“No ideas but in things,” said William Carlos Williams in 1923, calling for a shift in poetry to a focus on concrete objects and everyday reality rather than romanticized settings, characters, and moods, or abstract concepts, or statements of thought or feeling, all of which had characterized a great deal of Western poetry for several centuries.

Williams did not initiate this shift. It had been developing for quite some time, but he stated the nature of the shift more clearly than most of his predecessors.  Ezra Pound, for example, after studying Eastern forms of poetry like haiku, had talked about Imagism. Not surprisingly given the influence of haiku, many poems in the imagist movement were short descriptions of a single thing or of two juxtaposed things. His own poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” Willaims’ poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and Wallace Stevens’ “This Is Just to Say,” are all famous examples of this sort of short, imagistic creation.

Pound, however, never intended for the idea of Imagism to be limited to single images or to the simple, pretty picture poems that some of his followers created. He tried to clarify his concept by coining the word Vorticism, to describe the complex possibilities of the image, implying the way meaning, feeling, association, etc. swirls like a vortex around a strong image.   T.S. Eliot extended the discussion by creating the phrase “objective correlative,” i.e. a set of objects that correlate to a particular thought, experience, or emotion, to designate the same idea.

Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Stevens all went on to write lengthy works exemplifying the concepts of Vorticism or the objective correlative.  And others have followed in their footsteps throughout the 20th and 21st century, using the image as the foundation for communication through poetry, adding nuances to the concepts and renaming the practice such things as Objectivism, Deep Imagism, or Projectivism.

Today it goes almost without saying that a good poem will feature strong, evocative imagery; will prioritize showing over telling;  and will attempt to express the experience, feeling, or concept being presented as fully as possible, with a wide array of relevant details and associations, even when their connections are not immediately apparent.

The poem below, written by a former student of mine, does a great job of doing all of that, giving us a catalog of images associated with the word “poetry” to illustrate the inadequacy of the word to describe what poetry does or better, perhaps, needs to do, which is suggested through a second catalog of more powerful images.

I Don’t Like Poetry

John Meier

I don’t like poetry.

The word. Not the thing.

Three mild syllables:

too small, too thin, too dainty.

Suited to lighter tasks, a child’s paper boat,

a porcelain teacup in grandma’s parlor,

thick curtains drawn against the heat.

It may suit ripples on a lake reflecting morning light,

flower petals dropped behind lovers’ slow canoe,

maybe even stars in the wide desert,

and the normal tragedy of our lives.

It can hold you

as a sleepy child brought in from the car

over dad’s shoulder,

now you as father enjoying that quiet duty,

or daughter’s moist kiss on your cheek,

skinny, shivering by the pool,

wanting candy money.

Perhaps laughter of a distant dinner party,

or gratitude for knowing eye of elephant,

slow roll of dolphin.

But is it strong enough

for silent old woman and horse,

tangled hair swirling by cold ocean cliffs?

Or battlefield of corpses to horizon,

tattered flags slapping in desert wind,

while quiet foragers strip the bodies?

This small word seems a scaffolding

of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue,

ill-suited to greater tasks.

Perhaps we need a different word,

willing accomplice to rough-handed, difficult people,

those who have lived a while among us,

who see this world as it is and as it is not.

And in funk of real life,

smoke, sweat, machinery,

and in crowded bars with dangerous thick men,

low hats and dark eyes,

lips wet with whiskey.

The Sanskrit word was Kavya,

more mysterious and muscular,

but can it

sizzle like close lightning,

terrify like crocodile’s sudden lunge at water’s edge?

Can it hold the wind,

or a secret told in a dream,

forgotten with waking?

Or priest at altar muttering quiet Latin?

This word must capture our life and death,

and the creatures that made the first sounds on Earth

that were not wind and wave.

Any word must disappoint,   

as we tear and scratch the dumb fabric of things.

We want to push the veil from the face of God,

and compel the Almighty to explain

this beautiful strange world.

We proceed like flying fish,

leaping through the surface,

briefly in a wider world,

then returning.

Were we to land in a passing god’s boat,

gasping and doomed,

we might finally see:

Poetry is not a word and it existed before words;

it is ancient and will exist when the planet forgets us.

Then it will wait, patient and permanent.