Imagery: making a reader see the thing you saw
Imagery
Imagery is the concrete sensory detail in a poem, the part a reader or a listener can see, hear, taste, touch or smell, and it works as evidence rather than as decoration.
A poem that says a kitchen was tense has asked the audience to take its word for it; a poem that puts a plate down too hard on a draining board has shown them the tension and let them reach it themselves. That is the whole difference between telling an audience what to feel and giving them the material to feel it with, and it is why imagery is the device that most often turns a first draft into a poem.
What imagery does to a listener that a statement cannot
Imagery does something to a listener that a statement cannot: it makes them do the work, and an audience believes what it has assembled for itself. A statement asks for agreement. An image asks for attention and gets belief as a side effect, because the listener has to build the kitchen, the plate and the sound before they can arrive at the tension, and by then they own it.
In a poem said out loud this matters more than it does on the page, for a plain mechanical reason. A listener cannot go back. An image has to be built in one pass, at the speed a person talks, out of parts the audience already has. Symbolism and imagery are often taught together and they are not the same job: an image is the thing itself, described accurately, and a symbol is an image that has been asked to stand for something larger. Every symbol is an image first, which is why a young writer who reaches for symbols before images ends up with a poem full of doors and mirrors that mean nothing in particular.
The five senses, and the three that hardly anybody uses
The five senses give five kinds of imagery, and most poems written in a first workshop use one of them. Sight takes almost everything, sound takes what is left, and taste, touch and smell go untouched, which is unfortunate because they are the three that a listener has the least defense against.
| The sense | What it is called | What it gives a listener | The trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sight | visual imagery | the fastest picture, and the one an audience builds automatically | overused, and easily filled with adjectives instead of things |
| Sound | auditory imagery | atmosphere, and a second layer under the poet's own voice | drifts into noises that could be anywhere |
| Smell | olfactory imagery | memory, and an older and more emotional one than a picture cues | needs the exact source named, not the word smell |
| Taste | gustatory imagery | physical reaction in the body of a listener | slides into food description that is doing no work |
| Touch | tactile imagery | temperature, weight and texture, which place a body in a room | vague hands and vague cold instead of one specific surface |
Two more are usually added to the five: kinesthetic imagery, the sense of movement and of the body's own position, and organic imagery, the internal feelings a body reports such as hunger, nausea or the sensation before crying. Both are useful on stage precisely because a performer's body is visible while they speak.
The move from statement to image, in four steps
The move from statement to image is a repair you can run on any flat line in a draft, and it takes four steps.
- Underline the statement, meaning any line that names a feeling or a judgement: she was angry, the school was cold, nobody cared.
- Ask what you were looking at when you knew that, and answer with a noun rather than an adjective.
- Write the noun down with one accurate detail attached, chosen from a sense other than sight if the poem already has three pictures.
- Delete the original statement, and read the two versions aloud one after the other to hear which one the room believes.
Step four is not optional. A statement removed on paper is often smuggled back in the delivery, in a voice that explains what the image was for, and the fix is the same as the fix on the page: say the image and stop.
Teaching imagery without turning it into description practice
Teaching imagery works when the exercise has a limit in it, because an instruction to describe something produces adjectives and an instruction to notice produces images. Three limits that hold up in a room of teenagers: allow no adjectives at all for 10 minutes, so writers are forced onto nouns and verbs; ban sight for one exercise, so the room has to reach for smell, sound and touch; and ask for one object that was in a specific room at a specific hour, rather than for a description of a place.
The other useful move for the adult in the room is to read a line back exactly as written and ask what the writer could see. If the answer is longer and better than the line, the line has not been written yet. That is a question about evidence rather than a judgement about quality, and it can be asked 20 times in a session without discouraging anybody.
The failure mode: an image nobody can build in time
The failure mode of imagery in spoken word poetry is an image the audience cannot build inside the 2 or 3 seconds the line gives them. Four common shapes, and each one has the same cure, which is to cut back to a single thing seen from one position.
- The stacked image, where three pictures arrive in one line and the listener drops all three.
- The adjective pile, where the noun is buried under four modifiers and the picture never assembles.
- The borrowed image, which has been heard so often that the audience recognizes it instead of seeing it.
- The invisible image, which is accurate but too small or too private to be built by anyone who was not there.
Metaphor fails in a similar way and for a different reason, so the two are worth diagnosing separately: a metaphor fails when the transfer does not complete, and an image fails when there is nothing to see.
Where imagery sits in the workshop route
Imagery sits at the first draft and again at revising, and it does a different job at each. In the draft it is a way of getting material down without deciding what the poem means yet, which is why prompts about a room, an object or a meal produce so much more usable writing than prompts about a feeling. In revising it becomes a test: every line that states rather than shows is a candidate for the four step repair above.
Spoken word poetry then adds one more pass that page poetry does not need. Read the poem aloud to somebody who has not seen it and ask them afterwards what they can still picture. Whatever they name is the poem's real imagery. Whatever they cannot name was not there. The devices a young writer actually reaches for are all measured that way in the end, whether the device is an image, a repeated line or Anaphora holding the shape of the whole piece.