Image III (12.23.21)

For poetry, my dear, is not

Things other people said & thought,

      Nor what you're thinking. *

                                      -- Theodore Roethke, Notebooks

I leafed through my copy of Roethke's On Poetry & Craft and stuck at this entry.  It sticks to me because I'm thinking . . . about image and its power over us in a poem when the poem is well done and the poem's author is committed to making a good poem and not just saying something, expressing his or her thoughts in verse.  (Don't just say something, stand there!)

Image is what poetry is.  A sonic image a visual image a rhythmic image a tactile image a geometric image.  A gustatory image.  A taste in your mouth, familiar or foreign, pleasant or foul, arresting or soothing, sweet or sour, hard or mushy.  It's a knock upon the eardrum, a slap at the stirrup, a chime in the timpani.  Image is a wave a stumble through rooted paths a two-step a waltz a jitterbug a twist like we did last summer, a rest and a breath.  Image is burlap on your cheek, an emery board on a knuckle, a bee in the grass under a bare foot, silk on shoulder, a starched collar, a comb through tussled hair, a stone cool in the palm of your hand.

Right, poetry is not things other people thought nor what you're thinking.  Whether you're its writer or its reader.  It is all these sensations brought to you or imparted by you through the medium of language.

So, should we not count on what other people have said and thought about poetry when we write and read it?  Of course, we should!  Our experience of poetry is that much more robust, rich, for the context we bring to it and wring from it.  It is tapestry.

But poetry must be image and nothing but, if it's to be art.  We don't read or write it for its historical value--not radically--or for its therapeutic application, or for its logic.  We read it for the emotion that resonates to it.  Only images do that: sound, sight, touch & feel, taste, smell.

Radical imagery . . . something to think about next time . . .

* So, are these lines poetry?  Better question: what are the poetic elements of the lines?  Hint: not the lines themselves.  But the sonic image, maybe, of the rhythm of the lines, or the locution, "my dear," that expresses an emotional relation between the writer (Roethke) and the poet (Roethke).  Nope, they are not poetry.  They are "note to self."