Tag / poetry

by Chris Cocca

Imagists

I’ve been revisiting the Imagists lately. HD is from where I’m from and is buried over at Nisky Hill Cemetery. (Stephen Vincent Benet, though not an Imagist, is also from here).

I wrote a poem today in response to a lot of this reading. It’s about finches and thistles and fox-gloves and rain vales. It’s looking for a good home. And maybe also a title. Right now, it’s called Imagistes, which is just the plural of HD’s early pen name (given to her by Ezra Pound, who also called her – insufferably and predictably – Dryad).

We read “Oread” in high school. Our teacher subscribed to what seemed, to me at 15, a rather subversive take. But yes, “Oread” is about exactly what you think it’s about (and also other things). At least I think so.

I really like almost all of “Hermes of the Ways.” Here again, Pound had to interlope, changing “await” to “awaiteth,” because of course he did.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here talking to trees.

by Chris Cocca

Zbigniew Herbert on the Work of Poets

“In Poland,” Herbert once stated, “we think of the poet as prophet;
he is not merely a maker of verbal forms or an imitator of reality. The poet expresses the deepest feelings and the widest awareness of people….

“The language of poetry differs from the language of politics. And, after all, poetry lives longer than any conceivable political crisis.

“The poet looks over a broad terrain and over vast stretches of time. He makes observations on the problems of his own time, to be sure, but he is a partisan only in the sense that he is a partisan of the truth. He arouses doubts and uncertainties and brings everything into question”

Quoted on the From the Editors page at the UCity Review.