Edward Storer - 7 Short Poems (1907-22)

Forgotten Poems #89 || Reissue #7

       
              —: Fragment :—

       And you shall be
       A poet, and shall come
       Nearest of all
       To reading what
       May ne’er be read.
   

    
              —: Image :—

       Forsaken lovers,
       Burning to a chaste white moon,
       Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought.
    

   
              —: The Poplar :—
                       [excerpt]

       By the river’s edge,
       The poplar
       Quivering stands,
       Like a huge arrow,
       Shot from a giant bow . . .

       So clean upon the sky
       It lies,

       Flung in an artist hour of time
       Upon the pale blue canvas
       With wide, bold lines
       Of living crayon.—
   

     
              —: From the Mountains :—

       In the silent campagna,
       I cut from a cherry-tree
       A frond of white blossoms.

       By my window I place it,
       Against the blue sky.
       All around me are houses,
       I am sunk in the city,
       But unto me only
       Like a bird from the mountains,
       The pale spring has come.
    

     
              —: In Hospital :—

       Since tonight I must die
       why do they keep the window open,
       so that the April air
       flows in from the mountains,
       and why do they place by my bed
       this vase of spring violets.
   

   
              —: By the Shore :—

       Flowers flaming by the seashore,
       crimson flowers,
       shuddering in the breeze
       as if the violent sea,
       with its white fangs
       had wounded earth,
       and the blood dripped
       perfumedly
       o’er the salty stones.
   

   
              —: Poor Devils :—

       O lovers what is the best you find
       in love,
       when your eyes are wide with joy
       and your breath beats
       irregularly like those
       near to death?
       What is the best life’s highest hour can give?

       Oblivion,
              a moment’s oblivion.
   

Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)

One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.

Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.

Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.

Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.

     
              —: Ballad of a Wild Bird :—
                          by Dick Whyte

              I.

       we've sung
       this song before
       and those
       before us too
       & before them—

       & then
       the universe
       began

       (or didn't)

              II.

       blossom!

       from nothing
       no
       thing,

       not anything

       not nothing

              III.

       not not not
       becomes

       knots
       becomes

       knits
       becomes

       nets
       becomes

       nest
       becomes

              IV.

       a bird
       with no name
       of its own

       big & bloody
       & wild
       & screaming

       eyes made
       of everything

       & mind
       made
       of whatever
       everything else
       isn't
     

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