The Art of the Material Imagination: From the Literal to the Figurative and Back AgainThe Art of the Material Imagination: From the Literal to the Figurative and Back Again
Material imagination provides a launching pad for poetic thought. Each poet, drawing on his or her experience, reading, and inner angst and joy, offers new ways of seeing and experiencing life. But, as a poetry editor for the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, I have found that just the use of strong imagery or of stellar details doesn’t make a good poem. Some poems have luscious language but lack any interesting twists or turns. Some explore an emotionally powerful event yet offer no window outside the ordinary. What is needed for a poem to work is vivid, sonically rich language and imagery that open windows into new ways of seeing and experiencing our lives.
That is not easy to do. The poet has to find ways for the language to push beyond the conventional ways of seeing and thinking and carry us into a different world.
Having recently read an article in Poetics Today called “Art, as Device,” I realized that what makes poems work for me is how they defamiliarize reality, how they force me to see and experience what I had seen, or what I, as yet, had not seen or known, and startle me into feeling and thinking about the world differently.
Let me explain what defamiliarization is and why it’s central to what makes memorable poems work. Then, based on that understanding, I will present strategies you can use to defamiliarize your poems. By mixing the literal and figurative material imagination, you can break out of the conventional ways of seeing reality.
Defamiliarization
Alexandra Berlina, a literary philosopher, translated the Russian philosopher Viktor Shklovsky’s article “Art, as Device.” In her commentary, she noted that certain sentences had been mistranslated. When Shklovsky was distinguishing between poetic and prosaic language, when he was making the case for the poetic arts having a higher claim, a unique place in the creative process, he made a simple statement: “Art is the means to live through the making of a thing.” (Poetics Today, 154)
Berlina pointed out that Shklovsky uses non-academic language—“live through,” “making,” and “thing”— to describe how art works. Things that have become familiar and recognized as ordinary, not particularly significant, become in artwork something entirely different. To use a more contemporary example, Andy Warhol, the avant-garde pop artist of the 1970s, drew attention to prosaic images such as cans of soup and transformed them into icons. What had become a familiar item on a kitchen shelf became prints nearly three feet tall. This transformation of the familiar to the unfamiliar was called, according to Shklovsky, “enstrangement.” It creates significance by dislocating something from its conventional context. In short, “art exists in order to return the sensation to life.”
He is saying art gives us back to life. It suddenly makes life feel more alive. It makes us aware of things we had not seen. He is also saying something radical about art. He is saying that to make what seems trivial, what has become accepted, what is known and prosaic into art one must tear the commonplace from its conventional and convenient moorings and set it free to reside in the artistic dimension. The very act of creating art is an act of liberation. It sets one free. It’s like Alice in the Looking Glass. It’s like shedding one’s so-called tried and true assumptions about reality. It’s venturing into a newer world.
Shklovsky’s term “enstrangement” is analogous to “defamiliarization”: to make something ordinary into something extraordinary. Shklovsky believes that we often fall into familiar patterns of thought and action. We get used to things being as they are. We fall into habits of the mind. Our world becomes automized. Same old. Same old. Not until, as Kafka does in “The Metamorphosis,” when Gregor Samsa wakes up as a “vicious vermin,” as a beetle that can’t even open his bedroom door, does his familiar routine, once casually accepted by him as normal, as the way it was, become startlingly changed. The real becomes unreal. Art wakes us up to what we may be missing in our lives. As Shklovsky says,
Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, your fear of war.
“If the whole complex life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been. (162)
He is speaking, as Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, about so many of us:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
Thoreau was speaking not only of others, but of himself, and of what had become of his life. He wanted to find meaning outside the work of making and selling pencils, of teaching, and of living a normal life. He sought to change his life, to step outside his familiar environs, and to write some of the most poetic prose in the English language. He was doing what Shklovsky called “enstrangement.” In so doing, Thoreau began making art from his life and the life of those, including the natural world, around him. As such, he was doing what Shklovsky called art:
And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life,
in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of
art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the “enstrangement” of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to love through the making of things. . . .(162) (Italic mine.)
