The poets companion pdf download

The Poet's companion : a guide to the pleasures of writing poetry Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more?

Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Includes bibliographical references p. Books on poetry and writing -- B. Anthologies for further reading -- C. Finding markets for your poems ; D. The mixture of complete poems and extracts introduces readers to the variety of narrative and lyric work which forms an important part of the English literary heritage.

This edition aims to help the exploration of the qualities which made these poets popular during the reign of Queen Victoria, transporting readers to a world of romance, myth and fantasy. Cambridge Literature is a series of study texts which presents writing in the English-speaking world from the 16th century up to the present day. The series includes novels, drama, short stories, poetry, essays and other types of non-fiction. Each edition has the complete text with an appropriate glossary.

The student will find in each volume a helpful introduction and a full section of resource notes encouraging active and imaginative study methods. Shows how medieval Italian poets viewed their authorship of poetry as a function of their engagement in a human community.

Skip to content. The Cambridge Edition of the Poets. The Cambridge Companion to English Poets. The Cambridge Edition of the Poets Browing. The Complete Poetical Works. The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets.

It seems to us that any aware human being is going to look beyond that garden at some point. But a poem about a worker poisoned by asbestos isn't inherently better than one about a lover. Subject matter is not the issue; depth of imagination, and its articulation in language, is. So it's a question of awareness that shapes our poetry, even if poetry doesn't deal with direct political topics or historical topics.

Whether you've endured something personally, or know people who have, or want to address or to speak for strangers, you will need to fully inhabit the material so that you don't slip into easy rhetoric or soapbox preaching. Admittedly the largeness of such issues, their size and complexity, can leave you feeling somewhat lost in terms of how to approach them.

The important thing here is to look at your personal truths not to try and present a comprehensive portrait of the injustice in the world. Describe your own experience, or imagine that of others, at the level of the human.

Let readers in, instead of shutting them out with the thunder of your convictions and commitment. In spite of vast cultural differences, there is, at bottom, some common ground for all of us. Finding that commonality in your poems will. This poem by Linda Hogan begins with a description of a place the narrator has just moved into, but quickly opens out from the local.

The specific place dissolves, as do the boundaries between self and other, the living and the dead. Like Walt Whitman, who in "Song of Myself" claimed "I am large, I contain multitudes," the poet seems to contain not only her Native American ancestors but the lives of others around her, neighbors and strangers. There's a constant interplay between inner and outer, the mundane and the magical. There is anger in the poem, and compassion, and historical memory, all presented with a simple and undramatic clarity.

The floorboards creak. The moon is on the wrong side of the building, and burns remain on the floor. The house wants to fall down the universe when earth turns.

It still holds the coughs of old men and their canes tapping on the floor. I think of Indian people here before me and how last spring white merchants hung an elder on a meathook and beat him and he was one of The People. I remember this war and all the wars and relocation like putting the moon in prison with no food and that moon already a crescent,. Some are baking, with flour on their hands, or sleeping on floor three, or getting drunk. I see the businessmen who hit their wives and the men who are tender fathers.

There are women crying or making jokes. Children are laughing under beds. Girls in navy blue robes talk on the phone all night and some Pawnee is singing 49s, drumming the table. Inside the walls world changes are planned, bosses overthrown. If we had no coffee, cigarettes, or liquor, says the woman in room twelve, they'd have a revolution on their hands. Beyond walls are lakes and plains, canyons and the universe; the stars are the key turning in the lock of night.

Turn the deadbolt and I am home. No one here remembers the city or has ever lost the will to go on. Hello aunt, hello brothers, hello trees and deer walking quietly on the soft red earth. The speaker in this poem feels a strong bond with those who came before; at the end of the poem she becomes one with them, with the trees and animals, expressing a more wholistic vision of life behind the fragmented one presented by the alienating urban landscape.

