Image, Diction and Rhetoric, a Book Report

Tony Hoagland, “Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy: Image, Diction, and Rhetoric”
from Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, © 2006, Graywolf Press.

A Book or More Accurately Chapter Report
by Laura Gamache


As Kundalini Yoga describes the seven power centers, or chakras, of the body, Tony Hoagland describes the three poetry power centers as image, diction and rhetoric, listed in ascending order from where they arise in the human body. I like his idea, and the light way he acknowledges but distances himself from the judgement that higher is better. Sharon Olds’ image is not inferior to Wallace Stevens’ rhetoric, though I think he knows we will secretly continue to think so.

Image is the most potent force in poetry, he says, continuing, “the ability of images to carry complex information is tremendous.” For examples, he uses “My Son the Man” by Sharon Olds and “Tu Do Street” by Yusef Komunyakaa.

As the instinct underlying image is visual, that underlying diction is auditory, intellectual and alert to inflections of weight and implication. Diction, as defined here by Hoagland, is “speech that is consciously making reference to the history of its usage.” He uses for example Galway Kinnell’s “Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West.”

Poets are often wary of using rhetoric for its dangers of emptiness and impersonality. Hoagland identifies poetic rhetoric as relational speech signifying attitude rather than delivering information. To make his point, he uses Larry Levis’s poem, “A Letter,” which begins:

It’s better to have a light jacket on days like this,
Than a good memory.

He chooses Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” to show rhetoric’s power and its emptiness, Mary Ruefle’s “Trust Me” for her rhetorical muscle, and John Ashbery’s “Decoy” for his rhetorical virtuosity.

Good poems, all poems, our poems, he says, come from an interweaving of all three chakras. The best, as in Paul Goodman’s “Birthday Cake,” combine and integrate them “into powerful, unprecedented poetry,” that is “full of feeling and fully engaged in that feeling, but also offers shifting perspective on its feeling.” Consciousness adds power, and I will be aware of the presence and interplay of these three power centers in my poems as I revise them.