Metro

Is it a haiku or not?* There is much dispute about Ezra's solution to an Imagist query and which took him several years to write, as legend has it. To settle that once and for all (this would be an Imigist haiku redaction, as petals signify summer, therefore a seasonal reference - albeit kigo lite). Clearly, what we have done is simply merged the original's prescript/title with the original two lines. . . .

Metro station—

the crowd's faces appear as petals

on a wet, black bough

Ezra Pound

[edited by jp]

Sorted.

*At the same time, however, they would also be struck, as I have been, by the narrow definitions of haiku found in haiku handbooks, magazines, and anthologies. I was once told that Ezra Pound's famous metro poem first published in 1913, was not haiku.

The apparation of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough .

If I remember correctly, the reason for disqualification was that the metro poem was not about nature as we know it and that the poem was fictional or imaginary. Pound's poem may also have been ruled out since it uses an obvious metaphor: the petals are a metaphor for the apparition of the faces, or vice versa. This view of the metro poem was based on the three key definitions of haiku - haiku is about direct observation, haiku eschews metaphor, and haiku is about nature - which poets such as Basho and Buson would have seriously disputed. Haruo Shirane

jp 19-10-11

In a Station of the Metro

The apparation of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound (1913)