Image Sets the Mind on Fire

By Julie Funderburk

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I recently asked some poet friends, “How does a new poem begin for you? What is your first spark?” Some replied that a poem begins with a word, a line, sound, or rhythm. It might originate from personal context in conversation with the world. Words might spring forth out of formal constraint or as imagined for a particular audience.

When the mind is on fire, first there’s the fire. Language is the first responder. For me, a new poem always begins with image.

The concreteness of imagery makes an argument for the possibility of connection —imagery as a form of outreach to the reader. When written, an image is fused with language and the sound of words. Images want to communicate. Sights and smells, the tactile, what’s heard and what’s tasted — I think of these as the great meeting-ground of a poem.

Our experiences and viewpoints can be profoundly different from each other. And of course, people do not sense the physical world in the same way. Given such differences (and, more interesting, because of them), imagery feels like the community square where everyone has a place.

If images are so important, so central to my writing process, then why am I not soon finished with a poem after an image has arrived, seeming to me like it possesses magic? A few drafts have even needed years, as I waited and periodically tried again. It’s as though my life experience had to catch up, as though only another version of myself, in some future context, had access to the poem the image wanted.

What is your experience with image? Has an image sometimes not left you alone, bothering you into revision after revision? Or do you feel you’ve come up against the idea that poems must show and must not tell — a battle-cry that makes you want to do battle? And if a poem needs image, what does image need from a poem?