The Essence of Image in Poetry. Where does it lie? Can we call to mind the values or elements image possesses, or contributes in successful writing of poetry? Is image in poetry mainly of ideas or things, or both?

We will briefly explore these three questions to arrive at some common ground in attempts to discern the making of poetry. I do not say, or attempt to define "good poetry " for already, before even approaching an essay on the topic, I have made certain assumptions, assertions: that all poetry is subjective; that all poetry need not convey a message; and that readers certainly bring much more to the act of meeting the poet and the poem, than the poet imagines before, during and after he writes.

Overview

Certain elements exist within the verse, line, strophe, stanza or whole of the poem where subjectivity as found within the individual poet most often, except when purposed as in the extreme case of the ultimate exception, produces obscurity, ambiguity and vagueness of intended meaning. The inevitable objective of course is to the "intended purpose" of the poet: what if vagueness, obscurity and ambiguity is what is intended?" Is this the ultimate 'cop-out', a making the exception-of-breaking-the rules, the rule? When we dismiss all form, voice, sound and sense in poetry in return for an anarchy of lines and words, do we not then also impose a self-willed rule of the necessity to break established rules? Doesn't this, in fact become another set of rules to follow? (Even Concrete Poetry follows certain sets of rules in order to be clear and not vague to the reader.) What we as poets sometimes seem to forget is that lucidity lies in the eye of the observer not in the hand of the storyteller; what is lucid to the poet (unless stated real and objectively) may be muddy to the reader.

The Essence of Poetry: where does it lie?

Wordsworth called the poet a man speaking to men. Poetry is a form of speech, written or spoken.

By the very nature of being human, the ordinary citizen in the ordinary work- day speaks much of what we might call incipient poetry - he attempts to communicate attitudes, feelings, and interpretations, including ideas. We live poetry. Our lives (and writers have viewed lives as such), can be imagined as a whole metaphors or similes comparing styles and life conditions maybe for the worse or better. Who is to judge? The most common terms most folk use today without knowing it is: "you know", or "it's like"; these colloquialisms have become so deeply engrained in our vernacular that today they are favoritely taken for granted. The essence here is that the poet in all of us is searching for the undefinable term, the words that have 'no words' to capture the moment, the experience, the feelings we have about our world. Image is the grand inquisitor asking the mysterious question of our purpose and language gropes through our vast history of experience to communicate our common grounds poetic image is that fertile field of human understanding grounded in pictures, senses, thoughts, sounds, rhythms and meaning that we all send out to the listener or reader, hopefully with luck or success to receive distinguishable response, or obscurity thus confirming the loop of language and need for the continuum to progress along our pre-ordained semantic guidebook (or sometimes poetically licensed non-rule book). Poetry is not a thing separate from ordinary life and that the matters with which poetry deals are matters with which the ordinary person is concerned.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defines poetry as:

"that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species...it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part."

In other words, poetry gives pleasure first, then truth, and its language is charged, intensified, concentrated.

William Wordsworth defines poetry as:

"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity..."

As an instance of verbal art, a poem is a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, as consciousness in heightened language, i.e. a heightened mode of discourse. Ends require means: to convey heightened consciousness requires heightened resources. Any verbal text or piece of verbal discourse, even if not meant as "art" can be called "poetic" if it seems to exhibit intensified speech: an impassioned play, a stirring speech, a moving letter. Often, these texts partake of the resources offered by traditional rhetoric, i.e. devices of repetition and figuration. They become more highly figured and patterned than ordinary speech or prose, and so take on the term "poetic" as a metonym, since verse characteristically deploys these figures.

Artful but not verbal: any object skillfully made or intended as art though not a verbal text can be called "poetic" in the metaphorical sense - an intense moment in a play or movie, a romantic gesture, a painting, a piece of music.

Poetry is craft: the practice of one's craft is almost always painstakingly difficult, and usually entails periods of extreme self-consciousness as one trains oneself into a pattern of totally new reflexes. It is what Robert Frost once called: "the pleasure of taking pains."

The odd thing is that this practice and mastery of a craft is sometimes seen as an infringement on one's own natural gifts. Poets will sometimes comment that they don't 'want to be bothered with all that stuff' and about metrics and assonance and images because it doesn't come "naturally." Well, of course it doesn't come naturally, if one hasn't worked to make it natural. But once one's craft becomes "second nature," it is not an infringement on one's natural gifts - if anything, it is an enlargement of them, and an enhancement of one's own intuitive talents.

In all the other arts, an artist has to learn the techniques of the craft as a matter of course. Why would any aspiring poet/artist think poetry to be any different than all the other arts? For any would-be musician to sit at a piano and strike the keys without any formal "craft" or training and say "well, it isn't natural," the ultimate, inevitable result is a totally improvised cacophony of discordant nonsense (unless that person is a child prodigy). But poets often complain they don't want to be "held back" or "brainwashed" by a lot of technical considerations in the writing of their poetry. Which raises an interesting question: why do aspiring poets protest that technique per se is an infringement on their own intuitive gifts, and a destructive self-consciousness which inhibits the natural growth? Does the answer lie in the fact that they fear the study of craft, or the awareness that the revelation of the unknown will somehow change their personalities into some imagined intellectuals or hybrid long-hairs? Or it perhaps flows through a deeper psychological vein à la Nietzsche: that pure knowledge is seen as inconsequential.

Whatever. Wherever the answer: part of it lies in our Romantic era of poetry, in which poets as diverse as Walt Whitman and Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg seem to achieve their best effects with little or no technical effort. Like Athena, the poem seems to spring full-bloom out of the forehead of Zeus. And that is a large part of its charm for us: Whitman pretends he is just "talking" to us in "Song of Myself," so does Robert Lowell in "Memories of West Street and Lepke" and "Skunk Hour," and so does Allen Ginsberg in Howl and Kaddish.

But of course we realize it is no such thing, for to achieve such an illusion of a casual conversational tone requires the most consummate mastery of craft, and any poet who can be so skillful in concealing his art from us may be achieving the highest technical feat of all. What are the technical skills of poetry which all poets need in the practice and mastery of their craft? They can be divided into three faculties of sight and sound: voice-image, rhythm and persona.

Can we call to mind the values or elements image possesses, or contributes in successful writing of poetry?

For purposes of brevity and a pressing urgency to be less long-winded here, my aim is to focus on sight, image and idea.

Sight: Pictures are an integral part of our daily life, much more pervasive than we realize. We dream in picture images that come out of our lives embodying our most secret wishes.

Much contemporary poetry is written primarily for the eye. The reader takes in the poem, usually, in silence. That may be a good reason - if only to practice contrariness - to cultivate the sound and rhythm in a poem, to emphasize its music. Nevertheless, the visual predominates. Sight is the sense most entrusted with discovery - and invention. And this means the poem "gets to us" by the vividness and freshness of its imagery, the surprising rightness of its metaphors. As we rely on our sense of sight to clear our way in the world, the reader also has to find certain and most evident benchmarks, signs of sight made clear in our poems, or otherwise there is blindness or obscurity of the intended images, if at all the poet has provided them, or has intended to write about them. The clear image that links to a visual scene or thing creates for the reader an instant world known to him where he can visit many times in his life and maybe find new meanings out of the same spot each time he visits.

In poetry, an image is a mental picture. And those mental pictures store in the poet's mind memories that later emerge as imagination - the ability to create mental images - pictures in our mind. But where do these mind-pictures come from? First of all, they come from our experience: the things that we have seen, touched, smelled, heard, tasted, and thought about. They come from memory. Each of us has thousands of memory-pictures stored in our minds. Writers learn how to turn these memory-pictures (and sounds and smells) into words.

A photograph or a drawing of a rose is an image of a rose, and not the real rose. In using language, we have taken away the picture and replaced it with a word that stands for it. The four letters that make up the word "rose" do not look like the flower, and yet the word calls up a picture of that flower in our minds. What we are talking about, then, are the pictures in the mind (called mental images) that words have the power to make us "see." We "see" these images, as Shakespeare said, with the "mind's eye." The pictures that we see when we remember something that happened to us - the beach we visited last summer - and the things that we see in dreams are also "mental images." In treating mental images as pictures for the reader, the poet can go one step further and examine the subconscious quality of a reversal in the "image in the object" relationship as finding the quality of objects, states of mind, that are evoked by certain images. The word "rose" is a concept trigger to nerve stimuli in the brain that have experientially 'picked up' or learned the concept of "rose;" "rose" in the real realm of nature is an entirely different thing (as scrutinized by a biologist under a microscope, or seen by an alien from another planet for the first time, or viewed from a hundred feet above it). This simplistic evaluation of language is indeed quite complex when one considers the gestalt of effects that denotative and connotative impressions of conceptual objects and language have on the reader who is the contextual builder of his/her world of object and language. On this subject, later I discuss the lasting qualities that "object in image" evokes in writing.

Although sight may be the main sense invoked by an image, all the senses can take part. A good image puts readers right in the scene itself, making them see, hear, smell, taste, and touch what's there. Ezra Pound said it was, "That which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time." An example of an image: John Donne in his poem "The Relic" describes how some future grave-digger may uncover his bones and see: "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone."

The specificity of that image is as surprising to us as it would be to the grave-digger seeing it for the first time. Anne Sexton explains this shock of surprise when an image is done well:

Images are the heart of
poetry. And this is not
tricks. Images come from
the unconscious. Imagination
and the unconscious are one
and the same. You're not a
poet without imagery.

Is image in poetry mainly of ideas or things, or both?

Of course, for many poets the need for self-expression becomes the almost undeniable reason and purpose for writing. I often hear poets say "but that's what I feel." Can feelings alone enrich a poem? Can ideas alone write a poem? My assumption in answering these questions is that once ideas come from the out-birth of feelings, the beginning of a poem may be had; but, ideas alone cannot produce or manifest images on the page without first becoming objects of sight or things that we can feel, see, hear, touch or smell. Writing out of a need for self-expression is akin to self-adulation or self-mutilation where the writer flogs himself repeatedly and expects the reader to take umbrage with the villain, whoever or whatever it is. This self-masochistic form of poetry pervades many publications today and is espoused by many editors as "modern poetry;" however, I often wonder how many of these editors ever really read beyond the bottom line. Writing from self-expression (more like self-absorption) - that great need to make sure everybody knows exactly what we feel about this or that, how much we've suffered, and our handling of it seems to serve the poet more than the reader. We want everybody, for some reason, to know as much about this sort of thing - about the private "use" - as possible. T.S. Eliot said:

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provided by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life...Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

This is surely modern sensationalism, and history (and poetry publications) are filled with the sensations of various times - in fact all knowledge can be seen as 'the sensation' of any periodic history - this begs the proposal then that maybe all true knowledge is intrinsically spiritual and interior.

The poet as the sometimes unwished for harbinger of universal truth and human experience must foreshadow himself as the vessel of thought from which pours human action, human existence, human thought, human injustice and human prejudice. Whenever he portrays the telling or showing of his story in his own visage, he then becomes the false prophet to the world from which he blasts his own experience, action and existence; rather than speak to the world from himself - this may be the poets legitimate purpose though, as confessional poetry is quite the trend today. But when he somehow learns, through the craft, to be the vessel or mirror from which the world sees itself - then he holds his work as the conduit by which all human existence passes through. Self indulgence is tempting for the poet whose own ego may inextricably want to color the vastness of what is already vast in humankind as felt by his need to tell, not by the individual who lives outside the poet. A poet friend of mine, Charles Lowy has said, "God did not use any adjectives when he created the world;" poets seem to confuse painting sometimes with poetry, wanting to color "grass as green" as if the reader's mind is color-blind; as if is we do not trust the reader's senses. It seems the fashion for poets is to want to interpret the world (usually in colors and sounds) as they see it, but this is a self-eluding act for this interpretation acts as its own modifying sensation of the world, already known to the reader: remember word-concept, nerve-stimuli and the brain's concept of images? What has the reader gained in receiving the poets rendition (concept) of the world, or his suffering in it, or his joy in it? Poets are part of that same misery, happiness, and life. Inevitably, hopefully, somewhere on the road to truth in their poetry, poets discover the writing that must be done for people, for readers and not themselves and not for the sake of prosody or poetry. Poetry, unlike acting, is not lying, it is the one, undeniable truth about us. Hopefully roles change in order to show, from the poet's pages, the universality of human pain, pleasure, wisdom, falsities, expectations, disappointments, sufferings, prejudices and all that impacts and doesn't in the world. Our words, as poets, as world changers, as image painters, as word makers, as concept guns, should flow through us as if we are the vessels. Poets do also become the speakers and actors of poems to the world; for if we were only the vessels, the reader would only be our cup, and the world would be then left empty. Our poems should have as their purpose and aim, human consumption.

