Poetry Workshop: The Craft of Imagery

1. Imagery Workshop: Intro: I heard of mule deer up here at the spring, shielded by the Pentagon. I watched them dip their heads, drink. They're protected by the wind or heard of mule deer dip their heads and drink. One turns into year, my direction stands without moving, disappears, hidden by the wind as I am by the shadows. One Canyon over, camp Roberts call out to the silence in the tree limbs. One Kenyan over camp robbers flush out the silence from the pine needles between us, beaks, my grandfather's story and endless tail holding all mule deer, all opinions, all of the wind. And Hello, I'm Jason Nevado and welcome to my class, Poetry Workshop, the craft of imagery. I'm currently a professor with Adam State University's prison program where I teach a poetry workshop to incarcerated students throughout the United States. I have my bachelor's degree in English from Adam State University and my Masters of Fine Art in creative writing poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles. This means I've been apart of workshops as a leader, as a student in many different genres, both inside and outside of the classroom. I've read and written and performed poetry all over the place. I'm in this class. Why do I call it a workshop? Well, because of workshop is interactive and I want this class to be interactive. I use the word craft a lot in this and I'll keep saying it because poetry and creative writing, our aircraft, in fact, anything we do that's creative is a craft. We have to work on it and we have to practice a lot. Why imagery? Well, because imagery is the show. Don't tell part of writing, right? We've all heard that show, don't tell, but what does that really mean? On in this class, we're going to work on crafting, are creating our imagery. So who is this class for? This class is for any creative writer, especially poets who wants to work on imagery. I know I marked it as intermediate, but beginners, experts, all welcome. If you want to work on some writing, imagery is kinda hard to describe. So what will we cover in this class? Because it's hard for me just to tell you how that's a good image, that's a good image. What we'll do is we'll talk about two poets, poems to famous poems. And I'll unpack and we'll describe the imagery and we'll kind of go through it lightly and we'll talk about it. Then we'll do an observation exercise. And I'll show you how to use these observation exercises to see the world differently. And this will all end up being a project which of course will be new poetry. And hopefully you'll join me for this class. And I will see you in the next one and we'll talk about the project. See you there. 2. Imagery Workshop Project: Welcome back. I'm glad you chose to join me and let's talk about the project. For the project, I want you to post a new poem, say ten lines, more than ten lines to about a page and a half. Free verse, know rhymes, scheme, don't worry about structure. We want to concentrate on imagery in this class. Like I said, it's interactive, so I want you to post up. I'm going to comment. I want to see him because I love reading other people's work. And a little bit of guideline here. When we get on later in the class, I'm going to talk about an observation exercise. I want you to use maybe one or two images, maybe more images from your observation class. So when you write your poem and he posted in the project area the bottom of the poem. Tell me what inspired you and what lines from your observation exercise you used. But I did say put it at the end this way it doesn't color my reading of your poem because sometimes we write a poem and the reader takes something completely different than you intended. So I want to read it fresh and then I'll see what inspired you guys. Now of course, this is imagery, so we're going to talk first about metaphoric kind of the basic images. So I'll see you in the next class when we will talk about one poem and some metaphors. See you there. 3. Imagery: Plath: Alright, here we go. Let's talk about metaphor very briefly. This is one of the more basic ways of creating image, right? We call one thing something else. In a writing class long ago, I can't exactly remember the professor, but he made a metaphor. The moon is my arrest warrant. So he made a comparison between two different things. He actually didn't compare the cold one thing, another thing makes an interesting image in your head. You don't know what that means, especially out of context. But it jogs your imagination, it pulls you into the poem and you want to know more. So metaphor is one of the basic, easiest way is to create an image. And the first form I want to start off with his Sylvia Plath metaphors. She actually titled this one metaphors for us. So let me read this one. I'm a riddle in nine syllables and elephant or ponderous house, a melon strolling on to tendrils. Red fruit. I've refined timbers. This loves big with its ISTE rising moneys new minted in this fat perse, I'm a means a stage, a cow and calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train. There's no getting off. Let's talk about what she did first. She calls it metaphors, and then she uses a bunch of images, right? I'm a riddle and nine syllables. The poem is nine lines long. Now it's important to consider you can use form to be part of your metaphor. I'm a riddle and nine syllables or nine lines long. I'm an elephant or ponderous house. She's pregnant. And she's describing her pregnancy by calling herself things. She doesn't say I feel like this or I feel that, or I'm, I look like this sheath just saying I am an elephant, a ponderous house, a melon strolling on to tendrils. So you can imagine a watermelon or too skinny things strolling, bold red fruit. I've refined timbers again, I think that's describing her legs, right? I've refined timbers. This lopes big with its yeast E rising like a loaf of bread that keeps getting bigger. Moneys new minted in this fat perse. I'm a means a stage, a cow in Caffe and I really like I'm a cow in calf, right? She's reversed it. Instead of being a calf in a cow, she's reversed. I think she's saying that she's kinda small and this baby fields really large and big. I'm a cow and calf and that one made me think because she reversed it. I've eaten a bag of green apples that can't feel good. I'm sure she doesn't feel good when she's writing this poem. Boarded the train. There's no getting off, right? It's too late. Pregnant, maybe towards the end of the pregnancy, third trimester semester. Now of course, is this Sylvia Plath speaking or is this the speaker of the poem? Who knows? Sylvia Plath is known to do confessional poetry where it probably is her speaking and this is how she felt being pregnant. And you can imagine it to see sound happy. I mean, what do you guys think? To me? She sounds kind of miserable. She's ready for it to be overseas is not exactly happy. And so she writes this poem. It's pretty simple poem, it's actually really basic, but the emotions there, if you think about the things she called herself when she how she said she was feeling, especially that cow and calf line and I've even a bag of green apples. She cannot feel good at the end of that. So this is one, kind of an easier poem, but a couple of neat tricks, like I said, using the form as part of the metaphor and some pretty simple metaphors to get a point across. In the next poem, we're going to unpack a very short poem that has some really strong imagery in very few words. So I will see you there. 