03/09/2025
I've recently been re-reading 'Facing It' by Yusef Komunyakaa, a great US poet, in preparation for my craft / workshop course "Poetry: The Objective Correlative" at The Irish Writers Centre, which starts next week. (See the link to sign up.) This poem is from his book Dien Cai Dau which is about the Vietnam War largely from the point of view of African American servicemen.
The poem describes the return home, where the speaker is at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., two black walls of polished granite: "I go down the 58,022 names / half-expecting to find / my own in letters like smoke." The core of the poem's power lies in Komunyakaa's ability to use the image of the memorial in a variety of ways, most of which "shows" (and doesn't excessively tell) us what the sense of erasure as a veteran and as a person of colour, feels like:
In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
and:
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone.
The black mirror is also gives us a metaphor for PTSD, for being "back there" again"
I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
Here, Komunyakaa has found a deep image, one that keeps resonating, or detonating, long after we read it, and which rewards re-reading.
If I had to choose one thing as the most important element in a poem, I'd have to say that it's imagery. Imagery acts as the poem's engine, and the ability to create deep imagery that resonates on more than one level is what defines a successful poem.
Ok, then, what's "deep", and what's "successful"? A successful poem is one that affects the reader in ways that they can't ultimately explain. Even if they were to rationally parse it, the poem would still not give up the X factor that contributes to its power. And "deep imagery"? Deep imagery comes from a subconscious place, via an "objective correlative". The “Objective Correlative” (per T.S. Eliot) is, quite simply, the ability to find in the “outside world” a signifier, or equivalent, for our inner human experience. For poets, typically, we see the Objective Correlative in the form of an image. Sylvia Plath is a master of this. Here is the conclusion of her poem 'Words':
"Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life."
For me, deep imagery shares something with García Lorca's understanding of "Duende", the definition for which was given to Lorca by a cante jondo (deep song) singer (cante jondo is to Flamenco as the Blues are to Rock n Roll): "all that has dark sound has duende." Duende is ecstatic, tragic, definitely Dionysian. A powerful image can contribute to that "shiver" or experience where we cry and smile at the same time. Emily Dickinson captured it with the oft-quoted line "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Or per Robert Graves: “reading a poem, the hairs will bristle.”
These are some of the many poems we'll be mining, reading and "stealing from" in our craft section to learn how to find deep images for our own poems in the workshop section. The course is very practical, fun, involves craft, workshop and some in-class writing. Click the link for more info and to sign up.
From the haiku poets, via the Imagists, to Plath and beyond, imagery has been continually identified as the engine of the poem. Finding imagery that conveys our deepest experience is at the centre of this online course with David McLoghlin.
