On "In a Station of the Metro"--Ezra Pound

Bernhardt

On "In a Station of the Metro"

Ezra Pound (from Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916)

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that - a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.

That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realized quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, of even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour.

And so, when I came to read Kandinsky’s chapter on the language of form and colour, I found little that was new to me. I only felt that someone else understood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly. It seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.

When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the "ice-block quality" in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only "the shells of thought," as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others

Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colours.

Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my "Vortex": --

    "Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form."

That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or planes in relation, I should have expressed it in music or in sculpture. Colour was, in that instance, the "primary pigment"; I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness. The Vorticist uses the "primary pigment." Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary application.

What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist art. But let me go on then with my own branch of vorticism, about which I can probably speak with greater clarity. All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

One is tired of ornamentations, they are all a trick, and any sharp person can learn them.

The Japanese have had the sense of exploration. They have understood the beauty of this sort of knowing. A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku.

    "The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

        A butterfly."

That is the substance of a very well-known hokku. Victor Plarr tells me that once, when he was walking over snow with a Japanese naval officer, they came to a place where a cat had crossed the path, and the officer said," Stop, I am making a poem." Which poem was, roughly, as follows: --

    "The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:

        (are like) plum-blossoms."

The words "are like" would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.

The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --

    "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

        Petals, on a wet, black bough."

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. I a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

duessa

Yes, from this famous poem of Pound we can clearly see the influence of the Japanese haiku. Pound, using the poem as an example, declared that haiku provided a model of compression in verse; a “one-image poem” which renders “the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective,” combining the graphic with the sense of motion and volatile discovery.

duessa

Pound also translated into English many Chinese poems, among which The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter is the most famous. He inferred that the condensed juxtapositions of Chinese ideograms embodied what in effect were events and actions, transferences of energy among words, with the graphic figures presenting “something of the character of a motion picture.” (Fenollosa)

The following is taken from Norton, with some minor alterations, as is the same of the above.

1. Pound, together with Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, and others, is one of the leaders of Imagism, a movement advancing modernism in the arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry.

The three main principles of the movement
      i.        the “direct treatment” of poetic subjects;
      ii.        elimination of merely ornamental or “superfluous” words;
      iii.        rhythmical composition in the sequence of the supple “musical phrase” rather than in the “sequence of a metronome”.

An image, Pound wrote in A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste, is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,” and he interpreted the term complex as a notably energized verbal experience that yields a “sudden liberation,” expresses a “sense of freedom” and “sudden growth.”

2. Later, however, Pound broke away from Imagism and launched another movement—Vorticism. The principles of Vorticism remained central to Pound’s poetic strategies, although he later used other vocabularies for defining them. Imagism, he felt, tended to produce visual and static patterns, while Vorticism called for forms that were both sculptural and generative of movement and power. Pound conceived the vortex as some generative “primary form” that is prior to the specific forms in any art. In cultural history, a vortex is a period of shared ferment in the arts, or the channeling of effort and purpose that makes a city into a cultural capital. In poetry, an image is a “VORTEX”, a “word beyond formulated language,” “a radiant node or cluster … from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”

[ 本帖最后由 duessa 于 2006-10-30 08:02 PM 编辑 ]

Bernhardt

Another beautiful Haiku-like poem by Pound

Alba
Ezra Pound
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

duessa

L'Art
  
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.