Pierre Reverdy

From Plastic Tub


French man of letters practicing what he referred to as "Cubist poetry", Reverdy's influence on the developoment of Associationalist thought lay in the formulation of his primary thesis, referred to by Addission as long distance collision and transliterated below:

The Image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from two realities, more or less distant, brought together. The more the relation between the two realities is distant and accurate, the stronger the image will be--the more it will posses emotional power and poetic reality.
Two realities that have no relation whatever cannot be brought together effectively. No image is created. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic--but because the association of ideas is distant and accurate.

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