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the imagination, wholly our own. From this world alone does the work gain power, its soil the only one whose chemistry is perfect to the purpose.
    The exaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it. It sets them up, places a value upon experience — (said that half a dozen times already)
    XVI
    O tongue
    licking
    the sore on
    her netherlip
    O toppled belly
    O passionate cotton
    stuck with
    matted hair
    elysian slobber
    from her mouth
    upon
    the folded handkerchief
    I can’t die
    — moaned the old
    jaundiced woman
    rolling her
    saffron eyeballs
    I can’t die
    I can’t die
    XVII
    Our orchestra
    is the cat’s nuts —
    Banjo jazz
    with a nickelplated
    amplifier to
    soothe
    the savage beast —
    Get the rythm
    That sheet stuff
    ’s a lot a cheese.
    Man
    gimme the key
    and lemme loose —
    I make ’em crazy
    with my harmonies —
    Shoot it Jimmy
    Nobody
    Nobody else
    but me —
    They can’t copy it
    XVIII
    The pure products of
    America go crazy —
    mountain folk from Kentucky
    or the ribbed north end of
    Jersey
    with its isolate lakes and
    valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
    old names
    and promiscuity between
    devil-may-care men who have taken
    to railroading
    out of sheer lust of adventure —
    and young slatterns, bathed
    in filth
    from Monday to Saturday
    to be tricked out that night
    with gauds
    from imaginations which have no
    peasant traditions to give them
    character
    but flutter and flaunt
    sheer rags — succumbing without
    emotion
    save numbed terror
    under some hedge of choke-cherry
    or viburnum —
    which they cannot express —
    Unless it be that marriage
    perhaps
    with a dash of Indian blood
    will throw up a girl so desolate
    so hemmed round
    with disease or murder
    that she’ll be rescued by an
    agent —
    reared by the state and
    sent out at fifteen to work in
    some hard pressed
    house in the suburbs —
    some doctor’s family, some Elsie —
    voluptuous water
    expressing with broken
    brain the truth about us —
    her great
    ungainly hips and flopping breasts
    addressed to cheap
    jewelry
    and rich young men with fine eyes
    as if the earth under our feet
    were
    an excrement of some sky
    and we degraded prisoners
    destined
    to hunger until we eat filth
    while the imagination strains
    after deer
    going by fields of goldenrod in
    the stifling heat of September
    Somehow
    it seems to destroy us
    It is only in isolate flecks that
    something
    is given off
    No one
    to witness
    and adjust, no one to drive the car
    or better: prose has to do with the fact of an emotion; poetry has to do with the dynamisation of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.
    prose: statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectua states, data of all sorts — technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts — fictional and other —
    poetry: new form dealt with as a reality in itself.
    The form of prose is the accuracy of its subject matter-how best to expose the multiform phases of its material
    the form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words — or whatever it may be —
    the cleavage is complete
    Why should I go further than I am able? Is it not enough for you that I am perfect?
    The cleavage goes through all the phases of experience. It is the jump from prose to the process of imagination that is the next great leap of the intelligence — from the simulations of present experience to the facts of the imagination —
    the greatest characteristic of the present age is that it is stale — stale as literature —
    To enter a new world, and have there freedom of movement and newness.
    I mean that there will always be prose painting, representative work, clever as may be in revealing new phases of emotional research presented on the surface.
    But the jump from that to Cezanne or back to certain of the primitives is the impossible.
    The primitives are not back in some remote age — they are not BEHIND experience. Work which bridges the gap