Imagism

One of Ezra Pound’s most famous poems:

In A Station of the Metro

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

is heralded as the most important poem of the imagist movement.

His poem strives to capture a moment in time; a snapshot image that captures complexity in its briefness. This glimpse into the everyday prompted my following attempt at imagism:

An Open Window

Echoes of the pounding feet
Pulsing down the silent street

Though not quite as powerfully striking a moment in my personal life, this steals a moment: when passing runners can no longer be audibly heard, but the vibrations of their passing are still familiar. Instead of following Pound into the visual world, this captures an equally important sense. It interests me that these moments or captured seconds revolve most easily around one sense. A poem covering and explaining an experience of many senses would almost break out of the simplicity of the imagist movement by focusing on two or more images in the same moment. And yet, this drawing together of images is exactly what I attempted in the second poem.

Pound was struck speechless by the faces of the metro; he had to stop, to reevaluate over and over again the moment he had seen- and he revived it over and over again until he was satisfied. In this vein, I decided to attempt a similar reevaluation; to break down a longer poem into a shorter fragment the same way Pound did.

Therefore the following poem:

Almost a Rose

blushing pink to softly herald spring
unobtrusive, fragile
she calls to me
a beauty on a bush
and slips her way into my grasp
plucked by an independent hand, and
she is mine
too lovely to leave behind.
I admire her
sweet scent
suede petals, velvet leaf
pearls of dew worn as a string of moons
tracing her thornless stem, curling through my fingers
timeless.
But another enters, unseen
announcing his presence with a crash
a wayward hip, a toppled pile,
tumbling; my startled hand closes
crushes,
sweet scent
and she bleeds in liquid color
a pale watermark stains my skin

was then cut down to these two lines:

Almost a Rose

Blushing pink of spring; plucked, crushed
A pale watermark stains my skin

And this poem, like Pound’s, focuses solely on the visual. The sweet scent, the loud crash, the suede and velvet textures which all help set the scene in the longer poem disappear when confined to a specific moment in time. The second poem is less striking than the longer version; I happen to prefer the scene set in the longer version, but the exercise is interesting by nature of its boundaries.