Before Things Get Rough

Imagery is often defined as language that appeals to the senses. Imagery, however, is the meat of any poem, and going beyond this simplistic definition. One of the most important functions of imagery is to help establish tone, and relationship between imagery and tone enables a poem to describe, declare, assert, or imagine-to use voices that are objective, personal, opinionated, or wildly speculative. Tonally, the poems were aggressive, and something had to temper their edge. I went to the other extreme, looking to the most basic function of imagery-description. Obviously, all poems are, on some level, descriptive. Descriptive imagery is a foundation. It's the act of moving outside the self to make a physical thing present to one's consciousness. But images and poems rarely function in a single way. Few if any good poems are only descriptive, declarative, assertive, or imaginative. Most poems incorporate or at least gesture toward more than one tone. Many poems move among all four and/or weave them together. This is what Before Things Get Rough originally lacked. If there was any common thread, it was skepticism. Additional poems attempted to branch out from the strictly religious. On one hand, such poems moved from taking on the religious to satirizing the mythic-not much of a risk, and not much of a change in scope or tone. However, I found that the more poems I assembled, the more they began to wander away from, and then back to, the church, a reflection of my own relationship with Catholicism. A poem's tone, then, its description, declaration, assertion, or speculation, varies the intensity of the poem's heat. Variations in tum help create tension-the tension of the loud and assertive against the self-contained and quiet, the broad and external to the intensely personal, the accusatory against the wildly imaginative.