Later in the essay, Shklovsky shows various ways of deautomatizing. He shows how Tolstoy, by describing in detail what happened during an opera, makes the props, the lighting, and the characters seem almost like comic absurdities. Comedians often to the same thing. Bob Newhart, the comedian, had a skit on baseball in which the inventor of the game describes what happens and tries to sell the idea to a prospective funder. When he describes a field with four bases, a diamond, a player guarding each base, a pitcher, a batter, a strike, and a ball, the infield, the outfield, the whole game sounds absurd. It’s like an American trying to explain the game to someone from Britain whose cricket game has only two bases and batters race back and forth, not at all like the race around the diamond from base to base. It’s defamiliarizing to take what everyone accepts as “the way it is” and to describe it in detail.
What Shklovsky is talking about is the use of material imagination and how, by focusing intently on a thing, a game, a person, an emotion, or an event, without resorting to abstract language, it can make the commonplace strange and exotic. If the details, the close description of a thing, are carefully rendered, they in themselves provide a springboard to seeing and naming a thing in a different way. As Shklovsky says,
I personally believe that enstrangement is a present almost wherever
there is an image. (167) The image is not a constant subject with changing predicates. The goal of the image is not to bring its meaning nearer to our understanding but to create a special way of experiencing an object, to make one not “recognize” but “see” it. (167) The goal of parallelism—the goal of all imagery—is transferring an object from its usual sphere of experience to a new one, a kind of semantic change. (171) (Italics mine)
The purpose of art is, therefore, not just to render what we see. Nor is it just to narrate what we have experienced. Rather, in Shklovsky’s words:
When we are studying poetic language—be it phonetically or lexically, syntactically or semantically—we always encounter the same characteristic of art: it is created with the explicit purpose of deautomatizing perception. Vision is the artist’s goal; the artistic [object] is “artificially” created in such a way that perception lingers and reaches its greatest strength and length, so that the thing is experienced not spatially but, as it were, continually. (171)
Language arrests our attention. Our world is deautomized. It’s no longer what we thought it was. But how does a poet do it?
Material Imagination
Shklovsky gives examples from Russian writers who, in his time, defamiliarized reality. He showed how Tolstoy has a horse narrate a story, describing how men whip other men, never once reaching for judgment, but simply depicting how the men harmed one another to make corporal punishment absurd. As such, changing point of view, having a stone or a sparrow speak, is one way to defamiliarize commonplace subjects. Letting a frying pan talk about how ill-used it could make cooking into something other than cooking. He noted how some writers used metaphors to speak about an erotic experience, much as Sharon Olds has done in our time, to defamiliarize the experience and, at the same time, make it more accessible. In one of her poems, she imagines that pressing her body across the length of her lover’s body was like the map of the continent being folded over and pressing the west coast on the east coast.
But one strategy that Shklovsky hints at, but doesn’t entirely explain, is how a poet uses the shifts from the purely descriptive to the figurative imagination.
Since most American students learned how to write descriptive essays, how to show how something worked, what something did, where something was, most of us knew how to tell how to plant a garden, to hit a baseball, to walk in a park. Pure description is one of the tools of the material imagination. It’s the starting point. If I describe what I can see outside my window, I could say, “From the front porch, screened in, the ornamental cherry tree, nearly leafless, allows me to see the faint, blue-gray peak of Mt. Pisgah. The hillsides, still late summer green, with a few patches of yellow, cover the hillsides. A hydrangea, its once pink blossoms now a drab brown, leans against the porch.” I’m not attempting to make any profound statements. I’m mostly wanting to render what I see.
Does this make a poem? Certainly not.
I may have some interesting images, some colorations, some contrast between near and far, some hint of a season by the changing leaves and blossoms. When Tolstoy described the opera or the flogging of a man, his prose dwelt in such detail. Poems can find their home in such imagery, too. But it is like a corridor that lets you get into other rooms, some of which you don’t know are there, but which, as you explore them, might reveal some truth to you, something unfamiliar yet important.
