Imagism

Imagism, a school of modern poetry founded by Ezra Pound, seeks to portray an image with words, hence its name. The goal is also to use the exact word and to employ as few words as possible to portray the image. For example the title of Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro," is almost half the length of the poem itself.  Originally the poem was 30 lines long, but Pound destroyed it because it was the work "of second intensity."  To condense the impact, he rewrote the poem, this time half of its original length.  Then a year later he rewrote the poem to the form we know it today:

In a Station of the Metro


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Pound tells the story of the inspiration for this Imagist poem in the memoir he wrote about the artist Gaudier-Brzeska (pages 86-89). While in a station of the Paris metro, he saw "a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion."

The goal of an imagist poem is to recreate a visual image with verbal utterances using the most exact words possible.

My friend, Nathalie Le Beller, wrote a poem in the imagist form for a class we had together.  I feel the image as well as the emotion is well captured.

With No Ink


with no ink
left

the empty pen
scratches

invisible words and
drawings

against the used
paper.


This one my friend Lysandre wrote...which I just love for its imagery and feeling.

Carnival


Faces
Round unseeing
Eyes twisted frozen;
Pushed piled grotesque
Lifeless, carnivalesque.

Another friend from my class, Alisa, wrote this one.  The rhyme scheme emphasizes perfection and also the motion of waves.

The Ocean Touching You
Waves glide through one another
Admirable in perfection
When they leave the weave and wander
Perfect meets interruption.

Read aloud you can almost hear the waves crashing.

Cadence

Cadence is often neglected when constructing a poem. For Ezra Pound, one of the initiators of the Imagist school of poetry, cadence was essential to the form.

Think of it like this...a runner has 2 minutes to run 2 laps. If the first lap takes 1 ½ minutes, the second must only take 30 seconds. The distance is the same for both laps, but the cadence is greatly varied.

I kept this point in mind while writing a poem in the Imagist model for a British poetry class.



Being



Groggy...      morning...      waking...      slowly....

Yawn...       long...

Fist to eye and foot to floor

"Being": noun to verb