#29. Dependence


Lee Ka-sing here offers "two short poems" which, he maintains, were "picked up from the white ceiling,"  though if you ask me, they might just as well have been picked "from" the white ceiling the way you'd pick an apple from a tree.  The photo-poem at the right is buoyant--self-supporting--with its own calligraphic fervor.  The exquisite little "poem" on the left is the photo-equivalent to a compact, kernel-hard, Imagist poem.  A hook in the ceiling supports something.  Something "depends" from it (that is, falls from it, is supported from it )--as in pendant, pending, pendulum, pendulous.  The poem is not the hook.  The poem is what is supported by the hook.  Poetry happens when meaning arises from that  which supports it (from which it depends).  See, for example, the famous "dependence" in William Carlos Williams poem, The Red Wheelbarrow from 1923:  "so much depends," writes Williams, "upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens."