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Inspirations

BERNARDINE EVARISTO: peripatetic writing tutor

IMAGERY AND THE IMAGINATION

An ongoing series of Mslexia writing workshops on prose and poetry, inspired by the novelist’s travels and teaching experiences.

I love imagery and my favourite poet Derek Walcott uses it in abundance. His poetry is beautiful, visual, complex and his use of imagery is just dazzling. When I was first introduced to his work I was overwhelmed by his brilliance. What we learn from ineffective writers is what not to do. Conversely, truly great writers sometimes raise the bar to seemingly unattainable heights. Yet we do have a choice, don’t we? To choose to be deflated or choose to be inspired? Well, once I’d got over myself, I became inspired – not to write like him – but to become a better writer myself.

Walcott’s collection of poems Midsummer is a wonderful example of how imagery functions to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary so that we see things both differently and more clearly. His imagery is loaded and resonant too, demanding to be probed for deeper meanings. Walcott is not a plain-speaking, literal poet, easy to read or easy to understand. Instead his fertile imagination produces flights of fancy: his love of ambiguity means that his poems contain a multiplicity of meanings, while his challenging intellect demands that the reader puts in the work. What Walcott offers on the surface is just that – the top layer – and to unpick his images is to discover a plenitude of riches. Here are some examples from Midsummer.

1) The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of clouds,
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture

2) This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness,
with its one-eyed lighthouse, this damned sea of noise,
this ocher harbour, mantled by its own scum
offers, from white wrought-iron balconies,
the nineteenth century view.

3) The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh,
on a damp bed.

4) Chicago’s avenues, as white as Poland.
A blizzard of heavenly coke hushes the ghettos.
The scratched sky flickers like a TV set.

Suitably impressed? I hope so, although liking a particular writer is always subjective.

Walcott expertly uses the two most basic tools of imagery: metaphor – to describe something in terms of another; and simile – to do the same but with the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ A metaphor is more intense than a simile: the thing being described and the thing it’s being compared to are conflated. For example, The scratched sky is a flickering TV set is a metaphor. This is a bold statement which imbues the sky with qualities quite different from its normal association, a difference which nonetheless helps create a recognisable visual description of the sky as well as set the atmosphere and context for the poem.

Walcott’s version – ‘The scratched sky flickers like a TV set’ – is a simile. A simile offers the same comparison as a metaphor but it is more explicit and the artifice of the connection is exposed. There is more distance between the two things being compared.

But whether with simile or metaphor, imagery adds imaginative and associative depth and breadth to a piece of poetry or prose. Regarding how much imagery you use or whether you use it at all, there are no rules. It’s up to you.

We use metaphor and simile in our everyday language through, for example, these idioms: ‘She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth’ or ‘I felt like a fish out of water’ or ‘He’s on his high horse again.’ Beware, though, because these are also dreaded clichés – words and expressions which through overuse have become banal. The beginner writer is especially vulnerable to them. The trick to using imagery is to find original ways of describing things through comparison – as a linguistic device that will aid the telling of your poem or story and thus enrich your writing. Take heed, however: self-conscious, gratuitous or forced images will be apparent to a discerning reader.

For the past couple of summers I have run a writing course on Crete for the arts organisation World Spirit. The classes take place outside a café overlooking a beach in a remote, scenic bay. It’s hard not to be inspired to write about such an idyllic setting. At the beginning I set the students the task of doing just that, to get it out of their systems. The exercise I set was to describe the bay using fresh, original imagery, and to avoid cliché. One student applied, to comic effect, the imagery of B & Q products to describe the whitewashed houses with blue shutters. Another saw the long, narrow island facing the bay as a dinosaur. Yet another personified the sea as a grumpy old man. Personification, which is related to imagery, means to imbue something abstract or inanimate with human qualities. The ‘angry sky,’ for example, or the ‘forlorn forest.’

