*Negated once observed that the more I have to work, the more I mess around on the internet. I have an essay due at mid-day on Friday, 3500ish words--

Is Victorianism a rejection of Romanticism, or a continuation of it by other means?

Ugh. I'm sitting here in front of a Word Document with a pile of books, hoping to get started. I figure it's Wednesday today, and with Thursday tomorrow (and Friday morning) I can get a large portion of the text done.

Last night, I had the fortune to read a fantastic text by *Negated. We all have artists and writers we admire and wish to emulate, and *Negated is one of mine. She has a wonderful fanciness in her writing that appeals to me. Some of it sometimes strikes me as the slightest bit abstract and arcane, but I adore it.

Here are two of my favourite bits:

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She is a connoisseur of ceilings. Eyes closed, she could picture each of the plaster skies she’d ever slept under, right down to the angled slant of a painted splinter.

Don’t believe me? To the upper left corner, there's a pattern of cracks, shaped like the bridge between a fan’s handle and paper. The fan is fluttering about three-quarters open. On the center, a few inches towards the lower left, you can see an umber stain resembling the tossed mane of a horse. If you lay right up against the wall, it is possible to make out a rolling eye.

She tells me that she has just described a hotel room she stayed in. Belgium, back in the early days.

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Moving deliberately, she undoes the buttons down her blouse, bends slightly to unclip her bra. Her eyes are vises as the ridged scarscape appears, varying shades of red skating over her torso, circling her small breasts, snaking in a stranglehold down her neck. Some are evidently recent, swelling along the interwoven pathways; some are sienna scabs, the torn skin already knitting together. Parallel tracks rake along each arm, ending cleanly at the delicate wrists.

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Today I've also begun working on my dissertation for next year. Ten thousand words... I'm looking to write it on Imagist literature between 1912 and 1916, focusing on Ezra Pound.

Ezra Pound is an interesting writer for me. He wrote Imagisme; A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste in 1913. His thoughts are really interesting for me as a writer.

'Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.... Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

'Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

'Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative of vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was "pearl-pale," I can not remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament.

'Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose. Don't be "viewy"--leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it. When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad" he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

'Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point outward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work.'

See? One famous quote of his is that 'accuracy of statement is the sole morality of writing'.

In Imagisme he came up with three rules:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm; to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the rhythm of the metronome.

He and the Imagist school tried to use "ten words to your fifty". His famous poem, In a Station of the Metro, written in 1913, is short, but packed with imagery:

'The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.'

I'm hoping to write something in an Imagist style over the summer.