Dear Readers,
Forgive me, for I am a poet, and so I shall cite a poet’s words in this introduction, but as writers, regardless of genre, we are all artists, so feel free to swap out “poet” for “writer” or “artist” and “poem” for the piece of writing of your choice.
Dylan Thomas, in his “Poetic Manifesto” (1961), informs the reader that “one of the arts of the poet is to make comprehensible and articulate what might emerge from subconscious sources; one of the great main uses of the intellect is to select, from the amorphous mass of subconscious images, those that will best further his imaginative purpose, which is to write the best poem he can.” This is a tall order for us writers, but also a responsibility that we have to our readers. Images can be powerful tools for creating understanding, driving a piece of writing, and saying much with little. But how do we, as writers and readers, learn to do this? There are no “Articulating the Subconscious” textbooks out there (to my knowledge).
We can learn to master our craft and the various tricks (as Thomas calls them) that make our writing great by reading the work of those who have already mastered them. Thomas confides, “I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather, wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers.”
So choose a trick, observe the well crafted eggs of a writer you admire, then become the tiger and lay some eggs of your own. In this issue, our trick was image, that tool essential to connecting with our reader and building understanding. Here we have a pair of essays:
- Drowning Eyes and Green, Cold Stares: Eye Imagery in the Stories of Tobias Wolff by Steve Otfinoski – explores how one author utilizes the image of the eye in multiple works
- Spirit Guides the Art of Poetry; Craft Guides the Path by B.E. Wanamaker – looks at how mastery of craft has helped four millenia worth of female poets “make comprehensible” that “amorphous mass” that is our subconscious
Happy reading,
Colin D. Halloran