Poets in the past have given us wealth and wisdom about how to write poetry: write from necessity to be part of the human family, not above it, not below it, but equal with it. We are, after all, animal, and part of the organic cosmos that everyday revolves in and around us. To write for a poet is the same as procreation for all living things, the same as the water that falls from high places, same as the rivers that flow to the sea, same as the tree that withers and drops its leaves in the Fall; and, invention is the essential formulaic spirit and energy that drives simple verse to become art. In nature we find the necessity to be like itself, to find the need to express the simplest of things, to give heed to the smallest and poorest of neighbors through our words which are really reflections of what we see.

But the individual poet can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man). He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery (which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things), could bear it, endure it more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is instead of taking it lightly.

If only they could be more reverent to their own fruitfulness (which is essentially one, whether manifested as mental or physical, for mental creation arises from the physical), be of one nature with it like a softer, more enraptured repetition of bodily delight.

The process of writing is more than the transfer of ideas to paper. It involves clarity of thought that must have meaning. Usually, this does not happen all at once for most writers. Their epigram is one of constant rewriting; and, when it seems just right, more rewrite. The poet must learn to be brutal with his work. Writing alone is one of the most private acts we know; full of solitude that we find in the middle of the night or in empty rooms filled with the sound of papers or keyboards rattling. Many times we do not possess the objective eye when engrossed in a passage or a whole work; for these and others objective reasons, the poet must learn how to cut, edit, reshape and clarify his work. Much of our ego is involved in our writing, and for this reason, cutting away the extra baggage is hard. In order to stand back and visualize the work as a complete coherent piece with clarity of meaning and purpose requires painstaking ability to admit our faults and do something, sometimes drastic about it, i.e. cutting whole stanzas, pages, etc. etc. When doubtful as to what must be cut, or what is too wordy or cumbersome to the reader, a good rule is to ask oneself it the piece can stand on its own without the questionable section: if it can, cut; if it cannot, leave it in, or edit it slightly.

Objects in the Image

Ideas born from human conditions, situations, experiences, and feelings find common grounds in object oriented reality: things that must be written about, things that others can immediately relate to, things of the world around us that symbolize man's emotions fears, attitudes, opinions, prejudices, tolerances, illusions, temperaments, knowledge and wisdom. Ideas on their own cannot stand on their own feet, but words that stand for things have honorable feet that can stand, hopefully, the test of time. Write with purpose of necessity from your heart and soul; to write of things, not ideas is to let ideas rest themselves in objects. Once portrayed as objects, readers often find their own interpretations for the poets object-image connection. This happens when the reader can internalize the image connection from universal symbology the poet uses to relate this or that situation. From the reader's inner consciousness, a wealth of personal imagination is sparked by multiple interpretations the poet opens up because of a common vision he shares with the world; albeit he can go never nearly as far when he cries his"tell the world how I feel" syndrome, through his visionless, uncommon ground poems.

