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Magma Poetry Competition: 1. Imagery

In celebration of fifty issues of the magazine, Magma has launched a new poetry competition, which will be judged by TS Eliot Prize winner, George Szirtes. The rules for entry are here, although please note that that the competition opens for entries only from 16 October. We’re very much looking forward to receiving your poems after that date, both for the open competition and the competition for poems of under 10 lines (the latter judged by a Magma panel). On this blog, over the next few months, we’ll feature several articles relating to the competition, starting with this one on imagery. This is not even remotely intended to be an exhaustive treatment of such a huge subject, but I hope it will provide a springboard for reflection. As ever, comments and reactions below are welcome.

In his inspirational book about reading and writing poetry, Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch tells the story of an image, “I am a cloud in trousers”, which came to Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. How it made its arrival and what it meant, was at first unclear to the poet, but he recognised its potential for poetry. One possibility, Koch suggests, would have been to create a bizarre list – “I’m like a cloud in trousers,/ a night in gloves,/ a hurricane in a hat” – but this kind of list, while amusing (and much aped in contemporary writing), fails to connect to any strong concern or emotion. Mayakovsky went on to use the phrase to describe a character of shifting moods:

If you want –
I’ll rage on raw meat
– or, changing tones like the sky –
if you want –
I’ll be irreproachably gentle,
not a man, but a cloud in trousers…

Poems need imagery, but weak poems often suffer from excess description that makes nothing happen. Nature scenes, lists, urban squalor, all have their place in poems, but if a pile-up of imagery signifies nothing beyond itself, readers will fall asleep. Proportion is important. If I took twelve lines of a sixteen-line poem simply to describe a scene, I’d want to be certain every phrase was vital to whatever I was trying to achieve with the final four lines before I’d keep them all, however wonderful I imagined the writing to be. Mayakovsky’s image is memorable, pithy and arresting and connects integrally to the character’s emotional state, which is perhaps why ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ also became the poem’s title.

Poems often help us to see reality with fresh eyes. Powerful description isn’t only descriptive but transformative. Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer, writes sparse poems, many set in frozen rural landscapes. ‘Sketch in October’ begins:

The tugboat is freckled with rust. What’s it doing here so far inland?
It’s a heavy extinguished lamp in the cold.
But the trees have wild colours; signals to the other shore.
As if someone wanted to be fetched.

The imagery Transtromer selects is not accidental or ornamental. Darkness and light, the tugboat’s position, the signals both operational and extinguished, the possibility that there might be someone out there with a desire “to be fetched”, are all important when considering the second (and final) four-lined stanza on mushrooms sprouting from the earth. Transtromer doesn’t describe the sky or the water. He doesn’t let us know whether there’s a village nearby or what dramas are taking place. None of that would contribute anything to the poem. The images he leaves out focus all our attention on the few vital images he leaves in.

Of course, imagery on its own is rarely enough to build a great poem. Teachers often say, “Show, don’t tell,” useful advice for beginners perhaps, but telling is an art in itself. The worst kind of telling is when imagery is explained, just in case the reader can’t work it out. For example:

The sun falls behind the hills.
My mood darkens.

Useless poetry, of course (I just made it up, as an illustration). What’s even worse is that the mood is non-specific, and that the poet needs to tell the reader that this setting sun illustrates the narrator’s feelings. Such bland use of imagery should point any self-respecting poet to the delete key. In contrast, Transtromer’s unexpected final line from the poem quoted above, “We are the earth’s”, asks as many questions as it answers. It doesn’t explain the previous images, but suggests that the images have direct significance for our lives. The reader is invited to commune with the emotional core of the poem.

Edwin Morgan’s ‘The Second Life’ begins with the poet surveying a Glasgow renewed by the May sun, bright and full of possibility, even as the poet contemplates his own middle-age (“…the world may be the same, and we are not/ and so the world is not the same”). There’s plenty of description, but it’s glossed seamlessly by skilled telling. Poems built on images of seasonal renewal run an obvious risk of cliché and tedious description, but Morgan speaks from and to the heart by telling and showing in perfect balance:

Many things are unspoken
in the life of a man, and with a place
there is an unspoken love also
in undercurrents, drifting, waiting its time.
A great place and its people are not renewed lightly.
The caked layers of grime
grow warm like homely coats.
But yet they will be dislodged
and men will still be warm.

