VIETNAMESE MODERN POETRY
DINH MINH HANG
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements of the University of Bolton
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Abstract i
Acknowledgements ii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 7
From Imagism to Surrealism and their Initial Influences on Vietnamese Poetry
Chapter 2 26
From Japanese Haiku Poetry to Ezra Pound’s Poetry in Haiku Form
Chapter 3 46
Experimental Poetry and its Effects on Vietnamese Innovative Poets
Chapter 4 80
Symbolism, Baudelaire and the Vietnamese ‘New Poetry Movement’
Chapter 5 110
Gertrude Stein’s Writings and the Possible Influences of Tender Buttons in Vietnamese Poetry
Chapter 6 134
Surrealist Theory in the case of René Magritte, Mina Loy and Surrealism in Vietnam
Conclusion 192
Bibliography 198
Appendix 212
Abstract
This thesis moves from a study of poetic theory to poetic practice and examines the interaction between Western and Vietnamese poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to specific issues, forms and individual poets.
As a Vietnamese student studying in England, I have found at least two main areas of interest and concern: one is the impact of Western poetry on Vietnamese poetry, and the other is the acknowledgement by some Western poets that they have been profoundly influenced by Eastern writing. With my native awareness of Eastern ideologies in poetry, I also examine non-Western literary traditions and avant-garde approaches in the light of these parallels. To the best of my knowledge, no previous research has ever been conducted in this area.
In Chapter 1, Western theories and the practice of Imagism are considered. These are crucial areas in terms of offering a new approach to East-West borrowing, understanding and misunderstanding. Chapter 2 compares Imagist poetry with Haiku, a Japanese traditional form, and proposes a way of understanding Pound’s Imagist poems according to Zen and Eastern culture. Chapters 3 and 4 indicate parallel Western and Eastern innovations in literature and society in Vietnam from the 1930s onwards. I find that there have been different ‘wars’ in modern Vietnamese poetry as Vietnamese poets have struggled with ‘writing a poem’ and ‘being a poet’. Those ‘wars’ are between ancient Chinese poetry and Vietnamese script poetry; between Eastern ideologies of morality and beauty and Western concepts of freedom in poetry; between traditional Vietnamese poetry and Thơ
m i (‘New Poetry Movement’) in Vietnam, which was influenced by Frenchớ
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Bolton, School of the Arts, Research and Graduate School, The University of Bolton library, and the Immigration and Welfare office for great supports to my research.
I would like to send my most sincere gratitude to Professor Jon Glover, my first supervisor, whose each lecture was a suggestive and joyful academic journey, whose encouragement became one of the most motivating in my PhD life. From his most patient and inspiring supervision, I understand and receive an extreme enthusiasm in Western poetry, by which I hope to contribute to my national Vietnamese modern poetry.
I wish to gratefully acknowledge my second supervisor Professor Michael Schmidt for his precious supervision and suggestions in my writing and translation work.
I would like to convey my gratitude to Professor David Rudd, who first accepted my research proposal and showed generous support in my academic procedure.
I wish to special thank Professor Makiko Minow-Pinkney and Mr. Paul Rowe for their initial supervisions and willingness to support in my study.
I save each poetry group meeting time in our familiar Research room with Professor Glover and my fellow PhD students: Dr. Stella Pye, Dr. Phil Isherwood, and Dr. Owen Lowery as among the best moments in my life, in which I lived in their poems and their contributed academic suggestions. Thank you all indeed.
I wish to express my gratitude to the Vietnamese Government for awarding me the PhD Scholarship, the Department of International Education in Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training and Vietnamese Embassy for supporting me during my research in the United Kingdom, Hanoi National University of Education for introducing me to this award and my Vietnamese supervisors and fellow lecturers in Faculty of Philology for their encouragement for me to pursue the PhD.
I owe my family and friends for their unconditional caring and supporting. I wish to specially thank my father Dinh Van Son, my mother Pham Thai Ha, my husband Nguyen Anh Tu, my sister Dinh Phuong Hoa, my uncle Dinh Van Thien, my relatives in Bac Ninh home province, Dr. Pham Trong Nghia, and Ms. Anita Parmar.
I dedicate this thesis to Dr. Stella Pye, whom I regard as my Grandmother in the United Kingdom and my daughter Daisy, who showed me how to make ‘challenges into opportunities’.
Introduction
This thesis aims to compare Western and modern Vietnamese poetry. The thesis addresses the ways in which Eastern poetry has been influenced by Western theories and how some Western poets have been inspired by traditional Eastern thinking.
As a person born in 1986 – the first year of economic reforms in Vietnam - I understand the gap between the socialist economy before 1986, which depended on state subsidies, and the market economy after 1986 in my country. I was aware of the social conditions of Vietnamese economy before 1986, when each Vietnamese person regardless of age or what job he did was paid the same and most of the country’s income came from socialist countries’ aid. I then grew up in a new Vietnam, which was being constantly reformed, and which began to learn about the West, established economic co-operation with Western countries and normalised relations with the United States. Thus, the generation after 1986 was allowed to study English instead of Russian in high school and started to explore the West. Through learning the English language, young Vietnamese poets approached British and American poems. Following the redevelopments of 1986, many Vietnamese poets who had written during the American-Vietnamese war were restored. Thus, through my own personal experience and analysis from a Vietnamese perspective, I wish to contribute a mutual understanding between Vietnam, an Eastern country, and Western countries with regard to modern poetry.
I use the term Western ‘Modern poetry’ to mean modern poetry written in English (including poetry from Ireland, the whole of the United Kingdom and the United States). I also refer to poetry translated into English (e.g. from French) to illustrate the ways in which Western poetic theory and practice have been disseminated worldwide and in particular to Vietnam. Another reason for choosing to consider French and American poetry is the extensive passive influences of French and American poetry and culture during the wars in Vietnam in the twentieth century.
use in researching Vietnamese poetry. Vietnamese poetry does not exactly follow the main theories of Western ‘modern poetry’, and has no known representatives abroad.
There may be some acknowledgment in Vietnam of Western influences on Vietnamese poetry. In ‘M t s v n đ xung quanh ph m trù ch nghĩa hi n đ i’ộ ố ấ ề ạ ủ ệ ạ 1 (On the Category of Modernism), L i Nguyên Ân offers an understanding ofạ
Western (mainly French), Russian and American modernist history and gives some examples of pioneers among Vietnamese poetic groups from 1930 onwards. Some translations into Vietnamese of modern Western theory and practice, such as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge2 by Jean-Francois Lyotard, and A Room of One’s Own3 by Virginia Woolf, have encouraged understanding of
modernism in Vietnam. Trang Ng c Doãn Caoọ 4 discusses some modernist aspects of typical Vietnamese poets, and Paul Hoover and Nguyen Do present a more detailed picture of contemporary Vietnamese poetry in ‘The New Horizon’5 with poems from before and after 1975 (the time when North and South Vietnam were unified).