Like a lot of literary craft, creating images should improve with practise – that ability is a muscle, and the more we work with it the more it will meet our writing challenges. It’s a muscle I flexed when I wrote my novel-in-verse Lara: I would wait for hours for that moment of inspiration when the person, place, scene, situation, emotional landscape or whatever could be somehow encapsulated through an appropriate image. Okay, so I also read magazines, had to urgently clean the windows and went for walks. God help me if I’d been on the internet back in the mid 90s. Yet in spite of all that procrastination, I knew that deep down my subconscious was working up that bloody image.

Over the years and several books later I have much more immediate access to my imagination. There really is only one way to develop as a writer and that is by doing it: sitting at your desk, usually alone, overcoming your demons and just getting on with it. If the demons are so busy saying horrid things to you in your head that you can’t produce the writing, then seek out a suitable personal development course, book or audio tape. (The classic self-help book Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway is always a good starting point.)

I’ve taught creative writing students who tell me they don’t have an imagination and cannot therefore produce images. I tell them that of course they do except they haven’t been using it. They need to start exploring and exploiting it. The greatest thing about the imagination is that it is infinite and you really do get to play God.

Selima Hill’s unique poetry is often quite pithy; some of her poems are pared down to four lines, yet they are so loaded with meaning and emotion. Her poetry is also very imagistic; she applies the most unlikely images to an unsettling effect. This is one poet whose imagination is always playing full-out. In Lou-Lou, a collection about a young girl’s stay in a psychiatric hospital, she writes:

The way I speak
is like a mountainside
on whose white slopes
everyone is falling.

Another pitfall with imagery is to mix your metaphors. And yes, mea culpa. Mixing your metaphors means putting in too many clashing images, worst of all, in the same sentence. Every time I read this extract from Lara I cringe:

‘Oh!’ Her cold, egg-sized vowel suspended itself
over the table like a full colostomy bag.

Talk about over-egging the pudding, so to speak. These two images would both work separately but in the same sentence they jar and almost cancel each other out.

Anne Michaels’ deeply poetic novel Fugitive Pieces occasionally falls prey to this too. One of the most visual images in this novel is this one:

Bella was fifteen…with heavy brows and magnificent hair like black syrup, thick and luxurious, a muscle down her back.

Is the final clause necessary or does the ‘muscle’ image weaken the ‘syrup’ image. I think it does. But what do you think?

Some writers produce a motorway pile-up of images for a particular effect – and it works. Of course, there are always, always exceptions.

Another of my favourite books is Bruce Chatwin’s novella The Viceroy of Ouidah about the Brazilian-Dahomeyan slave trade. His intense, poetic writing is never plain and his images are always striking.

Of street sellers in Dahomey, he writes: Their hands reached out for their customers’ money – pink, moist, affectionate as dog tongues.

Of a dying woman: Sometimes they saw her face, the skin transparent as a gecko’s and the green eyes milky with cataracts.

Or: He saw the spirits of Dead Kings moving with the slow, disjointed gait of skeletons.

So simple yet so effective.

The first poem of Midsummer ends with Walcott flying into St.Lucia:

It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home –
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

When imagery works, it can be magical.

BERNARDINE EVARISTO’s new novel Blonde Roots will be published by Penguin in June 2008. She is co-editor with novelist Maggie Gee of this year’s British Council/Granta anthology NW15. For more info, visit www.bevaristo.net.

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From Issue 36 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2008

Homepleasure

Like a lot of literary craft, creating images should improve with practise…

• Write a poem describing yourself or a person you know using the vocabulary and context of one of the following: finance, theatre, cooking, forensic science, football, sewage, law, shop management, biology, physics, politics, a music genre, farming, medicine.
• Take a notebook with you while you’re out and about, notice the everyday things around you and try to describe them using imagery which reveals them in fresh and original ways. Be daring, be bold, be free and wild with your images – see how far you can go. Get your imagery-making juices going, no matter that your images might seem over-the-top or ridiculous. This is just an exercise, aimed at releasing the image-maker in you. Later you can apply imagery with more judiciousness to your writing.
• Bernardine Evaristo
• PHOTO © Portia St. Hilaire-Daley