Witnessing involves the past as well as the present; it's crucial that we explore who we came from, where we came from, what happened. This is true for all peoples, for without the past, without memory, there is no culture, and no tradition to be passed on.

Poetry has always functioned as a way to remember. Maybe that's one reason why it's been so undervalued in a culture which prefers amnesia, today's celebrity scandal or political corruption blotting out yesterday's, the new bulldozing the old. A character in one of Czech novelist Milan Kundera's books says that the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Memory is as likely to be painful as pleasant, and writers who explore its territory, whether on a personal or wider cultural level, must be willing to present its sometimes difficult truths.

This poem by Bruce Weigl, which details an individual's memories of the Vietnam war, confronts the persistence of painful memories and the difficulty of finding solace, even while the narrator yearns for relief.

We stared through the black screen, Our vision altered by the distance So I thought I saw a mist Kicked up around their hooves when they faded Like cut-out horses Away from us. The grass was never more blue in that light, more Scarlet; beyond the pasture Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches. Criss-crossed the sky like barbed wire But you said they were only branches.

The storm stopped pounding. I am trying to say this straight: for once I was sane enough to pause and breathe Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain I turned my back on the old curses. I believed They swung finally away from me. But still the branches are wire And thunder is the pounding mortar, Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly, Her hands reaching for the no one Who waits in waves of heat before her.

So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you, I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings Beat inside her until she rises Above the stinking jungle and her pain Eases, and your pain, and mine. But the lie swings back again. The lie works only as long as it takes to speak And the girl runs only as far As the napalm allows Until her burning tendons and crackling Muscles draw her up Into that final position Burning bodies so perfectly assume.

Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it. Weigl's poem holds redemption and horror eternally balanced; there is the beauty of the horses in that pasture, the "good love" of the.

Though the poem is of one man's experience, it speaks to us of all those who have survived war and continually struggle to come to terms with such images. Notice how Weigl interweaves past and present: the horses are seen through a "black screen"a barrier, but a permeable one.

The "pounding" of the storm becomes pounding mortar, the branches are barbed wire, and the pasture is "jungle green. Language, though, finally fails him; it can't save either the girl or himself. We said earlier that you don't have to have experienced extremity to write poems of witness. Perhaps, like Hogan, your link is through ancestry, the poverty or oppression of members of your family, or race, or religion.

Many Jewish writers have felt moved to explore the Holocaust. But so have writers whose religion and history would seem far removed from the killing of millions of Jews. Such writers identified with that suffering, not as Jews, but as human beings. Hearing how children were separated from their parents at the camps, a poet who is a parent might easily imagine the anguish of having his or her child taken away.

You might have read William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice or seen the film; such a scene is at the heart of it interestingly, the main character is not Jewish, but Catholic.

Norman Dubie wrote a stunning poem in the voice of a black woman slave who escapes to the north "The Negress: Her Monologue of Dark and Light" , and it convincingly and compellingly portrays her physical and emotional journey. Sharon Olds has written of starvation, civil rights, suicide, abandoned babies without herself living through drought, risking lynching, or otherwise physically participating in those events.

The imagination is free to follow whatever subject matter it finds compelling. To say otherwise that, say, a man can't speak as a woman, or an African-American as a Polish Jew, or a lesbian mother as Don Juan is to impoverish us all.

You may want to bear witness to your own experience, but try not to define that experience too narrowly. What issues in the world concern you? Write a rant; be as rhetorical as you like, get up on your soapbox and scream. Once that's out of your system, you're ready to begin a poem. Explore a large issueracism, sexism, violence, war, vanishing wildlife. Find out how and where that issue enters your life, intersects with it.

Make it personal: the story in the newspaper on your kitchen table, next to the plate of eggs; the homeless person sitting next to the Coke machine outside the grocery store; a walk in the woods; a remembered incident from childhood. The poet James Merrill wrote, "we understand history through the family around the table. Write a poem about someone in your family and how his or her story is related to history.

