Effective Imagery, What makes for an effective image?

What do you think makes for an effective image? I'm not so much after examples (though those are welcome and probably necessary), as wanting to dig down a bit and see if we can describe the qualities of an effective image.

I suppose the first question to ask about that is what I mean by effective. I'm not sure I have an answer. It depends on the effect the poet is aiming for, I suppose, which means it's open to your interpretation.

My interest in this is partly driven by thinking about a workshop I'm probably doing later this month.

To me, the effective image is one which enables the reader (or listener) to form a vision of the thing you saw in your mind when you wrote the words. It may be just like your seeing, or totally different, but as long as they have a coherent picture in their imagination, you've hit the nail on the thumb.

Some features that come to mind are compactness, originality, abstraction, surrealism, whether the image leads on to some new idea or whether it's an ornamental dead-end, etc.

Dylan Thomas' "heron-priested shore" works for me. Compact. Although I'm made to work, I can "solve" it at reading speed.

Tobias Hill's "The washing piling up like nasty thoughts" doesn't work for me. The things compared are of different types. This can produce original combinations but once I begin questioning the comparison the dissimilarities dominate over the similarities. Jacob Polley's "morning breaks like an egg or a promise" fails for me too.

Owen Sheers' "Conkers, like miniature mines" succeeds as description but fails utterly in originality - anyone seeing that sort of mine would make the same connection.

Kearney's "the stars are holes in the jam-jar so we don't suffocate" works first as a visual comparison and then makes a bigger point.

Gerard Woodward's "a toilet cistern refills like an old lady pouring tea" is cute, not trying to make a big point.

I like Jen Hadfield's use of imagery - jellyfish as "thimbles on the tide, all thumbs". Again, it's initially visual but adds something.

Geoff Ward described surrealist metaphors as being when "two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts" - great when it works (perhaps Pound's Metro image is an example) but hard to pull off and risks total failure.

Tim has some great examples ("heron-priested shore" is marvelous), but what occurs to me immediately is that all of them are either metaphors or similes. A satisfyingly accurate image needn't be either; as in this transparent haiku, from Kikaku: 'Above the boat, / bellies / of wild geese.' Eliot's poetry, for example, is full of weather, metaphorical and symbolic no doubt, but also just being weather: 'Then a damp gust / Bringing rain', 'Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides.'. Then there are those accurately observed effects of light and shade that help to locate the poem: '...the deep lane / Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon, / Where you lean against a bank while a van passes...'.

Babbette Deutsh's definition of an image is simply 'the representation of a particular thing with faithful and evocative detail', which is in keeping, I think, with Colin's idea of an 'effective image'. Deutsh made the point that Eliot's 'damp gust' (from The Waste Land) is not a visual image, and so might resonate with someone who was blind from birth. Something to bear in mind, I think, that poetic 'images' need not be visual. Dickinson's ‘Like Rain it sounded till it curved / And then I knew t'was Wind’ is another good example.

Can you identify any qualities of images that do this for you, Colin?

Could I put in a word for Mahon's 'A Disused Shed...' which seems to question just how effective an image can be?

Big time! One of my favourite poems (I can usually recite most of it on a good/inebriated night). Not sure exactly what you mean though. The poem certainly questions, or calls to, the photographer (and by implication the reader) as image-maker/-receiver/witness. However, since the poem itself is so imagistically rich (every rift loaded to the full), I am not sure how, or in what way, it might question the effectiveness of poetic imagery.

Also worth considering, for the sake of contrast, those (comparatively rare) poems which completely eschew imagery, such as Oppen's delicate 'Semantic': 'There is the one word / Which one must / Define for oneself, the word / Us.'

Can you identify any qualities of images that do this for you, Colin?

Back in the day, I remember discussing this subject with Ruth Padel. She said something to the effect that concrete images are things people can relate to, even if they've not shared your experience of them, and she had noted that I was already doing this in my own work. We discussed using technical terms, and how, although they might make the reader work, you should use them, because they make the poem more vivid and true to its subject. So if I'm writing a poem about pottery, I might mention a 'glost firing', even if it sends readers to a dictionary. My own background is in science, so I don't hesitate to use the proper scientific term in a poem, in its correct context, so the reader 'sees' what I mean. I tend to eschew abstract or philosophical language in my own poems, preferring to demonstrate the philosophical points through the use of real, concrete images.

