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Ink on Paper: Poems on Chinese & Japanese Paintings pairs twenty poems and twenty paintings on facing pages. The title is doubly suggestive of both painting and poetry: the painter's ink defines the
drawing, the poet's ink scrawls the words; the painter's calligraphy traces
word-characters, the poet's printed words create word-paintings. The book's
illustrations, reproduced in greytone, are beautiful, and John Wilson's poems are
a fitting match.
Many of the poems include direct descriptions of the paintings, objective,
honest accounts of what Wilson sees in them. "Boat in a Storm", for example,
describes Sesson's late-16th century painting of a boat:
Driven toward
the rocks...
toward the thatch,
bamboo
and leafless tree
on shore
The wind in the painting drives the ocean to "five sheer crests/breaking".
Or, in another example, describing Sesshu's 15th century painting of a
winter landscape, Wilson refers to the painter's spare "nine brush strokes"
used to depict a man walking through the mountains. This kind of description
serves to guide our eyes through the paintings.
Indeed, seeing is an important motif in Ink on Paper. Wilson
reminds in numerous ways that the paintings represent what the painters saw,
and, in turn, his poems help us to see the paintings clearly. In poem XVI,
"Six Persimmons", he guides our eyes through the elements of Mu-Ch'i's 13th
century painting "Persimmons". Wilson shows us that the persimmons "have no
resting place/not so much as a table", that we are seeing a still-life
suspended in space; he calls our attention to the persimmons at each end of
the row, "Two moonlike crescents/ of fruit"; he notes the gap in the middle
of the row. He declares that Mu-Ch'i had nothing else in mind but these six
persimmons "when his brush touched the ink".
As a poet, Wilson resists the temptation to look beyond what is in front of
his eyes toward a deeper intent:
...As soon as
I think, this might stand for
the mystery of life,
it's just a persimmon...
Wilson shows us that Mu-Ch'i saw them as they are and so should we: "Who
sees his persimmons/as they are are as they". One thinks perhaps of Wallace
Stevens' poem, "The Snow Man", which asserts that "One must have a mind of
winter", be like a snowman made of winter, not to sentimentalize or
over-dramatize it but to see the season as it is, to see "nothing that is
not there" and to see the "nothing that is" there. Wilson's poems "have the
mind of the painter".
True vision, however, depends too on what we can't "see" just in looking,
and Wilson provides this kind of insight as well. In "Boat in a Storm", he
frames his objective description of the painting, of "what/we see
outside" -- the boat and storm -- with what is there in the thatch-roofed
hut but which "We cannot hear/...or see": the boatmen's women,
under the grass roofs
singing,
over fish, kelp
and rice
as their minds moved
with the boatmen in the storm. The painting's strange "stillness" is broken
by these "strong singers/under their roof singing", but only in our
imagination as Wilson calls forth their song. Many of the poems are
suggestive in this way, relying on interpretation rather than creating
symbols from what we see in each painting.
Some of the paintings are ancient, ranging in date from the late-fourth century
to the late-18th century. Wilson plays with this antiquity in many poems.
The paintings are given as creations of specific painters in specific eras
of time, centuries old, and yet are timeless: each captured a moment and in
the painting that moment still lives, just as Wilson's poems capture a
moment of his seeing the painting, just as we see the two works together in
our own moment. Only in a few poems does Wilson directly "enter" the
paintings' worlds (as in, for example, poem XVIII, "Two Crows in Winter",
where he writes he's "as good as/there with them/just downbranch...").
Usually he stands outside as a sensitive, knowledgeable, and imaginative
observer looking at the paintings firmly planted in their time, yet viewed
now from the perspective of the modern world. The poems often juxtapose the
serenity and beauty of the paintings with harsher or jarring images of
contemporary life. Commenting on Buson's "Night Snow Over City", for
example, with its tangle of curved rooflines jutting above the snow, Wilson
describes how
(...modern cities
get it
in fine ridges
along
the phone
lines).
The effect is subtly accomplished. Instead of diatribe, invective, or
satire, we get mere mentions in passing of contemporary life: tennis courts,
traffic, electric wires, blues, a "jet's whine". Subtle as they are, these
references are important, because the contrast of ancient beauty and
contemporary culture seems to be part of the project of Ink on Paper.
"Art should give us back/the world/our living confiscates", he writes (poem
IX, "There All Along"). Living in our consumerist culture, these contrasts
show us, confiscates a lot. Yet Wilson's response is redeeming, reminiscent
of many of Basho's poems: the landscape of the paintings is prehistoric, the
paintings themselves are ancient, the moments captured in them are timeless
and therefore through the arts of paintings and poetry we walk "to
pure/clearness". Wilson asks,
What good do whole
nations
beside
this?
In keeping with such a telling rhetorical question, the book itself is
beautifully produced. (City Lights continues to bring us high quality
publications at a populist price.) In another book, we might want colored
reproductions of the paintings, but the greytone illustrations paired here
with poems in black print suit the book's conception of "ink on paper".
Furthermore, the beautifully designed cover is of smooth, heavy stock with
flaps and the pages are high-quality paper, sewn, not just glued, all a
fitting vehicle for the beauty of the art -- both written and drawn -- found
within.
-- Dr. Ronald Tranquilla is a professor of English at St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania.
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About the Publisher:
The City Lights masthead says "A Literary Meetingplace since 1953", and this concept includes publishing books as well as selling them. In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the now-famous Pocket Poets Series; since then, the press has gone on to publish a wide range of titles, both poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, international and local authors. Today, City Lights has well over a hundred titles in print, with a dozen new titles being published each year. The press is known and respected for its commitment to innovative and progressive ideas, and its resistance to forces of conservatism and censorship.
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