Modernism: Perception, Perception, Perception, Change, Change, Change....

OK. Yes.

WWI struck. The planet was broken open. Western civilizations were no longer navigated by the horse and carriage. And, out popped modernism!

Well, it wasn't that simple, but…

The world was irrevocably changed. Perceptions about the safety and even, perhaps, the innocence within the world were shattered. And, in turn, artists began to express their perceptions of the world in new, frequently more fractured, forms.

Visual and Textual Interrelated Veins of Modernism:

Cubism…
Like Imagism, Cubism was concerned with perception (particularly visual perception), structures, and the breaking of rote artistic traditions/forms. Cubism caught something in flux; it reminded the viewer that there is motion/dynamism in anything we view.

Cubism’s concern with structures was, in part, the concern with scrutinizing the underlying shapes of a subject, as well as examining the form from several angles – looking at the form as it exists dynamically in space, not just as an object viewed from one vantage point. The perceptions of these structures, angles, and planes of an object were then relayed onto the canvas. This created what often seemed to the viewer to be a scrambled image. Yet, beneath this apparently "scrambled image" lay an intensely studied awareness visual planes and of structure. So, cubism looked at the world intensely, then projected this vision back out into the world in a way that was, for the time period, a shattering and shifting of former modes of visual perception…


Stein:
Particularly in her poetic work within Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein -- much like a Cubist -- took elements and images from the world around her and scrambled them. She took words and images out of their familiar and seemingly logical everyday contexts, defamiliarizing them. She intently examined life, turned it around inside her and brought it out again in forms of writing that tipped our previous understanding of what poetry, images, words, and sounds were within the writing world. Also, like the Cubists, Stein had an intense awareness of structure, yet the structures she wished to break down and recreate not only included images of the world around her, but included grammatical structures. She intentionally deconstructed and played with nearly every aspect of grammatical structure, twisting the reader's mind into new shapes, often forcing the reader to let go of preconceived notions of language and images.

Pound/Imagism:
Imagism was "fathered" by Ezra pound and fostered by a larger community of poets (including and not limited to Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and H.D.). Also concerned with structure, this writing movement set out to strip poetry of its "excess." The purpose of this type of writing was that the concisely presented words/image(s) within the poem would be so strong, so direct as to carry an inherent power, a power that could have a transformative effect upon the reader. This writing was not so much about the ideas or feelings of the writer, but rather, sharpened experiences/perceptions and how these "translations of life" as we might call them, could affect the reader. The movement was more concerned with the (reader and writer's) experience of the present moment and the potentially transformative power in this direct quality. Pound, like the Cubists, wanted to move away from stasis. He looked for a liberation from the confines of a single perspective. And, it was often intended that this type of writing would shock/challenge the reader more than it would pacify.


Ezra Pound on Imagism:
"An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time...
It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the greatest works of art.
It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works...
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol...
Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a good deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which does not present. There is in the line nothing which can be called description; he presents... "
(http://faculty.gvsu.edu/webstern/imagism.htm)