A Poetry of Perception

Introduction: “Making Sense” of It All

There are many ways of imagining what poetry gives us, as readers, as humans, to enrich our experience (as readers, as humans). For my part, I have always valued poetry’s subtle, splendid way of asking us to look at things (everyday things, vast and sublime things) anew—to re-see the world, to re-see the language we use for describing the world to ourselves, to cease taking these things for granted. It is precisely this function of poetry that sometimes makes the reading and writing of it feel “hard.” After all, it is unnerving to encounter the common property of language—something we live within and feel we know—used as an artistic rather than journalistic medium. It’s a little like walking into the house you grew up in to find all the furniture made out of gelatin or glued to the ceiling. Or like looking in the mirror and finding you don’t quite recognize yourself—you feel a little estranged, you wonder at this weirdness. That wonder makes you look closer, and in looking closer, you see things that have always been there as if for the first time. This experience of being “woken up” to the world, which poetry can give us, is very exciting indeed.

I have a few exercises I find help to cultivate this experience (and appreciation) in young people, first as readers, then as writers—I’ll describe four of them in detail here. I gather these activities together in orbit around the idea of making sense, a notion I encountered in the work of environmental writer David Abrams, who writes, “To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world.” By “making sense” I mean, first, to ground our attention in the real, the actual, the palpable—to pay careful and mindful attention to the things we learn at the border of the five senses where the individual meets the world that he or she is moving through. To become, as novelist Wallace Stegner once put it, “an incorrigible lover of concrete things.” And then to imagine language as a sixth sense that gives us another, deeper way of accessing those things, “making sense” of them by describing them, connecting them, re-imagining them, and allowing ourselves to be tenderly (sometimes profoundly) affected by them. The writer Annie Dillard once said, “Don’t write what you know. Write what only you know.” She did not mean that the writer ought to be in possession of specialized knowledge; she meant that the writer should try to be faithful to her unique perception of the world. These exercises and activities will help young people to do just that.

Study 1: Ideograms, Imagery, and the Dance of the Intellect

It is often less useful to think of poetry as writing about something, and more helpful to imagine poems as writing around their subject matter. I sometimes tell my students that this is how a poem is like a doughnut—the sweet matter of it defined by the invisible center. Ezra Pound talked about logopoeia, what he called “the dance of the intellect among words.” It is from Pound, too, that we get the first activity in this series—the ideogram.

Pound “invented” the ideogram based on a misunderstanding of Chinese characters, thanks to his reading of the critic and translator Ernest Fenollosa (who was, at any rate, more of a Japanese than a Chinese scholar). Pound read that the written signifier for autumn in Chinese comprised the character for tree crowned or topped by the character for flame. From this and other observations, Pound developed his notion of the “ideogram,” which remains, however inaccurate it may be as a means of understanding character-based writing systems, a useful poetic curiosity in English because it arranges concrete, metonymic signifiers around an abstract, invisible center to create an imagistic suggestion of an unfixable concept. Famously, Pound’s ideogram for red is a relatively square-shaped piece, situating in its four “corners” the words rose, cherry, iron rust, and flamingo, as follows:

CHERRY         FLAMINGO
ROSE               IRON RUST

As humans, our sense of sight is almost certainly the most dominant of the five at our physical disposal, and it is perhaps for this reason that imagery (mindfully written) is one of the most pleasing and evocative of poetic devices. But good imagery is not good because it is surgically precise in the accuracy of its description; it is good because at the same time that it draws us a picture, it awakens a mood or a feeling or an idea. Prose, or journalistic language, as the poet Stephane Mallarme calls it, describes; poetic language evokes. Considering Pound’s ideogram, we have two iconic examples of a very red red—the rose and the cherry. Iron rust is a reddish-brown, and I think we often think of flamingoes (partly because of how we talk about them) as being pink more than red. Three of these things we easily associate with the natural world, whereas rust (though a perfectly natural process) often conjures images of industry. So we can gather that this little text is about more than just essentializing redness. Red is, in this case, not one but many. It is gathered to suggest something bigger than the sum of these parts—prosperity, maybe, or southerliness, or nostalgia. Read and discuss Pound’s ideogram, and invite students to suggest the mood or idea evoked by these four words, perhaps recalling William Carlos Williams’s statement on imagism: “No ideas but in things.”

