MODERN IMAGINGS cont.

To comment on some of the recent exchanges regarding contemporary poetics 
and what I might, as shorthand, refer to as implications for IMAGERY and 
PROSODY, it may be useful, while I'm at a computer terminal, to elaborate a 
little on how the Bakhtinian critique coming from Franco-Soviet literary 
practice and the US poetics tradition stemming from Pound, Olson and 
Objectivism might in certain respects intersect.

Although the Perloff quote I cited offers three ways of looking at the use 
of images in literary texts, only one of these, the second, is perhaps 
genuinely of recent provenance, and reflects a (post)modern proclivity to 
regard the Word as itself a kind of Image.  This may be implied already in 
Pound's debts to the ideogram.  However the poetics of Cage, Retallack, 
Drucker, McCaffery etc makes extensive use of language as a visual and 
dramatically enacted phenomenon, and indeed in Cage or McCaffery aural 
analogies are extensively implicated and explored.  Linguistically, this 
brings up the whole question of the relationship between semantics and 
phonology.  Isn't it curious that so many terms sound as if they could mean 
something other than they actually do?  And what about translation?

Bakhtin, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, I believe, are 
dealing with the relationship between time series and images.  Stein: A rose 
is a rose is a rose, and no doubt might well be something else, besides.  
The flow of words, their metrical sustenance is what appears to count.  (And 
Frye seems to accede that this as a viable textual strategy.)

As for the trend coming out of Imagism itself - continuing to foreground 
reference, whether the simple simile or complex indirect metaphor, this 
raises the question of what images signify and how they are perceived.  How 
much context is necessary to bring out the reference's resonance?  Does 
Imagism as originally conceived not imply a kind of originary essentialism 
that reduces or condenses the implications of connection to narrative and/or 
place?  How is the potency of images to avoid being used up in an entropic 
reduction to overconditioned, defamiliarising anomie; satire, or simply 
disjunctivism, perhaps unconsciously filling in to take up the slack of 
naively and inarticulately realised experience.  This might be a point of 
concern in such genres as the 'critical pastoral', the 'analytic lyric' 
perhaps.

The phrase I hear repeatedly revived from Pound, to whom, indeed, many of 
these trends can be traced, either as exponent or opponent, is that 'poetry 
is news that stays news'.  Yet, what's new about the language (English in 
this instance, but really any comprehensible means of conversing), about 
metrics or in formal 'construction', a vehicle of speech, a paste-up of 
lines, sentences, pages and bound media to put the words through or lay them 
out against?  Words uttered into air, of course, without a conversing 
recipient would be considered 'lost'.  In short, does the force of an image 
not depend on how it's constructed, what it's bound up with, what it's 
played against?

And back to more utilitarian pursuits...


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