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I've
been thinking a lot about concrete imagery. When I go to writing workshops,
and in moments when I teach them, I find concrete imagery being highly
recommended. And sometimes, I think: What about imagination? What about the
poet's right to be convoluted? What about the reader's role to work for their
insights? I don't think that this is necessarily the case. Concrete imagery
can often be where the greatest insights are discovered. There is a way to
use a simple image in a poem; to give it density, to explore the limits of
its possibilities. This is where, is you have any chance of doing so, you may
move your reader. Ellendore Watson seems to do a little of the oblique, and a
little of the concrete. In 'Rib(cage)', for example, we get concrete images
but they are complicated by their loose, tangential relation to each other.
The first few lines:
There's a way
not to say this. His father did "x"
and didn't do
"y". His mother was a creamy influence,
but then she
went and died. All grown up, he was still
a smudge of a
boy, no way to be a locomotive. He cut
the lace off
the apron and put it on. He woke up married
and took it
off. He traded the wife for a free-love painter.
He must be exhausted. I know I am. The cynicism doesn't help. It works to
reinforce the idea that something very specific feels like it should be
happening here and yet the poem is all evasion. A life, in the act of being
summed-up, is doomed. And yet this does not happen in a sharp, punchy manner,
but rather with a feeling of that strange 'creaminess' alluded to in the
first line. Perhaps this is deliberate, but the evasiveness of the poem
juxtaposed against the odd moments of surreal non-specificity (as in the
'locomotive') don't constitute for me the kind of conflict that provides
energy. Its effect is somehow deadening.
However, I cheered up considerably because I found much more to admire. This
work is what you might call sassy, it has a rhythm, its own attitude and a
springy pace. This is particularly striking when Watson concentrates on
specificities, as in 'Another Something', where the speaker is cut by glass
from a trash-bag:
...sink
deep into my leg
real easy, mingling its juices with
mine, activating the body's
big words and
little soldiers.
This is a quirky, memorable poem which ends with an exchange with a doctor
about tanning and sun-damage: 'It's called a rush to dubious / beauty, called
another something lurking in the body's dark.' Here is a poem which exploits
its everyday and very concrete image - that of the body damaged and
infiltrated - to the full. As such it is able to open out at the end,
unpretentiously suggesting the transition of the girl into adulthood with all
its attendant complications arising from the body.
I like it less when I am presented with unconnected lists of images, as in
'Sunday Morning', which is basically a summary of the newspapers, and more
when real craft has woven the images into a narrative, as in 'Not a Sweater'
with its beautiful negations:
An unmarriage
is not a sweater in half
unraveled or
sheared in two not half
of anything
not husk or shed thing
or artefact
behind glass or in the rubbish
not at the
bottom of the sea calling out
There is real longing here, present in the poem's exploration of language in
its attempt to understand what may be ultimately unknowable. That might be
one thing poetry is for.
© Abi Curtis 2007
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