In a lot of my critiques, here and elsewhere, I find myself going over the basics of imagery, trying to explain it and type it quickly so that the critique-ee can understand and put the ideas to use. Hopefully, this will become a more complete and useful guide for those looking to learn about imagery; but I want it to be good for poets who have a command of the basics and want to tighten the nuts and bolts.
So: what should I add? Is anything confusing, not phrased well, in need of cutting down/elaboration? Anything you want to say for quoting in a finished article? Arguements? Anything will be helpful. Thanks! =]
Imagery: Concrete and Purposeful
Imagery, at its best, isn’t just the background of a poem or a pretty veneer that draws attention from the ‘point’ the poet is trying to made – it can become the fabric of the poem, conveying the essential emotions and ideas. Imagery has the power to evoke and to illustrate, bringing out the response of the readers rather than pounding the expected response into their skulls.
Imagery is language that addresses the senses. It is a very flexible device and doesn’t have a structural formula, like the simile does; rather, anything that conveys sensory detail and shows, rather than tells, can be an image. Imagery deals in the concrete, rather than the abstract.
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Poetry doesn’t have to attack grand truths of the universe or be general and vague; these are often the mistakes of beginners, who really want to be Poetic with a capital P. This often leads down the road to abstraction. Abstraction is anything vague and hard to quantify – love, soul, hate, beauty, happiness, sadness, truth, nature, pain. These things are all very different for different people and so lose all meaning in a poem. You might want to say “I was happy,” but your vision of happy and my vision of happy are probably totally different things. When I think of happiness I imagine a rainy day, myself curled up on the couch with my best friend under blankets, reading or talking, and with a cup of tea.
You might imagine that one day in Santa Cruz, or the first snowfall of the year, or a bottle of wine and your lover. I don’t know – and since the response to something so vague is going to be completely varied, it will hold no meaning within the poem. It won’t show how or why “I was happy” or why that should matter. The reader isn’t going to care about my happiness – she can’t experience it.
Robert Wallace, author of “Writing Poetry”, on imagery, emotion, and subject matter:
Emotions, in themselves, are not subject matter. Being in love, or sad, or lonely, or feeling good because it is spring, are common experiences. Poes that merely say these things, state these emotions directly, are unlikely to be very interesting. We may respect such statements, but we can’t be moved by them.
The circumstances of the emotion, the scene or events out of which it comes, however, are the subject matter. Don’t tell the emotion. Tell the causes of it, the circumstances. Presented vividly, they will not only convince us of its truth but will also make us dramatically feel it.Evoking this feeling in the reader is of utmost importance. If emotion is important to the meaning of the poem – and it always is – then there is no point in trying to beat it into a reader. He goes on to restate one of the most oft-quoted ‘rules’ of writing; show, don’t tell.
The key is presenting; not to tell about, but to show. Put the spring day or the girl or the father into the poem. Put the mountain into the poem so that, in the absence of the mountain, the poem can take the place of the mountain.Addonizio and Laux, in The Poet's Companion, say, "Images are the rendering of your bodily experiences in the world; without them, your poems are going to risk being vague and imprecise, and they will fail to convey much to the reader." Also, remember that "images may be literal: the red kitchen chair in a dim corner of the room; the gritty wet sand under her bare feet. Or they may be figurative, departing from the actual and stating or implying a comparison: the chair, red and shiny as fingernail polish; the armies of sand grains advancing across the wood floor of the beach house." And also keep in mind that images can appeal to all the senses, not just sight--don't forget about smell, taste, hearing, and touch. These can be just as powerful--or perhaps more powerful--than visual references. Smell can be especially potent –- memories and smells are often closely linked in our minds.
While details will bring poetry to life, they can’t just be there for ornamentation; they have to link to something, help create meaning, or help convey an emotion for a purpose. What these details add up to can be explained in the poem, as in “The Black Snake” by Mary Oliver (http://sagesaidso.typepad.com/weekly_poem/2007/02/the_black_snake.html) or they can just imply the idea, and let the reader draw the conclusion, like with William Carlos Williams’ “Poem” (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-as-the-cat/).
Creating effective images
Strong imagery will give the sense of “I’ve never thought about it that way, but she’s right.” (This is generally the aim as poetry as a whole, but that’s a much stickier discussion for another day). It’s not enough to get some sort of visual onto the page, though that’s a step in the right direction; you want the images you use to be as descriptive as possible, to “pull their weight”. They should help push the reader’s thoughts toward the meaning/theme as much as describe or show.
As you keep your own experiences and meaning in mind and write imagery to fit that, your poetry should gain the added bonus of becoming fresher, more original. How many poems have you read where “tears streamed”? (Please, if you’ve counted, don’t tell me.) If you consider the significance of the tears, you can describe them in a way that’s original and personal, and that suggests more about what’s to come in the poem ( I read something wonderful recently with crocodiles moving hungrily down a face: a nice play on “crocodile tears”, but also violent and bizarre, which lent to the atmosphere of the poem in question)
So don’t write
The rivers of crimson
run down my arm,like the millions of teenagers before you have. Think, instead, of how the concept actually affects you and fits into the theme of the rest of your poem.
