Tonight, Bee would be descending with the sun.

The old city of New Orleans thrummed, still hazy into evening from the hot summer afternoon. The sky was smoky and the streetlights on, shining through the clipped and twisted trees of the French Quarter. Mardi Gras was long over, the months past worlds away from the current revelers, who ate and waited for the dancing to start. Bee was waiting too, but not for dancing. She watched the women’s legs and the men’s dark shoes, all jittering under tables, with someone else’s fascination. In filling Ratchet’s place, she was becoming her. Her nose twitched and her toes swung along with the blues coming from the next bar over.

So she sipped her coffee and watched freely. It seemed like no one saw her as she sat alone, wearing out-of-place leather clothing; it was as though their eyes skipped past her somehow, that in scanning the outdoor tables they blinked just where she should be.

A big fat crow flapped into the tree above her in a blink of black. She grabbed a rucksack from under her chair – enough tools and things for the night, a few days in a pinch, nothing like the trunk she usually traveled on – and stood up, holding out her forearm for the crow. When it cawed about the way to the meeting place she rolled her shoulders and set out down the alley. No one in the café turned. No one heard a sound.

when a universe comes loose and hits you in the eye –

That night it rained in the desert, flooding Vegas
with real splashes, not just light. The gods of the atomic
came up from Los Alamos to cash in for the end of the world.
And as the planes hummed out over the Pacific,
as we clashed close to midnight’s stiff fingers,
one physicist put hands in penniless pockets and looked
into the worlds brushing this one in the dark, said,
“At least one of me is rich.”

And our filaments of existence have split further since then.
Today I touched mine by accident; they tangled in a cat’s cradle,
a life lived a million times, sweet and sickening like a bruise.

Like those green-hued butterflies of damage
under your eyes at breakfast, your cries catching in my throat:
“but I love her!”
Your phantom legs tangled with mine
while the rest of me rode the bus, my phantom legs
climbing the ridges of the desolate dream,
my phantom hands in the foreign boy’s hair
while your empty form thumped in longing from the closet.

Think of it: his soft accent and the generator’s singing,
the screen of rain, the white sky and blackened trenches.
I touch his thin shoulder and taste the strain of war.
Or the canine master next to me in class -
his affected strut swings to the ghost of a lone trombone
and he bears scars from a bout with his own serrated flaws.
We play a duet the size of a symphony
and the audience is blindfolded.

That world is shuttered as his heart.
In another, hearts have been eliminated
and we are run by pistons. What I wouldn’t give
to gamble away my endless beating chambers
for one smooth cheetah machine;
cars slosh the coins of my wager down the highway
from here to the edge of the world.
There are only the twinging hairs of other selves
coiled painful in my pocket.
At least one of me is rich.

surgery.

Leaves change color, a comforting ritual
accompanied by charcoal smears in artsy back rooms,
love across collarbones, woodsmoke sinuses,
dusty eyes. We do not join those groups that paint glory
before the bite of cold sets in.
My mouth itches with new teeth against the soft normalcy
of breakfast and paper applications. I am that bite of cold;
I am the sting of running from the ice.
I taste winter and antiseptics
and when you touch my arm
the metal fingers of the speculum pry open channels
of clotted blood. Blood that sets me hunting,
a wolf upon the snow that never falls. Blood
that digs into your back, a field of divots and valleys.
Blood that makes me eat my own children, their
porous, embryonic limbs bright bruises on my lips.

————-

(Done at the lit. mag meeting. We did a “first line auction” — I had everybody write down the first line to something and put it in the bucket, and then you would take down somebody elses’ and continue whatever they started. )

The force of nothingness, the waste of time
floods into every cavity of this skeleton -
its old bicycles rust between my shoulderblades.
The fluff of sodden, exploded feather elephants
tickle my sinuses and blunt my senses with that hysterical sting.

Minutes go first – overripe berries that burst,
not quite sweet, in meetings or zombie mornings
in the halls.
Hours smell thick and heavy, and days
open up marrow into filled garages,
spongy with the ebb of foundation water,
the open yawn of the lives of decay.
Years are worst. Do not swallow them;
they are bitter. Your joints will seize up
with their juices
and ooze lime when you bend low
to hug your children.

And time’s refuse can’t be kept out. It drips and drips,
rotting gently in the mouth-sinkholes we leave open,
the mind-gutters we keep closed.

This is in chronological order; the first is from the beginning of junior year, the last is from about a week ago. You can click on the images to get them to open in their own window. They won’t be any bigger, but you’ll be able to see the horizontal ones without any cut-off.

self portrait from the beginning of last year, in watercolor and antelope ink.

