The Thing Itself: Working with Imagery

The first dictum of Imagism — direct treatment of the “thing” itself, whether objective or subjective — sounds deceptively simple, but is hard to live up to. In this workshop we’ll try to get better at direct treatment. We’ll look at poems from writers such as Hakuro and Wallace Stevens with that in mind. We’ll try, then, to apply what we find out by doing exercises. These might include making efforts, in poetic form, to directly present both objective and subjective “things”; revising our way out of interpretation and commentary; and juxtaposing images with no direct conceptual connection in search of a beauty beyond concepts.