Take a newspaper account of an incidenta riot, an assassination, a bombingand imagine that you are one of the participants. Rewrite the account as a first-person poem, using some of the details from the account. Objects have histories, too. Take an object and research its social history; where did it come from? How was it used, developed, made? What groups of people used it, misused it? Write a poem talking about what you've found. Imagine someone who lives in another part of the world under very different economic and political circumstances.

Have that person talk about your life in America from his or her perspective. You can also do this exercise by imagining someone else in America, but of a different class, race, and so forth. Everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Think about where you were when some major event occurred; write a poem that draws a parallel between something in your life and the event. What communities of people do you identify with and feel you belong to?

Write a poem from the voice of this collective "we," talking about your troubles, your failings, celebrating your strengths. In what ways do you feel oppressed?

It could be anything: a car, a lipstick, a tie, a photograph. Write a poem that is a conversation between you and a politically powerful figure from any moment in history.

The person can be living or dead; you must have a question you want to ask this person, and ask it in the poem. Let the person answer the question, too; make it a true conversation. Remember John Lennon's "Imagine"? What would your ideal world look like? Write a poem that begins, "Imagine. Remember, though, that you'll need to stay specific "Imagine no war" sounds great in a song, but won't cut it as poetry. How would "no war" look in concrete terms?

Offer an alternative vision. You don't need to cover everything that's wrong in the world; choose one thing, to start. When we imagine the birch trees and wooded hills of New England, we remember the poems of Robert Frost and Donald Hall. We can't think of the poetry of Garrett Hongo or Cathy Song without envisioning the hibiscus flowers and volcanoes of Hawaii.

The name Philip Levine calls up Detroit, its car factories, its black clouds and slick rivers. When we hear the word "landscape," we tend to think of poems about nature: hills, valleys, forests, and animal life, and those things are certainly part of it. Poets like Mary Oliver and John Haines have given us their visions of the natural world. But a landscape includes any vision of place: the heated rhythms of the city, the long silences of the desert, the pastel houserows and clipped lawns of the suburbs, the sights, sounds, and smells of our neighborhoods that help to shape our imagination and build the foundation on which to compare all landscapes that follow.

Often, where we grew up is not where we are now. The landscape of our childhood may be literally l o s t familiar streets and family businesses bulldozed for condos or shopping malls. Or it may be far awayin another state, another countrybut that place remains in our memory. Where we come from, where we live now, the particular places that are ours, help to define us, and influence and inform our poetry.

Robert Winner was born in the Bronx in A spinal cord injury at the age of sixteen kept him in a wheelchair until his death in The Sanity of Earth and Grass, his complete poems, sounds from its title like a book of nature poetry. It's in fact a book which often evokes the city where he lived: the landscape of the Bronx. Here's how one poem begins: HOME. My heart and my bones wince. It's so damn sad-looking and ugly, the Bronx driving past those small hills blighted for miles with bleak six-story desert-like apartment buildingsthe landscape I come from.

It's so damn ugly in its torment of knifings and fires, I forget I was happy there sometimes in its damp and dingy streets, living my life with the five continents of the world in my mind's eye. Maybe it was beautiful before us: the coast with no landfill a bluffed peninsula of swamps and forests, a wilderness that became another wilderness beds and linoleum, school books, musty hallways, laughter, despondency unremembering earth, a riverbed millions flowed on, clinging briefly to some masonry, then gone.

Winner's childhood landscape is unsentimentalized; there's none of the easy nostalgia one might expect from the title "Home. It can also be a gateway into our internal and emotional lives. Look at this poem by Charlie Smith:. T h e landscape of Los Angeles has given Smith a starting point for a p o e m about the "endless internal battering" that is wearing down the narrator.

T h e images Smith describes correspond to the narrator's emotional turmoil, his exhaustion; we could say either that h e projects his agitation onto the landscape, or that he finds his inner state reflected in the actual world. T h e palm trees are "untouched," "limp," "black against the huge sky. This is one way to use landscape, and it captures a truth about how the world works on us and how we, in turn, create it.