It seems the obvious essence of poetry has always been for poets to find the image in the object; and this simple relationship of image to object has produced (and is producing) tons of poetry. A famous line from Charles Bukowski can further illustrate my point, "God has made so many poets and so little poetry." The poet has the painful task of turning ideas, reality, into common, universal things and objects that symbolize other images: "this is what I refer to as "finding the object in the image." No easy task is it to find the words that can stir in the reader's heart and mind objective reality that calls to mind certain states of being or qualities of life that they know as once in their memory or may be have never known and are witnessing and feeling for the first time when reading a poem: this is the power of the verse where prose falls short; the impact on the heart and mind of the reader who was unaware of what was to be. Finding the object in the image is exemplified here in a line by Marge Rossi about a mother who grieves the death of her child: "the frieze of the grave." The slow, sudden awareness that the word is "frieze" and not "freeze" produces an impact unequaled to just saying "the freeze of the grave", for now we see the cut letters in the stone, the date of birth, the date of death; also, the alliterative assonance of "grieve" and "frieze" is even more apparent when the word "grieve" does not even appear in the poem, but our common mind, experience, calls it into the piece. There exists so much more impact for the "showing" the world of its misery and how one of its kind has dealt with it. When we find such examples of the object in the image, these are the poems that remain with the reader for many years.

To write such poetry requires craft: much individual soul-searching, research, reading what has come before us, and living life. Our emotions, (and I write,) ..."are the longest distance between two counterpoints, meddling passion that strums us..." are part of the cosmos, part of the human condition; alone they mean more to us as individuals than as poets. These emotions have no extra-special meaning to the world because they emit from us, the poets. Moreover, our emotions should act in us not interpretation of feelings, but mirrors of man's heart and soul since time immemorial. These emotions, when treated by the poet in special ways, unhampered by modifying interpretations, become images, objects, states of mind, and through situations and situational circumstances, the reader comes half way to meet us in the act of poetry. The reader, and poets must hold and cherish this, has certain contextual clues and preconceived meanings about human kind and universal truth known to be common to all man already within him before he even picks up a book.

As poets, we must tap into the vastness of commonality that exists in us and crosses generational gaps, crosses national boundaries, and joins people from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. There exists no trick in finding the "object in the image." It is born from the craft and exists when the craft becomes second nature. When it appears, the poet will know it for it stands alone and like the sculptor who finds his work of art already in the stone and tries to free it by chiseling away the space of rock and particles, the poet also will raise the line above the page as it becomes something more than language, prose, verse or literature in any form. It becomes a joy to write and elevate the lines from thought to object where the poet strives to elevate man's commonality by transforming emotions into objects and things and to take them a step further by showing (by "less telling") how these things change and transmute themselves into other states or objects, thus giving the reader additional insight into our common purpose of necessity. The poet can also exemplify this type of heightened awareness of things by transcending and transforming states of mind and objects by showing the reader how we, or others, have handled the common experiences mentioned before. It is in the hands of the poet how most effectively his words become new life, born in the reader; new life generated from worldly impressions seen, felt in the poet.

The final assessment is not to find in poetry definitions of what it is but to search for the universal impression that have meaning and sense to all readers; the ultimate for the poet is to reach all readers throughout the world.

Stephen Dunn has put it in a way that offers some insight into what a poet possesses:

Poets must be cocky and humble. They must trust their own assertions and observations in the face of overwhelming uncertainties. They must know their job is not to offer The Truth, but to be persuasive about their version of it...

Authors final note: "If governments exist to protect human life and human rights, poets exist to fill the barracks-like spaces with human worth."

Creating Poetry, John Drury. Writers Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio,1991. The Poet's Handbook, Judson Jerome, Ibid., 1980. The Art and Craft of Poetry, Michael J. Bugeja, Ibid., 1994. Writing Poems, 4th. edition, Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau, Harper Collins College Pub.,1996. Understanding Poetry, 3rd. Edition, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Renn Warren, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, N.Y., 1960. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton University Press, 1993. Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vintage Books, N.Y., 1984. The Palm At The End Of The Mind, Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books. "Tradition and The Individual Talent", T.S. Eliot (widely available anthologized essay.) "Introducing Two Essays on Form and Voice: Some Thoughts and Considerations", Paul R. Haenel, AOL on-line, 1995.