Based on my research of leading modern Vietnamese poets Tr n D n, Lê Đ t,ầ ầ ạ
Dương Tường, T H u, Vũ Hoàng Chố ữ ương, L u Tr ng L and Nh Huy in 2007ư ọ ư ư 6, I would like to identify the Western influences on representatives of modern Vietnamese poetry and to propose a new way of reading, studying and writing a modern poem. I want to suggest that the defining terms and possible influences of Western poetry have often been misunderstood until now (2017) in Vietnam. Therefore, I hope to group modern Western poets into specific periods to compare with groups in the East, bearing in mind the time differentials in terms of development at different moments and at different speeds in different countries.
1 L i Nguyên Ân, ‘M t S V n Đ Xung Quanh Ph m Trù Ch Nghĩa Hi n Đ i’, ạ ộ ố ấ ề ạ ủ ệ ạ H p L u t p san văn ợ ư ậ h c ngh thu t biên kh oọ ệ ậ ả , 9 (2008).
2 Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984).
Jean-François Lyotard (trans. by Bùi Văn Nam S n), ơ Hoàn c nh h u hi n đ iả ậ ệ ạ (Hanoi: Nhà xu t b nấ ả Tri th c, 2007). ứ
3 Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own (St Albans: Triad, 1977).
Virginia Woolf (trans by Tr nh Y Th ), Căn phòng riêng (Hanoi: Nhà xu t b n Tri th c, 2009). ị ư ấ ả ứ
4 Trang Ngoc Doan Cao, ‘Bodily Impacts: Locating Vietnamese Moderinsm in the Contact Zones’,
PhD thesis (California: University of California), 2014.
5 Nguyen Do, and Paul Hoover, ed., Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry
(Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2008), p. XI.
It cannot be denied that the arrival of the French at the beginning of the twentieth century brought Western ideology to Vietnam. However, it must have been after 1975, when the unification of Vietnam led to a change of ‘authority’ in recognising and publishing poetry, that Vietnamese poets started to deliver a ‘modern’ approach. This was about fifty years later than modernism in Western poetry.
The influence of different modes of writing led to the use of Latin script to put the Vietnamese language on paper. Some Vietnamese poets in ‘Th m i’ (New Poetryơ ớ
Movement: 1930-1945) read Baudelaire, Valéry and Rimbaud in French and declared that those Symbolist poets had inspired them7. However, besides French poetry, which used to be taught in high school in Vietnam at the beginning of the twentieth century, Vietnamese poets did not know about Western poetry or groups associated with writers such as T.S. Eliot, F.S. Flint, Hilda Doolittle or Ezra Pound. After that, the period from 1945 to 1954 represents a long pause in Vietnamese poetry. As a requirement of the communist revolution, modern Vietnamese poetry removed all influences from the French and came back to traditional writings. They closed their poetic door without knowing anything about the post-World War II poetry of the West. After 1954, whilst North Vietnam continued to maintain poetry under its political ideology, South Vietnam, with sponsors from America, responded to the time gap between Western and Vietnamese poetry by reading and writing poetry like the American poets. From 1960 to 1975, for the first time, Vietnamese poets and readers knew about Pound and Eliot. Also for the first time, American poets like Allan Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara were introduced in Vietnam through public poetry readings.8 Those particular Western poets did not help to form another movement in modern Vietnamese poetry. However, they contributed a different perspective for Vietnamese poets towards specific Western theories and movements. The American influences on poetry, in my view, were profound and unrestricted. For example, Bùi Giáng9 expressed a kind of ‘surrealist poetry’ in demonstrating his ‘craziness’, which I think could suggest an idea about the intellectuals in South Vietnam as the generation who lost their identities during the war. Moreover, the
7 See Hoài Thanh, Hoài Chân, ‘M t th i đ i trong thi ca’, ộ ờ ạ Thi nhân Vi t Nam ệ (Hà N i: Nhà xu t b n ộ ấ ả
Văn h c, 2016).ọ
characteristics of modernism are suggested by the way in which South Vietnamese poets blurred the borders between poetry and other arts and social ideology. Such multi-positions are exemplified by the musician-philosopher Bùi Giáng, poet-novelist-critic-philosopher Nguyên Sa, and poet-novelist-playwright-critic Thanh Tâm Tuy n. Thus, after more than fifty years, Vietnamese poetry caught up withề
Western poetry in different ways.
Throughout this thesis, comparisons between Western poetry and Eastern poetry are made. For example, I compare Imagist poetry with Japanese Haiku poetry; Ezra Pound with Basho (a classic Japanese poet); French Symbolism with the ‘New Vietnamese poetry movement’ (the first and only radical poetic movement in the history of Vietnamese literature, which appeared in 1932); Charles Baudelaire with Xuân Di u and Bích Khê (recognised modern Vietnamese poets in the 1930s);ệ
Bob Cobbing with Tr n D n and Dầ ầ ương Tường (some Vietnamese poets during the Vietnam war of 1954 – 1975, whose writings were not allowed to be published but through other means were known well in Vietnam); Gertrude Stein with Như
Huy (a young Vietnamese poet representative of the generation after 1986); Mina Loy (a Surrealist poet) with René Magritte (a Surrealist painter); and René Magritte with Nguy n Đình Đăng (a Vietnamese Surrealist painter whose ideas ranễ
contrary to traditional Vietnamese painting). Most of the Western names mentioned above are considered as leaders of modern theories and artistic trends in the West, whereas the Vietnamese names are those of people who dared to ‘fight’ against poetic tradition to introduce Western poetry and art to Vietnam. However, due to the geographical distance and different time sequences between West and East, certain misunderstandings may have arisen between them. Western poets might not have been aware of the existence of traditional Eastern culture and thinking and how these were hidden inside poems. Eastern poets, on the other hand, learnt from specific Western poems, not from systematic theories. They only accepted what was ‘suited’ to Eastern concepts. In my view, that is interesting because whilst similarities between Western and Eastern figures in poetry can be recognised, Vietnamese poets also show consistency in the way they preserve Eastern identities.
West. This revival started with Imagist poetry. Imagist poets emphasised concrete images, hit the habit of using metaphors of Symbolists and prepared for the language experiments of Futurism. This study builds upon previous work, namely Romanticism and Classicism10 by T.E. Hulme, Victory in Limbo11 by J.B. Harmer and
Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era12.
