Using Imagery to Embody Ideas

Using Imagery to Embody Ideas

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

 

Overview — 0:00:49

Two guiding ideas frame the session. The first comes from William Carlos Williams, who wrote that his ideal for poetry was to have no ideas but in things—not that poetry shouldn’t engage with ideas, but that it arrives at them through images, objects, the concrete. The second is T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, covered in a previous session: the idea that emotion in writing comes from finding the external object or chain of events that corresponds to the interior feeling, and then showing it rather than naming it.

 

Today’s session works through a sequence of poems—some short, some longer—to show how this works in practice, what imagery can do beyond simple description, and where its limits lie.

 

Thomas Lux, “A Little Tooth” — 0:04:24

A nine-line poem, in loose rhyme (you/two, fall/tall), that compresses a whole life into images:

 

Your baby grows a tooth, then two and four and five, then she wants some meat directly from the bone. It’s all over. She’ll learn some words, she’ll fall in love with Creighton Doss, a sweet-talker on his way to jail, and you, your wife, get old, fly-blown and ruin, nothing you did, you loved, your feet are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.

 

The idea behind the poem is entirely generic—kids grow up fast, life passes, parents get old—the kind of statement that could appear on a greeting card without landing on anyone. What Lux does is arrive at that idea entirely through specific images, and the specificity is what makes it hit.

 

First tooth to meat-directly-from-the-bone is comically compressed, but it works: one moment the child is an infant, the next she is a creature with teeth, capable, almost animal. A participant noted that this isn’t only about time—it’s also about competence and agency. The teeth can act; so can she. The image carries that shift on both levels simultaneously.

 

Creighton Doss, a sweet-talker on his way to jail is perfect in its specificity. Not a bad boyfriend—a specific bad boyfriend, with a name, a personality, and a trajectory. The specificity makes the whole rapid tour through adolescence believable.

 

Your feet are sore—one of the plainest images in the poem—does remarkable work. It arrives in the dusk of the speaker’s life and gives you the exhaustion of old age through a single physical detail that is also completely undramatic. Not grief, not regret; your feet are sore.

 

And then the final line: It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall. One sentence, two images, no abstract language whatsoever. Everything the poem has been building toward arrives in those words. Frederick summarized it precisely: the ideas go in the details, but they don’t need to be announced.

On whether imagery must be visual — 0:15:12

The poem prompted a discussion about what imagery actually is. One participant with aphantasia (the absence of visual imagination) noted that long descriptive passages don’t function for her the way they apparently do for readers who can vividly see them; she reads words on a page, not pictures in her mind. Jonathan’s response: imagery in the literary sense is broader than purely visual description—it’s any sensory detail, including sound, smell, tactile sensation. And it doesn’t need to be elaborate. Your feet are sore isn’t a visual image at all; it’s physical and proprioceptive. What matters is that it’s concrete—it names a thing, not an idea—and that it carries meaning beyond itself.

 

The corollary Jonathan offered about his own practice: because he doesn’t visualize richly from text, he tends to use imagery sparingly and only when it’s doing conceptual work. He doesn’t care what color a character’s hair is. He does care if a character is still wearing a ratty baseball cap from high school, because that tells him something about the person’s relationship to the past. The image is a vehicle; it has to carry something.

 

Jay’s observation rounded this out: image-use can also work in reverse. Rather than choosing an idea and finding the image that embodies it, you can start from an image—take a walk, notice something—and let the image prompt the poem. The direction isn’t fixed.

 

Thomas Lux, “The Past” — 0:25:51

A second Lux poem, similar in approach but darker in tone:

 

It shows up one summer in a great coat, storms through the house, confiscating, says it must be paid, and quickly, says it must take everything. Your children stare into their cornflakes. Your wife whispers only once to stop it because she loves you and she sees it dark in the room, suddenly, like a stain. What did you do to deserve it? Ruining breakfast on a balmy day. Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming. There was no life without it, anyway.

 

The underlying statement—your past haunts you and intrudes into your present—is equally generic. What rescues it is the personification of the past as a bully-cop figure storming through the house, confiscating. The image gives abstraction a body.

 

Small details do disproportionate work here. The children staring into their cornflakes—not cereal, cornflakes specifically—snaps the scene into life. It’s the right level of mundanity for a breakfast disrupted. Suddenly, like a stain uses an image of darkening to convey the shift in emotional atmosphere without showing it directly. The past doesn’t literally darken a room; but the image carries the experiential truth.

 

William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” — 0:26:44

A longer and denser example of imagery doing conceptual and ethical work. A man driving at night finds a doe dead on the road. He knows the road is narrow—leaving the deer could cause another driver to swerve and die. He begins to move the body and realizes she was pregnant, still warm; the fawn is alive inside her, and cannot survive. He thinks hard, and pushes the deer into the river.

 

The poem works by accretion: each image adds complexity to the moral situation without resolving it. Jonathan walked through it closely:

 

Traveling through the dark is literal—he couldn’t see what was coming—but also carries the resonance of moral darkness, of not being able to see clearly what the right thing is.

 

By glow of the taillight I stumbled back of the car—the stumbling is right. He’s not confident in his movements, any more than he’s confident in his decision.

 

Stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing—three nouns in rapid succession. An object, then a living thing, then a thing that has been killed. The shift happens in three beats.

 

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason her side was warm—he doesn’t say I noticed she was pregnant; he says my fingers touching her side brought me the reason. The tactile discovery, the warmth against his hands—this is the moment the poem pivots from practical problem-solving to genuine disturbance.

 

The car aimed ahead, its lowered parking lights, under the hood purred, the steady engine—the car becomes almost an agent, a living creature. Jonathan noted that if you back out: the man was inside the belly of the car (a machine that purrs like an animal) in the same way the fawn is inside the belly of the deer. The speaker and the fawn are in parallel positions, both contained within something larger. He doesn’t belabor the connection; the image does the work without announcement.

 

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust, turning red around our group—the red exhaust, lit by the taillight, is literally just the physics of the scene. It is also an image of blood. The warmth of the exhaust echoes the warmth of the doe’s side. The word group is important: he doesn’t see himself as alone. The car, him, the deer, the fawn—they are all part of something together.

 

I could hear the wilderness, listen—the poem personifies the natural world as attending, bearing witness. The speaker is on trial.

 

I thought hard for us all, my only swerving—the us all encompasses the deer, the fawn, the speaker, and all the drivers who might otherwise have died. It also opens out to the broader human question: what do we do with cruel acts done for good reasons? Karen made the observation that the swerving here is the poem’s one swerve into abstraction—a single departure from the otherwise utterly concrete world of the poem, flagged by the word itself.

 

Then pushed her over the edge into the river—matter-of-fact, almost flat. After all that hesitation, identification, moral witness—the action is stated in eight plain words. The matter-of-factness hits harder than drama would have. He insisted; the images told us everything else.

 

Making the Familiar Strange: Two Examples — 0:41:48

A shift in gear: imagery can also defamiliarize the ordinary, making us see things we’ve stopped seeing.

Charles Simic, “Fork” — 0:41:48

This strange thing must have crept right out of hell. It resembles a bird’s foot worn around the cannibal’s neck. As you hold it in your hand, as you stab with it into a piece of meat, it is possible to imagine the rest of the bird: its head, which like your fist is large, bald, beakless and blind.

 

A fork. The most ordinary object imaginable, treated as if it had just been encountered for the first time by someone with no cultural context for it. A participant noted it is also, interestingly, a kind of ekphrasis in reverse—starting from the fork, finding the cannibal’s necklace image, then extrapolating back to the imagined bird the foot belongs to, which the fork then becomes. There are several moves happening in a very short poem.

 

Jonathan’s read: he doesn’t think the fork is a metaphor for anything. Forks are weird, you know? That’s worth saying. The poem is a demonstration that attentive, fresh perception of any object—even the most mundane—yields strangeness.

 

One participant added that the fork actually does have a history of being feared: when forks were first introduced in Europe, some considered them the devil’s tool. Whether Simic knew this is unclear, but the resonance is there.

Craig Raine, “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” — 0:42:14

The conceit: a Martian writes home describing everyday human things—books, cars, watches, telephones, bathrooms, sleep—without knowing what any of them are called. He can only describe what he observes.

 

Books are Caxtons (an early printing press—he got the wrong word): 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. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground. Rain is when the earth is television—he’s thinking of static on a poor signal. A car is a room with the lock inside, a key is turned to free the world for movement. A phone is a haunted apparatus that snores when you pick it up; if it rings, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat when they suffer (the bathroom). At night, when all the colors die, they hide in pairs, and read about themselves in color with their eyelids shut (sleep, dreaming).

 

The technique is the inverse of Simic’s: rather than re-seeing a known thing from a strange angle, Raine strips away all naming and forces pure description. Everything becomes unfamiliar. The effect is comic and also genuinely re-estranging: you look at a telephone differently after reading it described as a haunted apparatus that snores.

 

Both poems operate on the same underlying principle—that attentive perception of ordinary things yields new images, and new images yield new ways of thinking. It’s also a useful writing exercise: pick an object and describe it as if you have never seen one before and have no word for it.

 

Maggie Smith, “Good Bones” — 0:51:44

A poem that went viral, offered as a counterexample—one that largely doesn’t use imagery in the traditional sense, but still works.

 

The poem’s premise: life is short and the world is terrible, but a mother keeps these facts from her children because she is trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor walking you through a real shithole will still chirp on about good bones: this place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Jonathan’s honest assessment: the first section—life is short and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways, the world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate—has almost no imagery. It’s all abstract assertion, and for him it produces a mildly self-satisfied quality. But when imagery appears—for every bird, there is a stone thrown at a bird; for every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake—the emotional impact is immediate. Frederick, who shared this observation during the session, felt the same: the abstract riffing leaves him at arm’s length, and the moment a concrete image arrives, he feels it.

 

What carries the abstract opening is voice—the wry, conspiratorial tone of a speaker who is both cynical and tender, who is keeping this from her children, who is also aware of the absurdity of keeping it from them. Repetition does real work: the circling back to I’ll keep from my children creates a kind of music that compensates for the imagistic thinness.

 

The poem ends with the realtor image, and discussion centered on whether the whole poem is secretly an extended conceit—the mother as realtor, the world as the house with good bones. Jonathan noted that this is probably more accurate than calling it imagery, but the conceit does carry through from the title. The world is a fixer-upper. Having children is an act of faith that it can be made beautiful.

 

The deeper question the poem raised: can abstract language, combined with voice and repetition, provoke imagery in the reader without providing it? Karen’s observation—that a thousand delicious ill-advised ways made her immediately picture her own specific images (smoking, driving too fast, old love affairs)—suggested yes. A participant introduced the concept of a slit: a deliberate gap in the poem that the reader fills with their own imagery. In that reading, the poem’s abstractness isn’t absence; it’s invitation.

 

What Imagery Does — 1:08:13

The session’s closing synthesis: imagery does several distinct things, sometimes simultaneously.

 

It embodies ideas in concrete form. Your daughter’s tall says everything about time’s passage that kids grow up fast says, but it makes you feel it rather than know it. This is Williams’s no ideas but in things—the idea is present, but it arrives through the image.

 

It carries emotion without naming it. The red exhaust in Stafford, the stiffening body under the speaker’s hands—these convey moral disturbance precisely because they don’t say I felt troubled. The images do what the emotion feels like, rather than labeling it.

 

It can defamiliarize the ordinary. When perception is fresh—whether through radical attention, an alien perspective, or oblique description—familiar things suddenly come back into view.

 

It opens space for the reader. Abstract language can also do this, if handled well. The slit concept: leaving gaps that readers fill with their own images and experiences, creating a different kind of engagement than a fully rendered image would.

 

It is not the only way. Voice, tone, structure, repetition, and conceit can carry poems that use little imagery. “Good Bones” is evidence that you can write something powerful from largely abstract materials if other elements are working hard enough. But the session’s examples consistently showed that whenever imagery arrived—however simple—something went up in the reader’s experience that pure statement couldn’t produce.

 

The final question Jonathan left open: is there a term for writing that doesn’t describe images but provokes them in the reader? He didn’t have one. It felt like something worth naming.