We are in the snug bar tonight, the TV sports have been relegated elsewhere.Grab a pie, some crisps(chips) or pork scatchings , a nice iced drink and park yourself on a stool to ensure full attention for a half -hour or so.
Here below is the story(extract), in a poet's own words of how an 'as is moment' became perhaps the clasic imagist poem in English (at least)
"Ezra Pound (from Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916)"
"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that - a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. ......I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough."
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. I a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."
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Three points jump out for me in this extract from Pound's tale of this poem
1.The conception process
2.The ' revision ' process from 30 lines ,to 15 ,then to destructuion ,then 'rebirth' to 2 , plus of course the integral title
IN A STATION OF THE METRO)
3.A poem without a verb, enforces the image
What did you notice ?
Does it ring any bells? and ...
For those interested in reading more of Pound's article and an in depth academic discussion on Pound's classic this link maybe of interest
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm
LATER UPDATE
If you had to write the second line of this poem in just seven syllables in the context of Pound's description above How would it read?
I wrote this verse some years ago to convey the imagist process as it appeared to me and seemingly to Pound a century earlier.....
fleeting butterflies
land in my mind-
a moment becomes a poem
POSTSCRIPT
For those interested in exploring Imagist poetry I suggest a Dover thift book
Imagist Poetry an anthology ed Bob Blaisdell isbn 0486408752
All the key imagist poets are included.