Tony Hoagland | March/April 2015

Many years after their composition, the essays of Robert Bly are still compelling, both for their fearless originality, and their didactic vitality. Bly’s sweeping, vivid generalizations about poetry, American culture, and the soul of Western Civilization still make plenty of sense, as does his open conviction about the spiritual way that poetry “works” to open consciousness. 

One of Bly’s recurrent obsessions is the fundamental aesthetic importance of the image. Bly’s contention is that images save poets, citizens, and readers from the aridity of the analytical, our mental willfulness, our plodding certainty. In profound and inexplicable ways, the poetic image triggers psychic movement, and connects the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious. Here’s Bly in his essay “What the Image Can Do”:

When a poet creates a true image, he is gaining knowledge; he is bringing up into consciousness a connection that has been forgotten, perhaps for centuries..... The imagination calls on logic to help it create the true image so as to recover the forgotten relationship.... The image brings so much moistness to a poem, that it cannot, I think, be overpraised.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, in English-language poetry, the image was promoted to an unprecedented status. Poetic modernism commenced by unplugging the machinery of meter and rhyme, and centralizing the power of image instead—see Ezra Pound and W.C. Williams. In the ’60s and ’70s, the image grew still more central to American poetry, as the musical element of poetry was once again down-sized, and as our poetics migrated toward less “civilized,” more intuitive, visceral modes. This was the era of Confessionalism, and the Deep Image School, the aesthetic movement associated with Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and others. Simultaneously, the vigorous translation of poetry from Spanish, South American, and European cultures provided the fuel for a powerful wave of American surrealist poetry for the next ten-to-twenty years. Here’s Bly: “A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious. If it can penetrate in this way, freshly, several times, then it is a poem of several lines. But if it does not do this, it is not a poem at all—no matter how long it is.”

Bly speaks with such certainty and originality, it is easy to forget that nobody knows what images are—or rather, that when it comes to images, different poets know very different things.

Robert Hass, another of our best poetic thinkers, emphasizes a whole other motive for the poetic image—a momentary contact with the infinity of being. If Bly draws his models from Spanish surrealists like Jimenez and Lorca, and cherishes the animistic irrationality of association, Hass’s touchstones are the compact, artless realism of images in Chekhov and the Eastern Zen clarity of Basho. Hass’s thirst is for the clarity embodied in Chekhovian still-lifes, like: “In July the red bird sings the whole morning.” And, “They undressed the corpse but had no time to take off the gloves; a corpse in gloves.” There is, says Hass, 

some feeling in the arrest of the image that what perishes and what lasts forever have been brought into conjunction, and accompanying that is a feeling of release from the self...

It has always seemed to me… that if one could get those moments and get them faithfully, one might come close to grasping the fabled monster, being… And it would not be a myth, it wouldn’t have that explanatory power; it would be more like pure story. Nor would it be a metaphor; it would not say this is that, it would say this is.

The intuitions and motives of Hass and Bly are as different as cowboys from Indians. Such divergence should remind us that the terrain of image and metaphor remains perpetually beyond the perimeter of our knowing. Moreover, it highlights the fact that our vocabulary for the variety of possible imagistic styles and technique is strikingly meager and undiscriminating. It is as if, on the edge of the Amazon jungle, we have established a small zoo with a few cages—“Image,” “Metaphor,” “Surrealism,” and so on. We know that, in the tangled psycholinguistic wilderness right next to our small bestiary, thousands of distinct species fly, crawl, and endlessly roam. We ourselves have sighted hundreds of these living creatures, though we have coined no precise names for most of them. How strange! 

Since the era of Bly, American poetry has revised itself many times over. The image’s poetic primacy in American aesthetics has waned. Yet image is still one of the first poetic skills to awaken in young writers, and the one that gives the greatest immediate gratification. And the territory of image and metaphor remains perpetually open to new discoveries, new understandings, and practices.

