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Poetry Quiz- En 190

"Japan"

Bill Collins

The poem "Japan" at first glance seems like a poem with an exotic name but not so much substance as an exotic name may imply. However, the very misleading nature of this first glance reveals the magic of this poem. Collins describes reading a haiku, and in the process shows a similar process to what the reader may go through while reading the very poem that is about Collins reading another poem. This hint-hint, nudge-nudge at a type of 4th wall reveals itself through the rest of the stanzas, as I found the poem “Japan” reached vastly beyond paper, beyond poetry form.

Collins loosely utilizes the haiku form by using three lines per stanza; except for stanza 7, which notably describes the poem that Collins is reading in “Japan”. I found it interesting that Collin’s doesn’t immediately tell the reader what the poem is, and when he does, he puts the stanza in the middle of the poem. Before this stanza, Collins describes how he reads “the one about the one-ton temple bell with the moth sleeping on its surface”, and after this stanza, he describes how he interprets it. I felt this was a sort of metaphor (possibly a reflection) of how readers may often read a poem over and over, but do not feel like they understand it. The significance of “When I say it at the window”, “ When I say it at the mirror” and “when I say it to you in the dark”; these represent different modes of perception that can be used for poetry.

More literally, however, Collins goes what are usual haiku rules (these I know for certain): 5-7-5 syllable pattern, while keeping within 17 syllables total for a stanza. The first stanza is 8-6-9, and after refreshing my knowledge of haiku after I read this poem, I found that one who isn’t familiar with haiku could easily mistake this poem for one. I think this was intentional; a theme of reading something foreign, then mistaking it for something else (or perceiving it as something else), ties in with my above observation of perceiving poems. Admittedly, however, this observation of syllable pattern is a stretch, but might further prove the perception theme; observation is after all, intertwined with perception, if not the same thing.

Collins also switches from staying within the 17 syllable limit (2nd stanza being composed of 16 syllables), to going well beyond it (1st stanza being 23-24, the 4th stanza being 30-32). After noticing this, I began to think if Collins purposely or inadvertently chooses this pattern in a rather small detail that the average reader would not pick up. Possibly, Collins tweaked the traditional form of haiku to represent trying to understand haiku, trying to break from non-haiku into haiku, as he uses some rules, but not all. Going further from this, I thought that maybe this could be tied with Collins in the poem trying to understand the haiku he was reading, how it looked different each time he read it.

Or, referring back to the earlier mentioned “hint-hint, nudge-nudge” of the 4th wall, in the final lines, Collins is using a perception of his own, of the haiku he reads, to describe the effect of us reading a poem by him: “And later, when I say it to you in the dark you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you.” It’s difficult to say exactly; I could even say all the above is true, that all my perceptions are neither correct nor incorrect, but rather are either existent or non-existent. If ringing is a metaphor for “thinking or perceiving”, and the bell represents while the tongue of the bell represents Collins’s poem, perhaps that is what Collins wanted all along; just simply ring our bells.



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