keep an animal

[The poet’s] tragedy is summed up in these word written in a private letter by a contemporary American poet: “For more than a month I have not been able to find time to write anything, and you know how heavy that is to a writer who feels all of youth lost to keep an animal.” Here is the animal, crying to be feed and warmed and housed. Here is the poet, who cannot rest from wanting to set down the bit of reality that he has been able to seize.

—Babette Deutsch, “The Plight of Poetry,” The American Mercury (May 1926)

imperial interference

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, or personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Bashô said, “Learn of a pine from a pine.” Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Bashô meant. This avoidance of metaphor or simile arises, I feel, from the poet’s need to render directly and concretely the vision he has had, and only that vision. Almost he seems to aim at the paring down of his medium to the absolute minimum, so that the least words stand between the reader and the experience! The result can be what Babette Deutsch has called a “naked poem” as she noted in speaking of the art of William Carlos Williams: “Not merely rhyme and metre but sometimes metaphor itself became an imperial interference between him and the sun.”

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Chas. L. Tuttle & Co, 1957)