OLD PHRASEOLOGY AND EZRA POUND
by
Robert Milo
Previously published in Small Press Review
Tradition can turn tyrannical but so too can the nontraditional in its bent to break tradition. In the Old Phraseology movement in China (1500-1600 CE), the leading poets decreed that only the poetry of the High Tang (8th Century), particularly that of Tu Fu and Li Po, was worthy of emulation. (See Yoshikawa Kojiro, Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150-1650, translated by John Timothy Wixted) This led to a stylistic straightjacket, an aping of past poems, much as rhyme dominated poetry in the English language until this past century. Now free verse reads much like prose broken into small lines, and what passes for rhyme often clunks as badly as a Bob Dylan ballad. Just skim Shakespeare s sonnets to feel the music in the cadence, the internal rhymes, the repetition of words something which seems lost to us today though any attempt to mimic it precisely would fail as badly as the Old Phraseologists attempt to ape Tu Fu and Li Po.
In contrast to the Old Phraseologists, Ezra Pound told us to make it new, something we ve been so busy doing for the past century that what s new now is often experimental for experimental sakes, a straitjacket of freedom, and as disjointed and ungainly as modern steel sculpture.
What s been missing for much of the past century in American letters is a balance between the old and new, as the new has often forgotten the lessons of the past.
While we re making it new, we should not forget the past or the insights of other cultures. As 14th Century Chinese poetic theory provided:
There are
three requisites for poetry. The poetic
framework differentiates the style of a poem; meaning communicates its
sentiment; and through atmosphere it achieves the marvelous. Unless a poem s framework is differentiated
properly, it will degenerate into baseness and go contrary to the way of taking
the past as a guide. Unless sentiment is
communicated, a poem will fall into vague emptiness and its capacity to move
people will be slight. And unless
marvelousness is achieved, verse will slip into banality and its tone will
scarcely transcend the vulgar.
Something else we can learn from the Old Phraseologists is their use of an external musical rhythm produced by the sound of the words and an internal one issuing from the breaks and flows in meaning. They also insisted on verse that would appeal to the senses. As one 12th Century Chinese poet said of a contemporary:
That old man did not write poetry
He wrote truly what was in his heart.
Jim Harrison has said much the same thing that you must write from the heart. He also keeps a note pinned above his desk that You re just a writer, meaning you re a humble observer, or, per the title of his recent memoir, Off To The Side. This is the antithesis of a belief developed among the 14th Century Chinese that literature and the arts are supreme above all other things. The medieval Chinese have had no monopoly on this theory, as it sometimes seems to rise up today in the proliferation of MFA writing programs and the dull prose and poetry of many literary magazines all of which may do more to stifle creativity than to create it. Writing instructions and strictures are nothing new to our times, as poetry was so refined for the 13th Century Chinese that they had manuals which stated how to write it, with guidance that for each couplet of feeling or emotion (ch ing) there should be a couplet of scene description (ching). Given its place, it s not bad advice, and perfect examples of the form can be found in the translation of Chinese poetry by Kenneth Rexroth and Sam Hamill; it s the straightjacket of both the old and new we need to avoid.
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