Writers often forget what the maxim “show, don’t tell” really means. It means that imaginative writing is rooted in what shows: that is, in images. This is especially true of poetry. W. B. Yeats, writing soon after World War I, could have written, “The old world is falling apart”; he would have been right, but it would have been unmemorable. Instead, in “The Second Coming,” he wrote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned....
These images embody an intense conflict: they provide a vision of chaos that is, in itself, supremely coherent. That conflict gives the lines great energy and makes them memorable.
Ambivalence: The Power Source for Images
In his book Earth and Reveries of Will , the great philosopher of images Gaston Bachelard writes: “[A]ll images emerge somewhere on a continuum between [...] two poles. They exist dialectically, balancing the seductions of the external universe against the certitudes of the inner self. It would be fraudulent then not to acknowledge the double tendency in images to extroversion and to introversion, not to appreciate their ambivalence. Each image [...] must be understood in its full complexity. The loveliest images are often hotbeds of ambivalence.”
Looking for images that contain ambivalence can help a poet break away from the idea that images are akin to photographs—that accuracy and crispness of focus is what they’re all about. Once a poet makes the shift from image-as-snapshot to image-as-hotbed-of-ambivalence, even the simplest image exercise can produce breakthroughs.
Recognizing the "Hotbed" Image
One great way to train yourself to create "hotbed" ambivalent images, or at least to recognize them when they arise in your writing, is to practice setting images side by side without structuring them as metaphors syntactically. The classic example is Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.
Note that there are no metaphors here. The faces—an external experience—simply call up the memory of petals in the speaker's mind. The poem quite literally looks outward and inward from its position on the threshold between the world and the self.
Of course, ambivalence exists in external images as well, when they reveal realities that might otherwise remain hidden or unacknowledged. Take this image from Robert Bly’s prose poem “Christmas Eve Service at Midnight at St. Michael’s”: “The dark surrounds the frail wood houses that were so recently trees.” Eliminating the reference to trees would make the line more photographic, but much less ambivalent and so less powerful. And, like Pound, Bly brings out the image's ambivalence without using metaphor.
Discovering Ambivalence in Your Images
Here’s a writing exercise that can benefit poets at any stage of their development. It needs to be done in two steps.
Step One: Write an observational passage whose aim is to create a vivid picture for the reader. Think of it as a well-composed, perfectly focused photograph—a snapshot you’re taking and so do not appear in.
Step Two: Once the exercise is finished, read over what you’ve written—then rewrite your observational passage. But this time look for ways to liberate the ambivalence in the images. Think of the passage as a painting or a sketch—concerned less with photographic accuracy than with using images bent or colored by emotion and/or ideas. Chances are you’ll be surprised by how much pent-up ambivalence is hiding in your work, just waiting to be released.
At the very least you’ll learn to recognize ambivalence in the images that spontaneously arise as you write.
The Element of Surprise
Robert Frost once asserted, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” This is really a call for ambivalence. After all, it’s the ambivalence in Frost’s own poems that made the poet and critic Yvor Winters call him (sneeringly) a “spiritual drifter.” It’s telling that few people today read Winters’ poems, and those who do seldom read them more than once. But readers find themselves drawn back to Frost again and again to savor his ambivalence.
Poets who grasp the ambivalent nature of images are likely to see their work improve automatically and often unconsciously. Because “hotbed images” can’t be produced like prints at Wal-Mart, they teach patience—which, as everyone knows, is a virtue—and they can make the poetic experience richer and more rewarding for both the reader and the writer.
Joseph Hutchison - Joseph Hutchison has worked for many years as a professional writer, both inside corporations and—since 1992—as the co-owner ...
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