Thinking in Images

by Donald G. Redman

We tend to think of images as objects seen, but the term also applies to our other senses: sounds, texture, odors and taste. Of the three genres that interest me most (poetry, fiction, playwriting) it is poetry that is most dependent upon images for impact. Indeed, sense perception is crucial for the poet and plays a vitally important role in the poetic creative process, more so than any other textual form of art.

All good writers are keen observers of their environs, but poets in particular seem to be more in tune with the senses and possess the ability to see, hear, feel, smell and taste more than the average person. While most of us usually gloss over our surroundings, poets are able to harvest powerful images from the mundane, be they spider webs; a leaf-clogged gutter; a dead squirrel in the middle of the street; arthritic hands; or a store display of red slippers:

Red Slippers
By Amy Lowell

Red slippers in a shop-window; and outside in the street, flaws of gray, windy sleet!

Behind the polished glass the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of the passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas.

The row of white, sparkling shop-front is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain – and freeze again to red slippers, myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window.
They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer; they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets.
Snap, snap, they are cracker sparks of scarlet in the white monotonous block of shops.
They plunge the clangor of billions of vermillion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement.

People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window farther down is a big lotus bud of cardboard, whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.
One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before?

The flaws of gray, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are only red slippers.

Lowell’s use of imagery is brilliant. Aside from the obvious visual contrast of red against gray, Lowell also uses sound imagery in very effective ways: “dripping,” “screaming,” “plopping,” “Snap, snap,” “cracker sparks,” “clangor” “trumpets,” “echo,” and the sound of “windy sleet” beating against the shop window.

Maxwell Bodenheim finds poetry on the rear balconies of an apartment complex. Take a quick moment to read Bodenheim’s “The Rear-Porches Of An Apartment-Building,” found here.

Again, a mundane scene, this one in the courtyard of an apartment complex, is described in vivid detail with color: yellow pears, lavender-white eyes, a red fan; sound: the girl’s singing, pears being peeled, and the unstated sounds of the urban setting beyond the confines of the apartment building; and taste: cakes and pears.

In the hands of a skillful poet, art exists in the ordinary. Alice Corbin’s “Sand Painting” captures a full day, from dawn to night, with exquisite imagery:

Sand Paintings
By Alice Corbin

The dawn breeze
Loosens the leaves
Of the trees;
The wide sky quivers
With awakened birds.

Two blue runners
Come from the east;
One has a scarf of silver,
One flings pine-boughs
Across the sky.

Noon-day stretched
In gigantic slumber –
Red copper cliffs
Rigid in sunlight.

An old man stoops
For a forgotten fagot –
Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.

Where one door stands open,
The female moon
Beckons to darkness
And disappears.

I draw your attention to Corbin’s poem to highlight an important rule writers must always keep in mind– avoid clichés and tired phrases. Here, instead of writing “leaves rustled in the wind,” or “wind-blown leaves,” Corbin writes that the breeze has loosened the leaves. She also avoids writing about squawking birds or birds chirping by phrasing it as the sky quivering “with awakened birds.” Her description of the setting sun is also brilliantly detailed as an old man with:
“Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.”

What beautiful imagery!

Charles Bukowski avoids the cliché in his poem, “The Crunch,” by brilliantly converting the ubiquitous “faceless strangers” into “strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks.”

For obvious reasons sight imagery is the tool most frequently employed by poets, but sound imagery can be equally effective in the development of a poem. Sound, or the imagined sound, in Amy Lowell’s “Red Slippers” was vital to creating an image of what certainly cannot be described as “quiet desperation,” but rather the internal rancor of ignored beauty.

Carl Sandburg uses the sound of a boat’s foghorn to great effect to describe the feeling of being lost.

Lost
By Carl Sandberg

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where the fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.

In using sounds, poets have to be much more creative than using broad generalities. The roar of the ocean, the roar of traffic, the rustling of leaves ... they’re exhausted phrases that mean very little to the reader. Instead, we must work harder to isolate the sounds and convey them in ways that are new and meaningful.

But what if our specific poem is indeed inspired by the sound of waves crashing against rocks or the pitter-patter of rainfall? I can only suggest that you keep it in the initial drafts and work with it until you find a new twist of a phrase or a better metaphor or simile.

In her poem “Fallen,” Alice Corbin uniquely describes the sound of an imagined wave washing over the body of a dying soldier: “The tide passed, and the waves came and whispered about his ankles.” Describing the faint sound of a dying wave rolling onto the beach – a sound I’m sure we all know so well – to express it as a whisper is simply brilliant.

Sights and sounds are on full display in Amy Lowell’s “1777 I. The Trumpet-Vine Arbour, II. The City of Falling Leaves”  (read it here).While the subject of the “Trumpet-Vine” may appear old fashioned – a tribute to the American Revolution – Lowell’s use of sound and color is nevertheless worthy of study. “The City of Falling Leaves” is simply gorgeous – a painting in words.

The remaining senses – touch, smell and taste – are even harder to express than sound, but deserve our consideration and effort. The imagery can be created from small observations like the feel of grains of salt spilled on the table; the scent of a child who has been playing outside; the smell and taste of a strawberry margarita with a freshly squeezed lime; the scent of pine or the tackiness of pinesap.

Lola Ridge’s “Iron Wine” assaults our senses of sight, smell and taste.

Iron Wine
By Lola Ridge

The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
Surely it is a strong wine - juice distilled of the fierce iron.
I am drunk of its fumes.
I feel its fiery flux
Diffusing, permeating,
Working some strange alchemy…
So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
So that I look askance upon the common cup,
And from the mouths of crucibles
Suck forth the acrid sap.

Accomplished poets rely on chance observations, but novice poets like me have to make it a habit to notice the sounds, odors, textures and sights around me, and to craft new ways to describe them that will be acknowledged by the reader.