Next, ask students to agree on a color other than red. Begin by brainstorming a list of colors beyond the standard seven or so of the familiar rainbow. In addition to orange or green, we have a spectrum of others to choose from—chartreuse, magenta, cyan, burgundy, beige, to name but a few. Asking students to push themselves past the first three or even ten colors that immediately come to mind will help to prepare them for the rest of this exercise, as well as for the activities to come. Often the first three or even five things one thinks of are “received” ideas—shared, predictable, the kinds of things that feel obvious, almost second-nature. We aspire to traverse these, arriving at the idiosyncratic, unpredictable, even startling. Once students have brainstormed a series of possible choices, put it to a vote. The color with the most votes will form the “center” around which to build the class’s ideogram.

Say the students choose, for example, yellow. It is likely they will start by suggesting, again, the usual concrete items we associate with that color—lemons, bananas, the sun, corn on the cob, sunflowers. After they’ve exhausted those, it’s important to keep asking—what else is yellow? Taxis, rubber duckies, corn tortillas, rain slickers, caution tape, butter. Then, onion skins, sticky notes, school buses, yield signs, egg yolks, urine, grapefruit rinds, fog—and now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re not talking so much about what we think of as yellow, we’re talking about what we actually see as yellow.

Once the board or screen is full of things we see as yellow, it’s worth pausing to remind students that we aren’t just making a picture of yellow. What the class chooses will suggest something about yellow—but it doesn’t have to be everything there is to say about yellow. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, just visceral, evoking “yellow-ness” (or “teal-ness” or “tan-ness”). Then, another vote. Or rather, a few rounds, in which each student gets two votes, until you narrow it down to the final four. And ka-pow! You’ve made an ideogram. If you still have class time, or if you wish to assign homework, students might be asked to produce another ideogram—perhaps of a color, or perhaps of an abstraction like liberty or health or belonging. You can always ask the students to show their work, as they might be asked to do when solving a math problem. You might insist they brainstorm at least twenty-five things from which to cull the four comprising their ideogram, and even write a short paragraph discussing why they chose the four images they finally settled on. In this way, students engage in making sense of a color or another abstraction, connecting it to an accessible series of images they perceive as somehow connected, and using those to write around rather than about the center at hand.

Study 2: Captioning the World

Ideogram-ing attaches concrete things to abstract ideas; this next exercise inverts the activity, attaching abstract ideas and descriptors to concrete things. But we’re still engaged in the unifying activity of making sense, learning to re-perceive the world and asking others to let their attention linger on something “common” for a moment longer than it usually might. For this activity, which is almost a kind of fieldwork, students will need chalk (quite a bit of it), and either the students or a designated leader (perhaps the instructor) will need a camera.

For this activity, students will go out into the world (they can stick to a campus, if necessary) and label things with adjectives that describe them. But not the first or even second adjectives that suggest themselves—no writing “hard” or “sharp” on a rock, for example. Rather, the adjective students write on an object should be both apt and at least a little bit surprising. Working in pairs or small groups, students take to the field, creatively (and temporarily) “vandalizing” the environment, documenting the effort in pictures that can be compiled for a class website or photo album. In the past, I have had students label a boulder as “ancient” or a log in a running river as “undying.” I’ve had a student draw an arrow on a brick wall, pointing to a tree whose leaves had gone vermillion with their autumn change, and on the brick wall next to the arrow, labeled the tree as “rich.” Another student drew an arrow pointing to the sky on a sheer concrete wall and wrote “unknown.”