4. Imagery: Pound: There we go. So we had metaphors by Sylvia Plath. We're gonna move on to Ezra Pound of this poem is really short. It's a two line poem with an enjambment title, basically making it three lines long, right? And jam title means that first line, the title can be read as the first-line. It's like 20-some odd words. In a Station of the Metro. The apparition of these faces in the crowd, Petals on a wet black bough. That's it. Wow, right? He did a couple of things In a Station of the Metro. It gave us something very specific. You can do this in your poems. This is real important for imagery. Name places named specific things, name specific items. He says, the Metro, I'm imagining London when he writes this. And because of that, we know what it means, right? The operation apparition of these faces in the crowd. You can imagine him standing in, the door is open and you get all these faces and thinking about your experiences. If you've ever been to New York, London, or any other large city, or even medium-sized cities where there's a large crowd. You just see these spaces, right? And Ezra Pound in this poem, you just sort of takes away the, because you don't really recognize them. You don't see details often and that's what he does. He just writes until he takes away the humanity from them. And they become apparitions, ghost-like, and there's a whole bunch of them. And you can imagine the scene layers of these phases. In this very short poem, he starts kind of not really erasing them, but blending them to become the, right, the petals on a wet black bough, you, they just become these petals of faces. And you can actually imagine it almost like an impressionist painting. Just these little dots that become one thing. Why did he say, why did he write it? I don't know. Maybe the speaker of the poem was new to London, new to whatever the city is. He gets off, he feels lost, right? There is no family, no friends, nothing he recognizes. And often the things we love to recognize her other people. And here he is in a situation when we recognize as nobody. So it's just the sea of faces. Maybe he's lived there for a long time. Maybe it is city, but he feels disconnected and lonely. That make you feel like that too, right? If you have to go to work every day and you see these spaces over and over and over again. But notice what he did. He used something he sees all the time. He observes faces. He sees them in the metro. And because he sees them all the time, he turned them into something quite beautiful. And in the last poem I talked about with Sylvia Plath using the form, right, the nine lines to be nine months of pregnancy. He does something interesting here too. He talks about something really large, even a large feeling like loneliness. If that's what you take out of this is loneliness, that's a large dealing show. Don't tell, right? You didn't sit. He was lonely. He showed us and he took this large thing and he only made 20 words out of it to really make us feel that way, this disconnect from the people that he sees in the metro. So there's a couple of poems there with some really good imagery. I urge you to go find them and reread them and see what you think about them. In the next class, we're going to run through an observation exercise just to help get our creative juices running. So I will see you there. 5. Imagery Workshop: Observation: Okay, and you made it, you made it through two lectures that kept them short. So they're not like sleepy time lectures, but we made it through two lectures about imagery and poetry. Very good things. And let's talk about this observation exercise that I mentioned at the beginning. As poets, as artists, we need to observe the world differently, right? That's where images come from and that's what keeps us from us, what keeps us, you know, our imagination going is we have to see the real-world and we have to see it differently. And we have to see it differently from how we used to and how other people see it. And that's kind of our job as writers. So I really liked this exercise. It's an observation exercise. What you do, grabbed your favorite notebook, journal pad, whatever you like to scribble in. These more skin ones around with no lines and I'm just so I can scribble all over the place. If you want to keep these observations and a separate one, that's really smart too. I don't do that. I just happened to do these observation exercise with whatever I have in hand. And so I have all kinds of writings and then an observation exercise and sometimes I go back to them and sometimes I don't. It just depends. I do that. But what you do is you set a timer for 10 min and you go sit somewhere. And I emphasize the word sit. I don't want you walking around because then you spend time walking to the next image while instead of observing whatever's around you. So set a timer for 10 min, look up, look down, look for small things, big things. Use all five senses. We can taste and smell and hear things all the time. It's not just about what you see. Makes sure you don't embellish too much with adjectives and really describing things. If you see a man and an orange suit, he's a man and orange. So you might see bright orange, dark orange. But don't start naming Hughes and getting stuck on those kind of things. Just make these observations, the things you see, write them down without adding too much. 10 min. I will see you back here. We're back. And what did you get? I'm gonna give you a few of mine, right? I sat outside on my front porch, a thunderstorm, it just pass through. So I got