Richard Hugo used the word "trigger" to define the thing that hap-. Hugo was often inspired by a town, especially one he had never seen before and was only passing through. The town would spark his imagination: Who lives here? What do they do all day? Why did they leave that tree growing in the middle of the road? He liked to write as if he knew the answers to those kinds of questions, as if he was born there in fact, or from the viewpoint of the corner grocer or an illegitimate child raised by the minister and his wife, or in the voice of the town cripple.

The title of his book of essays and lectures on poetry is The Triggering Town. It's a pleasure to read, and the title chapter is filled with ideas for ways of looking at a town that can be used as writing exercises.

The importance of place is also discussed at length by the poet and novelist Margaret Atwood in her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. She studied the writing of her native Canada and compared it to that of the United States.

She found that the concerns of Canadian writers seemed to arise out of their preoccupation with the landscape of that country, the harsh winters and wild open spaces.

Survival, victimization, terror of nature, desolation, solitude, destruction, and courage are a few of the themes Atwood found Canadian writers to hold in common. Compared to American writers, Canadians explored these themes more frequently, reflecting what she calls "a national habit of mind.

Wendell Berry has written a book called The Country of Marriage, in which he sees marriage as a new territory for exploration and discovery. The title poem of David Bottoms's third book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, is about a man whose recent divorce compels him to travel across the country as a way of understanding what he's been through. We've included this poem in "TwentyMinute Writing Exercises" in the last section.

In the Woody Allen film, "Annie Hall," the character grows up in an apartment on Coney Island under a roller coaster in an amusement park. The character becomes a stand-up comic, much like Allen himself. We can see how growing up under that roller coaster affected the comic's sensibilities. We see it in his strange brand of. How do your surroundings influence your poetry? Do you write in long, sweeping vistas, or are your poems like tall buildings, squat houses, ornate churches?

What do your thoughts look like, your feelings? You may find surprising correspondences between your poems and where you live or you may not yet have let your surroundings into your work. The place moves them, and moves with them, making its way into their poetry. Near San Ardo the grasses tremble and oak trees bend to the south against a constant wind. Here our faith is tested by the air that passes us ceaselessly and takes each lost breath as we stumble through the hills.

The monotony of breathing, like our heartbeat, is not the reassuring monotony of the hills stacked row upon row beyond our bearing and our ken. The sun moves with the wind and will be gone, but there is another light coming from below, casting trees from the shadows.

There is a shadow beneath me which moves as I move, and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass know more than I know of my duty here, my worth and my chance. Places leave their mark on us, and Young adds that we also leave our mark on them, even if it's only in the form of footprints. With the use of the words "we" and "our," Young creates a generous feeling of inclusiveness. We see ourselves as a group connected both by a place as well as to a place. It's interesting to compare Robert Winner's "sixstory desert-like apartment buildings" to Young's "hills stacked row upon row.

A New Geography of Poets, published by University of Arkansas Press, is a gathering of poets from all over America, presented by the region in which they live. Who are the poets in your area? How are you different; what sets you apart? How are you alike; what kinds of things specific to the place where you live unite you? These questions may form the basis for an exploration of what it means to be a poet in a particular place. Coupled with your own childhood landscapes, the place where you find yourself now may reveal itself to you in surprising ways.

The writer's journey is both inward and outward. The poems we record along the way are the traces we leave, the tracks laid down for others to follow. How does growing up or living near the ocean, in the desert, in a small town or a large city influence your writing? Is life sparse or abundant, brilliant with color or subtly shaded? Is the animal life around you tame or wild?

Is there an obvious change of seasons? Is the population large or small, working class or wealthy? Do you live near a factory, a river, a shopping mall, a nightclub, a school, or a graveyard? What's next door, down the street, around the corner? Write a poem about where you live as if you're writing to someone who's never been there.

