As a participant and contributor to poetry month, and part of the 30/30/30 initiative, Jim Lounsbury has written an article on Les Murray which features in the US ‘zine and online community eXit sTraTa. It’s an ongoing argument over the power of images vs. words and a celebration of Les Murray, an Australian poet who has used words to make pictures that we all remember.
EXCERPT FROM eXit sTraTa
About ten years ago, I stumbled into a heated debate with a filmmaker friend about whether words or imagery was a more effective way to convey emotion. I argued the case for words, and he took the side of imagery. As the disagreement escalated to a passionate squabble and then to a stamp your feet and beat on your chest free-for-all, I began to wonder what gave me such a strong opinion on the issue. We were both filmmakers. We were both avid photographers. We were both working in the visual arts. What then, was my problem with accepting the visual medium as the superior art form? At the end of the night, we agreed to disagree, and I left, still confused about why I was so confident in the power of words.
Of course, my affinity for words could be biological. My internal chemistry set might not react to imagery as powerfully as it does to a well placed noun, but I wasn’t going to let myself off the hook that easily. Over the course of many months, my thoughts often returned to this argument until a plausible explanation finally struck me a few weeks later. Imagery was powerful at evoking emotion, but words have the ability to surgically cut to the bone and identify a precise emotion. I realized, in that moment, that I was a poet. That I saw life experience as the paint, and words as the brush with which an observation can be made, and I valued poets who could create the vivid imagery of dreams, while making a precise observation. One such writer I discovered in my late twenties, was Les Murray, a well loved and collected Australian poet who has a way of capturing an exact feeling, while still swimming in the dreamland of visual imagination. The same way a watercolor captures a blurry lined image that requires an emotional response to connect the dots, emphasizing feeling and impression as much as the accuracy of the observation. I think this is why I like Murray’s poetry so much. He intoxicates my visual side and activates my dream world, while feeding my hunger for observations, the ‘that’s so true’ that comes with an emotionally precise poem.
read the rest of the article here>>
