Image and Form, East and West

Cross genre writing often utilizes a form which incorporates poetry, graphic arrangement, and other types of writing (i.e. stream of consciousness or found text). In considering the status of cross-genre writing in comparison to more “traditional” poetry, I became curious about the effect of manipulating the content of poetry with a particular form. This form might be a physical distribution of words on a page, a systematic breakage of continuity relative to formal attributes (i.e. a physical boundary between types of writing), or other such manipulations, which in its application to poetry alone is referred to as concrete poetry.
This curiosity led me forward to an even subtler distinction than that of form and content: that of the relationship between abstract and imagistic language. There appeared to me a very definite relationship between an emphasis on form and the dominance of abstract language or ideas. Being left handed, this emphasis disconcerted me and has driven me to do the following analysis of the image verses form.
This search initially led me to imagistic poetry. Such poems as “everything depends on a red wheelbarrow…” seemed to offer the most promising example. But poetry like this always contains some abstract element that calls into question the ontological status of the image. The statement “everything depends on…” is a judgment that moves the reader to wonder about the wheelbarrow and what else it might symbolize, for its status as the absolute fulcrum is not only ambiguous but fantastic.
Likewise, in the poem by Ryokan: “Once we start to bounce a ball, / We will only be led on to, / Counting: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, / eight, nine, ten, / Only to start again—from the beginning!” We may immediately abstract the idea of cyclical phases and repetition, of seasons that endlessly lead into one another without our control.
Poetry almost always contains either a transition that sets up a relationship, or a judgment/explanation that qualifies the status of an image. This haiku by Issa is an excellent example of the former strategy: “snow melts / and the village floods / with children”. The image of a flood has a quality that is both impressive to imagine, and useful for describing the manner in which children come out in good weather. In a photograph subjects may be juxtaposed spatially, but in haiku a more intimate relationship may be set up.
In a particularly masterful poem by ryokan, the image is only suggested: “Maybe some rain is pattering; / Maybe the trees in the ravine are whispering / Or it may be the maple leaves scattering / In a gale at midnight.” The image of Ryokan lying awake at night listening to a sound is suggested by the images that the sound calls to his mind. An inexplicit image or state of affairs is rendered through the use of descriptive images.
It seems there are two kinds of imagistic poems: ones that give an image and a judgment that opens the image up to interpretation, and ones that through image alone describe the world. Because of its brevity, a poem is able to reduce its contents to basic elements of information, elements chosen because they depict either the most inclusive subject or the most specific.
Chinese poetry provides an interesting example of poems that utilize only images. Consider the following poem by Wang Wei:

Passing by the temple of accumulated fragrance

I am not sure where it is,
the temple of accumulated fragrance.
A few miles and I enter
the cloudy mountain peaks.
There is no path for men
among the ancient trees,
and where is the bell
that rings from deep in the mountains?
I hear a gurgling spring on a steep cliff
as the sun becomes cold
on the green pines.
Around dusk I find a clear pool
in a remote place in the woods.
I meditate, trying to control my thoughts.
-Trns JHE

This poem is about an evening excursion into the mountains in search of a temple Wang Wei has only heard of, but has never been to. The poem consists of entire concrete imagery, except for the statement of lack of knowledge in the first line (bu zhi xiang ji si). The last line, which in English I have rendered with the abstract noun “thoughts” in chinese is actually a concrete metaphor: “[trying to] control poisonous dragons”.
Lets take a look at another poem by Wang Wei and observe the similarities.

Deer thicket

No one is seen on the empty mountain,
but I can hear the sound of talking.
Sunset light enters the deep forest
and illuminates green moss as it rises.
-Trns JHE

In the beginning of this poem we see a common theme. The human element exists, but it is somewhere else, somewhere out of sight. Wang Wei mentions the temple, but he never arrives there. Indeed he never explicitly says that he is trying to get there. Likewise with the temple bell and the sounds of talking in the mountain: both are sounds that reach Wang Wei from an unknown source. This seems very similar to the poem mentioned above about listening to a sound at night.
Perhaps the red wheelbarrow poem, if it were written in Chinese, would look like this:

空庭中独然
红独轮车坐

Alone in the empty courtyard
Sits the red wheelbarrow

One thing that I notice about the Wang Wei is that the poems have almost no formal experimentation. Each poem is arranged in sets of five character lines. Deer park is four five character lines, and passing by is eight. This leads me to believe that there is in fact some correlation between concrete imagery and simplicity of form.
When a writer consciously decides to be creative with the form of his writing, oftentimes this form becomes the focal point of the poem and the meaning of the words as a result becomes abstract. In Wang Wei’s poetry, the focal point is contained in the landscape of the imagery of the poem. As a result, the form stays basic while the meaning of the words represents physical contour, color, and sound.
As a last note, because I have neglected to properly represent concrete poetry and instead have focused on imagistic poetry, I will provide the following link:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Images/morgan.jpg

This poem by Edward Morgan is fantastic. It portrays, using only three words, not only the structure of archives, but also the manner in which information disintegrates through time. One can immediately apprehend the layering of information, and, if one studies history, connect this poem to ones own life and experiences. I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to find the origin of something and instead found a tiny fragment of a generation too far gone to have left anything substantial.