rose petals, pink rose petals in the mud. There was a yellow butterfly flying by. Diesel generator was running in the distance, but it was so deep sound, I felt it. I felt it. I could feel the breeze on my face. I have the smell like gasoline on my hands. I was working with some equipment today so you can never get that smell off the taste of coffee because I drink too much coffee and I drink it all day long so I could still tastes that in my mouth. Those are some of the observations that I've found. No. Do they mean anything? Maybe the yellow butterflies or hope. Maybe the pink rose petals in the mud is a failed love relationship. Maybe the gasoline on my hands is hard work. Maybe it's none of those things, right? The point is is that I observed them and I recorded them. And do this a few times. Do this even before you do your project, do this observation exercise a few times before you, before you sit down and actually write your new poem. What will happen over time is maybe if you have writer's block or something like that, sit down and do this observation exercise. You can make it a habit of yours and do it multiple times a week, do it every day. But you will find that you'll start making these observations, exercises just organically. You will be walking to the store, you'll be driving somewhere and you will just start noticing things that are different in that stick out in your mind. If you have a notepad with you, you can write it down. Write it down when you get home, but you need to write it down because you'll probably forget it. So in the next class, the next section, and we're going to talk about how to use these observation exercises to create a poem. So I'm going to pick a couple lines I think at a mine and we'll see what we can turn it into. So I will see you there. 6. Imager Imagery Workshop: Using Observation: All right, Welcome back. And I hope you got some good ideas of which ones of your observations you want to use for something. Like I said, maybe these could, maybe you wrote something down, can be a metaphor for love, can be a metaphor for loneliness, can be a metaphor for excitement. Whatever. The couple that stuck out in my mind, a mind was. And I mentioned them. It was the taste of coffee on my breath and the smell of gasoline on my hands. Now, how did I get there? Well, I had to do some brainstorming to do a little bit of Free Thoughts. Write, the opening poem I read was actually based on an observation exercise sitting over a spring and the mountains of Colorado was watching mule deer drink. And I could hear the camp robber is way off in the distance. If you've been in the Western United States, you know, camp robbers are very cool bird with a very distinct sound that they make, especially when they get panicked calls. And I could hear these camp robbers as I'm watching these mule deer. And it made me think of my grandfather. So that's wp home ends talking about my grandfather's stories. So my brain jumped. My grandfather's ringed on. I just mentioned my grandfather in the poem. So he's another person I know that liked coffee and he was a farmer and he worked on machines. So his hands were often smell like gasoline or oil or whatever it was it easy leap for me to make. But I had to go there, right. And however you get there is completely personal, but that is a great way to get there. It's just they don't have to be your hands like right. Didn't have to be my hands. It can be somebody's hands and that's kinda where I went in. Whose hands could these be on my grandpa? I was already thinking about him, his hands. I remember going to visit him on the farm. I start this poem and I just write those two with the perfume of gasoline on his hands. And the morning's coffee is still on his breadth there. All right. Couple of lines. I'm going to leave them together. And I just started scribbling new ones. My grandpa I call them grandpa. My grandpa would come in his close to your cool from the potato seller with a perfume of gasoline on his hands and the morning's coffee still on his breath. He never talked much. Okay. So now I'm going to have to revise, right? I've got one stanza in do I liked the words? Will see all have to work on it and see where this poem goes. But I'm definitely going to work on it because I've got a couple of images from the observation exercise that I like. A couple of words about, since this directly relates to your project, right? Couple of words about revision, revise, revise, revise, But don't get stuck in revision. I know it's creative writers. Sometimes we just keep revising, revising, revising and we don't want somebody to see it. It can be a rough draft, it can be a polished draft. I just want you to post it in the project area so I can see your poems. So that's really, that's really important. Don't get stuck there. A word of warning is the abstractions, the words that I've talked about, pain, sorrow, love, all those big abstractions is big ideas that we can't touch, right? That's where these observations can stand in for that. And v metaphors. Sometimes when we write, we just have to get that image, that idea, the poem out of our heads. And we'll end up putting abstractions in there. Go back, look for them and replace them with images. That's why you do the observation exercises. You'll have lots of images to pull from. Your imagination will start rolling and you can pull from those as well. So we made it through all of those. We'll wrap it up in the next one and I'll see you there. 7. Imagery Workshop: Conclusion: Here we are ready to wrap it up. Thank you so much for joining me. One piece of advice I can give you is read, read, read, read poets. Eli agreed policy. Don't like read poets that you've never heard of or seen before. Pay attention to the imagery. Think about what you like or dislike about an image. Maybe even what you would do differently. But it's really kinda like unpack those and see what you take from them and how the writer pulled something out of you, any sort of emotion from you. So that's really important. Of course, do a few observation exercises before you actually write your poem. But don't do too many because I do want you to write and post up in the project area. Because like I said, this is an interactive class and I will interact and I'll respond. And that is great amount of fun for me because I love writing and I love reading other people's writing. This class is my first-class, so please leave me a review. I would love to build more of these for Skillshare, and I hope to see you in the next one. Thanks.