If I were to add another level, some figurative shift to simile, metaphor, or hyperbole, I would also shift toward some level of defamiliarization. Say I said, “From the front porch, the ornamental cherry tree, nearly leafless, is like a man with no clothes, his gaunt, gray arms sticking out, as if pointing to the faint, blue-gray peak of Mt. Pisgah to let me know I would never reach the Promised Land.” Now I am in another domain, incorporating Moses’ story and the image of a man down on his luck. What I do now, who knows? But I have begun the shift. I have started to unfamiliarize what is and opened a window into what might be, which is where art exists, the making of a thing in a new way.
What makes a poem become more than description is the turn, the shift from the literal description to the figurative imagery, when the two are married.
The poet Jericho Brown has described how imagery works by using some very conventional images. If you call a “football player” “a bear” of a man, you have paired the literal “football player” (which is called in a metaphorical construction “the tenor”) with an image “the bear” (called “the vehicle”) as a way to distinguish how the literal noun can, by being paired with the figurative, become unfamiliarized and dislocated from commonplace reality and, as such, be charged with a new energy that forces us to change how we view reality.
Figurative imagination requires, on some level, the use of metaphor. To explore what Brown was talking about—for it is critical for understanding how to use the literal and figurative imagination to defamiliarize experience— let me go into more depth about what he said. I do this because what he is talking about is how “enstrangement” and defamilarization” are used in creating a poem.
In a session on Ellen Bass’s online “Craft Talk: The Art of Revision,” Jericho Brown explains how metaphoric language works. But he not only explains how it creates a comparison, an associative leap, but how the very act of leaping is vital to a poem precisely because it defamiliarizes reality. Robert Bly in his book Leaping Poetry (Pittsburg Press, 1975) said that the “leap can be described as a leap from conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known. “(1) He demonstrated how poems come alive when they shift and It provides the turn, the torque, to shift the poem from one dimension to another. It also allows the poet to stray from a strictly descriptive or discursive train of thinking to a more imaginative train of thinking. He believes that the use of metaphor is a means to condense and compress a poem as well as a steppingstone to discover what a poem wants to say and to leap into another way of seeing the world.
By jamming the literal and figurative, the descriptive and the metaphorical, together, you create sparks and redirect your mind and sensibilities in another direction. When I am revising and even as I am writing, I am always looking for the moment I can jam two unrelated things together, to cut text and couple a phrase in one line to a phrase two lines later, condensing the poem, adding energy to the poem. He explains what this process can do to a poem:
Every metaphor is made up of two parts: the tenor & the vehicle, as in “the linebacker was a bear.” The linebacker is the tenor & the bear the vehicle... One way to remember the parts is to think of the vehicle as if it is literal: it brings you closer to the thing you want to better know. In this case, you want to know more about the linebacker, so I tell you he was a bear. Now let me be clear... The vehicle is not literal. It is not there at all. When I tell you the linebacker was a bear, you don’t go to the football game thinking you’re going to see a bear. If you see a bear at a football game, run. The point I was making today is that it’s okay not to know what you have to say when you sit down to write. As a matter of fact, it’s best not to know when you’re writing a poem as not knowing is what facilitates an authentic experience of investigation & discovery... So you begin your poem in language rather than in idea. And you allow the literal images and items in the poem to guide you toward your metaphors. And you use those metaphors to tell you what you have to say when you don’t know... The spur of the moment example I used today was, “My life is like a tree.” It is very difficult to define a life, but I can talk about trees, forests even, all day long. I can write really concretely about a particular tree, say a crape myrtle because I really love crape myrtles. The more I say about crape myrtles given what to know about carpet myrtles the more you think you know what my life is like. More importantly, the more I write about crape myrtles while in the act of writing, the more I’m learning about my own life....
By letting the image of myrtles in one of his poems carry Brown off, he can compare his life, what that means to him, with his love of myrtles, and, by using the image, create a bridge to cross into the imaginative world where one image can speak to another. He shifts from the mundane, this world he is living in, to the life of a tree that, if it is healthy, will outlive him, and will, because it is outside the societal world, and because it offers up different senses of what is real (how does a tree think about itself, its body, its feelings?) it forces us to be estranged from our usual sense of what human life is.