Chapter 2 discovers that Imagist poets revived Haiku- a traditional Japanese poetry form which appeared in the seventeenth century, as one of the leading trends in Western poetic modernisation at the beginning of the twentieth century. In formal terms, both had a common poetic structure that compresses syllables and minimises descriptive words. As such, the poetic effects were instantaneous and imaginative. In terms of content, I reveal that a ‘return to nature’ was the source that they both looked towards. However, Imagist poetry was written about normal life, whereas Haiku was buried under the sediments of Zen culture which tried to define the world from the smallest and simplest objects. The chapter then studies the concept of beauty from Pound’s Haiku poems in association with Eastern thinking, which has not been mentioned before in examining his poetry.
Chapter 3 examines Experimental poetry, Language poetry, Concrete and Prose poetry, forms which might not be alien to the West but were a shock to the East. Experimental poetry emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism. It was also an underground poetic exploration. Firstly, I indicate that the changes of ideology and culture in a consumer society contributed to the evolution of Experimental poetry into an abundant type of interactive art more than conventional poetry itself. This change widened the gap between creation and reception, and re-evaluated the position of the poet and his recipient. Whereas poets played the role of giving ‘specific directions for performance’13, readers had their independent interpretations. I then provide an overview of picture, computer and sound poetry as specific Experimental variations.
10 Thomas Ernest Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edn
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 111.
11 James Barry Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908-1917 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). 12 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Chapter 4 focuses on answering the question of how French Symbolism affected Vietnam, what was accepted and what interaction took place. After a century of French domination in Vietnam from 1858 to 1954, French Symbolism played a decisive role in changing Vietnamese poetry from medieval forms to modern types. Thus, Vietnamese poets established a ‘New poetry movement’ considering Charles Baudelaire as a spiritual leader. They also wrote about ‘Correspondences’ or imitated poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. ‘Writing like Baudelaire did’ became an aim of Vietnamese poets at the beginning of the modern Vietnamese poetry period in the 1930s.
Chapter 5 reveals that Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons was a trailblazer for Experimental poetry in Vietnam. However, I find that what this Eastern country gained from Gertrude Stein was not her ideology or artistic concept but her concrete methods of writing. As a result, this chapter analyses some specific poems in Tender Buttons as model examples for Vietnamese poets in exploring Experimental poetry. Moreover, in the mechanism of what I call ‘magnetic Imagism’, the chapter also links Tender Buttons with imaginative exploration. Finally, I propose a new way to approach Stein’s writings by examining her conflicting ideology. In my view, whilst tending to redefine and reorder word and world, she resisted and showed a fear of some forms of change.
Chapter 1
From Imagism to Surrealism and their Initial Influences on
Vietnamese Poetry
1. Imagist Poetry in Classicism and Modernism
The idea of examining Imagist poetry was suggested from my personal recognition of the differences of establishing independent poetry, theories of poetry and groups of poets between the West and the East. Whereas the changes of poetry in England and America between 1900 and 1918 took place informally and were not the result of politically-motivated pre-existing manifestos, the changes of Vietnamese modern poetry occurred due to the social events and governed or ungoverned literature policies. Thus, in practice, poetic changes in Vietnam had to be consciously organised, whereas in the West, they could take place in back rooms and cafés. As such, examining Imagist poetry is the starting point for me, a Vietnamese reader with traditional experience of Eastern poetry, in accessing the idea of ‘independent writing’ that had been characteristics of Western artistic innovations.
Indeed, from a 2017 perspective, statements on revolution and classicism by T.E. Hulme might seem radical to a few readers but they were not part of a wider movement for political change. That is based on the assumption that poets such as Flint, Pound and Eliot were not members of politically active parties (at least at that time).
In this chapter, and in Chapter 2, I look at various ways in which Imagism worked. I am going to try to draw out some aspects of Imagist practice that were, on reflection from 2017, probably misunderstood in the West. In looking at T.E. Hulme, for example, I am trying to place his influence historically as well as seeing it from the position of a Vietnamese reader in 2017.
From reading Romanticism and Classicism14, I try to examine the way T.E. Hulme defined ‘fancy’, which he placed in contrast with ‘imagination’. I also consider
‘fancy’ as a leading word for classical revival and the contribution of Imagist principles, with or without the acknowledgment of Imagists15. T.E. Hulme wrote about ‘fancy’ as a ‘particular weapon of this new classical spirit’16 and implied its superiority to imagination. Although both terms are supposed to have come from the same meaning in German, they were derived from different sources, in which finite things created fancy and emotion led to imagination17. From ‘fancy’, T.E. Hulme sketched out derivative criteria that were later used for Imagist poetry (e.g., the ‘static motion’, ‘the conception of a limit’, ‘poem without talking’ and ‘moaning, dry and hard poetry’). Thus, ‘fancy’, in Hulme’s notion, was definite. Contrary to imagination, fancy was based on the truth and contained legitimate objects from ordinary life. I also found that another way to recognise fancy was by its visualisation. Hence, fancy was not a dream. According to Hulme:
…where you get this quality exhibited in the realm of the emotions you get imagination, and […] where you get this quality exhibited in the contemplation of finite things you get fancy. 18
In my view, this helps to explain why ‘fancy’ could not stray far from its destination. Thus, I assume that the coming back of ‘fancy’ to the finite things from which it was born was similar to the journey of the classical revival after the Romantic period - the revival of the original.
Imagist poetry, in my view, could be considered as part of the classical revival in two aspects: its limited syllables and its respect of fixed things. Flint wrote about the return to basics of Imagist poetry: ‘They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition’19. However, I suppose the word ‘tradition’ was not used as a reference to previous theoretical schools of poetry (e.g. Romanticism or even
15 ‘T.E. Hulme had written a few poems to illustrate his theories, and no doubt they were read out
and discussed at the meetings of the Club. None of the later Imagists was a member of this group, but the poem ‘Autumn’ and ‘A City Sunset’ by Hulme, which the Poet’s Club printed in January 1909 in a booklet called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII, may reasonably be termed the first ‘imagist’ poems, although the word itself was not yet in use’ in Peter Jones, Imagist poetry (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), p. 15
16 Hulme, p. 113.
17 ‘That where you get this quality exhibited in the realm of the emotions you get imagination, and
that where you get this quality exhibited in the contemplation of finite things you get fancy’, Hulme, p.139
18 Hulme, p. 134.
Symbolism) but as the foundation of a destination that prevented the poetry-kite from flying away with imagination. Thus, Imagist poetry declared: ‘Use no superfluous word, no adjective that does not convey something. Use either no ornament or good ornament’20. This approach explored how directly language speaks to one’s mind – ‘Their [Imagists’] poems describe momentary situations, and their images capture the reader’s attention, forcing him to stop and reflect’21. In my view, the depiction of ‘unexpected’ and instant things without word-organising also helped Imagist poems to stand out in terms of harmony. At this point, Imagists were close to Hulme in tightening the relationship between poetry and prose: ‘There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech’22. However, what Imagists were opposed to was the metaphor as a condensation of things, or a compressed symbol23. Like Hulme, they did not define metaphors as ‘polished gems’24. Thus, the smoothness of a ‘gem’ in the thinking of Hulme and other Imagists offered a form of poetic insight that was clear, well-organised and which, in effect, impressed on the ‘passive’ reader.
