POETRY THAT IS HARD AND CLEAR

A former student of mine named Marco e-mailed me recently about the two-line Ezra Pound poem that still turns up in textbooks and anthologies:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

I’d brought that poem to class to talk about Imagism. Marco said that whenever he found himself over-writing or over-explaining in his poems, he’d look up the Pound couplet again and use it as a antidote to excess.

Imagism -- Pound pretty much lit the fires of that movement -- was an antidote to conventional, ornamental 19^thcentury Romanticism. Just a few lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning will show you what Imagism was in opposition to:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I can almost hear Pound and his friends saying, “Yikes! Pound’s couplet puts us on our feet in a subway station. Apparition lets us know what follows is likely to be at least a little mysterious, and then -- and this is the reading I prefer -- a soot-colored train speeds past and faces in the windows remind him of petals on a dark, damp branch. It really is striking compared to the gassy love poem by EBB.

I’m not always an Imagist poet but I like the rules of Imagism: Treat the subject directly, make every word count, prefer music over the metronome of meter.

Here’s a poem of mine.

Open at 10:00 A.M.

I burst in at 10:01 and surprise

the pretty clerks whispering,

giggling, fussing with each other’s

hair, holding out their pale wrists

suffused with the newest scent.

Everybody blushes as I stare.

I feel like one of the characters

of mythology stumbling upon

naiads bathing. But not Acteon

with his ravenous hounds.

Just a bumpkin standing by

the water’s edge, one hand

on the warm flank of his

lost cow.

Amy Lowell took up Pound’s argument for Imagism’s cause and laid out a few rules of her own for anyone who was interested: “Use language of common speech, create new rhythms, allow freedom of choice as far as subject goes, present an image, produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.”

“Freedom of choice as far as subject goes.” Some of you know how just reading Ed Field’s “ Bride of Frankenstein” poem 40+ years ago opened so many doors for me so I could write about Dagwood and Devil Girls From Mars! (Ed’s poem is on-line if you want to take a look.)

“Open at 10:00 A.M.” isn’t strictly an Imagist poem but I do like Lowell’s Pound-like guidelines. The diction here is everyday, the rhythm is not traditional meter, I wrote about going shopping, the setting and characters are seeable, and the details are concrete.

Here’s something I ask my poetry students to do -- write the gist of their poems out in prose. Sometimes I do that too -- I went into Banana Republic before the clerks, all young women, were really ready for customers. I surprised them and I felt like I’d intruded. That’s pretty much what happened, but nobody would call that a poem. Playing along with Amy Lowell’s and Ezra Pound’s mandates helped me turn a simple incident into something that’s more fun to read.