A common recurrence, and weakness, I’ve noted in my poetry is the lack of concrete. I don’t have solid images, if any images, and there are no appeals to sense. Much of what I write lately has been based in emotions. While emotions are a way to feel, they are not concrete. Also, the way I experience something like panic may be different from how someone else does. The way I describe panic, like a thousand rumbling wasps buzzing in my chest, rising up in my throat, may be different than someone who may say panic feels inevitable like water sluicing down into the lungs, slipping and filling slowly until the only thing left to do is drown. The images, still, are not entirely developed, and the setting or event that onset the panic is absent.
Most of my writing has been based in prose, which is easier to base a lot of descriptions, but poetry has always seemed different to me than prose. However, poetry still desires the imagery prose uses, and I’ve dropped that in favor of brevity and emotions. Prose needs both emotion and imagery, so it makes sense that poetry needs it to. Sure, poetry can be more fractured that prose gets away with, but that doesn’t mean imagery can’t exist within the shards.
One goal I’m setting for myself for the future is to use more concrete imagery in my poetry. I’ve been basing in abstract concepts that can apply to many concepts, but concrete bases can be more applicable at times.