Ask students to keep their descriptions to a single adjective. The constraint of the single adjective requires a little more of the imagination, which is what we’re after in the end; the imagination that reaches not for escape from the real but for more and more magical access to the real. The real is not boring or fixed, and while it may sometimes include the sad and cruel, we should not toss about the phrase the real world as though the real were all drudgery and misery and pain. The real is infinite, and it is everywhere, and it is waiting for us to notice.

Study 3: Zuihitsu

As a teacher and a writer, I don’t really think of writing as a craft that one learns and then repeats in order to perfect it, like blacksmithing or bread-baking. Writing is, rather, a practice that engages the writer in her whole capacity as a human: reading, thinking, feeling, choosing, and acting. A writer from whom I learned this and whom (in turn) I like to teach to students is the great Japanese poet Sei Shōnagon. Written during the eleventh-century Heian period, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is arguably the first and certainly the best-known illustration of the genre called zuihitsu, which translates literally as “following the brush” but is perhaps best interpreted as “occasional writings”: series of lists, anecdotes, and observations written by a perceptive, articulate, well-educated and highly opinionated woman.

Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book includes, among others, lists of “Squalid Things,” “Things Worth Seeing,” “Things That Lose By Being Painted,” “Hateful Things,” “Splendid Things,” “Rare Things,” and (found below) “Elegant Things.”

Elegant Things

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Wisteria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow.
A pretty child eating strawberries.

Here the idea of “elegant” is not defined in a way that narrows and contains it; rather, by an accretion of examples, an idea of “elegant” is illustrated, opened, expounded upon. Elegance seems to arise at the place where the human-made and the natural or organic come into confluence with each other, and, in keeping with the notion, it seems to include (perhaps even require) a degree of impermanence. This is one of the consolations of writing—not capturing or fixing, but noting and appreciating the ever-momentary, always-fleeting pleasures, anguishes, longings, and curiosities of the world.

When using this in the classroom, I ask students to model (though not imitate) Sei Shōnagon; I ask them to suggest a series of possible lists based upon Shōnagon’s and then to choose (usually by class vote) one of the proposed lists. (In one class, for example, my students chose to write about “Annoying Things.”) I then separate students into smaller groups and ask them to create lists that are more than just a litany of annoyances but really evoke “annoyingness.” Each small group makes its own zuihitsu for the agreed-upon concept (“Annoying Things” or “Things Found in a Supermarket” or “Sorrowful Things”), and students almost always devise lists that imagine “annoying” (or some other feeling) differently, which subsequently makes for a terrific conversation supporting the notion that “what only you know” (to return to Annie Dillard) has as much to do with attention, perception, and sensibility as it does with knowledge and experience. Among its other virtues, this exercise in “perceptual” poetry is a good antidote to the way we often talk to young people about poetry as a way of “expressing” a self. The self is not the subject here, but it is wholly present as a conduit, a medium, a means; indeed, the finest writing often happens when (to quote William Blake) “we see with, not through, the eye.”

I also find this exercise particularly friendly to young people (young women, for example) who are unfortunately accustomed to thinking about how they look (as in: appear) rather than how they see (as in: perceive). To be a teenager is to be pathologically self-conscious, but this is almost antithetical to really good writing. (Here we should not confuse self-consciousness with self-awareness.) I do not intend this as an exercise in self-erasure; rather, I intend it as an exercise that empowers the student in her perceptive capacity, cultivating her relationship to her own interiority as it is altered (and as it transforms) the exterior world of which she is a citizen. Along the same lines, Shōnagon’s writing addresses itself not to a broad audience, but to an intimate confidant. In its conspiratorial attitude toward its reader, zuihitsu invites candor, risk taking, and sometimes startling originality—all things we still subtly and often even consciously discourage in (particularly) young women. Sei Shōnagon’s engagement with her (invisible, absent, but intimate) interlocutor also asks students to engage with the question: to whom are you writing? This question is, I think, among the most important in poetry. For much contemporary poetry is imbued with anxiety about its own reception, perhaps even relevance. Poetry that addresses itself to a skeptical audience will make for itself a skeptical audience—it will (by its very attitude) invite its audience into that species of relationship. Too much of our poetry comes at its audience on the defensive, thinking of the audience as a critic rather than a comrade or confidant. Such poems can come off as aloof, standoffish, or coy, or they can be evasive, sometimes even opaque. These are coping mechanisms, but not craft. From Sei Shōnagon, we can learn a poetic that is personal without being confessional or “expressive.” From her, we learn to ground the poem in the “stuff of the world,” as poet Kathryn Cowles often says. There’s no need to be defensive when you just call ’em how you see ’em.

