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Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters

24 September 2005:


old pond . . .

its silence
at last broken

by the sound
of a frog's splash-
in

No, I don't consider my poem above a translation of Basho's famous pond haiku. Well, maybe it is, who knows. I wrote it just now after reading the excellent essay Michael Dylan Welch wrote for the 1995 issue of Spring, the journal of the E. E. Cummings Society. Welch has William J. Higginson's translation of the poem: "old pond . . ./ a frog jumps in/ water's sound." I find this undramatic, unresonant. I continue to prefer my own:


old pond . . .

then, abruptly,
the sound

of a frog's splash-
in

which may be slightly different from my last version, and is more to the point, and less perhaps intrusively reader-directing than the version I started this entry with. For me, the poem is mainly about permanence versus emphermality, so should unfocus into a frog's jumping into the sound it makes hitting the water, however interesting that may be (but probably wasn't on Higginson's mind when he made his translation).

Didn't mean to get into all that. Just wanted to comment a bit on Welch's essay. To start with, to get it out of the way, I have one minor disagreement with Welch. It's about the following poem by Cummings:

It's in the Cummings essay I've been working on. About it, I said no more than, "A prettily spouting choo-choo train I'm including simply because I like it. But do note the wonderful poem-ending disconcealment from "violets" of "oh, let's!" Welch mentions it as haiku-like but disqualifies it as a haiku for having too many syllables (33) and "because the depiction of sky as candy is a metaphor." I go against the traditionalist objection to the use of metaphor in haiku (although I do agree that Cummings's poem has too many syllables to be considered a haiku). As I've argued several times before, it seems to me nearly all the best haiku have juxtaphors (i.e., implicit metaphors). Not an argument worth re-making, but it gave me a chance to showcase another Cummings poem, so I'm not deleting it.

Oops, looks like I'm going to keep the dispute going. Welch quotes the following haiku of Basho (in a translation by Harold G. Henderson):


Won't you come and see
loneliness?  Just one leaf
from the kiri tree.

Welch uses this poem as the clincher of a long, very persuasive and informative (and entertaining) attempt to show how proper it is to consider Cummings's "l(a" to be a haiku. But, ho, doesn't Basho's haiku consist of nothing but an explicit metaphor? The same metaphor that Cumming's poem depends on (although in his poem it is a juxtaphor)? Case made, yes?

Even if I disagreed with everything Welch said, and I think I agree with everything else he said as fully as anyone can agree with anything, I would still enthusiastically value his essay if only for this from Cummings:


dim
i
nu 
tiv

e this park is e
mpty(everyb
ody's elsewher
e except me 6 e

nglish sparrow
s)a
utumn & t
he rai

n
th
e
raintherain

It's from 95 Poems. I must have read it before, but it seemed new. I wonder if it was influenced by Robert Lax. I suspect when I previously read it, I was not as appreciative of things like "t/ he rai// n/ th/ e/ raintherain" as my involvement with Lax's work made me quite some time after my most fervent exploration of Cummings. I find it a better poem than "i(a" because it doesn't (pardon the cliche) tell us it's about loneliness, but shows us. And shows us the development of a rain (beautifully fore-shadowed by the disconcealed "dim").

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