Imagery

The Statue of Liberty is an image. Not pictures of the statue. The actual figure on its
pedestal on an island. It shows up in every movie about European immigrants to the US
who come on ships.
Why do I say it's an image? It's mimetic. That is, an artificial imitation of reality. The
statue represents a woman in flowing robes holding up a torch. You've got the folds and
billows in her dress. You've got the crown with the little tourist windows. You've got the
shiny surface on the flame to reflect light as if it were flame.
Of course, we don't confuse the statue with a real woman. Because women are only
sometimes that tall, usually in 1950s black-and-white sci-fi B movies obsessed with
radiation mutation.
An image in a poem is much the same thing. A linguistic imitation of reality. Here's a
famous poem by Ezra Pound, called "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The second line of this brief poem is all image. We can imagine, we can see in our mind's
eye the flower's stark contrast with the branch. Perhaps it has grown there. Perhaps it was
blown there by the storm. All of these add to the ambience (and meaning) of the poem.
Images are always sensory. They are sometimes sensual (if done right). They ground the
poem's themes and ideas in real things. Wallace Stevens said, "Not ideas about the thing
but the thing itself." William Carlos Williams said, "No ideas but in things."
While we're talking about Williams, here's his famous poem "The Red Wheelbarrow":
so much depends
upon
the red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Except for the first stanza, that's nothing but image. Nothing but image. Williams and
Pound and other influential poets of their time joined together in a movement called
Imagism. The Imagists argued for the primacy of image in poetry.
To be really practical, what images can do in your poem is draw the reader in. By sharing
your own perception and articulation of the sensory and sensual, you invite the reader to

perceive too. The reader connects with you because of course she is also an image maker.
All of us are, in our heads.
Remember, images may involve smells, tastes, tactile sensations, sounds heard, and not
only things seen.
Another thing to remember about imagery is that the image needs to be particular and
specific. Don't just say tree; say aspen or oak or banyan. Don't just say bird, say toucan.
When you say toucan, you actually help to set the scene because toucans live only in
jungle (or zoos, unfortunately). Of course you might also be referring to cereal boxes. In
any case, be clear, be specific, be detailed.
Detail. Detail. Detail. Detail. Detail.
That's the image mantra (in trochaic pentameter).
When you are vague and general, you don't give the reader enough cues and clues. If you
are specific, she will tune in better.
If you describe something fully and memorably, the reader will imagine your image but
she will also remember something similar from her own experience, and that will enliven
her mind's version of your image.
If you describe something vaguely and forgettably, with the intent that the reader be given
the freedom to imagine as she will, that memory spark won't fire and instead you'll have
mush, both on the page and in the reader's mind.
The reader will turn from your poem.
Now something else, a related topic: simile, metaphor, and symbol.
Here's a sentence: "Her umbrella was like a zebra." What does that make you think of?
Well, maybe the canopy of this umbrella is striped black and white in that swooshing
zebra way. Of course, that's a simile. Note the word like. That word ties together the two
ideas (umbrella and zebra) and demands that we see them as somehow interlinked.
Here's another sentence: "Her umbrella was a zebra." Better yet, "In the downpour, her
umbrella was a zebra leaping among its black and tan sisters in the town square." I've
tweaked the sentence to dramatize how this metaphor (note: no like) makes us see the
umbrella as a zebra. And the kicker is the image: "leaping among ... black and tan."
Before we go further, let me give you some terms: the vehicle is the word or phrase which
carries the "secret" meaning (in this case, "umbrella"); the tenor is the meaning (hence,
"zebra leaping").
Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is metaphoric. The qualities of the faces and the petals
are transferred back and forth to each other.
Now on to symbol. Let's go back to the Statue of Liberty. Yes, it's an image. If you write
about the statue in a poem, that would be an image too. But the Statue is also a symbol -in other words a metaphor whose tenor is something large and collective. The statue is the
vehicle and it signals to Americans this tenor: our pride in the U.S. affording shelter and
freedom to the oppressed and unwanted. That's a public symbol.