For example, the metaphors in ‘Vowels’ by Rimbaud use familiar objects which to the mind of a 2017 reader might seem predictable; however, their combination is paradoxically effective:
A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins: A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells, (…)
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!25
Rimbaud places a presupposition by symbolising vowels with matching colours. In
20 Jones, p. 19.
21 Flemming Olsen, Between Positivism and T.S. Eliot: Imagism and T.E. Hulme (Odense; Lancaster:
University Press of Southern Denmark, 2008), p. 15.
22 Jones, p. 21.
23 ‘In condensation several things might be compressed into one symbol, just as a metaphor like
“the ship ploughed the waves” condenses into a single item two different images, the ship cutting through the sea and the plough cutting through the soil’, Roman Jakobson, in Peter Barry, Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2008), pp. 78-79.
24 Michael Roberts, T.E. Hulme (New York: Haskell House Publishers), p. 225.
25 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Drunken Boat’ from Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. by Wallace
addition, he creates associations between vowels and shapes: ‘O’ – ‘Omega’ – ‘Ocean’ – ‘Eye’. However, there are gaps in terms of how objects, colours, shapes and motions can connect to each other. Thus, the metaphors of ‘A’ as a ‘black velvety jacket’ and ‘O’ as ‘strange piercing sounds’ remain mysterious. In my view, they are realities seen within chaos.
‘The drunken boat’26 could be considered as another example:
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings. Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbour lights!
By writing ‘I ran’ and ‘I danced’ as ‘drunk’ situations, Rimbaud borrows the excitement of a human being to show the tough and poetic movements of a boat in a storm. To the recipient, the process of a boat playing with waves for ten nights without losing its way may also be seen as a symbol of the adventure of poets in the challenges, duplicity and charm of linguistic creativity. Hence, I consider the drunken boat as a metaphor for artists who are keen to express themselves and find themselves in the adventurous spaces of art.
Therefore, in my view, metaphor has never disappeared in modern poetry. While on the one hand Pound and Hulme, the founders of Imagism, did not declare the existence of metaphor, on the other hand, they created their own metaphors with Imagist language. Pound wrote:
The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast -Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are, Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them. A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.27
This poem depicts a process of branches invading a human body. Gradually, ‘you’ is fully covered and becomes a ‘tree’, ‘moss’, ‘violets’ and ‘a child – so high’. From a different point of view, this could be a narration of a tree which has borrowed a human voice. The final metaphor with its proud attitude ‘folly to the world’ makes this poem become a song of boredom. Contrary to previous ways of using metaphor, I think that Pound considered not human beings but infinite nature as the centre of motion. Finally, without ‘questioning the reasonableness of each [image] at the moment’, ‘total effect is produced’28.
2. Dada and Surrealism as Suggestions of Modernism
Throughout my own education in Vietnam, I acquired a knowledge of poetry approved by the Vietnamese education system. My research has helped me to realise that there were some inherent misunderstandings for Vietnamese readers about how a poem could be written and understood, especially when seen from a Western perspective.
Normally, in Vietnam, poets tend to write with the guidance of a ‘formula’, in a logical or systematic process, with common or ‘understood’ feelings that should be reasonable for anyone to analyse. An example can be seen in a ‘Ca dao’ (Vietnamese oral folk poem):
Thuy n v có nh b n chăngề ề ớ ế
B n thì m t d khăng khăng đ i thuy nế ộ ạ ợ ề 29
(Does the boat miss the pier while going? The pier is still honest waiting for boat)
In traditional Vietnamese metaphors, ‘boat’ symbolises a man, who is always on a journey somewhere, whereas ‘pier’ and the ‘sea’ symbolise a woman, who can only stay in one place and wait for the man to come back. This waiting is regarded as the standard of loyalty in relationships. These verses were sung in the medieval
28 Shyamal Baghee, T.S. Eliot: a voice descanting: centenary essays (London: The Macmillan Press
Ltd., 1990), p. 29.
29 Phan Tr ng Lu n, ọ ậ Ng Văn L p 11ữ ớ (11th Grade Literature) Volume 2 (Hanoi: Nhà xu t b n Giáo ấ ả
period30 and are still sung today in Vietnam. In 1963, Xuân Quỳnh, a famous female modern Vietnamese poet wrote:
N u t giã thuy n r iế ừ ề ồ
Bi n ch còn sóng gióể ỉ
N u ph i cách xa anhế ả
Em ch còn bão tỉ ố31
(If say farewell to the boat
The sea has only wind and waves If say farewell to him
I has only storms)
These verses helped me to realise that in modern times, even when written by a female poet, in terms of the position of man and woman, the faithfulness and passiveness of woman remain unchanged. They have become ‘formulaic’ in Vietnamese poetry, regardless of any changes in society or ideology. Thus, as long as such ‘formulae’ remain widely used in poetry, whether in 1963 or 2017, Vietnamese poems seem unable to achieve ‘modernism’.
However, there have been other responses to ‘modernism’ in Vietnamese poetry. From the traditional background of strict and formal writing requirements, any symptoms of change in a poem, even a word, a new metaphor, a strange tone, etc., could be seen as ‘innovation’ or ‘modernism’. Thus, the desire for renewal in Vietnamese poetry moved from one extreme attitude to another. Vietnamese poets, I think, misunderstood Western modernism and hence, misunderstood their own way of following Western theories.
Therefore, in order to explore this new extreme attitude in modern Vietnamese poetry, I set out to examine what theories actually strengthened poetry in the West, and what could be picked out as innovations in writing and reading in the West. I chose to consider Dada, Surrealism and Futurism in relation to Vietnamese poets and critics, in the hope that these theories could help to form an initial understanding of poetry renewal in Vietnam.
30 See more about ‘ca dao’ in Vietnamese Feminist Poems: From Antiquity to the Present (Hanoi:
Women’s Publishing House, 2008), p. 29.
31 Xuan Quynh, ‘The boat and the sea’, Vietnamese Feminist Poems: From Antiquity to the Present
Firstly, I found that, in Dadaist and Surrealist poetry, metaphor no longer existed as a way of making words become flowery, attractive or poetic. By saying ‘no’ to the past, and showing a desire to destroy the present, Dadaist and Surrealist poets aimed to cut all existing visual relationships in society in order to create a new and strange realm that was barely understandable. Surprisingly, however, in my view, they still continued along the path that Imagism had paved before, that of transferring metaphors into other forms.