These ribbons of vitality
untie themselves and
float to the floor, discarded.The images of Federico Garcia Lorca are both simple and surreal - the picture the words create seems clear, but it is strange, and meaning comes from the unexpected. (Personally, I like his imagery because it’s beautiful and because it is never something I would think of.)
The dead put on wings of moss.
The cloudy wind and the clear wind
are two pheasants that fly through towers
and the day is a wounded young boy.
But do not light your pure nakedness
like a black cactus open in the rushes.A successful image can be created with strong verbs and nouns. It doesn’t have to be flowery, and in most cases it shouldn’t be. An overload of adjectives equals poetic drowning rather than detailed imagery. For a good exercise in getting rid of excess adjectives, take a look at this article, by Fand (http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/article18793.html). That method is just as useful in poetry as it is in prose. Extra adjectives can get in the way of the central ideas of a line or a sentence, creating a slush that the reader gets lost in. A few well-placed adjectives and, maybe (Maybe, if you use them really well) adverbs can complement strong verbs and nouns instead of drowning them out.
Take a look at this poem:
Enough
by Denis Johnson
The terminal flopped out
around us like a dirty hankie,
surrounded by the future population
of death row in their disguises--high
school truant, bewildered Korean refugee--
we complained that bus 18 will never arrive,
when it arrives complain what an injury
is this bus again today, venerable
and destined to stall. When it stalls
at 16th and McDowell most of us get out
to eat ourselves alive in a 24-hour diner
that promises not to carry us beyond
this angry dream of grease and the cries
of spoons, that swears our homes
are invisible and we never lived in them,
that a bus hasn't passed here in years.
Sometime the closest I get to loving
the others is hating all of us
for drinking coffee in this stationary sadness
where nobody's dull venereal joking breaks
into words that say it for the last time,
as if we held in the heavens of our arms
not cherishable things, but only the strength
it takes to leave home and then go back again.the word choice is very particular, and even single words suggest strong images: the terminal “flopped”, limp and apathetic and dull; “what an injury” is the bus, a personal insult, a wound on the face of the day. The terminal is not dull, the bus is not frustrating. With careful word choice, a poem can suggest much more than the basic ideas that it’s trying to convey. Dull is dull. Flopped has much more to say.
Some questions to ask of images, once they are composed:
-- How does this contribute to the overall feeling and meaning of the poem?
-- Are there any contradictions? Do the images switch gears too fast, or – if the tack or tone changes – does it do so gradually, in a way that makes sense?
-- are any images abstractions in disguise? (This can be difficult to spot, because these phrases tend to sound really cool and you won’t want to cut them. “Shards of opaque clarity” is an example: I don’t know what opaque clarity looks like, or how it can be in shards, so this image is doing nothing but sounding poetic.)
-- Can I condense the wording, so every word makes a maximum impact and I’m not taking up extra space?
EDIT: AN ADDENDUM/CAVEAT, added later, from another forum:
Thoughts On Imagery
I'm sure many of us are aware that we can go overboard on the use of "poetic" images. The fear of producing something unoriginal or trite is constantly nipping at our heels when we sit down to write, and for good reason: we want people to enjoy and want to read our stuff; otherwise, what's the point? So, to quiet that fear, we take the most interesting ideas, pictures, sounds, tastes, and smells, and plop them down. The task of writing then becomes simply an attempt to weave together what our brain has farted out in its moment of brilliance. We dig for some sort of coherence, biting pieces off the corners to make them fit, instead of stopping for a moment to really think about what's in front of us.
The images many of us use are nice and original: a sheet of sky tearing into snow-confetti -- a man made of bricks licking passing cars -- babies planted in the ground and growing into shark-mailboxes --whatever. But these images, while cool, are often baseless: not grounded in anything real. I think that a push for IMAGES: things, no matter what they are, as long as we can sense them, is what we should be after, but the concept has to be unpacked a little more, taken a little further.
I believe that a poet, first and foremost, is someone who has begun and sustained the practice of exploring the vast terrain of the imagination. We look inward just as much as we draw from the world around us for inspiration. We process this information through the context of our own personal experience: in terms of the real things that have shaped us, made us who we are. If our world is a reality, and our experiences formed out of that reality, then it makes sense that we should write about real things. But who wants real? Real life is tedium. Many people write to escape their real lives. The need to escape the oppression of reality is what gave steam to movements like dada and surrealism; but dada was extremely short-lived, and surrealism appealed only to a select few. If escapist, surreal imagery does not satisfy the average Joe, what will?
Grounded simplicity and clarity.