In poetry, we find public symbols too (the flag, the cross, the Star of David), but there are
also private symbols -- those which mean worlds to the poet and which are intended to
mean worlds (though maybe other ones) to the reader.
But no matter whether public or private symbol, whether metaphor or simile, the basic
element -- the image -- won't work unless you invest it with electricity, with lightning.
The image has got to crackle and it does that only if you use vivid, specific, and
appropriate detail.
One poetic form which relies on this dictum is the haiku. "In a Station of the Metro" is, in
Pound's own words, "haiku-like."
The haiku is a Japanese form which, in English, has three lines composed of five
syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables. It is always based on a single image. The
haiku poet typically evokes a single season, say "spring" or "winter," and the details often
focus on nature, at least in traditional examples.
The punchline is this: the reader is supposed to experience a kind of epiphany from the
haiku. As Emily Dickinson said, "I know it is poetry if I feel as if the top of my head has
come off." To use 60's slang, the haiku blows your mind! Through its intense compression
and compactness, the haiku liberates the mind into larger meaning.
Here's an example of a Japanese haiku from the 1700s, by Taniguchi Buson:
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel . . .
I'll let you work out your own response to this, but let me say that it seems to me the
haiku alludes to winter, pain, death, and fear of ghosts, but more importantly to love,
sorrow, and transcendence over death. What do you think? Pretty cool stuff. And it all
depends on image: "piercing" and "under my heel." That last phrase is sensory,
connecting with the tactile. Ouch.
There's a TV ad which says, "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything." Poetry is completely
opposite: image is everything.
-- Vince Gotera
Line and Meter
The line is the "bottom line." The sine qua non. If you ain't got line, you ain't got that
swing. Swing being POETRY. Or at least verse.
Verse is cadenced language cut up into lines, and poetry is profound verse -- verse with
layered multi-meanings as well as accumulated mega-meanings.
One of the differences between the modes of prose and verse is that the first doesn't break
into lines and the second does. And that's a pretty profound thing in itself.
When you combine or intersect the idea of lines with the notion of meaning, you end up
with two kinds of lines: the enjambed line and the endstopped line.
Look at it this way: there are sentences and there are lines. One way to write a poem
would be to break lines every time a sentence ended. But that's kind of a one-trick zebra,
don't you think?
But suppose you were to pit the movement of the sentence against the movement of the
line? Then you could make ebb and flow. Come and go. Catch and throw.

Think back to science class: two sine waves of different frequencies -- sometimes they
enhance each other, sometimes cancel. But together they create a new wave with an
exciting shape. Make sense?
An endstopped line is where the movement of the sentence works with the movement of
the line. For example, from Maura Stanton's poem "Childhood" (Strong Measures 346):
I must have turned down the wrong hall,
Or opened a door that locked shut behind me,
For I live on the ceiling now, not the floor.
See how there's a punctuation mark at the end of each line? The zones of the sentence are
in sync with the line break. Whenever you see punctuation at a line break, almost always
you've got endstop.
An enjambed line, on the other hand, happens when the sentence movement conflicts
with the line movement. It's probably more accurate to say that the line's intentions
interrupt those of the sentence. From Stanton again, same poem, opening lines:
I used to lie on my back, imagining
A reverse house on the ceiling of my house
Or the closing lines:
The floor so far away I can't determine
Which room I'm in, which year, which life.
In both of these examples, the first line in the pair seems unfinished, leaves you up in the
air until the second line enters.
You can imagine that the reader is forced by the enjambment to read fast from one line to
the next, almost as if the line break isn't there. Or you can alternately imagine that there's
a kind of suspense at the end of the enjambed line, a moment of tension. Both are true.
Pay close attention here, now. The juggling of enjambment and endstop can be used to
modulate emotion in a poem, to create tension and then ease it, to create pace by speeding
up and slowing down language. Okay? Now on to meter. When you think about poetry as
arising from oral traditions, it's pretty easy to see that an original purpose of lines was to
break up language -- a story, usually -- into easily recalled and recallable chunks.
Especially if you break it up into chunks that are the same length, identical duration
maybe.
Here's how the Old English did it. They got BOOM into their lines. Four of them to be
exact. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. The irreverent saying "Wham Bam ... " works the
same way. (Sorry about the sexist example, but it's a good one rhythm-wise.)
Actually the Old English thought four BOOMs was probably too much all the time, so
quite often they would back off one of them. They would also put in a pause, now called a
"caesura." Look at the opening lines of Richard Wilbur's poem "Junk" (Strong Measures
399):
An axe angles
from my neighbor's ashcan;
It is hell's handiwork,
the wood not hickory.
The flow of the grain
not faithfully followed.
The shivered shaft
rises from a shellheap
Of plastic playthings,
paper plates.
You can find the BOOMs by ... wait, let's call the BOOMs "stresses," okay?