I. Associative Energy in Action

In the act of writing, what we are seeking is a lucky accident; to stumble into an interesting dressing room of the imagination, to dig our way into some cache of pirate gold, into some sequence of words or imagination or insight in which we exceed our intention, expectations, or boundaries. Fill a page with writing, and such active moments are easy to circle with a pen, and say, “Here is where the poem is, Mister.”

The energies of image, of the mind in motion, and of linguistic music collaborate in the essence of the associative imagination. To look at the best of Keats or Shakespeare is to see every square inch fecund and festooned with sound and imagination. In Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy,” in which he treats suicidal moodiness as a kind of spelunking for poets, he advises you to gaze into your lover’s eyes and contemplate her imminent death:

….
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
and Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
bidding adieu, and aching pleasure nigh,
turning to poison where the bee mouth sips.
Ay, in the very Temple of Delight,
veiled Melancholy hath her sovereign throne
though seen of none save he whose strenuous tongue
can burst Joy’s grape against his palette fine...

Ask any Keats scholar, and she or he will tell you that, yes, of course, Eros, Death, and Nature-motifs are joined in all of Keats’s verse. But if you look at “Ode to Melancholy” as a product of poetic composition, you will notice an image-infrastructure: how rife the poem is with images of orality—mouths, tongues, grapes, lips, flowers, palettes. It is the irregular, ripe, unsystematic profusion of these images—their rhapsody—that testifies to the active presence of the associative imagination, sprouting up from the underground. These oral images bind the poem together in a rococo of aphrodisiac and poison, tasting and drinking and bursting. “Ode to Melancholy” is hot genius for the sensuous ear, yes, but also in its wildly-wrought, spontaneously-woven images.

Michael Dennis Browne’s poem “The Anxiety” provides a plainer, perhaps more accessible illustration of the compositional actuality, of the very moment when the associative imagination can be seen to enter a poem in progress, and energize it. As Browne’s title suggests, the speaker of “The Anxiety” is mulling over his lifelong struggle with nervousness, and trying to negotiate a more balanced perspective on this great nuisance of human nature. The poem’s opening is workmanlike and plain; but if one pays attention, a particular triggering moment stands out in what follows, when the poet’s language grows more interesting and animated:

The Anxiety

I don’t expect the anxiety to go away
but I want the anxiety to know
its place in the scheme of things
of which I seem to consist.
I want the anxiety to be
not an attention getter or star,
but faceless, like a butler bearing trays

whose old hand has turned down my bed
who knows when to take his leave
the one I could even grow to pity
this trembling retainer I keep on
as my father before me
out of some kind of long-standing loyalty
to the anxiety family
whose fortunes have been bound up
with ours for so long.

(Reprinted by permission of the author.)

“Anxiety” may not brandish the genius of Keats, but its plainspoken style makes more evident the instant when the writing begins to find its energy. That occurs in line seven, when the image of the butler enters the poem. Before this moment the poem is earnest and discursive, somewhat halting and linguistically ordinary—but with the appearance of the image, the sonic and the semantic energy of the poem’s language is suddenly enriched. Not only does the poem thereafter grow more assured of itself, more semantically vivid, it also becomes more spontaneously surprising.

Yes, “the butler” is only an extended metaphor, or analogy: but it turns out to be an athletic, elastic one. Anxiety is the family butler, a “trembling retainer” whose family has served the speaker’s family for so long that they are, in fact, cousins, families whose fates are long-since mingled; like family members, the speaker and anxiety must accept and tolerate each other.