Secondly, as Richter stated, irrationality and rebellion were the trademarks of Surrealism and Dadaism32. For Dadaism, freedom was evoked by its unique name, which was described as having various origins in Dada: Art and Anti-art by Hans Richter. One explanation was that it could be ‘discovered by opening a dictionary at random’,33 but it also contained a lot of meaning in different languages. For example, it means ‘rocking-horse’, ‘baby-carriage’ and ‘wet-nurse’ in French, German and Italian respectively. Furthermore, according to Ball’s diary34, ‘Dada’ was assumed to have a connection with the affirmative ‘da, da’ of Rumanian, which was a way to reiterate ‘yes, yes’ joyously.
Hence, it was suggested that Dada was also a form of ‘play’ for poets. Freud explained the concept of ‘play’ in Surrealism as: ‘to be the first and only one with a reality’35. He also interpreted the parallels between a poet’s creativity and a child’s play in Creative Writers and Daydreaming:
Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way, which pleases him? (…) The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy, which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.36
32 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 31. 33 Richter, p.32.
34 John Elderfield, ed., Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball (London: University of
California Press, 1996), p. 63.
In the Oxford Dictionary definition, play is described as something fun, as opposed to seriousness37. Furthermore, it is also defined as: ‘to represent’ or ‘perform’, as opposed to reality. Similarly, in Freud’s concept of play above, the opposite of play turns out to be not seriousness but reality.
Both child and writer construct their own world by rearranging everything into a new order and setting out images to bring more pleasure. However, in my view, while children play with the desire of joining in with the adult world, poets tend to release their intimate dreams in order to be like children. Freud’s idea of play seems to resonate with a loud call at the end of the nineteenth century to escape from the medieval chains of aesthetics, ethics and art. It could be seen as a trend to turn back towards the characteristics of human childhood and restore the use of children’s language, which had been suppressed by the rational mechanisms of the becoming-an-adult-process.
This re-discovery of ‘play’ by Freud could be observed in the experience of Dadaists or Russian avant-garde artists from the 1920s to 1930s as a reaction to Rationalism. Rationalism ‘ruled’ much of political, social and cultural life at this time38. It could also be seen as the mechanism of censorship in politics and culture. In this sense, childhood and play balanced out the Rationalism and satisfied human dreams. Thus, the name Dada was created through the re-discovery of childhood and play. Later, the Surrealist movement had a positive view of Freud’s theories of dreams, which served as the ‘inspiration’ 39 for their rebellion.
Besides this, the inspiration of Dada was largely derived from the stressed situation and the suffocating artistic environment in some countries during the First World War. The Dada artists, including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Emmy Hennings, were against the bourgeoisie, who were considered to support the war. Thus, a strong pronouncement was adopted in their manifesto: ‘Dada does not mean anything (…) Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation =
37 Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionary of English, 2rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.
1349.
38 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other essays (London: Methuen & Co, 1962), p. 11. 39 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan:
negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art’,40 and ‘Do not trust Dada. Dada is everything. Dada doubts everything. But the real Dadas are against Dada’41.
Therefore, Dada seemed to be the symbol of chaos, a rebellious attitude against all. It was also the desperate rebellious attitude of artists in the severe context of Europe during and after the First World War. Since then, on the one hand, Dada has been seen as an attitude and policy of destruction and self-destruction. On the other hand, with creative scepticism, it is seen as art as a means of being anti-war.
I have also considered Dada in comparison with Futurism. Both Dada and Futurism encouraged changes, but in European society, Futurism appeared to be aggressive:
No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. 42
This could be explained by suggesting that it was a revolutionary art movement with four main inspirations: action, speed, technique and non-human beings. In the movement’s manifesto, the Italian Futurists also confirmed the role of future science and technology in creating a gap, or separation, between those who are called the slaves of the past and contemporary liberals43. They called for the destruction of everything recalling the past, and claimed the need to remove all old social institutions in order to live in the present and the future. This made some artists - typically Marinetti - closer to Fascism. They also supported Italy’s participation in the First World War. Meanwhile, Dada seemed to be a ‘reaction to the general disintegration of the world around us’44. As such, in my view, Dadaism warned about a fragmentary modern life through disconnected images. In this life, words seemed to be useless; therefore, they could not give any power to the writer. Poets should be free from the oppression of continuous words. The failure of words in this fragmentary modern life released the poets from their position.
40 Richter, p. 48 41 Richter, ibid.
42 Umbro Apollonio, Futurist manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 21. 43 Apollonio, p. 30.
However, neither words nor images were completely destroyed. The aim of the Dadaists, according to Ball, was:
… to purify the imagination, directing attention not so much to its store of images as to the stuff of which those images are made. 45
Thus, although the method of creating poetry was not poetic or realistic (such as the process of cutting up words and arranging them by chance to make a poem), the Dadaists kept the original meaning of each word and a reality that was not falsified by random manipulation of language:
The discovery, by writers like Tzara and painters like Arp, of the significance of chance as an active principle, quite free of social and cultural necessities and liberated from the conditional response of logic and reason, protected this purity even from the potentially crippling influence of the conscious artist himself 46
As for the aspect of poetic form, Dadaists regarded rhythm in language as a reaction to the sequence of a metronome which had been ticking for a long time as the traditional standard of official poetry. This metronomic rhythm was now regarded as old-fashioned. Furthermore, according to his diary, Hugo Ball had enormous doubts about the arbitrary names of objects, and this urged him to find new ways of naming things. Finally, a new method of naming was supposed to be adopted. Dadaists changed the order of letters, destroyed the structure of words, broke invisible barriers of normal thought, negated recognised names and assembled fragments of vowels and consonants like a linguistician:
The bourgeois idea of beauty had become ridiculous. Poetry was now abstract and based on sound, acting as an antidote to the standardisation of language by journalism.47
For example, I analysed a stanza of the following poem:
gadji beri bimbaglandridi lauli lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini.48
45 Richter, p. 47.
46 C.W.E. Bigsby, Dada and Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 10.
The overlap of sounds, the absence of necessary letters according to the rules of grammar and spelling, and the experience of rearranged letters in words make this poem more like a musical notation sheet than a poem. I would anticipate that the writer’s ‘play’ had just begun; readers, with their rich imagination, would be expected to fill the empty spaces with meaning, but could hardly complete it.
