Creating a Vivid Image

I have been learning quite a lot from the handouts, each one delivering new and insightful tips on how to improve your work as a poet. In my opinion, I feel that the most important thing that every poet should continually work on is the importance of creating an image with words. In the poem “Snow”, I found David Berman’s description of a snowy day to be simply incredible; “A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.” Berman could have just simply given a very vague description of a snowy day but that would have made “Snow” very weak and ordinary. If you think about it, a bland poem that “just says” instead of creating an image ends up being a dull short story. In my opinion, if you aren’t feeling some type of emotion, either confusion, sadness, happiness, etc., then it really shouldn’t be considered poetry. Chapter 1 had great supporting evidence behind this when it stated how images themselves such as Salvador Dali’s, The Persistence of Memory, were a lot more powerful than words; “Memory alters our sense of time.”Even the most subtle imagery helps as well. Even though not much abstraction was used in the following quote from James Tate’s, “Consolations After an Affair”, the quiet phrase “I have quilts on beds and walls” did a fantastic job of forcing me to imagine a house full of quilts. Lastly, Chapter 1 also mentioned to avoid using excessive amounts of abstraction when depicting an image. I have always stereotyped poetry as excessively abstract but after reading through many of these poems, I found that even the simplest words can be very beautiful and descriptive when strung together in the right way. For me, I don’t have much of a background in poetry, so trying to depict these images in a very unique and interesting way has been quite challenging. I found the best thing to do, like the readings have mentioned as well, is to write “blandly” if necessary and then enhance your work at the end.

*Albert Sementa*