Getting Real: A Writer's Workshop for Poets - presented by Nancy Mitchell, Salisbury University February 6, 2008

One of the biggest challenges a poet encounters is the attempt to make the abstract tangible, or as Keats said, to express the inexpressible. Without the poetic devices of figurative language, metaphor, simile, to tether the intangible to what is percieived by the senses, abstractions such as love, loss, joy and happines, however deeply felt by the writer, remain inaccessible to the reader. Even when a poet is successful in tethering abstraction to an image, it can often be cliched and fall short of what is unique to the writer's experience. A simple example of this is from Nancy's own teaching history. A first year creative writing college student was struggling with a poem in which she wrote the lines: "I have toget out of town/ I've let everyone down/ my life is a mess/ I'm no success. After much prompting to thether the abstraction of 'no success' to a tangible image, she, in frustration blurted out: "A forty year old/ bleached blond/ waitress working night shift/ at Pizza Hut. Ah! From there she was able to begin to write a poem located in her own personal perspective by tethering abstractions to original, specific images unique to her experience.

After this brief introduction, including the above example, we begin an exercise in which each person would write an image of their own from a corresponding list of abstractions given to the group. The joy of this exercise is in sharing those images in discussion with the rest of the group; we come to see images highly individual and original.

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