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Les Imagistes (Other) by Nicholas Jones

We would call this peaceful and it is quiet compared to the noise of the urban morning and the tapping of the office workers. But still there are birds and human footsteps and background hiss of traffic like scratches on an old seven inch. The imagists were wrong, I think, you see Imagism is creating coherence by having an idea and purging all that does not fit. I argue instead for contradiction through mass inclusion encompass all we can and some of it will work: a poetics like a duck on a frozen lake confused that he can walk on water.

Nicholas Jones 1-Feb-06/10:06 AM
I did invent the duck image; I was sitting in the freezing cold by a frozen lake during my lunch break scribbling in my notebook.

The noise thiong comes from the fact it's a park just outside a town, so it is quiet in comparison but there's still the traffic noise.

The point I think is that imagism is too narrow; there are many other things going on in poetry than just the images. I think a very austere imagist poem can opnly work by excluding everything else; I'd rather have excess verbosity that encompasses more than a clinical precision that excludes. I've just been reading an anthology of imagist writers, and I read the poems and think yes, that's very nice, but where's the rest?




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