Blog Post #5 - Write an Imagist Poem a la Ezra Pound's "In the Station at the Metro"

The Imagism Movement

In some of the poems you've been exposed to thus far, meter and rhythm are the driving force of the poem. Imagist poets shifted attention from meter and rhythm to the power of the image. Image-driven poetry began with the Imagism movement in the early twentieth century. The movement began with poets such as Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and eventually dovetailed into the Modernist movement as exemplified by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for which Ezra Pound was the editor.
There are three basic rules that the imagists followed:

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.

Ezra Pound’s most famous application of this concept was the poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The concept, as exemplified in Metro, was to reduce a poem down to its most essential images, leaving out all the chaff that traditional poetry, especially iambic pentameter, seems so prone to. This does not mean that most poems should only be two lines, but rather that poetry should not waste time or space.

The Imagist and Modernist movements led to today’s widespread use of free verse rather than meter and rhyme. While the Imagist movement itself was fairly short-lived and not widely embraced (Wallace Stevens famously commented that “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this”) it opened up the possibilities of poetry and influenced future movements such as the Objectivists and the Beats.

Assignment:
Write a poem that follows the three rules of the imagists.  I know you all are probably tired from your sestina work, so feel free to work within the tiny constraints of the Pound poem:

1.) Title should suggest the place or thing on which your meditating.
2.) The first line should concentrate on one portion of the whole thing you've identified in your title.
3.) The second line should compare that portion of the whole thing you've identified in your tile with something else. The comparison should be figurative rather than literal, and you should use a metaphor.