Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry

1. Emptiness in Flux: The Buddhist Poetics of Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”

1 / On Friday, December 24, 1920, the front-page headline of the Boston Evening Transcript announced “Japan’s Tribute to Fenollosa.” Below, an image of a stone monument depicting a young Ernest Fenollosa fills more than half of the front page. The article begins: “On September 21, 1920, in the ninth month of the ninth year of Taisho—Japan in a memorial service formally honored the late Professor Ernest Fenollosa by the unveiling of a monument to him and his work for Japan—his interpretation of Japan to the non-Asiatic world, and its corollary, expounding the Western world to Nippon.” The image and accompanying text present Fenollosa as a towering influence within the history of transpacific (specifically Buddhist East-West) cultural migrations. As reported by the Evening Transcript, the monument reads: “Professor Fenollosa was a great believer in the Buddhist religion. After long study he became a convert to it, and he received baptism from the abbot Sakurai Keitoku [桜井敬徳] of Enjo-ji. His Buddhist name is Tei-Shin.”1 Tei-Shin was the first Euro-American poet to receive a Buddhist name, but he would soon be joined by a sangha (Buddhist community) of American poets ranging from Zenshin Ryufu (Phillip Whalen) to Ho-Ka (Armand Schwerner). Even though Ernest Fenollosa was one of the first Westerners to become a lay-ordained Buddhist, his work in poetics has never been read in relation to his Buddhist studies or practice. This is, of course, not to say that Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (henceforth abbreviated in text and notes as CWC), has been ignored with regard to the Emptiness in Flux: The Buddhist Poetics of Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” 34 / buddhist imaginaries study of Modernism’s transpacific origins. Ernest Fenollosa’s essay not only stands at the center of East-West studies of American poetry,2 it remains one of the most important prose works in twentieth-century American poetry and poetics more generally. In the eyes of Ezra Pound, the essay’s editor and its greatest supporter, it is “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics.”3 The English critic Donald Davie considered the essay “perhaps the only English document of our time fit to rank with Sidney’s Apologia, and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley ’s Defense.”4 Other giants of American literature, including Charles Olson, also reserved a special place for it.5 Fenollosa’s essay appears at the beginning of Donald Allen’s seminal anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, and it has remained available in a small-bound edition published in 1964 by City Lights Books to the present day. The editorial blurb on the back of the City Lights edition gives contemporary readers a glimpse into the essay’s controversial past and, I would argue, offers a clear indication as to why its Buddhist orientation has remained obscure through to the present: This important and much-disputed essay edited by Ezra Pound from the manuscript of Ernest Fenollosa (and published in Instigations , London, 1920) has since gone through several editions, despite the ridicule of such sinologists as Professor George Kennedy of Yale, who called it “a small mass of confusion.” The old theory as to the nature of the Chinese written character (which Pound and Fenollosa followed) is that the written character is ideogrammic—a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents . The opposing theory (which prevails today among scholars) is that the character may have had pictorial origins in prehistoric times but that these origins have been obscured in all but a few very simple cases, and that in any case native writers don’t have the original pictorial meaning in mind as they write. Whether Pound proceeded on false premises remains an academic question. Let the pedants rave. An important extension of imagist technique in poetry was gained by Pound’s perception of the essentially poetic nature of the Chinese character as it is still written. In this short blurb we are told that scholars object to the essay’s support of the “old idea” that Chinese characters are “a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents,” but that “whether Pound proceeded on false premises remains an academic question.” The blurb, therefore, emptiness in flux / 35 offers readers what appears to be a live debate between...