Prelude to “Night Songs: Field Guide to The Deep Image" April 26 Workshop & Reading
Merely human. I find myself wondering why poems written by a man thirteen hundred and twelve years ago with soot and brushes made of animal hair can help me. And why my friend finds sustenance in the words of an unsuccessful court delegate who was considered too insignificant by his rebel captives to execute while 36 million men and women were losing their lives in the same revolution.
Tu Fu’s most famous poem Spring View was written during the An Lushan Rebellion that would leave his country in chaos for years and Tu Fu separated from his family, imprisoned, some suggest, or simply not allowed to leave the city of Chang’an where the rebels took him:
The country in ruins, rivers and mountain
continue. The city grows lush with spring.
Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.
Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,
and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.
(translation by David Hinton)
Such a small scattering of images and yet, I feel the poem’s power, too. Steve suggests that it is because of the humility of the ancient Chinese language that forgoes the “I” and allows the reader “to put their own sadness into a larger perspective.” Of course, our Americanized translations cannot forgo the “I” that is “always speaking,” as Thoreau, Steve reminds me, once observed, but Tu Fu’s compassion for the social and political brutalizations of others weaves itself through the half-weeping blossoms and the bird’s cry. And the hairpin. For Steve, it is the perception of the world in “fresh ways” and a “shifting emphasis away from ourselves” that brings him solace and a renewed devotion to poetry and our troubled world.
For me, it is the tolling bell I hear for the deep image that consoles me and haunts me. No, here is not the duende of Frederic Garcia Lorca, his “powdered glass” and “deep song.” Nor the “omnipotence” of Andre Breton’s dreams that defy “reason and logic.” Nor the “leaping poetry” of Robert Bly I read as a student in the waning day of the “Deep Image” movement that he and a handful of other poets, like James Wright, rekindled. (How can I forget the breeze “delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist” and the body breaking “into blossom”?) But the deep image is here in Tu Fu’s work, though perhaps more subtle in the English translation and the elegance of Chinese classicism.
Robert Kelly, recognized as the founder of the deep image movement, equated the finding of the deep image to finding “the synchronous consequence of the motion of the whole world.” I understand it this way: that all things are mutable, open to connection as they pass the threshold of poetry between the visible and invisible worlds: the delicate blossoms turning to human tears, the sound of a solitary bird heard as the trembling of the wounded heart. Tu Fu’s poetry fulfills Kelly’s desire not just for “the archaic trove of all high poetry,” (though there is nothing archaic in the depths of the poem’s elegance that we English speakers can barely discern), but Kelly’s desire as well for the vivid “language of flesh and blood,’” embodied for me in another poem, when Tu Fu, unable to reach his family, mourns for them beneath the moon:
Moonlit Night
In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can’t think
Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?
(translated by Vikam Seth)
What is the deep image I am always seeking? I ask myself. What is the image that goes beyond literal description and manifests itself intuitively and passionately from profound and shared human experiences that exist beyond time, beyond place, beyond self? Much as I want to think myself a deep-imagist poet, I have no images like Lorca’s:
pain of a fresh lily
for a heart of chalk.
All night long, in the orchard
my eyes, like two dogs
All night long, quinces
of poison, flowing.
(Gacela of the Remembrance of Love, James Wright translation)
But I am a traveler of breadcrumbs and, sometimes, the heart, wild or merely human, will speak.
This morning, I walked down our dirt lane toward a canyon named Phantom because I did not yet want to turn on my computer and its siren of news. I was 6,950 miles away from Tu Fu’s spring view and breathing the same air some twelve centuries after Tu Fu and his brushstrokes. And then I was in it: listening for the early spring bluebirds that can shake a heart and looking for the first catkins of the aspen that will scatter soon like blossoms, like deep winter snow, like white confusion.
See you on Saturday, April 26th, at the Rialto Theater in downtown Loveland, Colorado.
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--Kathryn Winograd
Kathryn Winograd is a Colorado poet, essayist, and photographer. Her books include Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets and a Colorado Book Award winner, and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received a Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her most recent book, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye, a hybrid of poetry, photography and prose, is currently a finalist for the Book Excellence Award in Photography books. Her essay “Memories of an Urban Naturalist,” including several of her photos, was recently published on Terrain.org.
Steven Harvey is the author of four essay collections, most recently The Beloved Republic, and of the memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder. He is the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website promoting the personal essayist for a decade.