How to Write Imagist Poetry By Sarah O'Neill Chester County PA Supreme Editing

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By Sarah O’Neill, Chester County, Supreme Editing

Everybody Says That POETRY is All Around Us:

• In commercial jingles
• In songs of course
• In textbooks for any English class
• in any rhyme, we hear
• in awe of nature
• In awe of ourselves

But how the heck do you write a GOOD poem?

Writing & Knowing

We’re told ALL THE TIME to write about what we know. But what if we think our lives our dull or too ordinary? That we don’t have lives worthy of poetry. What are the greatest poems about? –death, desire, the nature of existence. They ask: who are we? Why are we here? We find it hard to believe that these BIG subjects can be explored in the ORDINARY of life like a poem about our best friend or about washing our wishes.

Walt Whitman wrote about everyday things like the stars, a live oak, a field. Read this poem:

The point?

Whitman began with what he knew, what was “at hand”, what SHIMMERED around him in the ordinary world.

Look off your own shoulders. Think about what you know We rarely start out poetry writing about death or desire. But look OUTWARD first: at the blue bowl, those shoes, the three white clouds OR INWARD: I remember, I imagine, I wish, I wonder, I want.

The trick is:

To find out what we know, challenge what we know. Own what we know, and then give it away in language: I love my brother, I hate winter, I always lose my keys. You have to know and DESCRIBE your brother so well he becomes everyone’s brother, to evoke the hatred of winter so passionately that we all begin to feel the chill, to lose your keys so memorably we begin to connect that action to all our losses, to our desires, to our fears of death. Good writing works from a simple premise: YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE NOT YOURS ALONE but in some sense a metaphor for everyone else’s.

Transform Your Raw Material

Our worlds will not be important to other people unless it reaches BEYOND the self-involvement of that person standing at the window so that what we know becomes shared knowledge, part of who we are as individuals, a culture, a species.

That’s why Imagist Poetry is SO perfect!

Pithy Ideas for Finding Subjects

•List the objects in your room — write a poem describing them and telling a little of their — and your- history

•What do you do every day? Shower, jog, cook? Try, in a poem, to get at the particular way you perform this activity that might be different from someone else.

•What are the things you love? Things you hate? List them in two columns. Now write a poem that combines something you love with something you hate.

Imagist Poetry: The Poet’s Craft

In an excerpt by Robert Hass:

“Images haunt. Wordsworth wandered the lake in an impassioned daze. Fu said it is like being ALIVE TWICE. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implications outside themselves. And they are not myths, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.”

We are all haunted by images, both light and dark. You might remember the smell of honeysuckle of 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. You can still see your dead aunt’s face or the food you ate during an important event. Images are closely linked to memory, and many of our memories consist of IMAGES. That partly explains why they are so powerful, and why we respond to them in much more visceral ways.

What is an Image in Poetry?

An image is a visual picture. An image in poetry is a language that calls up a physical sensation, appealing to us at the level of any of our five senses. Images can be literal: the red kitchen chair in a dim corner of the room; the gritty wet sand in our toes. OR it can 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. What an image should do? Produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is like being alive twice.

We all have our favorite sense. What is yours? Poets need to keep all five senses on continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language.

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, and fill your eyes with the dazzling surfaces of the fields and your lungs with the sharp pure air.

Images are seductive but not merely scenery! An image can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch, or embody an idea.

Let’s read a little from “Oranges” where Gary Soto uses color to explain love:

He carefully chooses all the images using color to create a feeling of unity.

Ideas for Writing

• What images obsess you? What do you think about when you are daydreaming? What kinds of images do you find yourself returning to or seeking out for comfort? What object, person, place, or picture could you look at for hours and not get bored?
• Look at one of your obsessions and describe it intimately. Do it in prose. Quickly, then contrast it with an image that you repress continually. That you fight with. Describe that second image just as closely. Once you’ve done that, try joining the two images, mingle them, and see what happens.
• Describe a painting or photo as though the scene is really happening; animate it with movement, speech, or story.

It is said that our sense of smell is the most primitive, that a scene can take us back instantly to a memory. Jot down some smells that are appealing to you. For each one, describe the memory or experience associated with that smell, making sure you bring the other senses into your description. Write a poem for each smell. For starters. You might title each poem with the triggering smell: “Roses” or “Chanel №5”, “Garic”. Do the same for smells you dislike.

Write your own imagist poem and send to contests!

Imagist poetry is taking a singular image, twisting it, turning it, looking at it from all sides — sucking the marrow out of it to find deep meanings. It forces you to have to practice precision and “in a moment of time” poetry. Use the exact visual image to make a total poetic expression, and you could practicethis type of poetry to become an overall more precise writer!

Remember this one:

William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

(1923)

This is an imagist poem! NOW…try YOUR hand!

Thank you for reading!

Sarah O’Neill Chester County Supreme Editing