Image or Sound?

A colleague invited me to guest-teach in her class the other day. The course is our department's introduction to the English major, so it focuses chiefly on essential elements like the close reading of literature, writing essays about literature, and getting familiar with the terminology of literary criticism. Our major has an emphasis in creative writing, however, so the course also touches on some aspects of writing "literature," not just reading it. So that day I was there to talk about writing poetry. I told the students that one big question all poets implicitly or explicitly take a stand on is whether poetry is essentially an art of image or an art of sound. I also told them (at least I hope I did) that this was, of course a false dichotomy. The language of poetry, even when it is read silently, makes sounds in the reader's mind; the language of poetry, even though it is almost always black letters on a white page, also creates images that are viewed in the mind of the reader. My friend, the poet and teacher Kevin Clark, is squarely in the image camp. Of course, he takes great care with how his poems sound, but he is an Image First poet. I suspect Dylan Thomas was a Sound First poet, judging by the lush, overwhelming (in a good way) sounds of his grand poems. Hopkins? Sound First. William Carlos Williams? Well, Image First, of course--ah, but we can't be completely sure; his poems are so carefully constructed in terms of the sound of the words, the shape of syntax. Robert Bly and Company stress "the deep image," an image or cluster of surrealistic images that seem to strike deep into the Jungian subconscious mind.

In any event, I had the students read Dickinson's poem about a snake, the "Narrow Fellow" in the grass. I told them to set aside their preconceived notions about Dickinson, resist the urge to hunt for symbols, and refuse to be distracted by her poetic eccentricities, such as the dashes and the capitalizations. This is an observational poem, I told them. This poem springs directly from a person who enjoyed going out in the fields and woods and looking at things and creatures. The poem captures her careful observation of snakes. It does so in a wonderful way; the images and metaphors are superb. She nails the ending of the poem Great stuff. But also basic stuff. By basic I don't mean simple or simplistic. I mean grounded--literally grounded: a creature crawling on the dirt. She observed, and she gave us the images. The snake is not from the Garden of Eden or from Freud 101. It's from a field or a marsh near Amherst.

I then asked the students to brainstorm a list of creatures they had seen. Their impulse was to list creatures they thought were "poetic," I think: elephants, toucans. I was surprised. I said, "Actually, I was looking for the ordinary stuff we see and really look at, especially as kids--you know, bugs, spiders." Eventually we got around to things like squirrels and foxes, at least.

"Poetry" brings so much baggage with it. To a much greater extent than short stories and novels, it is a literary form that requires demystification. It is somehow supposed to be grandiose, profound, difficult, cryptic, mysterious. I'm all for poems that may exhibit one or more of these qualities, but first of all, I think, a poem has to be grounded--and often grounded in what might seem at first to be mundane reality. You take a walk, you see a snake. A poet's job, of course, is to re-see the mundane for himself or herself and, if the poem works out okay, to re-see and re-present the mundane thing for the reader, in a way that's both fresh and believable. I mean, you can do all sorts of fancy, outlandish things with a snake that would be, in a way, fresh, but they might not be believable. And you can do all sorts of believable things with a snake in your poem, but they might not be fresh. They might be factual and dull, although the factual isn't necessarily dull and the dull isn't necessarily factual.

On that particular day, anyway, I was in the Image First camp. If you're a poet, I was suggesting, start by looking carefully--at anything. The thing looked at does not have to be Poetic. Then write precisely and freshly about what you see, about the seeing, and maybe about what the seeing means or meant--but don't get Profound. In this particular approach to poetry, a poet is like a still-life painter. Of course, the main thing a painter does is play with paint ("play" in the sense of improvise, work with), and the main thing a poet does is play with his or her medium, words. Beyond that, a poet and a painter work at seeing, at looking. Really looking. Then, when the snake goes through the grass, the grass parts as if it were hair being combed. According to Emily Dickinson, who saw.