That, I think, is about as good as it gets.

This Post Has 16 Comments

  1. Thanks for this interesting piece. I’m always conjuring with what imagery can do – its wonderful excesses, sharp visionary moments, and the way it makes a language or grammar of emotion and at its best engages readers to see in new ways. I like the way you describe the entry of the reader in the Transtromer poem. I too find ‘show don’t tell’ can be a limited piece of advice, but that outer world of imagery is essential (to this writer and reader) to find a way of expressing inner emotions that others can enter and experience. Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, though it’s primarily about prose, explores the ‘congested subtext’ of imagery in an interesting way that is also applicable to poetry, maybe more so. If one is emotionally a little inarticulate, the visual world offers up new languages almost that can express something not neatly available in the ‘telling’ language of abstracted emotion or thought.

  2. “The sun falls behind the hills.
    My mood darkens.

    Useless poetry, of course”

    I wonder about this. Because one of my favourite short poems is the Middle English

    Now goeth sonne undir wodde,
    Me reweth, Mary, thy faire rodde.
    now goeth sonne undir tree,
    Me reweth, Mary, thy sonne and thee. (Now the sun sinks behind the wood; I feel pity, Mary, for your fair face. Now the sun sinks behind the tree; I feel pity, Mary, for your son and you). Obviously this is a bit more complex than your made-up example; what with the puns on sun/son and rodde (rudd, complexion)/rode (cross). But essentially it’s the same kind of balancing act, an overt invitation to the reader to compare the darkening wood and the woman’s face darkening with grief; the setting sun and the dying god. The fact that it works in this poem would suggest that it isn’t the technique per se that is potentially amiss but the way it’s used – the language in your example was deliberately very bland.

  3. I teach poetry writing to children and to people learning English – and have done so for many years

    i also have a poetry blog

    having a blog allows the poet to start to understand what it is that people actually like – not what “poets” deem as good

    and what have i discovered?

    first, the only people that are attracted to free verse and poems that try to be great works of imagery – are, yes, other poets (and the occasional love struck teenager)

    (consider: http://thepeakoilpoet.blogspot.com/2011/07/maim-chaim.html – 3 levels of imagery each deeper than the other – it’s written for poets – few other people would every get close to understanding it)

    poetry is the written word – and poets slave over that perfect line or foot – yet many modern poems are only notable when delivered by the poet to a gathered audience of, well, other poets (like, have you EVER seen a “normal” person at a poetry reading?)

    i feel that poetry falls into two distinct categories

    1. poems written by the poet for the poet’s own edification or to get something off his/her chest – and sometimes for no other reason than to get other poets to go oooh aaaah (consider the traditional Ode form and how you have to jump through intellectual hoops to squeeze something into the form – and how, if you succeed, you are considered a “great poet”. Consider also that many countries have very strict forms – for example in Thailand something is a poem if and only if it adheres to one of over 100 very precise formulae – the only people who can appreciate such works are people schooled in those forms – consider what a 100 different haiku patterns might be like).

    2. poems written solely for other people – “normal” people – poems written to convey ideas in a way that sneaks past the defences of the average person’s aversion to poetry, You don’t think the average person abhors poetry? Sorry, but they absolutely do. Consider just the poetry of Australia – what poems are loved by the masses? They are the poems of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson – which are what? Verse. Stories that are fun, in verse.

    Yes these stories are “poor” poetry, ambling lines of lesser men – but think back to the poems you really loved when you were young – think about what ones still ring in your mind and are still a joy to read

    if you tell me it’s Yates or Keats i’ll tell you that you are a liar or a snob

    Poems need not convey imagery at all – by that i mean your focus needs not be on imagery because the reader has a mind equal to your own – his or her neurons will mirror the firing of your own when you read a poem – yours or any other’s

    i think also like this

    consider a surfer – a surfer waits in the ocean watching the water, watching all of the little tell-tale signs for an approaching wave

    then, when a wave is coming, or a series of waves, the surfer seeks to position himself or herself at just the right spot so that at just the right moment just the right amount of energy can be used to catch that wave

    and then it’s gone

    the world is like the ocean in that respect – there are waves of memes and shared ideas out there that ebb and flow – sometimes the world is like a pond echoing the slightest disturbance – other times it is a raging storm

    of waves for the poet to catch and ride

    to give words to what the heart feels at this moment

    so when i think “imagery” – i do not think “how do i convey an image to you?”