You can find the stresses by listening for the heavy words, where the shoe comes down
hard. But you can also look for a repeated sound at the beginnings of words, called
"alliteration."
See how in the first line the word "axe," "angle," and "ashcan" start with a short "a"? The
stressed syllable which is the BOOM backed off is
"neighbor's" (it's fun to note that the first vowel sound in this word is a long "a" though
that wouldn't matter to the Old English bards). Again, note the "h" sounds in "it is HELL's
HANDiwork, the WOOD not HICKory. Or the "p" in "of PLAStic PLAYthing, PAper
PLATES." What's interesting about that last one is that you have three "pl" stresses and
one "p" -- again backed off.
This is called "accentual verse" -- to be more precise, "accentual alliterative verse." Four
stresses, end the line. Don't worry about the unstressed syllables; you can have as many as
you want.
Later poets developed a system which also counted the unstressed syllables, noting that in
English each stress typically comes with one or two "unstresses." Happy Birthday =
HAPpy | BIRTHday. For the moment, I'll bite = for the MO | ment, i'll BITE. Each chunk
with one stress is called a "foot." The overall system is called "accentual syllabic."
Suppose you were to make up line after line with repeated patterns, the same foot over
and over? Maybe da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. Like "I got it now -- it's easy -yeah!" Or DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da. As in "Hey there, buddy, got a quarter?"
Both of these sentences have four stresses. But the first one is made of da DUM's and the
second one is made of DUM da's. A "da DUM" is called an iamb. A "DUM da" is called a
trochee. Couple those names with the stress count, and you have iambic tetrameter (first
example) and trochaic tetrameter (second example). Yes, "tetra" is Greek for "four."
It's all GREEK to me. A one-stress line is monometer. Two: dimeter. Three: trimeter. Four,
well you know. Five, pentameter (remember that one from high school?) Six, hexameter.
And so on. And so on.
Besides the iamb and the trochee, you might also note "da da DUM" (called an anapest)
and "DUM da da" (a dactyl). The second one is called that because DUM da da looks like
a finger. Yes, in Greek "dactyl" means "finger"; for example, "pterodactyl" means "wingfinger." You knew that "ptero" thing, right? It's at the end of "helicopter" (twisting wing).
Let's look back at Stanton's "Childhood" for some examples:
x / x / x / x / x /
Where I | could walk | around | in emp | ty rooms.
Here we've got five iambs, hence iambic pentameter. (Oh, the "x" stands for unstressed
syllable, and the "/" represents a stressed one. Sometimes when people do this, they use a
little symbol that looks like a bowl, like a half circle opening up, but I don't know how to
get that symbol into a webpage. By the way, this procedure of marking syllables is called
"scanning.")
If we look at other lines, we can see how Stanton uses other feet to break up the rhythm.
x / x / x x / x/ x/
I used | to lie | on my back, | imag | ining
x x /
/ x x / x / x /
A reverse | house on | the ceil | ing of | my house
In the first line she sticks an anapest in the middle of four iambs. In the second she begins
with an anapest, then switches to a trochee, and ends up with the iambic rhythm again.
This not only breaks up the rhythm, it calls attention to certain words like "back" or
"reverse house" -- in both of these cases, there's something going BACKward. Hmm.
This is getting too long, so I'll try to wind down.

