Deep Image

It’s already April, and at Experience Writing that means it’s time for NaPoWriMo (National /Global Poetry Writing Month) and the A-Z Challenge. Continuing this year’s theme, I’m writing about the A to Z of Depth.

The Deep Image Poets were a group of poets in the early 1960’s who wrote stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences.

The Symbolist theory of correspondences is the idea that there are inherent analogies between the spiritual and material worlds. It proposes that elements in one realm symbolically reflect and interact with their corresponding element in another realm. This relationship creates a system of interconnectedness.

I first came across the Deep Image poets while reading Dorianne Laux’s new poetry craft book Finger Exercises for Poets. In the introduction to her chapter, “The Leap,” she says that that the Deep Image poets introduced us to Spanish poets who use the technique of leaping into seemingly unrelated imaginary material such as Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. She lists the Deep Image poets as Robert Bly, James Wright, W. S. Merwin, and others and compares them to others who use “sudden metaphorical flights.”

The Deep Image poets, Robert Kelly, Joan Kelly, and George Economou, started their own magazine called Trobar which is available to read on JSTOR. Robert Kelly writes that Jerome Rothenberg coined the phrase Deep Image. Rothenberg made a magazine called Poems from the Floating World also available on JSTOR. Above the Table of Contents of Issue 3, he wrote:

“The poem is the record of a movement from perception to vision.
Poetic form is the pattern of that movement thru space and time.
The vehicle of movement is passion-speaking-thru-things.
The condition of movement is freedom.
The deep image is the content of vision emerging in the poem.”

Today’s Poem

Five Images Build Eudaimonia

union
youth dies
universe demands more
you dream in morning air
you’d have a money year

This poem was inspired by today’s prompts at NaPoWriMo and Writer’s Digest’s April Poem a Day (PAD) Challenge. And the word Eudaimonia from Deborah Weber’s A to Z.

Thank you so much for coming by and reading my post. Any thoughts or questions about Deep Image poets? Come back tomorrow for more depth exploration and poetry.