The conversation between the images, in turn, extends and elaborates what can be said and may lead to a discovery about his own life that he didn’t know before he followed the language to where it went. For instance, the life cycle of the crape myrtle in our backyard, having been left unkempt for years with broken limbs and weeds choking its trunk, can converse with the years I spent by myself, worried if I would amount to anything, wanting desperately to find someone who would love me and let me blossom as a writer.
When I think about myself as a young writer, I realize that one of the strategies my mentors used to help me better capture what I wanted to say was encouraging me to trust the interplay between literal and figurative imagination. Most beginner poets are adept at getting a good analogy into a poem. They can introduce a simile, metaphor, personification, or analogy to create an interesting image. But what is most lacking is that they leave the image on its own, like someone left on the side of the road. They don’t bother to build on it, to reprise it later in the poem, and to speak in a different way. The image is plopped into a line. It sits there. It often feels quite lonely, like someone on the side of a room at a party with lots of other interesting people and afraid to say something.
In my years as a student in an MFA program, I had the luxury of other accomplished poets showing me how to tease out an image and, just as importantly, how to let others go so that the one image could be seen and heard. The better I became as a poet, the more I trusted that an image that fell into the start of a poem could have its say, could have its own voice, and could tell me more than what I knew. As such, I find that as I write a poem, which images, which details, which voices need more airtime. A year ago, I wrote a poem about a friend and me. We were at the White Castle in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. I remember the exact location because my friend Jeff, who was as intoxicated as I was, leaned back, gazed at the sky, and wondered how far the universe went, how it kept expanding, how he wanted, as teens tend to do, to understand it and for it to make sense to him. I was struck by what he said, how he was pondering how our universe came to be. Not something a teenager normally ponders. To make sense of that moment and why, after sixty years, it was still lodged in my memory, I wrote about that moment, describing us in front of the hamburger joint and his asking that big question. Then, I wondered, “What else can I write? Where does this go?” I had us go to a high school dance, still not sure where the poem was headed and what it wanted to say. I trusted that the expansion of the universe, the way it circled away as we circled around the sun, would continue to speak. But how? I remembered “The Twist,” which had us go round and round, and how, on the dance floor, as we danced, we went round and round. The poem found its voice by linking the vast out-there with the 45s going around, the dark dance floor where galaxies of people went around and around, and my friend and I revolving in our world. (See Addendum for poem.)
I will tell this story about how a poem came to be as a way to explain how poems can work by pulling on an image or set of images— the trust in the interplay of the literal and the figurative—to broaden and widen the scope of your poems. They may start with an event, a scene, a moment, or an image, but they evolve from there. As they move, they reprise those details and let them speak. By the end of the poem, what began in one place has taken us to another, but something else has happened: the way the simile shifts the focus, the way a metaphor that seems just a thought about the universe becomes a dance, and a loving encounter with another.
The craft, as I have learned it, has taught me to keep asking about the details that crop up in a poem where they might take me, whether they might speak about something I missed at that moment, and about what, God knows, may trouble us all in our encounters with one another. I can hear the voices of my mentors saying, “Say more. Go deep. More detail, look closer.” Trust that the details and figurative shifts will speak. It’s like an adopted pet that has been alone for a long time. It takes weeks before they are comfortable, months before they feel at home, and years before they become intimate. Sometimes the images have dwelled long enough inside you, they tell you right away, “Go this way,” and sometimes you must dwell for days, wondering, asking questions before they say, “I’ve got an idea. Try this.”
If you keep practicing how to mix and match the literal with the figurative, and, as you do so, find those touchstones, those images or details that resonate, your poems will begin to sing, startle you and others, and reconfigure how we see and experience the world. They will defamiliarize our world so we can see it fresh. Each of you will incorporate those shifts between the literal and the figurative in different ways.
The interplay between the literal and the figurative, both important craft elements in the paint brushes of a poet, allows you as a poet to expand not only what you can say but how you can say it. Not everyone will use the same strategies in shifting from one to the other. Some come from a lawyer’s perspective, circumspect and Latinate, yet equally steeped in French symbolic perspective, imagistic and sensual, like Wallace Stevens, who eschewed the figurative imagination and felt the poem should exist in the things of this world. But for any of us who have read his poems, he certainly allowed for the fantastic, the unexpected to enter his poems. He speaks of the world in counterpoint to the notes on a blue guitar or the sounds of the sea in contrast to a woman who was “the maker of the song she sang.”