The third kind of well-known meter is "syllabic." Here you don't care whether the
syllables are stressed or unstressed, you just count them. Same number of syllables in
each line. For example, from the opening of Philip Levine's "Animals Are Passing From
Our Lives" (Strong Measures 200):
It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.
Seven syllables each time. Not as easy as Levine makes it seem.
Okay, I'll stop. For real.
Meter is all about rhythm. The rhythms of the lines are measured (yup, "meter" comes
from the Greek "metron" for "measure"). All of this is covered in more depth in Appendix
A of Strong Measures. I hope this gives you a good start, though.
-- Vince Gotera
Style
When I was growing up in San Francisco in the late Sixties, the everyday talk of my
friends and me often transpired in black slang (now called African American Vernacular
English by linguists). We would say, for example, "My lady be stylin." Roughly
translated, this means something like "My girlfriend consistently dresses in an attractive
and fashionable style."
Perhaps this sentence in black English may remind you of an often-quoted sentence, "The
style is the man himself" (Comte de Buffon). Or it may not.
In any case, style is an important part of the poet's repertoire. Style refers to the
distinctive and idiosyncratic way one expresses oneself. For example, in these lessons I
have tried to maintain an easy-going breezy style. This would be different from the style I
might use in a scholarly article, or in an intimate letter to an old friend, or in a letter of
complaint to a corporation. Style also arises from occasion.
What we're talking about here is personal style. You can develop your own style by
making your poetry true to your spoken voice. Learn your characteristic cadences,
vocabulary, syntax. Read your poems out loud and see if they sound natural in your voice,
in your body. The poet Donald Justice said that after writing a poem, "When I listen to it
and it sounds like me, then it's a good poem." Our topic also refers to collective or public
style. In modern and postmodern poetry, poetic styles have continuously diversified. The
most significant poetic revolution occurred in the early twentieth century, when modernist
poets began writing in free verse as a revolution against formal verse.
In mid-century the Beat poets added to the revolution. Poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac wrote first drafts and called them poems, valorizing the site (both place and
time) of creation. Beat poetry reflected not just a literary style but also a lifestyle. Often
such poetic styles are thought of as schools or movements. Craig Raine, for example, led
the "Martian School" of poetry in 1980s Britain. Here are the opening and closing stanzas
of the poem which started that school, Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home."
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but

sometimes they perch on the hand.

.................
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves -in colour, with their eyelids shut.
The poem tries to look at contemporary society through an outsider's eyes, in an
anthropological sense, but at the far extreme with an observer who is not even human. An
observer who knows the historical fact that the first printed books in England were made
by William Caxton, but doesn't know the words cry or laugh or dream. The poets of the
Martian School tried to achieve this sort of distant objectivity laced with humor and irony
(on personal as well as social levels).
Recent poetic movements in the U.S. include the New Formalists, the New Narrativists,
Language Poets, and most recently, Slam Poetry contests and poetry on the Internet.
Form
I hope it is clear to you that form is at the center of our course topic. So I won't spend
your time and mine here by outlining various forms of poetry since that's what we are
doing from week to week.
I consulted John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for
Pleasure and Practical Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1996) to see how he handles
this topic. (Other topics he discusses in separate chapters include metre, layout,
punctuation, lineation, rhyme, diction, syntax, history, biography, and gender). I found
that Lennard lays out various forms -- blank verse, couplets, tercets, etc. -- just as we are
doing over this entire semester. So that's not much help here.
[Just as an aside, while I find Lennard's book brilliant, it is not as useful to
American students of poetry because the British use poetic terms a bit
differently. For example, what we call consonance they call alliteration.
What we call alliteration does not have a separate term among the British.
A period is a full stop. Quotation marks are called inverted commas. An
envelope rhyme (abba) is called an arch-rhyme. Etc. Remember that fact
when you look at British books on prosody -- a fancy word for the study of
poetic forms.]
Okay, so let me begin again by first defining form. In poetry, this refers to shape or
structure without regard (necessarily) to content.
It's important to understand that all poems have form. Even a free-verse poem has form -it's just that it invents its own form as it goes. This is why contemporary scholars of
poetry have begun to use "open form" instead of "free verse," to acknowledge that free
verse also has form.
By extension, then, poems in inherited forms and meters have come to be called "closed
forms" -- a term I don't particularly like. Just as "free verse" implies formlessness too
much, "closed forms" suggests that inherited forms and meters are somehow hermetic,
unchanging, and unchangeable. Nothing could be less true.
During the 1980s, a group of poets -- including Molly Peacock, Brad Leithauser, Dana
Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, among others -- were banding together (or being branded