    i think “what images have you in your mind that i might crystallize in words?”

    that is the true secret of imagery – immho

    look around at what is in people’s minds and hearts right now

    economic worries
    population worries
    worries about how our children will fare
    worries about getting old
    worries about war and terrorism
    worries about the dishonesty and greed of banks

    and yes all the normal things we all experience as part of life – joy, love, loss, grief, fear…..
    pop

    ps what’s my own favourite poem? “Book of Rules” aka “Bag of Tools” – R L Sharpe – taught to my kids from the time they are old enough to talk

  4. Stephanie, Sheenagh – thanks for those interesting points, both of which make sense to me.

    POP – thanks for posting your views. I more or less entirely disagree, but there you go. I think you are underestimating readers’ abilities, as many people read poetry precisely because they want something that touches on the complexity of life. Those normal things you mention – joy, love, loss, grief, fear – are far from simple, once you get past cliches and useless generalities.

    Poetry is a minority interest, but so are plenty of other things and no one says they should change to become more popular. But the way is open for those who want to try to court popularity to do so – they can post easy, fun stories in verse to the Internet and people are free to read them if they want. If some poets prefer to write more complex stuff, why is that a problem? People don’t need to read it if they don’t want to. I read statistics not long ago showing how few people read any books at all – http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html – (in the USA, but I’m sure the picture isn’t much different in Britain), but that won’t stop people writing poetry that few people are going to read. That’s the nature of poets. Poets are not normal, even if they seem to be on the surface.

  5. I’m not sure I quite get what you’re saying about imagery, POP, but if ,as i think, you’re saying that poems with imagery in them only appeal to academics rather than to ordinary listeners, I don’t see how that can be the case, because folk poetry is absolutely full of imagery:

    My daddy is a handsome devil
    He’s got a chain five miles long,
    And from every link a heart does dangle,
    Of another maid he’s loved and wronged (“Silver Dagger”)

    I leant my back unto an oak,
    I thought it was a trusty tree.
    But first it bent and then it broke,
    Sae my true love did lichtlie me” (“Waly, Waly”)

    Throw a letter
    into the sky.
    The crane’s a wanderer,
    so am I (“The Crane; Armenian folk song)

  6. PS – “poetry is the written word”, you say: well, not to me it ain’t. It wasn’t in ancient times, nor really until the invention of printing, and even these days, a poem doesn’t really exist for me until I read it aloud to myself. It exists more for the ear than the eye, surely?

  7. Sheenagh: “I’m not sure I quite get what you’re saying about imagery, POP”

    consider

    i tell you to think of (or not think of) an elephant with yellow pants

    ok, you have that image – i successfully used your mind to paint a picture in your mind

    simple – imagery right? but to what end? If you were a child and were new to elephants in picture books that image might resonate and make you smile – i’d have leveraged what is part of your world view – and got you to laugh

    job of poet done

    here’s another simple example

    you are a wandering poet, ariving at a hamlet where you hope to earn a dinner and a dry place to sleep. The hamlet, as is the case for the whole of the particular country side you are in, has been suffering from poor harvests, and everyone is worried about the crops

    do you

    1. paint mind pictures of a far away land dripping with milk and honey (and elephants in yellow pants) or
    2. put words to what is in the minds of everyone but add a slant – like the prediction of a good crop this year

    if you choose 1, i wonder if you will be fed tonight?

    let’s take a more challenging situation – you are an adult in a very confused world full of information flows and conflicting views – your mind is as conflicted as the world around you

    if i now i paint a simple picture of some aspect of that conflict in your mind – and give you a handle on it – and a release – will i earn my supper?