This raises questions about the impression made by Dada on Modernism. These questions can be examined by considering the movement’s artistic methods, which were experimental. Collage became a method of visual art under the creation of the Dadaists. By collaging, the artist outlined social aspects to form a representation of an active lifestyle as well as various sections of society using normal objects from everyday life. At the same time, by using a collage technique, the breakdown of capitalist society during and after the war was shown visually. Moreover, having rejected the hidden lines of Realism, I suggest that collage was used a way to expose reality itself without any intermediary.
Meanwhile, Installation art, which was also known as theatrical, immersive or experiential art, was a form of ‘art in practice’. It challenged all boundaries and could be applied to lots of different social and aesthetic situations, though in the expanded definition, the term was used to describe all arrangements of objects at any time and in any space. From a historical perspective, Installation art derived from the early twentieth century, in parallel with the development of the Dada movement (1916-1920). It was led by initiators including El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp. Accordingly, the ‘Bicycle wheel’ by Marcel Duchamp (1913) and ‘Merzbau’ (first made in 1923) by Kurt Schwitters were considered to be the first examples of Installation art. Continuing over nearly half a century to the 1990s, Installation art reached its culmination with the cult ‘Turbine Hall’ at Tate Modern49. In terms of form, Installation art was born as an antithesis of traditional arts in general and painting in particular. It highly favoured interaction, focused on the nature of the stage, respected space and overall elements within it, created dramatic context and produced a vastly heightened non-linear environment:
The move of Installation art from the margin of the art world to its center has had far-reaching effects on the works created and on museum practice (...) Installation art, however, has a physical presence while it is on view, and this allows for it to be reconstructed in a sense, using several different methods.50
Thus, viewers were directly led to the presence of space where emotions were presupposed, and where visual senses as well as bodily responses were awoken and enhanced. It must have presented a sharp contrast with conventional observation of art from a remote perspective. Whereas fleetingness and instability were characteristics of Installation art, these can hardly be found in paintings, which favour sustainability and immutability. In my view, however, the value of an installation work would be destroyed immediately after the end of exhibition; the only response remaining would be the viewers’ initial experience. Thus, despite the value of an installation as perceived by the experience of viewers, Installation art can be seen as a way of both creating and destroying.
If Dada was supposed to play a role in causing social and artistic revolution, Surrealism has been considered its consequence. This view was expressed by Anna Balakian: ‘Surrealism established a closer bond between poetry and art than ever before’51. The pioneers described this relationship through manifestos, in which the main source was image. In André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism52 (1924), he created the image 'a man is cut in half by the window’53. On the one hand, this was visual reality; on the other, it was the effect of imagination and illusion. No sooner had the image been seen out of perspective, than it suggested the idea of incorporating poetic material. The immediate appearance of the image as a cut on the stream of unconsciousness purely expressed an action of mind without demonstration, and free from didacticism. With reference to the first statements of policy for Imagist poetry by F.S. Flint in ‘Imagisme’, and by Ezra Pound with ‘A few don’ts by an Imagiste’54, the image seemed to be transferred in an osmotic process, removing its constant meaning, refusing initial sensory feelings, even referring to the death of the subject. In concrete terms, Surrealist poetry was deprived of the qualitative identification of the subject as well as the
50 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Massachusetts: The MIT
press, 2001), p. xv.
51 Willard Bohn, The rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002), p. 141.
52 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, ibid. 53 Breton, p. 21.
organic relationships binding him to life, ethics and law, turning him into a free citizen with liberal ideas.
This freedom with words and with the positions of the artist also led Surrealists to the automatic method, which was described in the movement’s manifesto as the creation of image ‘by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’. The effect of this was that:
The image...results not from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two realities that are more or less distant. The more the relations between the two juxtaposed realities are distant and valid, the stronger the image will be55.
This reminded me of an essay by Virginia Woolf in which she mentioned the effect of a flash of innermost flame in Joyce’s work as a leading method of modern fiction:
He (Joyce) is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see 56
Although meaninglessness is likely to have played an essential role in the creation of Dadaist poetry, it used to be mistaken as one of the Surrealist criteria. Dada and Surrealism may have followed their own poetic desires but it was still meaningful. Deepening in its marvellous and noisy shell was:
The disclosure of certain number of properties and of facts no less objective in the final analysis, than the others. 57
Tristan Tzara wrote:
It isn’t to do with destroying literature! I would prefer instead for the individual to destroy himself. I also find that there is a very subtle way, even
55 Breton, p. 20.
56 ‘Modern Fiction’, Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1968),
184-195 (pp. 190-191).
while writing, of destroying the linking for literature. This is to combat it by its own means and in its formula.58
This could be expanded on by pointing out that the aim of the Dadaist was not to change the habits of using formulaic poetry, or to create ‘play’ by simply putting characters, words and poetic weapons in poems. The Dadaist tried to prove that he had made a totally meaningless and different type of poetic form. In my view, the poems themselves appeared to change, turning from personal to ‘apersonal’, without personality or any type of pretension. That could be considered a way to renew poetry from the root of manufacture: from the poets. It might have been a development of Tzara’s concept that caused a lot of poems to be written without any relation to the conditions in which the poets were living, the environments they were experiencing or the requirements of the society in which they were being depressed. It was by refusing themselves and casting off all constant human characteristics that they found the final meaning. I consider Aragon’s poem named ‘Suicide’ to be an apt example:
A b c d e f G h I j k l M n o p q r S t u v w X y z 59
This could be considered as the suicide of the alphabet, the end of life. Alternatively, using letters as words also helps to obscure any dictionary meaning. Each word here exists as an individual character, a single period in the journey of life. However, the strange feeling in this poem is evoked by its title, ‘Suicide’. This is because the letters from A to Z could promise a circle that would make an endless routine, but when the poet puts the word ‘suicide’ at the beginning, it could be the end of everything; no rebirth, no turning back. In my view, it might be the way the poet has deleted himself consciously before releasing poetic words from any conventions. Clearly, this kind of poem could be analysed in various ways. Thus, it has no meaning in itself or in its own existence. I think that the poet’s position has died along with his personality.
Another example is ‘Anecdote’ by Francis Picabia:
You see, I am crazy to imagine it I am a man with nimble fingers
Who wants to cut the threads of old pains False folds in my anxious brain
History in arabesques memories I am only happy on the open sea Where one goes further
On anonymous waves60
In my view, the desire of escaping from constant modals in concept and history (which are compared with ‘old pains’) has led the poetic character to the open sea with waves as means of transport. Through this process, from the subjects expressed by ‘you’ and ‘I’, the character becomes ‘anonymous’. From a person with clear personality traits - ‘crazy’, ‘a man with nimble fingers’ - he disappears into the open sea. I consider that destroying the poet’s ego is the way he removes all the ‘pains’ that an uncertain man could experience. Therefore, the effort of cutting ‘the threads of old pains’ is not a declaration of intention to fight the world, it is just the determination to make war inside himself. It could be a spiritual war for a new way of thought or a new kind of poetry. This has led me to think that in Dadaism, poetry no longer belonged to a large section of society; it tended to be the product of one person, expressing themselves in an individual way.
