The Many Imageries
Karrie Xu
The purpose of many words is to remind us of things rather than to announce things. In poetry, visual elements of some kind are often present between lines. Moon, silver, dust, roundelays... poetic wordings like these create a series of visual links and gift the discourse a range of non-visual attributes that are sensuously suggestive. These attributes collectively build a strong conceptual image for the audience.
However, this nuanced notion of the image is often hard to put into words, and the interpretations of a single piece of poetic writing can be discursive due to the bifurcation of readers’ previous association with the elements presented and their new response to the aesthetic relationships established by the poets. Attempting to unravel a poem's imagery, The Many Imageries traces the braiding of images around which the poem is built. It reproduces and visualizes the ongoing cognition and the discursive imaginative space where each audience explores a stretch of poetic discourse.