So much for the meaning. But in the passage from lines 7-16 we can observe how images split and reproduce new images from themselves, like cells mitosing under a microscope. The fertility amplifies: various puns and doublings are visible in the surface of the poem. For instance, that the “anxiety-butlers” are “long-standing” is a punning image suggestive of the way that an attending butler will stand in a posture of attention. Similarly, the word fortune has double meaning here, denoting both “fate” and “wealth.” Likewise, the phrase “bound up” suggests the bondage that is the speaker’s motive for the poem. That anxiety is figured as a “retainer” holds a double meaning, also: both employee and shackle. That the speaker could “grow to pity” the butler of anxiety suggests the kind of personal growth the poem yearns for at its outset. Another signature of the presence of inspiration is the pleasurable rhyme (assonance) between the words anxiety and family; the poem IS, in fact, a poetic narrative, and an embodiment of personal growth. 

This brief example makes evident another truth about the imagistic sensibility: that associative energy is rarely smooth, but more often rough and irregular, bumpy in its compositional texture—wildness is its characteristic surface, more than consistency. The more “smooth” the music of a poem is, the more homogenized it is—and that is not what we want in poetry of imagination. As the shamanic traditions say, the human is the “horse” of spiritual energy, and invites the spirit to “ride me.” The moment we look for in writing is when the gust of imagination catches and dilates the language.

II. Image Out of Sound

What is an image in a poem anyway? It would be logical enough to suppose that it is “a creation of the image-i-nation,” some image-conjuring function of the memory-brain. I have always conceived of the poetic image as a word or set of words that constructs a little picture-icon, which the mind seizes out of nowhere, a fantasy, or an embodiment of some psychic correlative.

Images are the most “solid-seeming” thing in a poem. In the way that a noun is more solid than a verb or an adjective, the image anchors a poem, holds it in place. And the mind of a reader almost always latches onto an image more strongly than any idea. When the poem has passed by, the images will still be locked in memory.

These versions of image suggest, in a way, that images pre-exist, or that they have the inevitability of matter; this version of the imagination suggests the existence of a secret intelligence agency, which works covertly in a warehouse somewhere, putting together custom-designed image-packages to send to the expectant, less cognizant world. 

The big revelation is that images arise not just from the mind’s eye, but from the ear as well. Writers who are good at “sight” (images) are usually talented at sound. A poem called “Sentimental Education” by the poet Mary Ruefle illustrates the strong relation between sound and image-making:

Ann Galbraith
loves Barry Soyers.

Please pray for Lucius Fenn
who suffers greatly whilst shaking hands.

Benny Polton
loves a pug named Cowl.

Please pray for Olena Korsk
who holds the record for missing fingers.

Leon Bendix loves Odelia Johnson
who loves Kurt who loves Carlos who loves Paul.

Please pray for Cortland Filby
who handles a dead wasp, a conceit for his mother.

Harold loves looking at  Linda’s hair under the microscope
Londa loves plaiting the mane of her pony.

Nadine St. Claire loves Ogden Smythe
who loves blowing his nose on postage stamps.....

“Sentimental Education” is a poem equally engaged with mouth, ear, and eye, with diction as much as image. To read it out loud is to fully exercise the lips and tongue and palette. What has surprised me when teaching Ruefle’s poem as a generative prompt is how readily my students produce images of a particularity and vividness which surpass all their previous efforts. It seems to be the rich orality of Ruefle’s writing which draws their image-making talent into the composition process. When drawing from their “visual” faculties, my students are less impressive: they often cannot seem to vividly describe, or to invent images of any freshness. But when exposed to a poem like Ruefle’s, which exaggeratedly emphasizes sound and diction, they are suddenly able to produce images of vividness and wit. The difference in performance is the difference between writing images with the eye or with the ear. Paradoxically, the ear produces more memorable “pictures.” Here is a set of couplets arising from the exercise written by an undergraduate poet:

Huangzhou Martinez
loves Samantha Smalls.

Please pray for Contessa Worthington
who never gets her stories straight.

Please pray for Davyd
who spelled his name with a Y in his tattoo by accident.

Felicia Lewis
loves a rapscallion named T Dog.

Ichiro Miyamoto loves Mitsuko
the femme fatale from a manga comic.

Please pray for the young girl Misa
who stands contrapposto next to candy-painted imports.

