Poets Built It Critique Club & The Movements Program
Hi! Zena here.
Our “Movement” themed season begins by introducing the concept of movement as intentional on artistic and poetic lens shifts. Shift that altered the poetry landscape across time.
What are Poets Built It “The Movements”?
This seasons Poets Built It Critique Club explores the work and profound discoveries of The Imagists.
The capital city of London saw great upheaval politically and industrially during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Colonial expansion drove a need for a new expression of consciousness as the world opened up to new wealth and sense of possibility. Many who held right wing and conservative opinion craved a normality that, for some creatives, was not conducive to the artist’s mind: to imagine, to envision and evolve and adapt.
Not many were brave enough to challenge the established literary world.
‘The Imagist Manifesto’ demanded that upstanding citizens who held moral high ground evolve their thinking and adapt beyond the usual norms of respected societal art production.
Literature, in particular, nursed a conservativism and hidden bias that adhered closely to traditional classic form, and the works of poets such as Tennyson, Keats, Emily Brontë held fast to rooted poetic structures which had served a purpose among many, which was to establish the English as a premier language, which, in effect, caused with strict structures which cultivated religiosity, verbosity – in the eyes of an Imagist - and perpetuated the endorsement of classism and racism.
However, this moral position was not only non-inclusive, it was not remotely modern. Major shifts in cultural identity were happening in cities globally and a flux in the imagination was rippling across cultured society.
The Romantic poets, who wrote beautifully, cinematically with immense sentimentality, but sought escapism and were removed from the edge of industrial noise, the force of the industrial age, and more importantly, the hunger for a poetic lexicon that spoke to the moment.
Criticism of the structure of the classics and the abstract sentimentality of the Romantic genres, which had provided much security for over a century, was not welcomed.
However, the Imagist were a determined group of young writers who respected the classics and the traditional form, but needed to express a new voice which honoured their experience of a rapidly changing urbanising physical landscape.
Poets such as Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound found that the aesthetic of the Orient – Japan, China, and East Asia - resonated with them because of its minimalism and clarity. It offered interesting reprieve from the vagueness of rhetoric, the sentimentality and constrictive and rigid traditional poetry writing, and invited a new way of thinking.
The work of the imagists created space for symbolism and guidance toward the imagination for a more sensory experience of poetry, and they invited a new way of thinking about how we write in the today. Modernism, Post-modernism, even 21st Century poetry can thank the Imagists for introducing the West to the Eastern writing trends, often led by women to the Europe and the US.
In this, the first of The Movements series, I’ll guide you through the looking glass that is the imagists point of view of writing poetry and discover how, as a short lived , it paved the way for the next generations of poets still to arrive.
Later on in this season - The theme being Light - we will look at Slam Poetry and its beginning as cultural rebel paving the way for powerful performance literary voice, born from the streets of urbanity and the heart of resilience.
– Zena Edwards, Founder of Poets Built It.
Ready to write with the clarity and power of an Imagist?
In this workshop, you’ll read
a truncated history of the writings of Imagist poets Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle and John Gould Fletcher
Analyze Imagist poems to uncover their craft secrets.
Practice writing with immediacy and precision.
Program Details
The Movements is a text based explorative workshop program.
A bundle of 5 session costs of £20 including the booking fee on the Poets Built It Online Community platform.
Or you can select a workshop individually per workshop for £7.60 including booking.
All proceeds from ticket sales go towards the Poets Built It ‘Poets Supporting Poets Contribution Fund.’
This enables Poets Built It to pay poets and spoken word artists fee – whether nominal or inline with their cultural worth.
We are currently looking into
Imagism
Confessional Poetry
The Beats
Negritude
Eco-Poetry
Slam Poetry
Objectivists
Currently running is The Imagist Movement.
Sign up for the Poets Built It Critique Club – ‘The Movements’ Courses via the Poets Built It Eventbrite link -
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-movements-a-story-of-poetry-across-the-ages-tickets-2000785243523?
