Word: imagist
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Poetry East (paperback,$3) is a new periodical, edited by Richard Jones and Kate Daniels. This debut edition offers an eclectic, mostly finely-wrought bunch of verse, including a section of Swedish poems, from the imagist miniatures of Harry Martinson to the brusque commonplaces of Sonja Akkeson ("There is an interest in Swedish poetry here in America which is quite remarkable," says editor Jones, perhaps somewhat hopefully); a healthy chunk of presumably new American work (including a moving tribute to Cesare Pavese by David Wojahn and a backhanded one to the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh by the redoubtable Louis Simpson...
...keep me trying." Harvard (A.B. 1915, M.A. 1916) all but undid this model boy. His discovery of the decadent poets of the 1890s led him to write lines like "(Oh God!) the wonder of you-" Courtesy of Ezra Pound, he also fell in with free verse and the imagist movement. Poetry henceforth was to be simple, sensuous and direct, images fresh, startling and spare. Cummings proved an apt poetic experimenter, though some of his finest verse, eventually, was traditional...
...Beck's introduction to "Over, Under, Sideways, Down;" Ray Davies' integration of "Land of 1000 Dances" into his archetypal "Top of the Pops;" the musical moment between "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Women," which signified the end of mainstream Sgt. Pepper experimentation; "Lola." Pithy moments that, like good imagist poetry, are form, substance and implication in the instant they are heard. Take Peter Townshend's "My Generation." The singer's stutter says as much as the lyrics and says it better...
...mainstream." When the work of California artists refuted this, the position shifted: now there was a New York-Los Angeles axis, but everywhere else I a vacuum. An exhibition is currently on view at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art that attacks this generalization too. "Chicago Imagist Art," a grab bag of work by 28 painters and sculptors, moves to the New York Cultural Center on June 27. It is a messy and often backward show, but it does trace the growth of a resolutely independent attitude to paint, metal and wood and what images can be made from...
...TINY IMAGISTS more or less dominate the poetry establishment-at least by the measurement of sheer volume. They derive from the original imagist movement, formulated before World War I by (among others) Ezra Pound and British Critic T.E. Hulme in rebellion against the lofty subject matter, plushy rhetoric and rocking-horse rhyme scheme of the past. Pound demanded a poetry "direct, free from emotional slither." Hulme insisted "it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things." Williams Carlos Williams, whose five-line poem The Red Wheelbarrow is perennially quoted as the purest imagist creation ever, announced...