Unlike fiction, poetry has but a handful of absolutely essential elements. First and foremost, one must realize that the poem has a speaker, and thus a voice. Secondly, the poem has an addressee, a person to whom the speaker speaks, and that person is the listener. The listener is often never explicitly addressed, though sometimes enters through a deliberate “you”; but always that person is there, even if just as a device for a diaristic “I” (in which case the listener is forced into eavesdropping).
Oftentimes, though, the writer forgets that there is a living reader. When this happens, the writer either is more involved in getting down “the story” or the narrative that may have inspired the poem, or the writer simply has decided to write for him/herself primarily and the listener be damned. Here we have an issue of what the poem means to do. In a diary, the writer can merely jot down ideas or scraps of phrases, come back to them and remember in full. “Ah, yes, I recall that.” But the reader, who necessarily is shut out of those memories, is blocked by these obvious gaps and lacunae.
The only way for the reader to enter a poem is through shared experience. The easiest way to do this is to introduce an image. Various authors have spoken of how this is done.
“Detail suggests empirical evidence; it makes the text plausible,” Ellen Bryant Voigt says in The Flexible Lyric.
“A poem manipulates our memories with its sense data,” adds Stephen Dobyns, in Next Word, Better Word. “It doesn’t create the illusion of virtual life by itself; rather, it provides the materials—the sense data—and we create the illusion.”
Images draws on all of the senses of human experience, primarily sight (as we are highly visual creatures) but also smell, touch, sound, and taste. When we recreate these on the page for the reader—the listener, the one who overhears—those images spring alive in their imagination, and thus a living link is forged. The poem brings a new awareness to the reader; it revives.
Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux in The Poet’s Companion (pp. 85-86) relate:
We all are haunted by images, both light and dark. You might remember the smell of honeysuckle, or your father’s cologne. A day in your childhood comes back, every detail sharp and precise, and you hear a shallow creek running over the rocks, your dog snuffling in wet leaves, your friend’s voice calling you. You can still see the face of your dead aunt, or cousin, can taste the meal you choked down after the funeral. Frances Mayes, in The Discovery of Poetry, says that images are closely linked to memory, that in fact many of our memories consist of images. That partly explains why they’re so powerful, why we respond to them in a much more visceral way than we do to generalized abstractions.
… Images are a kind of energy, moving from outside to inside and back, over and over, a continual exchange. You take a walk outside after the first snowfall of the season, fill your eyes with the dazzling surfaces of the fields and your lungs with the sharp pure air. Your boots sink in, crunching down to the frozen earth, and when you return to the cabin the warmth feels like a pair of gloved hands placed on your cold ears. You sit down and write about the snow. Miles away and years later, someone—a reader—closes her eyes and experiences it.
Some of the most striking poems have as their subject not the author nor the speaker (for these are not necessarily the same—often, the speaker of the poem is merely a persona or imagined character as a device of the poet) but simply the images themselves. William Carlos Williams published his celebrated “This Is Just to Say” in 1934, nearly a century ago:
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Then we have Elizabeth Bishop’s “
The Fish” (1946) as a counterexample, where narration does come in but the imagery remains central:
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
The word choices bring up the scene in great detail, and it is in these details that the poem finds its kineticism.
Still other poems use items, objects, to convey a sense that otherwise would not be able to be captured in straight prose. Take, for example, Theodore Roethke’s classic piece, “
Dolor”:
Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
Here we have the monotony of industrial life enumerated in object upon object upon object, communicating in its own terrible way the weight—the “dangerous” emptiness—of modernity.
Today’s prompt: Write a poem where neither the speaker nor the listener makes an appearance or is addressed. That is, compose a still life. (If the poem absolutely needs set-up, have the “I” or “you” make the briefest of appearances.) Describe something either living or inanimate, utilizing language in such a way that the subject comes alive through imagery. Use at least two primary senses (sight, sound, taste, texture, scent). Have the reader see what you see.
Alternatively, you can follow Roger Mitchell’s straightforward task in
The Practice of Poetry (“Breaking the Sentence: or, No Sentences But in Things”, p. 37): Write a poem that is simply a list of things. See Herbert Scott’s (1976) “
The Grocer’s Children”:
The Grocer’s Children
The grocer’s children
eat day-old bread
moldy cakes and cheese,
soft black bananas
on stale shredded wheat,
weeviled rice, their plates
heaped high with wilted
greens, bruised fruit
surprise treats
from unlabeled cans,
tainted meat.
The grocer’s children
never go hungry.
Best of writing to you!
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