Some folks didn’t care for our recent commemoration of the centennial of Futurism – like we were endorsing it somehow, sheesh! Well, it’s time to celebrate yet another birthday.
On this date one hundred years ago… T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Edward Storer met in the Cafe Tour d’Eiffel off Tottenham Court Road in London and started up the School of Images! Later members included H.D. and Ezra Pound.. and Amy Lowell, who tried to take over the whole enterprise.
In honor of the occasion, I invite you to take an Imagism Quiz. Click here and see if you can correctly distinguish between some Imagist poems (no pun intended) and some parodies of them.
If you fail, you’ll need some remedial work; try clicking here to see “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, and better luck next century.
NUMBERS
My wooden desk
cold as a frozen pond.
I look through tall school windows
into autumn’s graphite sky;
a distant duck flies into a grey cloud
like a decimal point, trying to return
to its place on the math test
I am sure, once more, to fail.
- Edwin Hamplethorpe, Imagiste
ca. 1915
Nicotine, my Nicotine! They should have locked that guy up sooner.
Slightly off topic but, considering when it was written, I found this statement by Ezra Pound in the essay linked to above quite interesting.
“Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’”
even better, he advocates a ‘classroom’ or workshop for poets, as a solution to that indifference. good luck with that, EP!
The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are “all over the shop.” Is it any wonder “the public is indifferent to poetry?”