Use place names and street names, the names of neighborhoods, neighbors, and friends. Be detailed and specific. In "The Palms," Smith begins with a sort of cinematic overview. Write a poem about some journey you took in the pasta road trip, hike, business trip, family vacation. Describe the particular place where you stopped off, broke down, or visited.

Try to make the scene evocative of whatever your mood was at the time. At the end of the poem, see if you can do what Smith does zoom in for a closeup. Read C. Williams's poem "From My Window" in Tar or in his Selected Poems, and write your own poem describing a scene outside your own window. Do this even if your window faces a brick wall or a boring landscape; use your imagination to make it interesting.

Now brainstorm imagesremembered or imaginedfor these places. Your images for Paris might include snow on iron benches in the Tuilleries, cats in the cemetery at Pere Lachaise, croissants piled in a basket on a cafe table. Write a poem that includes some of the places you've been, and at least one place you haven't. Find a common thread to connect the past and future: an emotion, a desire, a particular person.

If you lived in many places, pick the one that feels most alive with memories, images, emotions. In your poem, try to explain what that place meant to you at that time of your life; what were the discoveries you made there, what difficulties did you encounter? Most of us, as children, had a secret hiding place or a favorite spot to get away from our families and our ordinary lives.

It might have been a spot in the woods, a fort in the yard or basement, or the roof of the house. Take a two-hour field trip to someplace nearby, and stay there with your notebook recording images and impressions. Some possibilities: a hotel lobby; a cafe or restaurant; a woods; a laundromat; the beach. Make it someplace you haven't seen before, or at least haven't seen from the particular vantage point you choose. In a poem, recreate that place for someone else. Brainstorm a list of words you identify with the city: skyscraper, crosswalk, asphalt, balcony, dumpster.

Then make another list of words that are often used to describe the natural world: clouds, columbine, riverbed, granite. Write a descriptive poem about the city using words from your natural world word list, or a poem about the country using your city word list. Remember the poems by Winner and Young. Mixing things up like this will often spark fresh ideas and interesting language. Images haunt.

There is a whole mythology built on this fact: Cezanne painting till his eyes bled, Wordsworth wandering the Lake Country hills in an impassioned daze. Blake describes it very well, and so did a colleague of Tu Fu who said to him, "It is like being alive twice.

And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is. You might remember the smell of honeysuckle, or your father's cologne. A day in your childhood comes back, every detail sharp and precise, and you hear a shallow creek running over the rocks, your dog snuffling in wet leaves, your friend's voice calling you.

You can still see the face of your dead aunt, or cousin, can taste the meal you choked down after the funeral. Frances Mayes, in The Discovery of Poetry, says that images are closely linked to memory, that in fact many of our memories consist of images. That partly explains why they're so powerful, why we respond to them in a much more visceral way than we do to generalized abstractions.

What, exactly, is an image? For most people, "image" carries the. Put simply, though, an image in poetry is language that calls up a physical sensation, appealing to us at the level of any of our five senses. Images may be literal: the red kitchen chair in a dim corner of the room; the gritty wet sand under her bare feet. Or they may be figurative, departing from the actual and stating or implying a comparison: the chair, red and shiny as fingernail polish; the armies of sand grains advancing across the wood floor of the beach house.

Think of going to the movies, how at first you are aware of yourself, sitting in a darkened theater, watching people and objects moving around on a screen.

You are aware of the person sitting next to you, the walls or ceiling of the theater in your peripheral vision. Then a shift occurs and the world outside the screen falls away and you fall into the movie, aware of nothing but its world of story, emotions, images.

And sometimes, an even stranger occurrence: the actor on screen lights a cigarette or pours a glass of wine and for an instant, the scent of smoke or grapes is in the air. Some synapse in your brain has been nudged and produces the memory of the aroma. That's what an image should do, produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is "like being alive twice. If you ask several people to describe coffee, one person might describe its smell, another its color, another its taste or the sound of beans being ground.

