A few years ago I came across an intriguing passage in THE ZEN OF CREATIVITY by John Daido Loori that caught my attention because it seemed so violently opposed to the way most poets writing in English approach writing poetry. Loori wrote, “One of the beautiful aspects of Asian poetry is the vagueness of its languages.”
Loori went on to talk about how Chinese and Japanese characters often have multiple meanings --- many more than a typical word in English does --- and how different characters (with entirely different meanings) may have the same sound. The uncertain references and abbreviated grammar can be eloquently obscure. While this may pose a problem for a translator who has to decide, word by word, which meaning out of many meanings to choose from, it can be used to good effect by a poet writing in Japanese since it allows for a good deal of subtle wordplay, allusions, and punning.
Around the same time, an American friend of mine who is fluent in Japanese made the offhand comment that the Japanese think we often say too much, much more than needs to be said. And how English forces us to be too specific.
Most poets that I know, myself included, are wedded to the specific image. We strive mightily for accuracy and precision. It’s hammered into us beginning with the first workshop that we take in college, and it’s what we subsequently encourage in the work of our own students if we teach. It seems to fly in the face of reason to deliberately try to be vague or general in a poem. And yet, seemingly valid precepts, however good and useful they are initially, are always there to be outgrown or broken as one’s poetry evolves.
It’s not as if the idea of vagueness in language --- a kind of intentional largeness and generality --- has not had an occasional appeal for poets writing in English. Walt Whitman wrote, “You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers….a certain free margin, or even vagueness---perhaps ignorance, credulity --- helps your enjoyment of these things.”
His quote made me think of Robert Frost who, in some of his best short lyrics, often uses a terrifically limited, rather general vocabulary in which only extremely common, almost colorless, words are allowed into the poem. “Tree at My Window” is a case in point: It begins:
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Specificity here --- the poet informing the reader exactly what kind of tree it was --- would have been ruinous. And yet I can easily imagine the feedback from a teacher or workshop pushing a novice poet in that direction.
Another example from Frost that comes to mind is “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”:
The people along the sand
all turn and look one way.
They turn their backs on the land,
They look at the sea all day.
Frost never tells us where the poem is set. Or who the people are. They are presented not as individuals but as an undifferentiated mass. There is no explanation, dramatic or psychological, offered for their actions. The poem dispenses with place names, mention of weather, time of day, or season. It could be taking placing anywhere. Which may be the point. The archetypal nature of the scene, its universality, is what is important. Frost adopts Whitman’s “free margin” to help the reader enter the poem and stretch it in all directions.
All of this made me want to write a poem that would be much less specific than usual, deliberately vague as to certain details and images. I began thinking about what kind of dramatic situation would lend itself to intentional vagueness. Maybe a poem set in old age, a place of loss and unremembering? A place I was watching several older friends entering. A place, I imagined, that I, too, might someday enter.
This is the poem that resulted:
A Memory of the Future
I will say tree, not pine tree.
I will say flower, not forsythia.
I will see birds, many birds,
flying in four directions.
Then rock and cloud will be
lost. Spring will be lost.
And most terribly,
your name will be lost.
I will revel in a world
no longer particular.
A world made vague,
as if by fog. But not fog.
Vaguely aware,
I will wander at will.
I will wade deeper
into wide water.
You’ll see me, there,
out by the horizon,
an old gray thing
who finally knows
gray is the most beautiful color.
I’ve come to believe --- is it because of the age that I am? --- that the future already exists. That it’s as real and present as the past. We just can’t see it. A little blurred around the edges, it’s like an unmapped, unnamed continent, not able to be described yet with any accuracy or precision, but there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
(Poem credit: from A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires, to be published by W. Norton & Co. on July 24th, 2018.)
Elizabeth Spires is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker. “A Memory of the Future" is the title poem of her new book, which is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in the summer of 2018 -- official pub date: July 24 -- and available for order here. She is the author of six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst, the tale of a white mouse that moves into Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, I Am Arachne, and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings. She lives in Baltimore and is a professor of English at Goucher College.
I very much enjoyed this essay (and poem). This is a topic I am always having arguments about (at least with myself), and I hope your thoughts here will get more people thinking about it and not just blindly kneeling at the altar of the concrete.
Posted by: Michael C. Rush | June 16, 2018 at 10:38 AM
The impossibility of accurate translation -- and the excitement of trying to do it, nonetheless -- has intrigued me for years, but I had not connected it with ambiguity and generalized language before. Excellent sample poems to ponder. And a really delightful poem of your own to cap off the essay. Thank you!
Posted by: Oona | June 17, 2018 at 02:30 PM