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| blooming in the garden now |
Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
What does the mind do, entering this poem? We might assume it simply takes what it's been given, gathering branch, river, movement, cricket, song, to assemble some one-to-one, mirroring inner perception. And yes, that does happen, and is what would happen in life, were these things directly viewed; any image, in literature or life, is first simply seen, the retina's neural firings "made sense of." But in literature, something else happens as well. Understanding, as we have already seen, is like perception itself is: active, not passive. From the start—it is how our minds work-the listener to a poem is not only registering each word as it arrives but also raising and attempting to answer the omnivorous, subliminal, always present questions of rhetoric: "Who is speaking to whom, in what context, and why?" Or, put more simply: "What do these words want of me?"
This steady, unconscious murmur of question and answer is the way we unfold all language, not only poetry, for its comprehension. In entering a poem, though, we're already aware that what words want from us is something different. A thing becomes art in part by a granted acknowledgment: we are aware that it has been made, and made for art's reasons. And so, entering a poem, a person steps at once into at least two rhetorical frames. There's the frame of the particular poem's particular speaking, and there's also the deeper frame of poetry itself, the shifted background knowledge that these words are a poem, and that in them a poem's maker is speaking to a poem's listener, within poetry's forms and intentions. From the first syllable, then, we look for those forms and intentions: for words that sing as well as speak, for words that hear as well as speak, for thought and feeling unfrightened of depth and complication, for intensification, for implication, for playfulness, for all the surplus marks that increased attention leaves on language, which we call meaning, call pleasure, call beauty, call tenderness, call, sometimes, terror. Within this kind of listening, Issa's cricket is both cricket and image.
This is referencing the following poem:
On a branch
floating downstream
a cricket singing
Kobayashi Issa (tr. Jane Hirshfield)
On This Day (09/09):
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