Valencio di Magliani
loves the eau de naturel of a girl’s locker room.

Please pray for D.J. Bhoy Ligawa
who can’t believe he made a record deal.

Marie Theuriau loves the mysterious
painter at the Seine, who never paints her portrait.

These lines are full of sonic pleasures—alliterations, assonance, and consonance. The fact is, this young poet has discovered the delights of diction in his poem (“femme fatale from a manga comic”),—but it has empowered his image-making too. The fact that images are born in part from the sonics of language will come as no surprise to any working writer; still, this phenomenon is another example of the crossed wires of cognition, and of poetry; all the neurological roots, including language, are clumped together in the rich compost of the mind, and the nature of creative imagination can’t really be segregated. We can only understand it so far.

III. The Universal and the Regional: How the Image Can Carry Social Knowledge

There are much greater differences between images, and many more types of image than we usually acknowledge. The flat and the round, the fantastic, the surrealistic, the realistic, the cartoony, the literal and descriptive—images belong to many distinctly different families.

Yet we tend to think of images as visual, and symbolic, and as not being especially vernacular—not especially linked to the colloquial, idiosyncratic culture of a place. Poetry in translation seems to illustrate the universal nature of image. After all, if anything travels well in translation, from one language to another, it is images. Languages in which the image plays a primary poetic role—Spanish and mid-century Polish poetry, for example—have translated very well into English. Poetries whose essence is deeply married to its sonic qualities—Russian poetry, for example—seems, even in translation, to be distant, almost out of reach for English. We will never know from a translation what Pushkin or Pasternak are like for a Russian reader.

But images—they seem so substantial, so free of regionalism. Here, for example, is a poem by Mark Strand from the ’70s, using images in the American surrealist mode:

I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.
I give up my tongue.
I give up my mouth which is the constant dream of my tongue.
I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.
I give up my heart which is a burning apple.
I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon.
I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain.
I give up my hands which are ten wishes.

In the ’60s and ’70s, we believed that such images possessed a potent kind of poetic universality; an aura of significance that was transcultural: stone, moon, rain, apple, hands, tongue. In many ways stripped of locality, such images aspire toward the level of the symbolic, without getting specific. In the ’70s it was called deep image. One feels the confidence with which the Strand-poet, in his impersonal, vatic, and imperious voice, delivers his images. They have an authoritative quality of absoluteness.

Our ideas, it turns out, were wrong, and they may seem naïve today, but they were not unreasonable assumptions. After all, poetic images clearly possess some ability to bypass analysis; they work upon a reader’s mind faster than rational processing accounts for. Their “visual” dimension places them on a different track of cognition than most language. From such evidence, it isn’t a great leap to presume that poetic images stand, in some way, outside history as well; to presume that a strong image transcends the relative contexts of language, region, and culture.

It turns out, however, that images and metaphors are more embedded in language and culture than we gave them credit for. And the work of certain poets can strikingly overturn our conventional assumptions about poetic image.

One such poet is David Berman. Berman’s poems are very much image-driven, and unmistakably influenced by Surrealist tradition—a tradition in which the power of image holds central place. But Berman’s images are rooted in the America of idiomatic materialism; which is to say, they are intensely, comically conscious of themselves as language. Similarly, they are intensely conscious of being “local”—of being born in and belonging to 20^th-century American culture. Here are some stanzas from “From His Bed in the Capital City”:

The Highway Commissioner dreams of us.
We are driving by Christmas tree farms
wearing wedding rings with on-off switches,
composing essays on leg room in our heads.......

One immediately recognizes this as Post-Something—Post-Marxist, Post-Levi-Strauss?  Berman’s poems perceive language itself as an environment, often a commercial one, registered in phrases like “leg room” and “Christmas tree farms.” Here is a ground in which idiom and image are fused. Such awareness is an unmistakably contemporary, generational development. Berman’s poems see the contemporary world as the product of a prolonged socio-economic hallucination, in which consumerism, manners, commercial idiom, and a general artificiality have reconstructed human consciousness, if not human nature.