This began as a challenge assignment for independent study: pick a white object and do a progression of drawings and paintings, paying attention to value and the warm/cool nature of shadows. The first couple did that, but … it was just too much fun to use as many colors as possible here. Acrylics.

Pastel, probably about 12″x16″.

Pen and ink. Unfortunately, this is from a photo.

Collage with ink, acrylics, newspaper, other paper, and white out. On an actual train schedule.

Trying to use the idea of swirls/fingerprints to create a portrait. It didn’t come out conceptually as I intended, but I like the way it looks [the fingerprint/identity portrait is to come, i think]

Ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.

AP concentration (maybe): light and refraction

Acrylic on cardboard

Yes, my sister habitually makes this face. Swirls again. I like doing them, even though they’re time consuming; they’re very good for suggesting movement or form and they’re very meditative.

Portrait practice. From a photo. Thanks, Brandi.

I know, AGAIN. AP summer assignment: graphite rendering of a tool or toy, 4 hours plus. (I used H through 6B)

AP summer assignment: a collage that represents you.

Weekend assignment. An interior space that describes the person who inhabits it.
The semi-mess, techheadness, and goofy details (they might not be drawn so well, but there are toy cars and a robot in there) really do describe my dad. The view is through the lattice next to the basement stairs, looking in; besides being a more fun composition than head-on, it’s usually how I see his studio – poking my head through the slats and calling him up for dinner.

The sun, a hot vessel sparking trees over water,
does not concern itself with partings.
This is more comforting than you’d imagine.
If we were standing on a long dock with a wet dog
wriggling along, I would watch the flaming ship and say:
that’s the best part. Everyone is saved.
But there is no ocean here, only woods gossiping about
plastic exposives and fall. Salvation in the face
of a sunset is the strength to watch it all, to then
get back to business without the silence pulling you apart.

I don’t have it. I invite the quiet into the cracks.
You might. I know so little of your thoughts
about a sunset, about what opens us at the close.
Three years and I can barely see the golden hinges.

Your mother tells you to wear the virgin around your neck
so the devil doesn’t pull you off the train –
can you imagine
a string of virgins, bare beneath blue headscarves?
They flap perfect freckled hands at the dangers of long island,
stroke your collarbone with the rhythm of summer’s last taps
against the window, the beats of the final storm.

Tonight we ride out the echoes. Tonight, between worry
and dreaming, the ship will hit the bottom.

Years later after the armchair editor in my head
has snipped through film roll number seventeen
I will see you setting up camp, our rambunctous goodbye,
the long drive home. The colors will be spectacular –
teenagers used to live in a world like an overexposed photo.
But for now I am left with the tugging image
of a quick kiss, then me riding shotgun to the laundromat
and watching you walk up the dark driveway, alone,
already two hours away.

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.

—-

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 or they can just imply the idea, and let the reader draw the conclusion, like with William Carlos Williams’ “Poem”.

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. 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?
__________________

they provide awesome ideas and material.

—–

Spacetime created the earth. If spacetime is some form of higher being, so be it; maybe that will be the myth of the future, a thousand years from now or two thousand years from now, when our gods are forgotten except in figurines and paintings like the gods of the first people are long, long gone, the gods of cavemen who were buried mysteriously with flowers and animal teeth — a pinprick of light exploded and from that came all the material of the universe, and as it spread out and Spacetime spread its wings it curved, and the bits and pieces of the divine, the molten feathers rolled off into the spaces and coagulated into stars and planets and galaxies.

You know, it’s one of those lists. Give a shout if you’ve read/recommend any of these. Some are classic catch-ups on books I missed at school [hello, Plath], others obviously aren’t.

—-

The Once and Future King – T. H. White
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
Flying in Place – Susan Palwick
Rollback – Robert J. Sawyer
After Dark – Haruki Murakami
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Stranger – Albert Camus
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Stardust – Neil Gaiman
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
Where I’m calling from – Raymond Carver
Spunk and Bite – Arthur Plotnik
Reading Like a Writer – Francine Prose
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A. Heinlein
Fabric of the Cosmos – Brian Greene

This is probably going to be more like a “notebook” than anything else, with challenges for myself, snippets from my writing or writing done on the road that I need to save, ideas, NaNo and NaPo madness, and book reviews and lists.

I love comments on my writing and if you have writing sitting lonely and un-critiqued somewhere, you can drop me a line.