At the other end of the continuum, Tony Hoagland is quite delighted to fling out as many figurative associations as he can. He draws on the figurative in many of his poems to explore what he wants to say. Some of his poems, like “America,” are one extended simile (a conceit in poetic terms) comparing America to a prison. He explores how such a comparison, far-fetched as it may seem, might be true:
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—(See Addendum II for the whole poem)
Using details that cascade down the poem, he begins to see how his student’s comparison
might have some merit, although the prison walls are not brick and razor wire, but greed and consumer consumption.
In contrast, Mary Oliver’s practice of deeply focusing on a scene, letting the literal be named first, leads her to the figurative, which, in turn, changes what she sees and sets it in a different context that she explores in her poem. There are many different ways to enter the material imagination, sometimes using an extended simile, and then going back to the literal; other times, dwelling on the literal and let it lead to a figurative leap, which, in turn, can come back to the literal image, the swan in the pond, the frog on a stone. Watch in your own writing how to enter a poem and how the two intersect in your work.
If you look at poets that you like, ones that you relate to, more than likely you will find how the intersection of the literal and the figurative in their poems matches your own proclivities in writing. If the poem works on more than one level, you will find that it has at some point forced you into a moment of “enstrangement” and made you feel “defamiliarized” which, as you read on, opens new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, smelling, touching, and tasting the world around you. For instance, a poet like Ezra Pound has always intrigued me with how, in his Cantos, he incorporated quotations from historical texts, how he rants about usury, how he freely dissociates from topic to topic. But it runs quite contrary to how I think and how I imagine the world. I’m more drawn to the Romantic poets, to lyric poets, to narrative poets who are more aligned with my own imaginative sensibilities. I know, however, that I am reading (and experiencing) a good poem when it forces me to rethink what I knew of this world.
That’s what you want your poems to do. As Shklovsky said, “And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony.” If we can make a stone speak, to tell its truth in such a way that anytime we pass a stone off the side of a path, we look at it and realize something about it that we had never conceived before, we have made the poem work.
Addendum I
It Goes Like This
We were drunk, standing outside the White Castle,
holding the smallest, most tasteless burger on earth.
My best friend asked if I ever wondered
about the stars and what was beyond them—
if there was an end to it all?
I munched my burger, soggy with onions, in one bite.
Neon lights washed across my friend’s face,
swaying as he was back and forth, staring
at the immensity above us where he was
pointing. “Think of it.’ he said, “What we’re
seeing can’t be half of it. And if that’s so,
how far does it go before it ends?”
I took a bite of my second burger. It was gone,
not the universe—the vast out there—that kept
expanding and reaching, getting bigger
and bigger despite my offering my friend
a tiniest cardboard cup of French fries.
He ate one and shook his head
as if he could rearrange the clutter of his brain
to explain, if he shook it right, how the last
bite of his third burger in 1962 could refigure
a world that spun around a sun that spun
within a galaxy that revolved in a universe
and swirled inside our sixteen-year-old brains.
I sucked the last onions from my burger.
We sauntered across the street, my friend
still gazing at the sky, that, for all I knew,
was looking back at us, waiting for an answer.
We went to the dance at Dayne Street school
where 45s, one after another, spun on the record player.
We danced “The Twist,” spinning up and down,
going around the room to Chubby Checker wailing,
Yeaah! Twist again like we did last summer,
come on let’s twist again like we did last year,
as if the needle, caught in its groove, caused us,
and everyone around us, to circle the floor.
Some couples in their own galaxy grooving,
really hummin’, while others like my friend
and I circulated like planets in the dark
immensity of the gym drifting in and out,
waiting for the Beatles to sing, You know,
you twist so fine yes. . .come on and twist
a little closer now and for us to keep dancing
as if the universe had changed its mind,
reversed itself—let me know that you’re
mine--and contracted to us. Just us.
II.
America
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Tony Hoagland, “America” from What Narcissism Means to Me. Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Source: What Narcissism Means to Me (2003)