Poets need to keep all five sensesand possibly a few moreon continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language.

Images are a kind of energy, moving from outside to inside and back, over and over, a continual exchange. You take a walk outside after the first snowfall of the season, fill your eyes with the dazzling surfaces of the fields and your lungs with the sharp pure air. Your boots sink in, crunching down to the frozen earth, and when you return to the cabin the warmth feels like a pair of gloved hands placed on your cold ears. You sit down and write about the snow. Miles away and years later, someonea readercloses her eyes and experiences it.

Images are seductive in themselves, but they're not merely scenery, or shouldn't be. An image, when it's doing its full work, can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch,.

Take a look at the following poem by T. H u m m e r , which unfolds in a succession of carefully chosen images. T h e speaker here is fascinated by the color of the woman's hair and overwhelmed by his love for her.

He shows her to us, letting us observe. These literal images give way to figurative ones as he articulates his feelings: her hair is briefly "like metal," and then in the long, wonderfully imagined description that follows he compares himself to a boy falling into a silo.

Notice how he deepens his imagery by using specific, physical details: "swirling in a gold whirlpool" is a vivid visual image, while the noon sun "hot on his back, burning" is an image that is tactilewe can feel the sun, imagine ourselves falling "down in a gold sea, spun deep in the heart of the silo.

The image of the silo is both fascinating and frightening; love is both dream and nightmare, a sort of death which is terrible but also beautiful. Also notice that the whole poem is in the form of a question: "What is i t.

Like the love described, the poem won't let us go in one long sentence it takes us into that whirling and shining. Now look at how another writer, Gary Soto, uses color in this poem about young love. The first time I walked With a girl, I was twelve, Cold, and weighted down With two oranges in my jacket. Frost cracking Beneath my steps, my breath Before me, then gone, As I walked toward. Images Her house, the one whose Porchlight burned yellow Night and day, in any weather.

A dog barked at me, until She came out, pulling At her gloves, face bright With rouge. I smiled. Touched her shoulder, and led Her across the street, across A used car lot and a line Of newly planted trees, Until we were breathing Before a drugstore. We Entered, the tiny bell Bringing a saleslady Down a narrow aisle of goods.

I turned to the candies Tiered like bleachers, And asked what she wanted Light in her eyes, a smile Starting at the corners Of her mouth. I fingered A nickel in my pocket, And when she lifted a chocolate That cost a dime I didn't say anything.

I took the nickel from My pocket, then an orange, And set them quietly on The counter. Outside, A few cars hissing past, Fog hanging like old Coats between the trees. I took my girl's hand In mine for two blocks,. Then released it to let Her unwrap the chocolate.

I peeled my orange That was so bright against The gray of December That, from some distance, Someone might have thought I was making a fire in my hands. Knowing a little about how colors work together makes this poem and its last image even more impressive. Artists have used this trick: adding a bit of red to green to make the green appear brighter.

Soto sets his orange against a gray sky. Using the color gray as a backdrop makes the orange brighter, larger, wilder, more like the fire he likens it to with words. Also notice the other colors and references to light used throughout the poem: the porchlight that burns yellow, the girl's face "bright with rouge," and the light in her eyes that precedes the fire in his hands, all carefully chosen to create a feeling of unity.

Each of these specifics works toward animating that last incendiary image. No matter how many times I try I can't stop my father from walking into my sister's room and I can't see any better, leaning from here to look in his eyes. It's dark in the hall and everyone's sleeping. This is the past where everything is perfect already and nothing changes, where the water glass falls to the bathroom floor and bounces once before breaking.

Images Nothing. Not the small sound my sister makes, turning over, not the thump of the dog's tail when he opens one eye to see him stumbling back to bed still drunk, a little bewildered. This is exactly as I knew it would be.

