Order it here: www.amazon.com/dp/1961694026

3/ Killed in action during WWI at 34, Hulme left a small but mighty legacy. His bold ideas endure, proving a few poems can change everything. Learn more about rest of the Imagist legacy on this week's episode of The Poetry Space_:

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

2/ Hulme wanted poetry be “hard and dry,” free of romantic fluff. His influence on Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others cemented modernist verse, turning words into crisp, photographic images.

Thanks, Matthew, good one to bring up—I don't think we've read that on the podcast before! Also good suggestion!

10/ Another great little Imagist poem, "Fog" by Carl Sandburg:

Mike White's "NASCAR" from Rattle 32 is the first to come to mind—note the way the triple-metaphor relies on the immediacy of the image of the dog: rattle.com/nascar-by-mi...

8/ What's your favorite use of imagery in a poem? Share some in the comments and we'll share them on the next episode of The Poetry Space_! I'll add some more too.

7/ Images are processed more quickly and permanently than the other senses we can evoke—and they function most effectively in the symbolic realm where the wisdom of our holistic right-brains reside. Images are the stuff of dreams, and dreams are the stuff of poetry.

6/ The Imagists—Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, etc.—recognized this, and taught us all to be visual writers ever since.

5/ We read body language, we remember subtle differences in faces, and our recognition of visual symmetry is the foundation to our sense of beauty itself. Our brains care so much about vision that we evolved whites in our eyes just so that we can see what others are seeing.

4/ As scavenging hunter-gatherers, we relied primarily on sight for threat-detection and food acquisition, and honed those tools even further as a key component of group social structure.

3/ Why is imagery such an important element in poetry? Around 40% of of human cerebral cortex is devoted to image processing—more than all the other senses combined.

2/ That painting is Charles Demuth's "The Figure 5 in Gold," inspired by one of the great William Carlos Williams poems:

Wonderful suggestion, thanks!

7/ That's my perspective, anyway. But I'm curious what everyone things about spirituality in poetry. What is the most spiritual poem to you? I'll add more examples throughout the day.

6/ But any poem can be seen as the product of this kind of attention. The poets job is to notice their own attention, and to bring forward its complexity into our working vocabulary. It doesn't matter what the poems are about.

rattle.com/the-play-of-...

5/ I love Peter Cooley's explanation of this process in "Instructions for Assembling the Miracle":
rattle.com/instructions...