However, Dadaists did not stray far from the common characteristics of literature in general and poetry in particular. As Tzara defined it, poetry was ‘a means of communicating a certain amount of humanity, of elements of life that one has within oneself’61. Therefore, despite its abnormalities in terms of linguistic innovation, Dadaism was still based on humanity.
The Dada Manifesto of 1949 stated the position of Dadaists in the world of art:
The misunderstanding from which Dada suffered is the chronic disease that still poisons the world. In its essence it can be defined as the inability of a rationalised epoch and of rationalised men to see the positive side of an irrational movement62
60 Dachy, Anthology of Dada Poetry, p. 113. 61 Dachy, Ibid, p. 117.
Thus, it is suggested that Dadaist ideas were encapsulated in the question of ego, or ‘who I am’63. Dadaists and Surrealists had experienced life themselves. Turning back to childhood, trying to rediscover purity and creativity of mind, requiring equality between dream and real life, mining depressed instincts including libido and writing in an extremely mysterious language were ways in which they sought the answers. According to this interpretation, in my view, the human being was pushed into his own monologue and had the ability to lead the dialogue through a maze. Here, they would find their images about a man half-animal, or about a man in the peripheral zone, both of whom lost their identity in life. They seemed to follow nature and the voices of dreams, and to forget consciousness. This was also the situation of humans in modern society.
3. A Very First Experiment in Modern Vietnamese Poetry
The first time Dada and Surrealism appeared in Vietnam was in the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’,64 written by Tr n D n in 1946. Although this Vietnamese Surrealistầ ầ Manifesto was not published officially until 2008, this could be seen as an actual step toward Surrealism in Vietnamese poetry. However, in my view, this did not help to form any trend of Surrealist poetry in Vietnam, or even participate in changing modern Vietnamese poetry, because this influence was hidden in the dark.
In Vietnam before 1945, attempts to follow the poetic trends of Dadaism and Surrealism were considerably likely to be frustrated. Even now, in Vietnam in 2017, any such attempts have still not been considered alongside traditional poetry or recognised as official poems. They have been considered as experiments. Because experiments could succeed or not, no achievements of this kind have been recorded. In my view, modern Vietnamese poets from the beginning of the twentieth century have been regarded as peripheral writers in literature. This could be explained by the fact that in the context of continuous wars in Vietnam, the purposes of encouraging soldiers, enhancing national pride and looking towards a victorious future were more urgent subjects for poetry. The poet played
63 Dachy, Dada and the revolt of art, p. 117.
the dual role of a faithful citizen and a powerful soldier. Certainly, he had to loudly declare the voice of the nation, victory and glory. No tears, blood, pain or even private feelings were allowed to appear in literature. Therefore the novel of B oả
Ninh, which was first published in 198765, was immediately a shock to Vietnamese writers and readers. He wrote about the consequences of war from the point of view of a couple, in a situation where both sides of the war were losers: ‘War was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting. War was the world without real man, without real woman, without feeling’66. Before B o Ninh’s novel, no Vietnamese writer could have written about theả
‘sorrow’ of the glorious war that they used to praise. For more than half a century, Vietnamese literature like that had been considered to be abnormal. Therefore, despite the focus on the possibilities for writers in this country, the position of the poet himself had been forced to be forgotten. This helps to explain why the coming of Dadaism was a shock to Vietnamese literature. The destructive aspects of the first manifesto affected the Vietnamese poetic environment exactly as described in the later manifesto of 1949:
Over and over again, the strumming, shouting and dancing, the striving to épater le bourgeois, have been represented as the chief characteristics of Dadaism. The riots provoked by Dadaism in Berlin and Paris, the revolutionary atmosphere surrounding the movement, its wholesale attacks on everything, led critics to believe that its sole aim was to destroy all art and the blessings of culture. The early Dada manifestoes, in which nonsense was mixed with earnestness, seemed to justify this negative attitude67
In Vietnam, it was reminiscent of the ‘iceberg’ theory of Ernest Hemingway:
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.68
65 B o Ninhả , The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam, ed. By Frank Palmos, trans. by Phan
Thanh Hao (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996).
66 B o Ninh, p. 27. ả 67 Bigsby, p. 60.
68 Charles M. Oliver, Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon (New York: Checkmark, 1999), p.
From this, it may be suggested that what helped to shock the world of Vietnamese literature was the ‘one-eighth’ above water aspect of an iceberg. Poets as well as readers sank into the attractions of word sound, broken lines and free verse before trying to turn poems into playful juggling acts. By examining the following poem, it can be seen how it was lost in the magic of words:
Nôel Nô-elle Nô-em Nô-men No man’s land No-mô m–nen x-len Leng beng
Lang ben Ma lem Mariem69
From the world ‘Christmas’ (‘Noel’ in French), Dương Tường has collaged, mixed and imaged in many other directions which would be far from the origin title of Christmas. The structure of this poem is expressed by the image of the word ‘Noel’ and the sound of a church bell. By doubling lip-consonants (e.g. ‘l’, ‘m’) and wind-consonants (e.g. ‘x’, ‘s’), and keeping the fundamental sound (‘e’), the poem is constructed as a colourful Rubik’s cube in which each face can be turned into various combinations that even the player might not understand and anticipate. Taking off the colourful cover of words, there is almost nothing inside except ‘play’. It is an experience of Dadaism but lacks Dada’s spirit – the communication of humanity.
Nevertheless, Dương Tường’s poem, written in 1967, was regarded as part of an awakening in Vietnamese poetry, which had been full of morals, formulae and political views before. For the first time after more than twenty years, Vietnamese poets dared to write about nothing. Although the above poem does not seem to reach Dadaism, in my view, it made a strong declaration about new Vietnamese poetry to the traditional critics and readers who always stared intently at poems to find their meanings and lessons.
Chapter 2
From Japanese Haiku Poetry to Ezra Pound’s Poetry in Haiku Form
In this chapter I want to illustrate and discuss some of the ways in which Eastern poetry may have influenced Western poetry. As a special case, I want to look at the ways in which Ezra Pound used the Haiku. I also hope to use my own insights into Eastern poetry, derived from my background in Vietnam, to see whether there are any qualities in Pound’s poetry, which are often missed by Western readers. I also want to look at the problematics of such wide cultural interchanges to see if there may be particular aspects of East-West influences which might be indicative of West-East creative practice and critical understanding. Moreover, in some respects, Pound’s Imagist poems might be seen as a suggestion for Vietnamese poets to renew their traditional Haiku poetry.
