some phonetic transmission of the Japanese sound, as well as,
incidentally, explanations, footnotes, and comparisons to Western poems.
Sound is important. It's a seventeen-syllable machine, with certain kinds of internal rhymes, and certain phrases like "ah", or "oh", or "kana" - "kana" - which are used for emphasis and filler of syllables. Filler meaning filler emphasis-isms.
Student: (I also recall that in Japanese some of
them sound like (perhaps) another word)
AG:
Right.
Student: (Sound. Content. Precision)
AG: And
Blyth points out that you probably find more haiku in precise prose than you might in poetry, (or at least in the
nineteenth-century poetry - Tennyson and
the Georgian poets - that Blyth was brought up on - he, being an older man, who was brought up in 1910, reading British poets before Pound, before (Ezra) Pound's influence of
sharpening direct treatment of the object). So he points out that prose probably offers more haiku than poetry.
However,
the point of these that I'm reading is the mind-jumps, the mind-gaps, the
space- jumps, the time-jumps, the two poles of image (one, and another that you
fill in with your imagination, conjuring up in your mind
space/time/compression), with the mother eating the astringent parts of the persimmons - that what is unnameable is
conjured up in imagination by the coordinates in actual space and time
perceivable (or space and time
themselves are suggested in all their vastness by tiny coordinates contained
within them). So it's the mind
content, or mental content, or structure, that is perceptual (the structure of perceptions in haiku that I was trying to manifest with
these), rather than the technical poetic aspects of number of syllables - seventeen - filler-words used, history of them, or assonance. There's quite a bit of assonance in them, and internal
rhyme.
There's
a repeat of one that I did before
but in larger [form]:
Misty
rain on Mount Ro, the
incoming tide at Sekko
Before
you have been there, you
have many regrets,
When
you have been there and come back,
It
is just simply misty rain on Mount Ro, the
incoming tide at Sekko.
And
parallel to that:
This
New Years Day
that
has come at last
just
another day.
New
Years Day
the
hot just as it is
nothing
to ask for
The scissors hesitate
before
the white chrysanthemums
a
moment.
Does
anybody have (William Carlos) Williams' Collected Later Poems
here? Well, there's a Williams poem about.. "The Act", I think it's called:
There
were roses, in the rain.
Don't
cut them, I pleaded. They won't last, she said.
But they're
so beautiful where they are.
Agh,
We were all beautiful once, she said
and cut them and
gave them to me in my hand.
The
scissors hesitate
before
the white chrysanthemums
a
moment.
So, what's conjured up there? The scissorer is hardly mentioned. It's
just the action, and seeing the action of the scissors themselves hesitating
before the white chrysanthemums you have the whole philosophy of emotions. A whole philosophy of emotions and
reactions and sensitivities and philosophies about transitoriness.
Similar
to that:
Ah!
grief and sadness
the
fishing line trembles
in
the autumn breeze.
You can take that any way you want - whether the wind is rippling the
fishing rod, or the hand holding the rod is trembling.
I'm
almost done with these, actually. tape breaks here
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