Dyou have any tips on how to think in more 'abstract' or 'poetic' ways? As someone from an academic background i find that i struggle with breaking away from the direct and literal...if that makes sense?
it’s interesting that you use the word abstract because that’s the exact opposite of how i approach writing. for me, poetry is the art of taking abstract emotions and making them into concrete pictures. i prefer the imagist school of thought which states that it’s always better to avoid telling how you feel, and instead to show how you feel through straightforward images. so in my own way i’m trying to be direct as well.
but i get where you’re coming from. to write poetically, to create metaphors and similes, to experiment with new kinds of diction, are all challenging. at the end of the day, poetic imagery will always be more metaphysical than academic writing. this mostly comes through in the imagery. poetic imagery usually revolves around comparisons or associations.
let’s do an exercise, start small and work our way up. you see a pine tree. what’s it like literally? well, it’s tall, straight, dark green in color, made of branches and needles and roots and sap. now you have to work beyond the literal. this is where you start making some associations.
the tree stands straight and tall. okay, what else does? soldiers stand straight and tall. so the pine tree stands like a soldier. is anything else dark green colored? perhaps a late night sky or your lover’s eyes. so the pine tree is the color of just-before-dawn, or the pine tree is the color of their irises when they smile. maybe the clusters of needles remind you of the way teeth crowd together in a mouth. maybe the shape of the root system reminds you of snowflake fractals or human nerve endings. maybe how the sap drips from the bark reminds you of sweat.
all of these images convey different emotions but do the same thing, which is describe the tree. what kinds of feelings you want to evoke will determine which images you use. and the more you work at this the more complex you can get. so the pine tree doesn’t just stand like a soldier, it stands like a lone soldier who’s seen too much war and who waits for the enemy to martyr him. or you can reverse it. the boy soldier, gun in his hands, stands like a pine sapling caught up in the wind. what do these images convey? the first, a sense of too much time, the second, a sense of too little. but we didn’t say ‘the pine tree is old and weary’ or ‘the boy is young and trembling’. we showed through the shapes and actions of our central poetic figures, yeah?
if you’re just looking to experiment with images, one of my favorite exercises that i got assigned in a high school cw class was to take two cliche similes and mix them up to see what new unusual similes you can create, i.e. ‘sharp as a knife’ and ‘red as blood’ become ‘red as a knife’ and ‘sharp as blood.’ then if you like one of the similes you make, you can incorporate it into your poem. it’s a fun exercise if you’re stuck and want something to do.
i also mentioned diction– there’s less to be said on this, but one of the best parts of poetry as an art form is its total anarchy of grammar. throw your academic language out the window. write long, sprawling sentences. write fragments. drop verbs from your sentences, or invent new verbs that have never been used before. put in commas, or take commas out. the cadence is your kingdom, and you can do whatever you want with it here.
hope this essay answer helps you out! wishing you all the best with your future writing endeavors xx