Haiku was a traditional ancient poetic form which appeared in Japan from 1630 to 1862 and widely influenced Classical Eastern poetry (e.g. Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese poetry). Extraordinarily, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was revised by Ezra Pound as one of the leading trends in modern Western poetry: Imagist poetry. In my view, this transformation could be explained by Hulme’s concept: ‘the revival of Classicism’70. However, instead of concentrating on the similar minimalised form of both Haiku and Imagist poetry as evidence of a Classical revival, this chapter is expected to show how Pound, through his poems, might have understood or misunderstood Haiku and the Eastern spirit and, on the contrary, how modern Haiku was written after the period of Imagist poetry.
1. A Return to Nature
Ideologically, I suggest that Haiku and Imagist poetry had a common source: a ‘return to nature’. In the modern world, most things could be expressed logically by concept and science. However, the appearance of natural images (e.g. a little butterfly, delicate petals, an autumn mountain, a grey bough and a fan) was supposed to work against rational analysis. Such images seemed to retain pure
beauty. Thus, returning to nature could be understood as a way for poets to explore things in their original states, in which they could question their minds’ deep unconscious in order to contemplate and elucidate hidden meanings of living. Haiku was buried under the sediment of Zen (禅)71culture, which had profoundly influenced the way of life, thinking and creativity of the Japanese in particular and Eastern people in general. On the surface of this sediment, Zen upheld the value of meditation and intuition; under the sediment, Zen emphasised nature in silence. For example, when someone saw a beautiful object, the best way to respect it in ‘Zen’ was to observe it in silence. The object itself was beauty expressed nonverbally. From that perspective, I understand Imagist poetry to be a creation taken from normal life with no fussy description or explanation. Imagist poets let images make poems themselves. The relation between ‘Zen’ and Haiku poetry was close; traditional Japanese poets learned and followed ‘Zen’72.
The ‘return to nature’ was marked by the use of a special term (e.g. spring, summer, autumn or winter) in Japanese poems, which was known as a ‘precious term’ (‘kigo’ in Japanese). However, using a ‘precious term’ did not mean that Haiku was traditional poetry with a rigid formula. Instead of using specific terms for the four seasons, Haiku poets tended to turn them into vivid images like cherry, blossom, swallow... (Spring); sun, dragonfly, cicada, grass… (Summer); moon, frost, cricket… (Autumn) and snow, field, mountain, wind, storm… (Winter). The instant sophistication of this approach was to create images which may be themselves in word-form but may not be themselves in understanding. For example, Basho wrote hundreds of poems mentioning ‘rain’ with different visuals:
On the cow shed a hard winter rain;
cock crowing. 73
* * *
Passing through the world Indeed this is just
71 From my understanding of the image-word in Chinese and Japanese language, the word 禅(Zen)
in Japanese was collaged by two pictograms, one meaning ‘indicate’ and the other meaning ‘stage for worship’. Thus, the meaning of the word ‘zen’ itself was used to express piety.
72 ‘Scholars guess that he (Basho) went to Kyoto to study poetry and Zen’ in Robert Hass, The essential Haiku Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2013), p.22.
Sogi's rain shelter74
In the first poem, ‘rain’ acts as a catalyst. It falls on the cow-shed and makes the cock crow. The cow-shed and the cock might be separate, with no relation to each other. Perhaps the winter rain, like an invisible touch, pulls them closer together. These images create a soothing idyll. Contrast words are used to highlight the silence before the cock crows, then the crow introduces the sound of lively activity. Thus, this poem might imply a message that in wet, cold and sad winter rain, life still rises powerfully and mysteriously in a way that cannot be explained.
In the second poem, the image of rain does not appear directly, but can be recognised through the rain shelter. From the absence of subject, verbs and adjectives in this poem, it could be understood that the time man takes to pass through the world is just as short as a moment when we stand in a rain shelter named Sogi. Here, Basho has used the opposing mechanisms of length and shortness. ‘Passing through the world' could be seen as a great journey that everyone has to confront. It is strange that the poet removed the conventional sense, the familiar thoughts of endless life by narrowing the distance and time into a moment in a rain shelter. As such, life seems to be seen only in a blink of the eye, which is ephemeral. Moreover, the rain shelter could symbolise a station in the whole of life’s journey, which has no starting point or destination. It has become a cycle. The understanding of this cyclical life makes people treasure life’s moments and keep their minds peaceful when facing sudden changes, even if facing death. Here, the rain is a condition, an environment for each person to reflect on his life. It is quite alien from the existing meaning of rain. This philosophy was a common understanding in Eastern culture. This helps to explain why Oriental poets tended to write about fragile and simple things. They are symbols of a short, cyclical life. The movement of ‘passing through’ is frequently used to talk about a specific period of life. This is the death:
How refreshing!
moon over this gate through which, at last, I’m free to pass. 75
74 William J. Higginson, The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World, (Tokyo: Kodansha
International, 1997), p. 25.
The return to nature also made the poetry of Ezra Pound seem explosive. In ‘Vorticism’, in The Fortnightly Review (September 1, 1914), Pound attempted to use a thirty line-poem form to describe the images and faces he was impressed by at the Metro station. However, descriptive words seemed to be useless in this case. In my view, Pound did not turn images into a second intensity – the intensity which is transferred onto paper – because the intense emotion seemed to appear only at the moment the poet saw or felt it. When this intense emotion was described and decorated carefully in poems, it was not as fresh and as true as the original experience. The initial thoughts and flexible meaning might have become lost in words. Thus, I read Pound’s poems with a thought that he pursued Haiku poetry as a pure way of 'preserving' the right image in its state of origin. He recorded images by utilising the maximum length of seventeen syllables in Haiku poetry in order to exploit the space and silence between words and images:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. 76
In this poem, verbs are hidden and only two adjectives appear, yet throughout the poem, there are continuous images like screens in a film. These are used as an interpretation since the non-logical images received at the same time have no relation to each other. The apparition of faces is also the appearance and disappearance of petals. Moreover, the faces seem to have the characteristics of petals which makes them appear pure. The crowd suggests interlacement like the bough and the words ‘Station of the Metro’ creates the feeling of busy life like a web of branches. The first line symbolises urban life and the second one expresses countryside. These places contain competing ideas: among faces and between petals and bough. The ‘wet, black bough’ makes it seem a challenge for the fragile petals to be alive. However, it is life, and people should learn to face it. In Eastern ideology, this could remind us of the cycle of life which starts with birth, continues with disease and ends with death. Pound could make none of these philosophical reflections either in the thirty-word-poem written at first, or in the fourteen syllables written in haiku style after that. He created this poem just through a non-verbal gap between two lines and his own life experiences. This is appropriate to
76 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S.