Study 4: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboard

If ever anything rhymed with the idea that poems write around rather than about their subject matter, it’s got to be Wallace Stevens’s notion that “Poetry should resist the intelligence almost successfully.” Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” also converses (if you will) elegantly with Sei Shōnagon and the other activities mentioned above. This tremendous poem is one that rewards as much close and careful reading as one can spare for it, and it deploys its many glimpses of its elusive subject via a litany of meticulous poetic gestures worth discussing with students. Here is attention and perception; here is image and comparison; here is list and accumulation and re-presentation; here is description and evocation. After inviting students to read and discuss this poem as a group, assign them to write their own “Thirteen Ways” of looking at something—something as everyday and overlookable (and ubiquitous) as a blackbird.

Here’s a tip, though. The first time I engaged teenagers in this activity, they wrote thirteen ways of looking at “my hair dryer” and “my car” and “my skateboard” and “my parents” and “my church.” And that’s all right, because the teaching moment (should this happen) comes in letting students know that they missed what the assignment was intended to elicit from them—namely, the same activity of perception that the previous three studies cultivated. Instead they wrote about themselves, and perhaps that’s to be expected. Trying to figure out who you are is, in fairness, a pretty all-consuming task. But one thing literature can ask us to do is to let go of the idea of a fixed (or fixable) self, to surrender that notion to the activity of perception and the activity of empathy. Literature has many uses and consolations, but I do think that above all, compassion (for the world and the creatures inhabiting it) is creativity’s finest enterprise. Whether students write brilliant, perceptive, poetic “themes and variations” the first go-round, or whether the teachable moment arises and they have to reconsider and rewrite, the poems that finally emerge from the process almost always represent a real range of voices and foci, an impressive imaginative scope.

And so, in each of the students’ “Thirteen Ways” and among the students who produce them, we get a kind of microcosm within which we can see how and why contemporary American poetry has evolved into what it has—contemporary American poetries. We are multiple and multifaceted, and there is no reason this should not be the case. Permission is, I think, as important as instruction, exuberance as useful as rigor.

Further Studies


Henry James insisted that writers ought to be people “upon whom nothing is lost.” These exercises and activities are meant to encourage young people to become exactly that, and more: to become writers who can vividly, evocatively, and personably communicate their findings as observers, attentive to the subtle movements of the world, of the world in them, of language. But before (and above) anything else, literature ought to be a pleasure. The study of literature ought to enlarge the possibilities for pleasure, not contract them. Sometimes I hear people (especially young people) say they “don’t understand poetry,” and I hope these studies help to dissipate that anxiety. For even if you can’t say what a poem is “about,” perhaps because you can’t say what the poem is about—if it knew, it wouldn’t have come to be as a poem, it would have been an aphorism or essay—you might understand the text better than you think. Is it a sunny poem or a rainy poem? A night poem or a day poem? Would it open a door for you, or would it chase you down an alley with a baseball bat? Is it wearing shiny heels or dingy sneakers? “Getting it” need not be a prerequisite for having a good time. It’s not you versus the malevolent puzzle master, after all; it’s a meeting of consciousnesses—two activities of perception converge, and something wonderful and alchemical takes place.