Petals on a Bough, by Will Waltz

Will Waltz on Ezra Pound, poet of haikus

In April 1913 Ezra Pound published this poem, entitled “In a Station of the Metro” -

The apparition   of these faces    in the crowd  :

Petals    on a wet, black    bough.

This, both in its original form with the odd spacing and without, is one of first beautiful haiku written in English, and one of the finest ones written in our language then or since - and it has every right to be called a “haiku”. 

. . .

What is a haiku? It is a Japanese verse that began as an opening line to a longer form called a renga. Because it was supposed to set the tone for the rest of the poem, it had rather strict requirements; it functioned kind of like a guidepost to the beginning of a path, setting an example for other lines in the renga to follow. Over time haiku (also called hokku) composition became detached from the larger form of the renga and became its own creature entirely – but its strict compositional rules remained until well into the 19th century. 

We will tackle the most well-known of requirements first - haiku being written in a 5-7-5 syllable verse. Surprisingly, it is also the most controversial element. Almost every American child has met and exercised this requirement, and while a good step toward understanding syllable and beat structure, not really useful for capturing the spirit of haiku. Take this example:

All children write down

Five-seven-five : twenty-two times.

“Where is my haiku?”

Sure, this meets the form and syllabic requirements, and is a little cute, but would never be accepted as a “classical” haiku for reasons I’ll outline. And even for modern haiku– which eschew many of those requirements– it is so trite and self-referential as to be ugly. (Don’t worry, I wrote it.) We need much more than the right beats in the right places for haiku.

All formal Japanese poetry is written in feet of either five syllables or seven syllables for as long as anyone can remember. Somewhat miraculously we can arrange “Metro” into an English syllable structure of 5-7-7 :

The apparition

of these faces in the crowd:

petals on a wet, black bough.

Pound demonstrates that he understands the 5-7-5 requirement in another classical haiku of his, “Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord” -

O Fan of white silk,

clear as frost on the grass-blade,

You are also laid aside.

So, how was this 5-7-5 form found and brought into English? To answer, it was done very poorly. The first haiku very likely ever printed in English can be found in W.G. Aston’s “A Grammar of the Japanese Written Language” written in 1904, and this is how it is presented:

Into a sea of mist whither

hath Mt. Fuji sunk?

Humble beginnings, but it is clear even to early translators that the strict 5-7-5 was a requirement for Japanese poetry but didn’t fully transliterate to English meter, and it took years for attempts to be made to transfer the syllabic form into English. Furthermore, in English there are x feet for every y lines (sonnets are iambic, have five feet to a line, have fourteen lines, etc.) But haiku are written in all one line down the page in Japanese. 

Ordinarily this would simply be a question of translator’s preference, like whether to render the Commedia as terza rima or prose as you see in older editions. But an additional complication is that Japanese syllable-counting is totally different from English syllable-counting in that there’s on (phonetic units that are what’s counted up in haiku) and what we would consider actual syllables. For example, we would say “Osaka” has three syllables (O-sa-ka) but “Osaka” in Japanese has four on. This leads to our double-bind of word-for-word haiku translation being somewhat unmelodious, as in the Mt. Fuji poem above, but strict 5-7-5 in English (both in translation and in original) don’t represent the intention of the bounds of the haiku.

I am not the first one to notice this and the issue has made itself apparent since haiku entered the English mainstream, with more wishy-washy definitions being made like “the space of a single breath” or “10-14 syllables total”, etc., with some modern English haiku writers agitating for a return to the one-line form. The point I wish to make is that Pound’s expression meets some of the requirements of classical Japanese prosody, though a little unusually, and also reflects the English free expression of image. Note also that “Metro” is nearly a couplet, another column of formal English poetry. In short “Metro” is able to dance around all definitions and requirements- a bird on the wing, avoiding lawyer-hawk capture by any who would wish to disqualify it- even Pound himself, who called it merely “a hokku-like sentence”. 

Haiku, however, is much more than meter. There is the kire or kireji, whose literal meaning is “cutting word”, typically considered a requirement for haiku. The kire is multifunctional– in Japanese, it supports the end of a verse while closing it gracefully and also signals that a new image or idea is upcoming in the next verse. It is much more than what we would consider a stanza break’s function to be in modern English poetry – even more than a simple street sign indicating a new direction that the poem is headed. It is more like a fulcrum on which the two images rest on, balance, combine, and oppose to form the whole image of the haiku. These images do not necessarily have to be opposite, just different, and the kire is what tacks them together in the poem. At the end of the first or second line, a kire indicates both cutting and joining, and at the end of the third line, a kire directs a reader back to the beginning in a kind of circular thought. There are a very rigid number of kire in Japanese, about eighteen classically used in total, and seven or eight most commonly used.

