Poemranker [Replying] Mon May 06 16:21:54 PDT 2024

Replying to a comment on:

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

2-Feb-06/11:47 AM

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think the first stanza does make sense. Perhaps it needs the addition of the world 'place' - We would call this PLACE peaceful'. The point we would it peaceful, and it is in comparison to the town, but there are actually still lots of noises, including traffic. I could articulate the sense of place better, more description, but at this point the poem is meant to be pseudo-imagistic. No single image is sufficient - neither peacefulness or noise - because context is so important. So pure imagism would lead to distortion, because I could only a purely imagist poem by ignoring certain aspects of the scenario.

It's not about the narrator being at peace or not (this isn't the pathetic fallacy at work) but about the place.

Poetics = a theory or set of beliefs about poetry. It's a word, haven't you heard of it? Like Aristotle's Poetics. The influence at this point I guess is Hugh MacDiarmid, who wrote a long poem called something like 'The Kind of Poetry I Want' which lists many images - a poetry like a man playing a billiard shot or shooting a gun and who analyses and considers carefully all the appropriate factors. But I'm not writing MacDiarmid's poetry of fact (although elsewhere I do attempt to) but a poetry of imagery (the images are of course influenced by the imagists, that's the point) that contains other things besides. I want to include things that don't fit to create internal cohesion actually based on contradiction.

Not sure if any of that makes sense. The point is, the duck on the frozen lake is confused, surprised, there's contradiction at work; that's what I'm poetry can do, whereas imagism is paring everything down to a level which denies complexity. I think.

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