    you see i need not focus on the imagery at all – if the issue is dishonesty of the banks i don’t need to focus on trying to get you to see the image i want you to see – that would be the job of banks wanting to change your attitude. No, i want to help you resolve the conflict in your mind by extrapolating from where you are to where you can find some level of comfort – for example i might give you a poem that paints a simple picture of the bankers all going to jail/gaol – full of humourous images of the banker being shaved and tarred and feathered etc on the way

    you see my focus was never on imagery – my focus was on the thing already in your mind – and simply directing that towards an outcome – not necessarily the “right” outcome – but an outcome that would resonate with you to such an extent that you might smile and relax a little and leave that nasty conflict in the bin of unsolvable problems of the past

    (* but see caveat below)

    the poet earns his/her bread (and stripes) by being with the people and giving something to the people in exchange for some reward – or being so clever as to be kept by a sugar daddy tyrant or state

    so many poets focus on imagery for imagery’s sake – trying to convey what is in the mind of the poet – inward looking and, frankly, to the everyday working person, of little value and unlikely to get even a first reading

    poetry is a very powerful thing – as poets we have the oportunity to be way ahead of many of the other forms of art – we can be wandering the virtual highways of the world – making the lives of our fellow humans better in some way

    (* the caveat?

    all this goes out the door if for example your goal is to try and paint a mind picture of starvation and war for the purpose of trying to stop that starvation or that war – then, your job is to use any tools whatsoever to try and get people to do what you think they should do

    it also goes out the door if you are the idle rich (or spend all your time with them) and can make up quaint clever poems for the enjoyment of the dinner guests etc
    )

    pop

  8. You’re concentrating all the time on poetry as some sort of practical tool to do things with, and I don’t think it works best when poets take that attitude to it. It’s a way of using language; paradoxically, I think it “does things”, like influencing people, a lot more effectively if the poet concentrates on entertaining them – after all, you can’t have an effect on an audience if they’ve become bored and resentful and left, as they well may if they suspect you are propagandising at them – I would. But what I don’t get is your “you don’t need to use imagery” attitude, as if it were something to be avoided if at all possible – it’s one of the poet’s potential weapons, why not use?

  9. focus

    focusing on the use of imagery is like focusing on the use of nouns, or colours, or anything else

    hmm, let me see – i shall write a poem with as many nouns as possible and no adjectives…

    imagery is just something we should take for granted – go google “mirror neurons” – just like we take for granted that because we have a working vocabulary of tens of thousands of words whenever we need a word we will not have to go look for it (though cheating is allowed 🙂

    in other words it’s about focus

    i read a lot of modern poetry – i have friends that are esteemed poets – some have Ph.D.s etc – and their focus is on imagery – trying to tease out that evocative conjunction of images that will be unique and “creative” and nice – new

    but nobody really reads their poems

    none of their publications have made any money unless they are lucky enough to latch on to the teat of some public source like the school system though even there i doubt they have profited much (and no i’m not focused on money – far from it – but it is a measuring stick because it translates into numbers of people)

    there are exceptions of course – i know a writer of children’s books who publishes poetry with pictures and does pretty well

    and i know some TV people who use poetry in their children’s shows – as part of their creative mix

    no, what i am sorry to see is that so many talented word-smiths who produce so many poems are simply not communicating with anyone much at all

    and the reason is that their focus, their very definition of what constitutes a “poem” – is imagery

    to the exclusion of everything else – everything

    let’s ask the question – who are today’s great poets?

    i would argue, for example, that Marshall Bruce Mathers III (Eminem) is a wonderful poet – though he does have some flops of course – not only does he use imagery but also a host of other tools

    his focus is not imagery – it is just a tool – one of many

    consider “Stan” – it’s fantastic poetry – it resonates with at least 3 generations of of people from many cultures

    what tools does he use?

    juxtaposition of free verse and verse (Dido’s beautiful song)

    clever stringing of words into a story that flows naturally and can be followed like you ride a bike – completely unconscious of the mechanisms being used

    he tells a story we can all understand and he tells it in a way that we all can follow, easily, without thinking about the imagery he uses because it, like the specific words and the grammar and the meter and the music of Dido, blends into a whole

    it is beautiful, moving, modern poetry

    and it’s not me that makes the claim – it’s millions of people

    so i say – yes use imagery – but do not focus on it

    let creative juices flow naturally even if you have to struggle with a line or a foot or the meter or whatever

    don’t use imagery just because you think that if you don’t you are not writing poetry

    i have watched what the incessant focus on “imagery” has done to my kids – the schools have stomped on their natural ability to make fun with words

    because they judge their own work and find that it is lacking sufficient imagery – and when i question them about what imagery is they can not tell me because it has become some illusive rubbish the teachers (none of whom are poets) have instilled in them

    the only kids that write great words are the ones who simply ignore the teachers or, if lucky, are seeded by the occasional decent sort who just feeds them lots of great poetry from the past and present – without comment and without judgement

    do you get a glimpse of what i have been trying to say?

