Imagery in ancient Chinese poetry was keen in relating human emotions and sensations to images of nature. Numerous stereotypical associations were made, which the reader, educated or not, was expected to identify and draw from the written, or rather painted, characters. Many complex sounds and words have been catalogued as “non translatable”. Usually, these poems bear no title. Classic “stanza” examples are Ono no Komachi’s “the pearl of dew” and Tu Tu’s “alone in her beauty”.
Fast forwarding a few centuries, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), founder in 1912 along with other artists of the literary movement Imagism, considered poetry to be the highest of arts. In their 1914 manifesto The Imagistes declared that the natural object is the adequate symbol. They recommended not mixing abstraction with the concrete and obtaining clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. This was an opposition to the French Symbolist movement. In other words, to Imagistes poetry should be a photography made up of carefully chosen words or diction.
In “Selected Poems”, James Wright (1927-1980) shows a display of purity and clarity in his depiction of images. Evocative and down to earth, Wright does not use figurative language as much as descriptive. Reading his poems, I felt compelled to liberate my self and to cleanse my soul with the holy water of poetry. Employing an uncomplicated language and the quasi absence of abstractions, Wright reaffirmed to me the suspicious simplicity of language: “lashed blind by the wind”, “her face was smooth as the side of an apricot”, “and the shade crawling upon the rock”, “I hear the horse clear his nostrils”. All these images appeal to the physical senses, visual, tact, aural, taste, and in doing so they immerse the reader into the poet’s body, and eventually, his feelings.
Mary Ruefles’s collection “Post Meridien” appeals to the senses in a different way. A direct connection between one or more physical stimuli is usually paired with a concrete mind or soul situation: “the baby’s screams were berserk, like a bird over the ocean”; one can discern the sound of the baby, the image become clearer by hearing the bird squawking and flying over the azure, then one lives the desperation of the mother. In the image “the corpses are clean, like diamond in a museum”, one sees the bright, dry diamonds in a place of quietness, then the corpses, resting, arid, and finally the sadness and solitude of lost beings emerge in the heart.
In “you can open your mouth like the doors of a theater being unlocked in the evening” you foresee the crowd of people storming out, but by closing with “and speak the truth”, you realize how the truth cannot be held inside. One must speak out, or implode trying not to.
In “Enola Gay” Mark Levine is much more abstract than Ruefle or Wright, yet since the opening verses one is violently drawn into the chaotic oppression of post-modernity. The world that surrounds the subject “the dark altar / where among paint cans and tar paper / and a microphone with its wires torn out” is at once cause and effect of the inner anguish. Appeals to the senses abound: “everybody is rubbing ice across their necks and chests”, “he smelled the resinous traces of the others”, “and it stood upright, like a sagging fence”, “he could hear the rasp of his servant’s breath”. The fact that he writes in an epic way makes a wider audience empathize with these metaphors and similes, action clips, and video-dreams. This confused canvas or collage is more evident in the barrage of images listed in “The Holy Pail” and “Event”, where one cannot avoid feeling with just the physical senses but also question our present worldview and ask: What will I do?
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