together) as so-called New Formalists. What they were (and are) up to is redefining
formal verse, updating it for our times.
The odd thing that happened was that free-verse poets, who were of course in the majority
at that time, began to label the New Formalists as Reaganites, as ultraconservatives, as if
somehow the choice to use forms indicated political party affiliation. At the same time,
the New Formalists felt themselves to be avant garde, and that writing in forms was the
hip new thing.
Thankfully, this controversy has pretty much faded, and poets now have carte blanche to
choose free verse or formal verse, open form or closed forms.
Here's an example of a free-verse poem, "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand:
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Notice that this is in tercets but there is no preset meter; also external rhymes occur only
rarely. But notice how endstopped the lines are; in fact, there is a comma or a period after
each line except one. So we can see that it is mainly syntax (sentence structure, if you
don't know that term) which governs Strand's lineation. Even the single line without
ending punctuation is not enjambed since it's also a full sentence by itself.
What we might notice though is that the lines come in widely varying lengths. One might
say that Strand balances variant line lengths against the predictability of tercets to
advance the central opposition between the speaker's spontaneous effervescence and the
librarian's repressive fussiness. So the form invented for this poem aids us in the
understanding of content, conflict, and narrative.
Now here's an example of a poem in an inherited form, "Just Like a 6 Month Old Child"
by my former student Amy Kunst (she wrote it in a beginning poetry class):
Grandma is 91 today.
She has a toothless smile
That makes me look away.

She wears a pink gingham dress.

She has a toothless smile
Just like a 6 month old child.
She wears her pink gingham dress
Covered with a clear plastic bib.
Just like a 6 month old child
She sits in a special chair
Covered with a clear plastic bib
Waiting for someone to feed her.
She sits in a special chair.
I look at her and want to cry
As she waits for me to feed her.
I am the only volunteer.
I look at her and want to cry.
I listen to her grown children whisper,
"Thank God, Susan volunteered."
She holds her head up high.
As I listen to her grown children whisper,
I feel like screaming, "She's not deaf!"
She holds her head up high
As I begin to feed her.
I feel like whispering to her (she's not deaf),
"Remember when you fed them?"
As I begin to feed her
She squeezes my hand and smiles.
"Remember when you fed them?"
Now they look away.
She squeezes my hand and smiles.
My grandma is 91 today.
This is a pantoum. Damon refers to this form in his treatment of quatrains. Just to remind
you, the second and fourth lines in each stanza return as the first and third lines of the
next stanza. At the end of the poem, the first and third lines of the opening stanza (which
have not yet been repeated) recycle in reverse order in the final stanza. So that the poem
comes full circle, with the last line the same as the first line. If that was confusing,
compare my description with Kunst's poem. Or look again at Damon's write-up.
What we want to do here is to see how the form (and a difficult one it is) affects what
Kunst says. Kunst has told me that she had no idea where the poem was headed and
allowed the line repetitions to be in charge.
Notice how the speaker of the poem moves from being disgusted at her grandmother's age
to realizing that there is nothing to feel that way about, while simultaneously condemning
her parents and aunts and uncles for continuing to be disgusted. The opening line seems
somewhat regretful that Grandma is so old, while the closing line (see the addition of
"My") conveys the speaker's new pride in her grandmother.

It's quite a brilliant poem with lots of wit and charm, especially in the ways it subtly alters
the lines as they return sometimes. And I hope it's inspiring to you that this was written in
an introductory poetry-writing course.
What I hope this example delineates for you is the practical aspect of form for the poet.
When you are working with an inherited form, you can become so involved in fulfilling
the "rules" of that form that your subconscious is more readily able to "cough up" things
that you didn't know you wanted to say but which the poem wants to say.
The result is surprise both for the poet and the reader -- discovery and newness. Learn to
abandon yourself to form and see where it takes your poems.
The aspect of form we have not yet discussed is tradition -- that certain forms have
become historically connected to given attitudes or types of poetry. But that discussion is
for the next treatment. So 'nuff for now.
-- Vince Gotera