And if I whisper her name, hissing a warning, I've been doing that for years now, and still the dog startles and growls until he sees it's our father, and still the door opens, and she makes that small oh turning over. As we've said, images aren't always primarily visual. This is a poem in which the narrator's vision is in fact quite murky, even blocked. She enlists the aid of the dog to help her see what she can't bear to see.

What she remembers more vividly is mostly auditory, the sounds of the past: the water glass falling, the dog's tail thumping, a whisper, a hiss, a growl, and then that heartbreaking "small oh. These vivid images enable us to feel the helplessness and vulnerability of the sister.

Images are the rendering of your bodily experience in the world; without them, your poems are going to risk being vague and imprecise, and they will fail to convey much to a reader.

The more you practice with imageryrecording it in as much vivid detail as you can the more likely it is that your poetry will become an experience for the reader, rather than simply talk about an experience. We are surrounded by images daily. Pay attention to those images, and use them to make your poems. What images obsess you? What do you think about when you are daydreaming? What kinds of images do you find yourself returning to or seeking out for comfort? What object, person, place, picture could you look at for hours and not get bored?

Look at one of your obsessive pictures and describe it intimately. Do it in prose, quickly; don't worry about making it a poem yet. Then, contrast it with an image that you repress continually, that you really fight with. Describe that second image just as closely. Once you've done that, try joining the two images; mingle them as Hummer does in his poem, and see what happens.

Keep an image notebook for at least a month. Jot down the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and sensations of your life. These are good seeds for future poems; take an image you've noted and try to expand it with lots of descriptions, and with your ideas and feelings about that image. Describe a pair of shoes in such a way that a reader will think of death.

Do not mention death in the poem. Write a poem composed primarily of auditory images. It is said that our sense of smell is the most primitive, that a scent can take us back instantly into a memory. Jot down some smells that are appealing to you.

For each one, describe the memory or experience associated with that smell, making sure you bring in the other senses in your description. Write a poem for each smell. For starters, you might title each poem with the triggering smell: "Roses," "Chanel No. Do the same for smells that you particularly dislike. Take an image from a film, something that impressed itself on your memory, and write about it.

Describe the image or scene and then try to talk about why it made such an impression. Describe a painting or photograph not an abstract one, but something that pictures people or objects as though the scene is really happening; animate it with movement, speech, story.

Imagine a literal world, in which nothing was ever seen in terms of anything else. Falling blossoms wouldn't remind you of snow. A dancer's sensuous grace wouldn't resemble the movements of a lover; the shape of a cloud would never suggest a horse or a sailing ship.

If such a world were possible, it would be a severely impoverished one. In fact, we live in a figurative world; our language and our thinking, our very perceptions, are metaphoric. We continually make comparisons and connections, often without even realizing that we are doing so, so comfortable are we with seeing in this way. Contrary to what you might think if you are beginning to study the craft of poetry, the use of figurative language isn't a new skill; it's one you already know.

The trouble is that most of the figures in our language are so common and have been heard so often that they're virtually useless for poetry, which deals not in cliched, worn-out expressions but in surprising ones that reveal new connections or cast a different angle of light on an idea or experience. There, we've just resorted to figurative language "cast a different angle of light"to explain what we mean.

Wright, or Charles Bukowski's "Love is a dog from hell. Once, perhaps, to say "she sticks to him like glue". The Toxic Language Dump is a place you should get familiar with as a writer. One difference between good and not-so-good poets is that the good ones recognize when they've written stuff that deserves to be dumped, and load up the truck.

The not-so-good poets leave it in. There's a line at the end of Norman Dubie's "The Funeral," about the death of an aunt, that has always haunted us: "The cancer ate her like horse piss eats deep snow. But using figurative language in poetry is more than finding a startling simile or metaphor that grabs your reader. Look at a poem by Sharon Olds, who we're convinced has a machine in her basement which operates day and night generating similes. Along with her odd line breaks and often intense emotional subject matter, Olds's prodigious use of similes immediately stands out as characteristic of her style.