The voices of the bumper stickers tangle in our heads
like cafeteria noise and we can’t help but be aware
that by making this trip, by driving home for Christmas
we are assuming some classic role.

It is the role he has cast us in: “holiday travelers”

Berman’s work is like the marriage of a sociologist to a comedian. “From His Bed in the Capital City” imagines the perspective of a Highway Commissioner—itself a generically-conjured social identity—a man who thinks of human life in terms of traffic and demographies. Channeling this Commissioner, the speaker is hyper-aware of his own life—indeed, of the whole environment—as a set of stereotypical socio-economic details. We are “holiday travelers,” driving past Christmas tree farms, reading bumper stickers on other cars, wearing wedding rings with on-off switches.  Inevitably, this vision presents contemporary life as radically denatured, flattened by commercialism and self-consciousness, and only intermittently wins back its claim to the real by the emergence of wild incidental details—moments in which surrealist humor wields its redemptive strength.

In Berman’s poems, the sociology grounds and situates surrealism in a way that is paradoxically and deeply antithetical to the original intentions of Surrealism. That poetry was meant to explode the mind, to shatter the shackles of bourgeois cultural reality. Surrealism (French surrealism) intended to shatter the bonds of habit with the radical freedom of Image. In contrast, Berman’s speakers are immersed and saturated in habit, in the form of idiom. They have the sensation of being themselves shaped from and by products, spin doctors and soundbytes. His image-laden narratives present their vignettes and language as “samples” of life; or as consumer items offered to the intellect, items which have a fleeting and local value:

...He was my assistant wrestling coach
sobbing into the white ruins of his kitchen
for the olde tymes when the towne hospital was fringed
with icicles
and the dogtrack
stands were packed with his friends.

In Berman’s one poetry collection, Actual Air, everything is in quotation marks, rendered with ironic familiarity, even the surrealism. Such postmodernist riffing often conjures a speaker so satirically detached as to be invulnerable. What is special in Berman’s work is that, as clever and observant as his scenarios are, his poems are not merely satirical. They wink at us, yet also wear a tone of millennial melancholy. The effects and powers of tone operate here as instrumentally as image. There is a wry sympathy with which the speaker views us and himself.

I find a credible cousin to Berman’s sociological intelligence in W.H. Auden’s work. Auden was brilliantly observant of the manners of the anthill, and an expert at combining tones of diffidence and sympathy, “where the torturer’s horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree”—something he and Berman have in common. 

Auden may have brought social survey into the realm of poetry, but not Berman’s sly, idiomatic self-consciousness about the artificiality of language itself, and the constructedness of all observation—social, historical, or personal. That is a special property of our moment, and Berman has found a way to use it, sometimes with eloquence. To me, the following lines almost might have been written by Auden:

Already a helpless orbited dog
has blinked at our sorry conceited O
where many are famished, few look good
and by day turned out torturers
who read Rilke on their rest periods.

Who knows? Berman’s amazing images may, in the way of much pop music, have a limited shelf life. So may much of American Surrealism. Its appeal may be limited to a generation or two. But then again, maybe not —after all, the same might have been expected of the “regionalism” of Frank O’Hara. The imagination redeems itself by surpassing our expectations. Berman’s images already exceed our expectations of what can be done with this kind of data; he has made the familiar language of consumer surveys and newspaper accounts into a weirdly poignant poetry. His work is a recent twist on a resilient animal, and in our era, it is a fine thing to see an old instrument, the image, execute a new trick, sometimes with dignity as well as flash:

...the rain comes down at a slant as
as if shot by Indians,

and we are  not even close to being through.

Tony Hoagland’s  fourth collection of poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, was published by Graywolf in 2010. His latest collection is Twenty Poems That Could Save America, published by Graywolf in September 2014. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the University of Houston.