I did a Guardian poetry workshop on this subject.

I've always had a feeling that the most effective images bring sonic, syntactic and visual meaning into total alignment, each element feeding into the others and enlivening them. Sound on its own is not enough; a clear visual image on its own is not enough; and the clear conveyance of a particular paraphrasable meaning, too, is not enough. All three together, however, and you've got a great image.

I'm not sure I see the point of saying "a great image must have all these qualities" - a really great poet can produce a sensation as of image out of the thinnest stuff. For example, the knight at arms "alone and palely loitering." I think that's wonderful. As you say, Andy, each image works in the context of its particular poem.

Speaking of using the five senses, though, I wrote a recent blog post (on Text Pixels, not BiH) about something like "harnessing the power of poetry to improve your copywriting," and one thing I said was that an image helps even the dullest report come to life. (Yawn. No, really.) I said there's a reason why, when we understand something, we say, "I see" - and that even "sense" means understanding too.

But as for parsing out your senses, did I tick this one, did I do that one, it's just not like that when you're writing, is it. You're trying to create something whole and complex; I think if you stopped to say oops, must vary my sensory imagery, you'd wreck whatever the integrity of the piece was. I'm not sure if I really keep them straight all the time anyway, since even the phrase "the honking of the car horns"(say) would cause me to see the cars, rather than hearing their horns. I think I'm mildly synaesthesiac. Which may help, as it means I'm experiencing all sorts of things as essentially visual. But I couldn't say about my own work.

Even Eliot's damp gust somehow goes into my brain as a visual.

Andy, in terms of your workshop, in the absence of any definitive answer, you could do worse than just sparking off this discussion with some examples and quotes, and let them have this debate! (Make sure you bring some paracetomol.)

Same here (almost). Not quite a visual for me, but certainly on the brink: an ash-grey smudge on the air.

Quite agree, also, I think of "images" that are not just visual but have an olfactory sensation too, the way remembering certain smells can really send the mind into overdrive.

Absolutely.

"Smells are surer than sounds or sights
to make the heartstrings crack" - Kipling, Lichtenberg

Quite agree, also, I think of "images" that are not just visual but have an olfactory sensation too, the way remembering certain smells can really send the mind into overdrive.

Yes but you don't need any given image to be both olfactory and visual, do you? I mean, is it really the job of each and every piece of imagery to wrap everything into a parcel? Is it really "more successful" the more senses it evokes? What if it were great but only hit four?

Could it not just be itself? Or do the work of its own moment in the poem? And even the poem even do its own work? Even over an entire oeuvre, a poet could, say, engage visually with the world - that's his project - so do we mark him down for not engaging in your project of total sensory alignment?

If a poem contained a phrase that really brought a smell alive for me, I suppose I'd like it. (I'm trying to think if Prufrock has smells in it. The fog on the windowpane is a pretty damn good image, though, and I think it's a metaphor without sounds or smells.) But if it didn't, as so very many don't - or else the smell was merely implicit, an unspoken part of a given experience, as with the damp gust, I'd hardly fault it. After all you can only judge them on what they're trying to achieve. Walking around with a little tick-list doesn't really help...

'It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?'

And 'sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells' certainly suggests an olfactory experience.

And his 'Preludes' has ' The winter evening settles down/ With smell of steaks in passageways.'

followed, later, by

'The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.'

Thanks Mark

Re smells, memory and poetry, you really should read Eliot Weinberger's essay "Karmic Traces" if you haven't already.

I wonder how much of the effectiveness lies in the reading? In the sense that an effective image about say St Edmund Arrowsmith would be lost on my kids, but would have profound implications for me. An image contains implicit cultural references and I'm not sure they're transferable? So we've talked of writerly intention as if this had some command over the effectiveness but I'm not sure we can judge it outside of a communal response. And that, in itself, I find rather troubling, as for me, poetry keeps me apart from people and does not unite me in some common sense of perception — I mean I can share in some communal imagery but at a deeper level what I think poetry does is not unite us but help us to see how we stand apart. An image which brought about nodding recognition would leave me feeling that I'd been in some way coerced or co-opted. Unless what we're saying is that we're valuing how effectively we can control readerly reception? That strikes me as undesirable, it's just propaganda isn't it?