Finding and Developing Imagery that Resonates: The Object Correlative with David McLoghlin

Course Summary

Finding and Developing Imagery that Resonates: an Eight Week Craft Workshop in The Objective Correlative and the Deep Image.

The “Objective Correlative” (T.S. Eliot) is, quite simply, the ability to find in the “outside world” a signifier, or equivalent, for our inner human experience. For poets, typically, we see the Objective Correlative in the form of an image. From the haiku poets, via the Imagists, to Plath and beyond, imagery has been continually identified as the engine of the poem. Some of the most significant poems employ “deep imagery” that resonates on more than one level, staying with us long after the poem is read. Finding imagery that conveys our deepest experience is at the centre of this course.

Course Outline

William Carlos Williams wrote “No idea but in things,” communicating the importance of remaining concrete and “showing” rather than “telling”, which is one of the roles of the image in modern poetry.

We will divide our time equally between craft and workshop. Each class will dedicate an hour to reading and discussing exemplary poems, learning to read as writers, identifying prompts and what we would like to “steal” and how we would go about implementing our learnings in our own poems.

The second hour will be dedicated to workshopping our own work. Depending on student numbers, we should be able to workshop one poem each per class. We will read poems by diverse poets from a variety of English-speaking countries, as well poetry in translation, from several literary traditions.

Students will have the opportunity to workshop work-in-progress as well as to write new work according to prompts developed in class. The process of finding deep or resonant imagery is an intuitive one, and I find a supportive workshop can be helpful in that goal. We will read each other’s work to offer assistance in terms of how to improve it, but also to identify pathways to the next draft via deep imagery that is strong enough to carry our experience.

Week 1. The Poetry of Noticing. Haiku, and modern poets like Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert.
Week 2. Poetry of Witness. Carolyn Forché and Suji Kwock Kim
Week 3. The power of Fairy tale imagery.
Week 4. The poetry of trauma, specifically Sharon Olds.
Week 5. The personal is political: Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath.
Week 6. African American poets: Charif Shanahan.
Week 7. Surrealism and surreal imagery: Lorca’s Poet in New York
Week 8. Heaney and images rooted in continuance in the midst of fracture.

Course Outcomes

Students will

• Learn to listen to their intuition in finding objective correlatives (images) true to their experience.
• Improve their ability to show and tell in their work.
• Improve their ability to edit their own work, particularly in terms of imagery.
• Learn to read as writers, by identifying prompts from exemplary texts to spark their own writing.
• Learn how to offer constructive criticism in a workshop context.

David McLoghlin’s third collection, Crash Centre (Salmon Poetry, 2024) was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. He was awarded a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2023, and was selected as one of two poets to represent Ireland on the Versopolis EU poetry network. He has taught creative writing widely (both memoir and poetry, online and in person) in the community and in university settings, and offers writing advice on memoir and poetry manuscripts.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.