+++The exploration of the poetic image is one of the defining features of the modernization of poetry. The standard use of the image in contemporary poetry can be seen as fitting into a triangulation of three different approaches that emerged out of Romanticism as the early modernisms, each of which offers its own solution to the Romantic problem of the mind in the world.
+++(1) The Romantic image is composed of a speaker's perceptual observations—the data of their senses—that are then abstracted into rhetoric. The romantic image thus contains both the literal sensory image and its abstraction into emotional and intellectual content. This image opened the way for poets to write about the actual world around them, giving them permission to include details from their real lives. Additionally, by dramatizing the role of the mind in interpreting the senses, the romantic image also inaugurates a fundamental problem in modernism: the gap between mind and world.
++++++((1A)) The surrealist image, which is an involution of the Romantic image. It cuts off the external world and instead draws on the subconscious of the writer. Its images are extremely striking juxtapositions, hyper-encoded complexes of mental content that cannot easily be decoded. In fact, their primary beauty is in their perpetual mystification. They embody different tones of mystery and darkness, libidinal or unspeakable or even transgressive forces with the human mind. Here, the gap between mind and world is solved by making the mind the world.
++++++((1B)) Imagism, which strips Romanticism bare of its rhetoric. The image acts as a translation of force from the external world to the inner world, thereby fusing the two. The human speaker is central as the sensory and curatorial force that carves these images out of its perceptual field. Imagism dissolves the gap between mind and world by resorting to an empirical immediacy of the human senses.
++++++((1C)) The objective correlative, which takes the opposite approach to the surrealist image. Here, the image has a definite referent; the writer wants to evoke a specific feeling or idea. Readers are able to pick apart the image and discuss it a classroom. The gap between mind and world is stabilized through the transformation of the world into a symbolic technology for human expression.
+++All three of these sub-forms of the image were developed by the 1940s, and since that time poets have considerably refined them, while also exploring ways to combine or hybridize them. As can be seen in each of these images, however, a certain figuration has remained constant: the manipulation of images by a human speaker.
+++I want to offer a few notes on the possibility of developing new forms of the poetic image beyond this figuration. I don't necessarily think the above triangulation needs to be replaced, or that it even could be, but I do think it is possible to expand it, to add some nodes to expand the triangle into a quadrangle or some higher dimensional space. Alternatively, we can think of the next set of propositions as a separate space, a new arena in which image-making activities can be employed to de-center the individual human speaker, so that a poem can be a become a multi-agent system.
++++++[[2A]] Concretion. Would it be possible to write an image as an actual being appearing in the text as itself? Can we reverse the image so that instead of feeling a real thing tunnel into the mind of the poet, we feel the text tunneling into the mind of a real thing? The way to do this is to understand the text itself as a kind of instantiation of this other being. We do not get the thing in itself, but we get its textual equivalent, its impression or ingression in the text. To do so, we need to let the image model this being's own internal and external relations. The image needs to be allowed to dilate, to expand across lines, to employ everything in the mechanics of language to capture the richness of this being. In order to treat the text as something other than the fabric of the poet's own mind, the text needs to be treated as a separate kind of thing, it needs to be viewed as a different kind of mind, a separate creature from the poet, a hyper-sensitive creature that can register the minutia of the other beings that leave impression in it as images. Thus, the poem itself becomes a kind of meta-creature or meta-being. Every poem is a different creature, composed of the many kinds of beings that form it through their textual equivalents. Images are the textual impressions of real minds the come together to form worlds.
++++++[[2B]] Images of reading. Because of the development of many kinds of text as a result of the internet and post-industrial capitalism in general, the reader exists in a world of many different kinds of reading. Every text is visually presented to a reader and is grasped, either immediately or after a period of reading, as requiring a certain kind of attention and processing. After this grasping, the text itself becomes an image of this kind of reading. We rifle through these different images of reading all day, moving from social media posts to articles to books to signs to emails to poems to text messages to user agreements. However, too often, poets write poems that require only one kind of reading—usually, a slow, focused reading that does not seek too hard for exact meanings. In this sense, they are not making use of an array of reading-images that lie waiting to be deployed. To use images of reading, one must again think of the image as dilating beyond simple phrases. An image of reading is a whole text block. In a traditional book, we can think of each page as an image of reading. But poets can also re-work the page to contain multiple images of reading. The top left corner might contain one image of reading, while the bottom right corner might contain a different image of reading. By doing so, poets would add a new dynamic energy to their texts, a vibrant ability to shift focus that mirrors the structure of contemporary cognition. Different forms of reading are different forms of cognizing worlds.
++++++[[2C]] Words as images of letters. The contemporary use of typing has redefined our relationship to spelling. Misspellings have become a common element in the process of using language. Spelling, spacing, font, abbreviation, emoji/emoticons, slang, and neologism have all become everyday elements in how we express ourselves in textual language. As result, how we type something becomes an image of what we want to say. When I use an emoji in a text message, the emoji does not exist in some separate order from the letters. The emoji is both picture and symbol, and it exists right inside the text message because the text is also picture and symbol. When I read a word, I receive the word’s content, but I also see the letters that compose it—and, most importantly, I almost see its content through those letters, in the same way that I can see through the gloss on a photograph to the image beneath. Or, the way I see an image focus through the movement of the lens. It as if the spelling (and all the other visual elements listed above) are part of that focusing apparatus, in a way that allows that apparatus to be seen through its shifting. There are infinite beauties to be found in non-standard typing. Typing embodies the process of becoming before a world is fully present.
++++++[[2D]] Form as Image. One of the defining elements of poetry is that it cultivates the reading of form. Reading form means reading what is not strictly there. For instance, reading iambic pentameter involves a kind of virtual gloss in which the infinite subtleties of intonation in language are reduced to a binary system, a kind of lattice or grid that is imaginarily overlaid on the page: the system of scansion. The ability to read the form of iambic pentameter involves this invisible overlay. Iambic pentameter, then, is form as an image. In our contemporary era, there are many more ways to think of form. The use of concrete poetry in the middle of the century was only one of the most obvious and literal ways to do so. Poets can manipulate language in different ways to cultivate new ways of reading form. Form is the way in which a being and its world solidify themselves as continuing to exist.
+++One element these directions all have in common is that text itself acts as the image. It is not completely non-referential, though the meaning of reference has definitely been altered. Many of them focus on dilating the image, so that rather acting through a couple of words, the image now appears as longer swaths of text. This is appropriate for our time period, in which text itself has gained the capacity to act as an image, and images having gain the capacity to work within and as text.