Hello Bob,
Many thanks for your full and informative comments on this piece. Your suggestion for the Via Negativa approach is very interesting. I feel that many readers who have responded to this piece have taken it rather more seriously than I intended. I thought it was quite amusing but maybe I´ve got an odd sense of humour. Doesn´t the final couplet raise a smile at all? Certainly the poem is not intended to be a critique of Western philosophy even though the connection to one small, though very important, aspect of Plato´s is unavoidable. I´m not even sure that I myself see it as an argument against imagism, although it would be naive of me not to expect that some would read it that way. I suppose I can see that the voice in the poem - the one that says, `so please make the things big enough...´ may sound confrontational but I much prefer the other adjective you used, `mischevous´ for the poet. Can I have that one, please? I think the bottom line, though, is that this one is not as amusing and witty as I thought it was. Never mind, I´ve got a big rubbish bin.
Best wishes, Mike
--- Alkuperäinen viesti ---
Hi Mike,
I think this as a bit like a dry cracker, it needs some cheese! I was
travelling yesterday and thinking about this and thought, “OK, so you don’t
want to mention things… but you want your piece to work as a poem… so how
about saying what it’s not! Via Negativa, as rheumaticky Tommy Aquinas used
to say as he blew to cool his porridge. Help us to glimpse more than we can
see in your words.
Ha! If you get into ranting you could say: “It’s not like a sock, not like a
mouse, not like a biro, cos there’s no ideas in things!” (etc. etc.). (H’m,
at the end of such a list, your comment: “Always beware of this trap:/too
many things, too few ideas.” has something extra – and that extra isn’t just
that your list has entertained us.
I guess poets often see things sideways, from unusual angles. Very few poems
seem to work like a pack of rugby forwards, head on.
Perhaps I’m suggesting a different approach because you’re going against
almost everything poet’s see as being in poems and – as Sue pointed out so
well – how we see the world around us – and Sue’s world isn’t my world but I
“see” what she means! Lean sideways a little, it can be done!
I think in this draft you’re also coming across as repeating a few phrases
from a student’s philosophical essay, when the poor person who wrote it has
only read one or two chapters in a Teach Yourself Plato book, and who hasn’t
much of a grasp of the history of Western Philosophy. (I’m not saying YOU
haven’t a grasp, I’m saying the poem is vulnerable to attacks from anyone
who’s read the next chapter and can see, lets say, what Hume, or Kant, or
Wittgenstein, or whoever, has to say… And who were the Imagists keen on, I
can’t rightly remember… Bergson, Santayana? How did they cope with the
statement: “It is the idea/which is the *raison d´être* of the thing.”).
The poem, I sense, isn’t as mischievous as the poet - or as entertaining, or
skilful, or memorable as a poet can write... So how should you write this? I
don’t know…
But don’t confront us, inveigle us. Don’t provoke us, seduce us. Don’t
assume we won’t agree, (which seems to be the tone - the tone seems very,
“OK, take this or leave it” confrontational) assume we could go along with
what you say – and, if you want to be provocative, irony might make the
build up to what you’re saying make us enjoy smiling along with you.
If the poem however, is a refutation of (The) Imagist Manifesto (I think
there was one, and was it published in Blast in 1915?) I can’t make the
connection, too well. Didn’t they have a fair few bullet points? Is it fair
to begin with William Carlos Williams’s dictum when he wasn’t one of the
signatories?
Bob
>From: Mike Horwood <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: Imagist Manifesto
>Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:50:06 +0300
>
>The asterisks around a word/phrase indicate that it is *in italics*.
>
>
>Imagist Manifesto
>
>
>No ideas but in things;
>always the eye focused on things,
>but not *more* things than ideas.
>And the ideas should be quite big
>and interesting, so please make the things
>big enough and interesting enough to carry them.
>Always beware of this trap:
>too many things, too few ideas.
>
>At all times remember that the things
>have only been called into existence
>in the service of the idea. It is the idea
>which is the *raison d´être* of the thing.
>
>And above all, remember that the thing itself
>is nothing.
>
>
>
>
>Mike
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