AIMLESS
The cat's abandoned sleeping places:
nests of leaves under the bushes
A hesitant gull decides whether
to grab bread from the bird table
Knocked back because
you didn't like my paintings
(Best I've ever done)
Are his poems imagistic
or something beyond?
Started to rain as I sat down
at the garden table
Too much egg, sunshine, talk
Not enough to drink
Hidden landscapes revealed
interior monologues within
the poem I've found again
Now seems like a good one
Email quiet over the summer
Everyone bored or gone away
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language and experimented with non-traditional verse forms, especially free verse. Imagism rejected the sentiment and discursiveness of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. Ezra Pound was its most influential figure; although imagism isolated objects through the use of what Pound called "luminous details," Pound's ideogrammic method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image. However, the movement began in January 1909 with the publication of T. E. Hulme's "Autumn" and "A City Sunset" in "For Christmas MDCCCCVIII." Hulme had helped organize The Poets' Club, the publisher, in 1908 and served as the group's secretary before leaving it in 1909 to launch The School of Images, which introduced Pound to the group. In 1911 Pound brought his former fiancée Hilda Doolittle ("H.D.") and her future husband Richard Aldington into the group and announced that they were "Imagistes." When Harriet Monroe started her "Poetry" magazine in Chicago in 1911, Pound acted as her foreign editor; in October 1912 he arranged for the publication of 3 poems each by H.D. and Aldington. And his own "In a Station of the Metro" ("The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.") appeared in the April 1913 "Poetry." The following month Pound contributed 2 manifestos in which he described an image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" and outlined the movement's basic principles: 1) Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective. 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. Then Pound arranged for the publication of "Des Imagistes" which contained work by himself, H.D., Aldington, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and others. However, by 1915 Pound parted ways with his fellow imagists. Lowell took over leadership of the group, recruiting such luminaries as D. H. Lawrence and Marianne Moore (who had been one of H'D.'s classmates at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania); Pound mocked the new direction, calling it "Amygism." Nevertheless, imagism was the 1st organized English modernist literary movement.
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