Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

What is a memory that, in your mind, feels bright, vibrant, alive? Freewrite for 8-10 minutes a description of that memory-image. Focus on a description of the image itself. Emotional or moral qualities may arise naturally in the images, but don’t mention those qualities by name—let them arise in the images themselves.

Poem: “Spring and All: III” by William Carlos Williams

Retrieved here.

The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
A cold wind ruffles the water
among the browned weeds.
On all sides
the world rolls coldly away :
black orchards
darkened by the March clouds —
leaving room for thought.
Down past the brushwood
bristling by
the rainsluiced wagonroad
looms the artist figure of
the farmer — composing
— antagonist.

Divinations

William Carlos Williams was a leading poet of the Imagist Movement—a movement within 20th century Modernism that espoused an image-centric ideal of poetry. The Imagist aesthetic is one of crisp, clean sentences, of simplicity in form and language, and of leading with images. The Imagists didn’t comment on the images of their work so much as let the images speak for themselves, and the “argument” of an Imagist poem is in the poem’s form and arrangement of images, rather than anything explicitly stated by the poem’s speaker.

You can see those ideas here in this poem, whose vivid images are only briefly adorned by abstract ideas. Even those abstractions are largely those of the imagination: ideas in the head of the poem’s subject, a farmer thinking about the early Spring planting of seeds as yet aboveground. We’re presented with a scene a little sinister, a little uncomfortable: black clouds and cold winds and barren fields. Yet Williams has no problem finding humor in the moment, the image of the world rolling “coldly away” “leaving room for thought” in the farmer’s head.

It’s the end of the poem that feels like an epiphany. I love those two invented compound words. Rainsluiced wagonroad. What a delight it is to say those words out loud! I can see the images by way of their mouthfeel. And that ending is a little cryptic, no? The farmer is suddenly an artist, composing—and why, suddenly is he an antagonist? What is antagonizing? Who is the protagonist? The poem’s concrete images set the stage for this sudden abstraction, which sits like an empty space, a patch of sun between two clouds.

What do you make of that word? What are the competing forces, the tensions shaping this poem?

Perhaps the farmer is an antagonist of Nature, in that the farmer shapes the land in a way that Nature tries to resist. Perhaps the farmer’s art is in the imagining of a land not yet shaped. The truth is I don’t know—but this poem’s grounding in imagery gives way to more imagery, in that, when given an abstraction, I fill it with more concretion.

Learn more about the use of imagery at my craft article here: https://writers.com/imagery-definition

Imagist Poetry Prompt

This prompt is inspired by the Imagist approach to poetry. Write a poem that describes the stark reality of something through vivid, intense imagery. Resist the urge to use metaphor, simile, symbolism, or other forms of comparison: simply describe the thing as it is observed.