    pop

  10. oh

    and as for the practical aspect

    gee, are not you and i so very very lucky?

    you and i can write anything we like because we have the time and the money (ie we don’t have to slave in a paddy field like many people i know)

    so, here am i, privileged, beyond the dreams of maybe billions of people

    and what shall if do with what i have?

    shall i just labour over some clever words for my own edification? Or to get accolades from people i hardly respect?

    or shall i try and make the lives of others a little better with what tools i have?

    read what i state as my favourite poem – not because it is great poetry – but because it resonates with what i believe – that in this world we can build stepping stones or we can build stumbling blocks

    maybe i will try to build a stepping stone that causes other’s to trip

    but my heart says build the stepping stone

    and build it in front of where people want, or are forced, to go

    pop

  11. “do you get a glimpse of what i have been trying to say?”

    It isn’t a picture I recognise. I know a lot of poets and have taught a lot of students, and I can’t recall anyone who sat down to write thinking “now I must use x amount of imagery”. That would certainly be ludicrous, but I’ve never known it to happen; poets don’t comsciously think about the techniques they are using (leastways this one doesn’t), except sometimes rhyme-schemes perhaps.

    As for teachers, I’ve never taught very young children but my mother was an infant teacher and I still cherish a poem written by one of her class after a visit to the zoo:

    The lion walks so quiet
    Like a star in the air.

    This wasn’t prompted by her; it was his own observation and a very natural one. I think imagery does come naturally to most of us, albeit on different levels, just as rhyme and metre do. Language is for playing with, after all.

  12. The important thing is to write with integrity. Poets ought to write what they feel they need to write and do so as well as they possibly can – whether that’s light verse or complex fragments, fun stories without imagery or image-rich narrative. When it comes to getting readers, well, good luck to everybody! As for making money from poetry, forget it.

  13. ‘The worst kind of telling is when imagery is explained, just in case the reader can’t work it out. For example:

    The sun falls behind the hills.
    My mood darkens.’

    Of course it CAN be disasterous to explain imagery or anything else in a poem; ‘don’t explain’ is probably a more generally useful rule of thumb than ‘show don’t tell’. But I agree with Sheenagh Pugh on this; the problem is not that the image is explained, but that it is bland as Pound’s much-quoted example: ‘dim lands of peace’. I’m sure there are endless examples of explaining, or enlarging upon, poet’s images and moods, in poems by The Romantics, Pound, Eliot (‘Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides. I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.’). Forgive me, Rob, for raising this again, as I know you’ve already acknowledged Sheenagh’s point, but it struck me quite forcefully. And I wonder if what you’re really objecting to is sequential images, the un[or less]ambiguous narrative (I know you admire Ashbery, for example).

    Re ‘normal people’, Normality, like Beauty, will always be more aspirational than anything else. Normal people don’t really exist (or only exist momentarily or in parts), and recognising (and reiterating) this is by now a traditional theme: ‘the most subversive unit in society is the human family.’ (Paul Durcan).

  14. Once again, I replied on the hoof. I take back what I said re Rob’s ‘objecting to is sequential images’. Far too presumptuous of me. As he says himself: ‘The important thing is to write with integrity.’ I agree.

  15. Integrity.

    That’s a funny concept really. It’s actually breaking the second commandment. It’s believing that you are right about something and writing from that belief – or if you prefer it’s writing what you believe

    but is not fiction writing what you imagine and as such transcends integrity?

    i think poets should try to explore all aspects of the art – explore the forms, explore themselves, experiment and work within defined controls – any defined control

    except integrity

    🙂

    when you deal with others – on a day to day basis – when you trade and negotiate and form contracts

    that’s when you need integrity

    poetry often does better without it

  16. Very interesting!And instructive too.Especially for aspiring poets like me.

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