Modern Poetry Final Project

1. Let the Image Speak for Itself
Alfred Stieglitz impact on the poetry of William Carlos Williams

2. Alfred Stieglitz
 Born in Hoboken, NJ. 1864
 Moved to Germany for school
 1884 started interest in photography
 First article in 1887 about amature photography In Germany -
lead to more writing/more photos
 Moved to NewYork 1891
 Formed The Camera Club of NewYork- merger of SAP and
NYCC
 1897 Camera Notes
 1902 Photo Secession- exhibition judged only by
Photographers put on by National Arts club- positive feedback
 Lead to Camera work same year- journal of developing
photography as an individual art form

3. Photography as an Art form
 Unlike painting –
photography is
instantaneous
 Must be a seer
 Clear sharp
representation- maximum
detail with maximum
simplification
 Snap shots of NewYork
(1901)
Old and NewYork
1901
Reflections of
Night 1902

4. 291 The Original Modern Art Gallery
 Gallery 291 (1908)- goal
was to showcase different
mediums side by side
 Rodin, Matisse Rousseau,
Cezanne, Picasso
(European)
Minerva date
unknown
Tiger in a Tropical
Storm 1891
Girl with a
Mandolin
1910

5.  Alfred Maurer, John Marin,
Marsden Hartley,Arthur
Dove, MaxWeber
(American)
Painting No. 48, 1913
Brooklyn Bridge 1912
Cow 1914
Interior Fourth Dimension 1914

6. Armory show (1913)
 VP, first official exhibition
of modern art in America
 Most famous and
polarizing: Matisse’s “Blue
Nude (Souvenir de
Biskra)” and “Madras
Rouge (Red Madras
Headdress),”and
Duchamp’s “Nude
Descending a Staircase,
No. 2”
 Impressionist Fauvist and
Cubism were represented

7. Williams Evolution of Style
 Began with Keatsian and
Whitmanian form and
content
 Pound in London 1909-
1910
 Exclamatory then Imagism
 The Tempers (1913)
Poundonian style
 Fascination with visual arts
on NewYork Avant Garde
 Camera work

8.  “The step Williams took
consisted of a progression
from the concept, the
thought, to the poem
itself, just as the painters
following Cezanne began
to talk of the sheer paint:
a picture a matter of
pigments upon a piece of
cloth stretched on a
frame” (Dijkstra 50).
Marcel Duchamp
(Bride 1912)

9. Image as a Subject vs. Metaphor
 Visual space/ tension into Poetry
 Remove narrative sequence of
imagist poems - Story
 Moment of Perception
“Dawn”
 Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6-Bi8fwakMo
Francis Picabia , Nu
devant un paysage

10. Good Art vs. Bad Art- Williams Lens
 The story cannot overtake
the visual content
 If used must sacrifice the
immediacy and objective
perception of a painting
 Instead suggests artist
should isolate moment of
reality and strip it from all
things nonessential
 Recreating the pure moment
 Example;“Station in a metro
Ezra Pound” (1919) The
apparition of these faces in the
crowd;. Petals on a wet, black
bough.
 Example Williams “Red
Wheelbarrow” So much
depends upon the red
wheelbarrow

11. Creative Imagination- Memory Photos
 Imagination as- “The
undetermined moments
between waking and
sleeping” (53).
 These moments create a
lasting mental photo reel
that refuses the limits of
time and shape.
 Certain aspects of the
original action “become
liquid.” Creating new form
=
Two Figures (1913-14), Liubov'
Popova

12. “Nothing is Good Save the New.”

13. “Danse Russe” (1917)
 If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
Girl with a Mirror-
Henrich Kuehn 1906
Alice Boughton 1909

14. “Queen-Ann’s-Lace” (1921)
Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness.Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.
Nude against the light
Constant Puyo 1906
Alice Boughton The
Seasons 1909

15. Ignored Relationship
 Letters in 1922 (Yale
Stieglitz file), Marsden
Hartley’s Adventures in the
Arts,
 John Marin Painting
 Cover up in Williams
Autobiography