Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Chinese opens with thirty or so pages of poems by Tu Fu. I'm going to suggest we start out slowly here and focus only on poems I through V.
Read these poems over a few times; allow yourself to fall into the speaker's very particular and personal voice. The "I" is a powerful draw in these brief pieces.
Now, after you've spent some time with this "I," go back and think about how the poems end. What happens here? Do you feel a commonality among the endings? Do the endings feel different from the rest of the poem? How and why?
As a writer yourself, how might Tu Fu's approach to endings help you figure out how to end your own poems? How might it make trouble for you?
12 comments:
I sense a common wistfulness and some variations on theme: shared experiences produce both pleasure and sadness. The endings focus inwardly while indicating outward movement, or at least desired movement in space. I think this inward/outward coexistent is productive in that while the "I" engages the reader, the external landscape also beckons. Too often, I think, poems stay too rooted in one landscape or the other; this paralleling of internal and external experiences makes the poem seem both personal and universal. For my own writing, it would serve as a good model, not only in the manner that the poems end, but also how the speaker avoids becoming maudlin in the reflections.
Reading Carlene's comment reminds me of the old Peanuts cartoon of Charlie Brown and Linus looking at clouds. Charlie Brown asks Linus what pictures he sees in the clouds. Linus replies with something like "There's Rembrandt's 'Night Watch'" and then goes on to name some other Old Masters as well. He then asks Charlie Brown what he sees. Charlie Brown says "I was going to say a duck and a horsey and a cow, but I think I changed my mind"...
David, I relate to your comment. For me, the I is both participating and observing. Perhaps that is what we really do when we write. Because I cannot do this as skillfully as Tu Fu, I always have too many words and too much information. The endings draw me back to the personal, rather than observational level. For my own writing, keeping to the persoanl mode rather than generalities would be good advice.
David...that is so funny. It's one of our "catch phrases" at home, too.
I keep changing which one is my favorite. Each ending is a drifting away, sad, but not sad somehow. Each one remains me of the time I've spent at silent retreats. Yes, dear people who know me well, I can be silent for a day or two!!!
I like the first one most of all, mainly because I, too, have had the experience of having a good time, but then...but then. Time to go home. The one that fills me with the most sadness, almost despair, is the fourth one, Snow Storm. The last line is so final, after so many images of desolation and brokenness. So bleak.
The language and word choices in all of them are quiet and elegant but also vivid. Recognizing, of course, that a lot of that is Mr. Rexroth's art. The last lines always unexpected yet, like Carlene and Ruth say, so true and human. How he brings that off so naturally is impressive. A careful building in the lines before, I guess. But was anyone else put off by the "Auld Lang Syne" and car references in poem 3? Maybe the introduction explains (haven't read it yet) but you're dreamily going along in this pitch perfect rendering of time and mood and CLUNK! What the...?!? Someone with a light touch suddenly banging the keys, and the keys wrong.
The poems remind me of haiku. Images(in nature) and how they are related. These poems emphasize simplicity, intensity and directness of expression. The descriptions are simple, devoid of strings of adjectives. They evoke a spiritual image to me. The ends of the poems speak of a greater inner peace, which we all seek, in the simple things of life. I seldom use "I" in a poem, feeling it is too intimate. This for me is a challenge to be "up-front" in my poems. I want to speak to the heart. Maybe Tu Fu has the answer.
I agree with David, I was put-off by the "Auld Lang Syne" in poem 3. I had to stop & make sure I wasn't imagining it. I read the notes hoping to find a clue. No such luck.
And I mean what's with the car?
Similar to David, I felt a jar at the modern references in III. Rexroth doesn't say anything explicit about this in his introduction or notes (at least not in my old edition. He does say that the translations were done gradually over time and reflected the state of mind when he was translating. After rereading the poem a few times, I gradually came to appreciate the anachronisms precisely because it marked them as versions rather than simply attempts at transparency of translation.
On a related note, I was wondering about some of the specific effects of enjambment (as in II and III and how those effects correspond to anything in the original language. I am wholly ignorant of Chinese, but my guess is that Chinese characters do not lend themselves to enjambment as English does. Makes me very curious about the technical form of Chinese poetry.
I've been struggling to write up some other adequate responses to these poems--I'll try to post them soon.
Tom
Some more thoughts here: Reading these, I can’t help recalling the Chinese paintings I studied years ago, in which massive landscape panoramas, often obscured by mist, contain tiny, nearly insignificant human figures.
The relation between the I and the surrounding world in the poems seems similarly disproportionate. Is that the right word? Building on Carlene’s wonderfully articulated description of the relations between the internal and external, I just would add that what seems so striking to me is, while there definitely is the resonance between the two, we see so little of that internal world (and when we do, it’s empty!). Unlike the Romantic inner and outer natures of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Tu Fu denies us the explicit articulation of the linkage between the two. Any connection between the inner feeling of the I and the dew on the lute strings is completely implicit, not explicit. And the external seems to dominate in the poems—I would say threatens to overwhelm the I, but that language is too forceful, too menacing. IV maybe best enacts this, but even V in the image of the figure walking through fields seems tiny in comparison, perhaps because of the “dust of the dead” that feels more vast.
Interesting, too, how non-narrative these poems are. They all capture a moment of pause, some, like the banquet poem, in the aftermath of narrative, but all at a kind of point of stillness, maybe even emptiness. Is that what all lyric poems do? Does that strike you all as typical or distinctive? Somehow Tu Fu seems to capture not so much a lyric moment in which experience prompts reflection, but rather a constellation of juxtaposed images from experience which come to rest in an internal moment that, while it may yearn to wander, doesn’t itself go anywhere. Perhaps that results from the poems’ brevity? I’m curious if others hear echoes of other poets or poems in English—and whether most of those come from after the translation of Asian poetries into English.
Tom
I too, was bothered by those lines; however, the rest of the poem was so vivid that I was able to ignore it and hope that someone of you would be able to explain it and make it fit.
As I type this morning, I am listening as usual to Jackson Browne and the line "you have to prove your own redemption" resonated with this poem.
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