Distillations: Imagery

For many people, poetry is a strange new land, as bizarre as any landscape imagined by Tolkien, Heinlein, or in extreme cases, Lovecraft. As the number of poetry reviewers at The Fix grows, I will be taking some time each month to discuss the mechanics of poetry. This guide will not make the landscape any stranger, but it may at least provide a few hints to help find your way.

Poetry is often scattered in magazines in much the same manner as artwork—to provide a visual break and a palate cleanser between longer prose pieces. Therefore, it makes sense to start with imagery. This is defined as “a mental picture; a concrete representation of something; a likeness the senses can perceive” by John Drury in The Poetry Dictionary. As an example, it includes “A Marchant was ther with a forked beerd” from The Canterbury Tales. There are some specific challenges to speculative poetry in this definition. How can a poet create a “concrete representation” of something entirely new? Where does the “likeness” come in when describing something entirely other?

Sonya Taaffe’s poem, “In Sight of the Seasons” is full of splendid answers to these questions. Originally appearing in Not One of Us #34, it is currently available on their website. The poem is told from the point of view of a being who becomes an embodiment of the seasons “All that winter I wore the moon…I set the sun in my eye for summer.” Taking on the aspects of the seasons is what this poem does, but imagery is how it succeeds. The first series of images is of the moon: “like a borrowed eye, glass-cold / in a globe of tears.” The cold glass eye and the shivery globe are concrete.Then as the cold grows deeper, Taaffe uses the images of “mouths sealed with ice, the lips of a mute mask.” The poem achieves an immediacy in the reader’s mind despite the literal distance to the moon, and the mental distance between ordinary existence and this strange vision.

The Autumn 2007 edition of Goblin Fruit brings us back to Earth, but not as humans. In “Bear Clad,” Jennifer Crow uses a familiar fantasy theme—the usual in an unusual setting. In this case, it is a person in a bear’s body, “the cloak of white fur… the thickening of my nails.” This leads to a feeling of the exotic in the simple image of “soft padding / among the pines, through the wild berries.” The reader can hear the bear in the woods as if he or she were there, perhaps in the same skin.

Another poem in this same collection, “Old House” by Alex Dally MacFarlane, is a cynical response to the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Although the story is well known, MacFarlane takes the time to revive the images in the reader’s mind, “the wolf / in his fur-coat, his grandmother dress and his house-shirt.” However, she uses further images to paint a world more real than that simplistic story “crumbling bricks and / peeling paint.” And when the poem takes a gruesome turn, the details of the situation are painted all too clearly—the maidens “carpet-wrapped (little cocoon feasts),” the bones “white jigsaws.” It is not always pleasant to be able to clearly visualize the subject of the poem, but it is certainly an example of art.

Imagery is only one tool in the poet’s toolbox, and not the only one used successfully in the poems featured in this column. Whether a poem is about other worlds, other animals, or matters more mundane, there are mechanisms which make it work.

Next month we will examine another tool and how it is being used in speculative poetry to bring the bizarre a little closer to reality.