"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.'

This quotation is from the first page of Christopher Isherwood's 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, and it's a great way to think about the endeavour of writing. The phrase puts an emphasis on capturing images, as opposed to the author's own voice, and I think it's such an effective idea to apply to your own writing process. When I refer to imagery, I don't refer to including pictures at the bottom of your poems, but of capturing a moment with words, and presenting it to the reader as plainly as possible. So, the next time you write, think of yourself as a camera, maybe walking through a woodland, and each line or stanza being a photograph of that walk, but in words. You'll soon see how it focuses and deepens your writing.

‘No ideas but in things’

This is a famous phrase by William Carlos Williams, an early 20th century American poet, and it basically points to the essence of this post: to let the images in your poetry speak for themselves. You may well have read lots of philosophy and have thought about these philosophies deeply, however, I’m going to be honest with you, the reader doesn’t want a lecture - they want to be moved. So, don’t let the ideas you want to convey get in the way of the pictures you paint for the reader; the ideas should derive from the pictures you paint, i.e. don’t put the cart in front of the horse.

Show, don’t tell

A lot has been written about this maxim, and I’m not saying that telling does not have a place, indeed I think sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between showing and telling, however, I think Archibald MacLeish sums up the idea of it better than I ever could in this excerpt from his wonderful poem ‘Ars Poetica’ which was published in 1926:

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

Allow the image to do the work

Think of imagery as the fuel of your poem. Poems run on imagery, so make sure your poem isn’t image-thirsty. Read back over it and make sure there are enough images to make the reader interested. Without imagery, you can expect your poem to seem over-explanatory, dry and lacking in music and imaginative depth. However, at the same time, you don’t want to pack it out to the point it’s overflowing with images, as this will be hard for the reader to take in, and might make your poem a bit of a dog’s dinner. So much in poetry, as I write so often, comes down to balance, and balancing showing (using imagery) with telling (describing and explaining) is part of the art. I’ll finish this section with the words of Chekhov as I can’t improve upon what he mentions here:

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

The poetry is in the image

An image can communicate more than we could ever possibly write about it. It holds a range of ideas in one single entity. The image is the vehicle through which ambiguity is achieved, and ambiguity is that precious quality which makes poetry so distinct as art form, it is the quality of a poem that makes us want to keep coming back to it, it is the quality which makes poetry as Auden called it ‘memorable speech’. Take this final quatrain from Seamus Heaney's 'Mossbawn: 1. Sunlight' and see how he lets the image do all of the heavy lifting:

And here is love

like a tinsmith’s scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

It helps you use fewer ‘poetic’ words

‘Azure’, ‘shards’, ‘melifluous’ are the kind of words you’ll want to avoid using in your poetry. In fact, it’s easy to come across as pompous and overly poetic in a poem, as strange as that may seem. After all, you may be thinking, “if I can’t be poetic in a poem then where can I be?” However, poetry works best when it turns everyday speech into Auden’s ‘memorable speech’. So, what better way to avoid using flowery language than by using language to conjure up an image instead? Instead of trying to convey the sadness of children at the end of a party by saying ‘the children were awfully sad at the end of the party’ we could instead focus on the imagery, such as ‘ the children kicked and screamed, with tears falling down their cheeks as the parents wrestled them into their coats.’ The image intimates what is happening.