An example from Basho (with Romanization if you wish to read it aloud - I won’t embarrass myself pretending to know kanji here)

yuku haru ya

tori naki uo no

me wa namida

which was translated as 

spring going –

birds crying and tears

in the eyes of fish

“ya” is the kire here, and represents a kind of pattern-matching or interrelationship between “spring going” and “birds crying and tears / in eyes of fish”. 

Here we have another problem of English equivalency. Stanza or line breaks are simply not sufficient to represent the complexity of what the kire does for the poem– neither is there any real kind of “sounded punctuation” in English to represent a similar idea– think about how hard it is to read aloud a question mark or exclamation point without shouting or doing a little California uptalk. Nor do we really have a good set of words that both lend grammatical structure and indicate a new idea (“but” and “and”, in the author’s opinion, are a little too wimpy for this). In “Metro”, however, this idea is still present. Pound simply chooses to use a colon to separate his two images. This style of punctuation-use to approximate a kire works well enough and is quite common in English– The translator of the above example also uses this method, drawing an em dash to indicate the presence of the kire at that line. This method, or simply indication by line break, is what haiku in English are left with, or you can simply jam two images into the one- or two-line spaces and let the reader sort them out. 

(Aside- the strictness upon the impression of the 5-7-5 form in English- but the idea of the kire completely absent, and arguably, more important - when there is no such English equivalent for either? Simply more proof that what is popularly taught in classrooms is at best arbitrary and worst designed for rigidity, conformity, ease… One of my sincere beliefs is that children could be taught kire – Japanese children are!)

Finally there is the kigo, meaning more or less “season word”, which is a different kind of signal word than the kire. It indicates a particular Japanese season (with solstices and equinoxes in the middle of the season rather than at the end). For a foreigner, this is an impossibly complex topic to tackle, as a kigo represents not only weather but also the accouterments, the mood, of a particular season, as well as other famous verses using the same kigo. In fact there’s a whole almanac of kigo that Japanese poets use to accomplish their task– kigo representing all four traditional seasons and the New Year. Some kigo are easy to understand (winter - fuyu - chillness or interiority) and some are exceptionally difficult to use correctly if you are not Japanese (fugu soup - fugujiru - the pufferfish soup, needing three years of training to prepare correctly due to the toxicity of the fish, a particular example of cuisine linked also to winter and several folktales). And while not necessarily considered a “requirement”, due to its history all haiku had a kigo indicating the season it was written in until about 1900, when modernism began to shake the temple of tradition’s columns everywhere. 

Back to our patient subject. “Petals” - flowers, growth- “on a wet” - rain - “black bough”. It is impossible for me, at least, to have an intensive reverie on this line and not think of springtime rain- early, budding springtime rain, the time of the season when the wet blanket of winter is still being shaken off. In this we also imagine the metro “wet”, even though that isn’t explicitly stated - it’s too easy to see squelching boots, rain jackets, umbrellas, liquid footprints overlapping with our “apparitions”. In this way, Pound has successfully approximated a kigo both by remarking on a particular kind of weather and vegetation, and also transferring that idea to the other image of the poem. The haiku, to be ultramodern, is a kind of particle accelerator, in which two images are smashed against each other at blinding speed. The haiku is a readout of the resulting collision. 

Pound had many influences to help him succeed in this endeavor – his circle of Japanese-European friends, French influences who became obsessed with the block print, and new texts from the East coming to light in one capacity or another. But the Imagist sensibility, of dominating, painterly-totality of sight, all things Pound already believed, fuses so neatly with the ideas of haiku that it is simply impossible not to acknowledge “In the Station of the Metro” as one. His stunning feat of reverse-engineering, maybe even “cultural appropriation”, is made no less impressive by his interests and attitudes dovetailing so neatly with haiku thought. Cronenberg states, “Artists are like insects… with more sensitive antennae than most people to pick up things around.” Pound could have written thousands of words to explain why he felt empowered to attempt a “hokku-like sentence” – but he needed only fourteen. And he blessed us with this dewey, enduring example. 

And remember –

A leaf lands gentle from the tree – knife cuts the season.

Will Waltz is a St. Louis-based writer. He contributes often to Apocalypse Confidential. Follow him on Twitter: @20gaShotgun

Illustration: Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis