Teaching Imagery

In my early years, I thought poetry had to rhyme. As I became more and more exposed to poetry through books, workshops, public readings, and the like, I became enlightened to the fact that poetry has many forms. The best poetry is figurative, not just lieral. In poetry, an image is a mental picture and a mood. All senses take part, taking the reader right to the scene itself, with suggestion, overtones, emotional depth, vividness and relation. I have always enjoyed using nature as my starting point, as the natural world around us holds such incredible scenes to build on with analogies and metaphors. Take a couple examples that I wrote, as illustration:

"The rain falls, as ancient empires" or "eyes reading silent messages across a chalkboard sky."

I highly recommend the book, "Creating Poetry," by John Drury, to learn more about choosing and using imagery in your work. I leave you with "Gauging Parallels" and "Shared Sounds"----

Best of luck to you in your own writing endeavors!

Gauging Parallels

Some folds are inevitable.

Creases in the texture of pebbles

by soundless streams; imperfect speech

to describe its anonymous beauty;

and a woman's virtue, lapping

over the hem of the pleated outskirts

of a man's world.

We house ourselves

in wrinkled symmetry, havens built

in the flat country of expectation;

a touch of flexible rapport, like wind

triumphs over thick-girthed layers of season,

like wind cuts, bleeding crevices

into smooth flesh.

We double and unite,

leaving impressions

titanic as simple speckled stones

and the stumbling words found

to measure their worth;

gauging the parallels

between a smoother spirituality

and a rougher edge.

Shared Sounds

Seven gulls

line up side by side

on the pier

like a cluster

of illiterate speech patterns

allied to an ancient scroll

And yet, their words

split the throat of silence,

as eyes note each surge

of movement below

their maritime perch

Children play beneath

in tidewater, splashing

tremors of excitement

upon the pillars

with long strings of vowel sounds

One by one, they fly

into the breeze:

vowels and oceanic fowls,

free falling

into articulate agility