The Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society is grateful to Marjorie Buettner for her permission to republish the following article on our website.

 

originally published by Ribbons

Volume 2 Number 4, Winter 2006

 

 

 

These Images with Words:

The Poetry of Jun Fujita

 

The Hindus believe that there are four distinct stages (Ashrama) in life: the student phase or Brahmacharya, the household stage or Grihastha, the hermit stage or Vanaprastha, and finally the wandering ascetic stage or Sannyasa.  The third stage involves an escape into the wilderness or forest in order to get away from the strictures of society.  Jun Fujita (1888-1963) embraced this third stage whole-heartedly after leaving his prestigious job as photographer at the Chicago Evening Post (the only Japanese photographer in the U.S. at that time).  He simply dropped everything, exiling himself to a cabin on a remote island in the northern woods of Minnesota in what is now the Voyager’s National Park.  He wrote poetry, painted and sketched sand dunes:  “My dream is to go far away from civilization some day and lose myself in the wilderness. I already have the spot picked out...which I believe is the most beautiful country in the world.  Nature and the drama in it are all the companions I need.  There I shall do what I like best to do, read and write. And I don’t propose to take another picture!” (www.Eastland Memorial Society)  Fujita loved nature and was inspired by the deep wildernesses of northern Minnesota; his poetry, paintings and photographs are infused with this love but his relationship with these images go beyond what can be seen on the surface. In Diane Arbus’s journals she explains that her photographic images are metaphors for an inner awareness or truth.  For Fujita he gave up his camera as tool for the tool of a pen; however, his poetry remains photographic and is, in effect, images with words, descriptive and layered with color and depth.

 

In 1923 Fujita published his first collection of poetry:  Tanka: Poems in Exile.  Fujita demonstrates a minimalist approach to tanka:

 

A sudden caw, lost in the air,

Leaves the hillside to the autumn sun;

Save a leaf or two curling

Not a sound is here.

 

Here the motion of sound, sight and no sound makes for an eloquent montage.

 

 

Fujita’s solitude is palpable in many of his tanka; yet his self-assumed exile seems at times filled with regrets:

 

Against the door dead leaves are falling;

On your window the cobwebs are black.

Today I linger along

The footstep?

A passer-by

 

So his poetry transcribes his daily life but this poetry also becomes a metaphor--like Diane Arbus’s photographs--of an inner reality, one fleeting yet hauntingly beautiful:

 

Down the lope, white with flowers,

Toward the hills, hazy blue,

A butterfly

Floats away.

 

Under the scowling sky

The frozen sand plain stretches.

Curled and crisp, two leaves

Scud away.

 

Again there is a movement in his poetry which captures the variegated transformations of life from one form to another; we change, too, on our journey.  His poems often reflect—like a still-life painting—a momentary, transient instant where nothing, not even the rain on trees, remains the same.  Even at this still-point life goes on, moves away, and changes:

 

The storm has passed,

The sky washed clear.

Rain-drops on twigs

Reflect the moon.

 

 

It is almost as if the world—in this vast and silent wilderness—has ended:

 

Across the frozen marsh

The last bird has flown;

Save a few reeds

Nothing moves.

 

The air is still

And grasses are wet;

Thread-like rain

Screens the dunes.

 

Here, with the use of the imagistic verb “screens”, Fujita reveals to the reader his photographic eye.  Though in his exile Fujita wanted to leave his camera behind, his poetry captures, just as a camera would, this light-filled and fragile world; and with his word-images he colors beautifully those things that are translucent and transient; at this point his poetry becomes a metaphor for life:

 

A frail hepatica

Shyly holds its fragrance

Beneath the fresh morning dew.

So, Elizabeth.

 

Milky night;

Through slender trees in drowse

A petal—

Falling.

 

The sloping sand plain

Fades into pale night air;

A black tree skeleton

Casts no shadow.

 

And perhaps some of his poetry, too, becomes a metaphor for that life unlived, full of regret:

 

The rocking horse,

A half built block house—

Stillness echoes

Lost laughter.

 

While you pant deliriously, I awake

To the bold moon,

The somber hills,

And myself.

 

In the deep wilderness of Minnesota, Fujita created a life in exile.  His success as a photographer, poet and painter carried him through life in America.  In 1954 Fujita finally became a U.S. citizen through a private Congressional Bill.  His exile did not stop him from creating by utilizing what he has called that “illusive mood” (Poetry 20, 1922) so important in tanka, haiku and photography.  His minimalist poetry gives little away and yet, like a passing fragrance, we are enveloped in the mystery of its scent wanting more as soon as it has faded.

 

 

Marjorie Buettner