Sunday, November 18, 2018, 1:00 P.M. To 4:00 P.M.
Imagist and Pulitzer Prize poet Wallace Stevens was quoted as saying: In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
And, like Stanley Kunitz, he was also an insurance executive. Poetry was a spiritual endeavor to Stevens, revealed in the quote: We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark. But one of the sweetest Wallace Stevens quotes is: The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Jim Moreno’s November poetry workshop at San Diego Writers, Ink will not serve you ice cream. But it will return to the more affordable 3 hour format to blend the writing of 10 Imagist poets to prompt original poems for participant poets: Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, H. D., Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, & Adelaide Crapsey. In addition, Jim has researched poetry from writers of other cultures and genres that resonate with Imagist verse.
Imagist poems were published from 1913 to 1922. The review of Peter Jones’ book “Imagist Poetry” described Imagism as … a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets, described as ‘a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth … half-melted, lumpy’. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should ‘use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something … it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech’. It was this freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluable Introduction, ‘imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice’. Other voices claim Imagism was not a movement, but a group of contentious poets who agreed on a few small things about poetry like free verse, brevity, and the powerful voice of imagery in a poem.
Join Jim Moreno and write your original poetry in a calm Container of respect, inspiration, and imagination. A class syllabus includes quotations of germane poets, suggested music for listening while writing, and a bibliography of Jim’s research. Moreno also brings brief film clips of relevant poems that add visual resources to the workshop. For beginning and seasoned poets.