the worst poem you have ever read

[Sospira]

Words do not form images whether those words are in a poem or a story or even on a map as a place name. Words take time to read. Images are immediate. Words use sound. Images use vision. I am almost tempted to say that words mean something or are about something while an image need not be.

This is a very unusual experience of reading poetry especially considering that you enjoy poetry. Most people who enjoy poetry experience the intense conjuring of pictures even like a film, as 108fountains wrote, in their mind. One word, if chosen and placed well, can conjure up in the mind of the reader intense pictures and feelings. When I read 'The Windhover' I am there with the bird doing its somersaults in the sky, and it's like being inside an intense surround-sound movie-like experience. Some examples from 'The Windhover' of the words conjuring a picture or feeling:

'Then off, off forth on swing,' I feel the movement of the bird through the 'f' and 'ff' repetition, almost like a false start with the first 'off' before it really takes off with 'off forth on swing.'

'As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend,' here I experience it as though it were myself swerving smoothly round this 'bend.'

'...the hurl and gliding/Rebuffed the big wind...' here the '-buffed' is like a gust of wind blown in my face.


It isn't the case that words are only experienced as sounds, for me they immediately conjure a picture and/or video if the poet is skilled enough with language.

And I can think of some photos that are loud and noisy to me. Senses overlapping I think is a must to appreciate art and poetry fully.

The way you experience it, is your own experience, and you are not 'wrong' to explain your experience but you are wrong to state as a fact that words are only sounds and ideas, and cannot create images. That is your experience and it isn't the experience of most people who are poetry enthusiasts.

[Sospira]

'THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.'

The image painted by the poem is based on comparing the "apparition" of faces in the crowd to petals. The poem is a Hokku (Japanese form), so when I read it I think the apparition of the faces (in other words, the ghostly image of the faces, rather than the actual faces) resemble petals in a Japanese painting, or, perhaps, in a formal Japanese garden. The image is striking because the hustle and bustle of the Metro seems (at first) so different from the quiet formality of a Japanese painting, or silk embroidery, or garden. But the reader is required by the poem to see not the differences, but the similarities. Since the faces are "apparitions", rather than real faces, one can imagine them to look quite a bit like petals in a painting.

There are other, non-visual qualities to the comparison. Do the apparitions of the faces represent a detachment on the part of the reader (viewer)? Are they somehow unhuman, because of this detachment? Why is the bough wet and black? I don't have the answers, but the image of a subway crowd creating a vision resembling petals is a striking one, and the key quality of the poem.

I would find this to be a very striking image even if it was about people walking down a countryside lane. The words themselves are so affecting and evocative. Your idea about detachment and the 'unhuman' faces is interesting, and that's how most people feel in big cities with the swarms of people around them.

The poem seems to slow and calm everything down and puts the scene of the hustle and bustle of a city metro in slow motion and on mute for me, with these eerie but delicate faces appearing out of the black ether. Why is the bough black and wet? I'd say that's a pretty good metaphorical image of their black suits dampened by the rain on a wet evening. And then maybe there's the juxtaposition of their black suits (the boughs) which represent mundane repetitive office work, formality, and conformity; and their faces which are likened to white petals, the whiteness and delicateness of which is both beautiful and ethereal but also ghostly and unhuman.

[YesNo]

Some examples from 'The Windhover' of the words conjuring a picture or feeling:

Just to make sure we are talking about the same thing, I am only objecting to "images" and then only the images that are claimed to be in a poem. A poem can be about something which would generate an image in the mind of someone reading it. I am not concerned about those images.

The way you experience it, is your own experience, and you are not 'wrong' to explain your experience but you are wrong to state as a fact that words are only sounds and ideas, and cannot create images. That is your experience and it isn't the experience of most people who are poetry enthusiasts.

I don't see how words are anything other than sound that is about something. Being "about something" is where the "idea" comes in.

If most people experience poetry as an image, which I don't think is true, but I don't know, I suggest that would be because they were taught to use image metaphors when talking about a poem. If they liked a poem, the expected comment would be something like, "What nice images you have in your poem." A better comment would be, "What nice sounds."

My point is that those image metaphors are inappropriate and cover up the value of sound in communication.

[Sospira]

Nobody's teaching made me think in terms of pictures. I am a very visual person and have been since a child where it began with intensely visual dreams. I read poetry and images form in my mind, that is simply how I have and always have experienced it. When I first read children's books as I child I felt as though I was in the book, it was such an intense experience for me. Certain passages of books, the general subject of which I can vaguely recall, still conjure intense pictures in my mind and that's up to 20 years ago.

It's not confined to poetry, when I hear music I sometimes see pictures or colours in my mind. It's an overlapping of the senses. I don't have synesthesia, but I think in pictures.

Not everyone is visually minded or thinks in pictures.

You said:
'A poem can be about something which would generate an image in the mind of someone reading it. I am not concerned about those images.'

So what images are you concerned with?

[Sospira]

The poems I can't stand are those that are tailor-made for mainstream middle-brow tastes, banal and safe and bland. I also resent poems that are over-rated. Please "Google" critical comments on Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees," as well as this piece on a great Robert Frost poem that is woefully misinterpreted by American educators:


Why High School Teachers Can’t Read Poetry by John Kilgore

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Would high school or secondary school teachers (in the UK) really not see what the Robert Frost poem was about? They have been to university where their lecturers and professors would have discussed it with them, right? Or is not on university syllabuses? I don't get why the bash at teachers. Unless some teaches really are that bad?

My secondary school English teachers were excellent on the whole. I can't comment on the teaching of this poem as we didn't cover this one, but I can't imagine it would have fooled them.

[YesNo]

Nobody's teaching made me think in terms of pictures. I am a very visual person and have been since a child where it began with intensely visual dreams. I read poetry and images form in my mind, that is simply how I have and always have experienced it. When I first read children's books as I child I felt as though I was in the book, it was such an intense experience for me. Certain passages of books, the general subject of which I can vaguely recall, still conjure intense pictures in my mind and that's up to 20 years ago.

It's not confined to poetry, when I hear music I sometimes see pictures or colours in my mind. It's an overlapping of the senses. I don't have synesthesia, but I think in pictures.

Not everyone is visually minded or thinks in pictures.

You said:
'A poem can be about something which would generate an image in the mind of someone reading it. I am not concerned about those images.'

So what images are you concerned with?

The question is whether poetry contains images. It is not whether some people experience a poem visually. Although I don't think I am a very visual person, I can visualize if I put my mind to it.

The reason I think this might have been taught, which could mean simply imitating how other people respond to a poem, is because this has been a teaching of early 20th century Imagists and later picked up by academics and when I read comments on poetry I still hear remarks on the "iimages" supposedly in a poem. I don't see any images there. The poem contains words which are sounds. True, there might be images in the reader's mind. There also might not be any images in the reader's mind or very different images depending on the reader. All that means, is the idea that there are images in a poem is not correct.

Besides, I think most people experience poetry as sound, primarily as music lyrics. They aren't reading any words. They just listen and are often moved which encourages them to repeat the experience. I don't think being moved by a song is a visual experience in general unless one is also watching a video that accompanies the song.

[Sospira]

YesNo, if it's all about the sound of the words rather than the images they build, then I would assume you think a deaf person can't appreciate poetry?

There are deaf poets, like Judith Wright...

And you can't teach someone to be a visual thinker, that is how your brain is wired. No one would be able to teach me to think in a mathematical way.