Imagism and Transubstantiation

I read some more of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this morning. I'm 2/3 of the way through it. It's summer in the book, and there's been a devastating flood because of a tropical storm.

Even her most benign descriptions move me, and I hardly ever know why.

At the end of this week, we looked at the Art of Modernism in my AP Class: Hopper, Stieglitz, Okeefe, Demuth.

I showed Demuth's The Figure 5 in Gold and the corresponding poem by William Carlos Williams.

It reminded me how much I enjoyed the work I did in college on the Imagist poets, particularly Williams.

I love the aesthetics of vacillating between the literary line and the figurative one, and I'm fascinated by the emergence of meaning from the point where language meets visual perception. I think this is why I like Dillard so much: meaning emerges from the point where language meets biology and place--only with Dillard, the emergence is more of a transformation.

Her language does to nature what transubstantiation does to the bread and wine of the Eucharist.