Yes, we've heard it before, but I think we may have been afraid to really listen. Sure, realism can get banal, if someone chooses to cling firmly to verisimilitude and forget that they're still writing a poem, which still has the potential to be something beautiful (if the author chooses). The blending of realism and art is probably our ultimate goal as poets. We need to take the actual world around us and turn it into something else. Something bigger than just the sum of its parts.
One of the biggest problems a growing writer can face is subtext -- what they want the poem to say without actually saying it. It's a thin line to walk. Every time we pick up the pen, we're trying to find that happy medium, a working balance between text and subtext. When we create images, we should be trying to imagine all the ways it could possibly function. This is a grueling task to be sure; our own subjective responses are almost always attached to them automatically (We are later surprised to find that not everyone feels the same way or gets the same thing from baby shark mailboxes, even though we thought the implications couldn't be clearer). It's disheartening, but we have to be willing to accept that our first instincts and inclinations may almost always lead us astray.
Now, I'm not saying that there's any way to escape subjectivity in your writing. It will be with you always, and that's not a bad thing by any means --it's really what makes your writing "your writing." But, as I said, we need to be as considerate as possible to the reading of others. Because this must be so, we need to think about what kind of images we're putting out there for our readers to pick up. I believe that there are two main things to consider when writing a poem.
First, as I hinted at before, we need to make sure that our images are as real as possible. This way, we can have some degree of confidence that our message will get across to a larger audience. I'm not talking about just abstraction or vaguenesses, but in the actual images we choose to present, and how to present them. For example, writing a poem that compares the idea of love to a galaxy exploding and devouring a million vividly described worlds of freedom is an interesting idea, but what is there to anchor it to reality? What do a million screaming, burning alien children, flesh dripping from their faces like honey from a comb, really give us about the abstract of "love?" You can taste, touch, feel, and smell all you like, but in the end you're left with unrelatable melodrama and...well...dead babies. Now, comparing love to the shore curled about the sea with endless repetitive motion: there's something real, something solid.
While solid, real imagery is completely necessary, I think that we are too focused on our senses for our own good. A good poet does not need to remind you that your senses are engaged. There's a type of "in your face" mentality among us that can really be detrimental to our work. I am loathe to bring up our hated axiom "show, don't tell," but I think it can come back to bite our butts if we're not careful and don't show a little restraint. Someone who writes "The paper-textured flowers wafted the scent of jasmine/ my nose crinkled and a tingle touched the back of my throat" is doing what he or she has sworn not to do: they are telling you what you are feeling. Instead of going subtly (a subjective idea, I know, and a whole different discussion) into the subject, they are pounding their reader with their sense perceptions.
I don't know about you, but I like to experience things for myself.
How we've decided to handle our subject matter will ultimately decide what kind of imagery we will use, and to what extent. Dialogue can contain its own brand of imagery (and no, not the kind that describes a picture). Suggestions, images placed at a poetic distance, in the background, so to speak, will have much more power because of their subtlety. I think, when all is said and done, we just need to realize that imagery is what makes poetry, but it is not what makes the poem. Thoughts, ideas, wording, coding, pictures, smells, suggestions -- all these things work together. You don't have to use all of them all of the time (restraint is awesome guys, seriously.), but conscious choices as to their uses must be made.
You can see the original, and the original author, here. (http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/original-poetry-lyrics/pl-s-peak-guide-to-poetry-and-critique-feedback-discuss/t.27141949_181/)
Poetry doesn’t have to attack grand truths of the universe or be general and vague; these are often the mistakes of beginners, who really want to be Poetic with a capital P. This often leads down the road to abstraction. Abstraction is anything vague and hard to quantify – love, soul, hate, beauty, happiness, sadness, truth, nature, pain. These things are all very different for different people and so lose all meaning in a poem. You might want to say “I was happy,” but your vision of happy and my vision of happy are probably totally different things. When I think of happiness I imagine a rainy day, myself curled up on the couch with my best friend under blankets, reading or talking, and with a cup of tea.
I liked your post, very helpful, and the examples you gave were great. I agree with you on most of it except the abstraction losing meaning due to different interpretations. Although everybody's views of an abstract idea or thought is different, that just helps us adapt towards the poem (or other work). While imagery if not descriptive enough might make our reactions change more than abstraction. A description of the sky as blue might seem like a regular or dull day to someone living where the sky's usually clear, but it might seem like a rare or happy day to be remembered by someone who lives on place where it's always raining/snowing/cloudy. On the other hand, a description of the day as happy might invoke a a blue sky on many people, but a cloudy sky on others (like me); so my vision would be adapting to your feeling.
I think imagery goes well hand-in-hand with abstraction. Like in the poem "Enough," the poet combines both imagery with emotions/abstract descriptions, and it helps you visualize the setting and feel like you're there.
Still a great post - I'd also recommend maybe a few more non-visual examples.
>Certain foods apart from giving a visual and gustatory (taste) image, evoke a smell (like coffee), touch (hot cocoa makes you think of a cold area and the drinker getting warm), sound (eating crackers reminds you of the crunch), or all five (freshly-made chocolate chip cookies).
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