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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
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A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
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10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
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· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
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A dilemma for educators:
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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The history of Imagism.
By F.S. FLINT.
. . . itaque, quae priores, nondum comperta, eloquentia
percoluere, rerum fide tradentur.—TACITUS.
“Chi compra Manfredi?”
SOMEWHERE IN THE gloom of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme, now in the trenches of Ypres, but excited then by the propinquity, at a half-a-crown dance, of the other sex (if, as Remy de Gourmont avers, the passage from the aesthetic to the sexual emotion, n’est qu’un pas, the reverse is surely also true), proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets’ Club. The thing was done, there and then. The Club began to dine; and its members to read their verses. At the end of the year they published a small plaquette of them, called “For Christmas MDCCCCVIII”. In this plaquette was printed one of the first “Imagist” poems, by T. E. Hulme :
In November of the same year, Edward Storer, author already of “Inclinations,” much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay at the end attacking poetic conventions. The first poem in the book was called “Image,” here it is :
Mr. Storer, who has recanted much since, was in favour then of a poetry which I described, in reference to his book, as “a form of expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant heart of an exquisite moment.” A fair example of his practice is this from “Clarice-Henley”:
I have always wished that Storer, in his after work, had brought more art to the exploitation of the temperament he displayed in the Mirrors, which, for me, is a book of poetry. But he changed his manner completely.
In all this Hulme was ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage…
At that time, I had been advocating in the course of a series of articles on recent books of verse a poetry in vers libre, akin in spirit to the Japanese. An attack on the Poets’ Club brought me into correspondence and acquaintance with T. E. Hulme; and, later on, after Hulme had violently disagreed with the Poets’ Club and had left it, he proposed that he should get together a few congenial spirits, and that we should have weekly meetings in a Soho restaurant. The first of these meetings, which were really the successors of certain Wednesday evening meetings, took place on Thursday, March 25, 1909. There were present, so far as I recall, T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, F. W. Tancred, Joseph Campbell, Miss Florence Farr, one or two other men, mere vaguements in my memory, and myself. I think that what brought the real nucleus of this group together was a dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then (and is still, alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and haikai; we all wrote dozens of the latter as an amusement; by poems in a sacred Hebrew form, of which “This is the House that Jack Built” is a perfect model ; Joseph Campbell produced two good specimens of this, one of which, “The Dark,” is printed in “The Mountainy Singer”; by rhymeless poems like Hulme’s “Autumn,” and so on. In all this Hulme was ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage; and he and F. W. Tancred, a poet too little known, perhaps because his production is precious and small, used to spend hours each day in the search for the right phrase. Tancred does it still; while Hulme reads German philosophy in the trenches, waiting for the general advance. There was also a lot of talk and practice among us, Storer leading it chiefly, of what we called the Image. We were very much influenced by modern French symbolist poetry.
On April 22, 1909, Ezra Pound, whose book, Personae, had been published on the previous Friday, joined the group, introduced, I believe, by Miss Farr and my friend T. D. FitzGerald. Ezra Pound used to boast in those days that he was Nil prœter “Villon” et doctus cantare Catullum, and he could not be made to believe that there was any French poetry after Ronsard. He was very full of his troubadours ; but I do not remember that he did more than attempt to illustrate (or refute) our theories occasionally with their example. The group died a lingering death at the end of its second winter. But its discussions had a sequel. In 1912 Mr. Pound published, at the end of his book Ripostes, the complete poetical works of T.E. Hulme, five poems, thirty-three lines, with a preface in which these words occur : “As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909 (previously referred to as the ‘School of Images’) have that in their keeping.” In that year, Pound had become interested in modern French poetry; he had broken away from his old manner; and he invented the term “Imagisme ” to designate the aesthetic of “Les Imagistes.”1 In March 1913, an ” interview,” over my signature, of an “imagiste” appeared in the American review Poetry, followed by “A Few Dont’s by an Imagiste” by Ezra Pound. The four cardinal principles of “Imagisme” were set forth as:
(1) Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
(2) To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
(3) As regarding rhythm : to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
(4) The ” doctrine of the Image “—not for publication.
Towards the end of the year Pound collected together a number of poems different writers, Richard Aldington, H.D., F. S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, John Cournos, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Heuffer and Allan Upward, and in February-March 1914 they were published in America and England as Des Imagistes: an Anthology, which, though it did not set the Thames, seems to have set America, on fire.1 Since then Mr. Ezra Pound has become a “Vorticist,” with a contradiction, for, when addressing the readers of The New Age2 he has made Imagism to mean pictures as Wyndham Lewis understands them; writing later for T. P.’s Weekly, he made it pictures as William Morris understood them. There is no difference, except that which springs from difference of temperament and talent, between an imagist poem of to-day and those written by Edward Storer and T. E. Hulme.
♦
F.S. Flint was a poet and translator and a champion of Imagism. This essay first appeared as a notice in The Egoist, May 1, 1915, p. 71. It is republished in the New Series to accompany May Sinclair’s appreciation of the poetry of ‘H.D.’
NOTE
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Publication: Tuesday, 23 May 2017, at 01:01.
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