Imagery in Poetry: How Poet Joy Harjo Creates Strong Imagery

Joy Harjo is a poet, author, and musician who became the first Native American Poet Laureate in 2019. Joy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a citizen of the Mvskoke Nation, a self-governed Indigenous tribe in the United States. She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a teenager and later graduated from the University of New Mexico. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop. Joy has written several landmark poetry collections, two memoirs, plays and screenplays, musicals, and children’s books.

Joy began writing poetry in the early 1970s, during the US’s civil rights movement and as a renaissance of contemporary Native art was underway. Joy also plays the saxophone and flute and performs with the Arrow Dynamics Band. She has released seven studio albums and has taught creative writing at a handful of top colleges and universities.

In poetry, imagery is a vivid and vibrant form of description that appeals to readers’ senses and imagination. Despite the word’s connotation, “imagery” is not focused solely on visual representations or mental images—it refers to the full spectrum of sensory experiences, including internal emotions and physical sensations.

There are a few main types of imagery in poetry, including:

1. 1. Visual imagery: In this form of poetic imagery, the poet appeals to the reader’s sense of sight by describing something the speaker or narrator of the poem sees. It may include colors, brightness, shapes, sizes, and patterns. Examples of imagery include metaphors, similes, or personification, which can help conjure a clear picture in a reader’s mind.
2. 2. Auditory imagery: This kind of imagery invokes a reader’s sense of hearing or sound. It may include music and other pleasant sounds, harsh noises, or silence. In addition to describing a sound, the poet might also use a sound device like onomatopoeia, or words that imitate sounds, so reading the poem aloud recreates the auditory experience.
3. 3. Gustatory imagery: This use of imagery appeals to a reader’s sense of taste by describing something the speaker or narrator of the poem tastes. It may include sweetness, sourness, saltiness, savoriness, or spiciness. This is especially effective when the poet describes a taste a reader has experienced before and can recall from sense memory.
4. 4. Tactile imagery: In this form of poetic imagery, the poet focuses on the sense of touch, describing something the speaker of the poem feels on their body. It may include the feel of temperatures, textures, and other physical sensations.
5. 5. Olfactory imagery. In this form of poetic imagery, the poet appeals to the reader’s sense of smell by describing something the speaker of the poem inhales. It may include pleasant fragrances or off-putting odors.
6. 6. Kinesthetic imagery: With kinesthetic imagery, the poet describes a sense of motion. It may include the sensation of speeding along in a vehicle, a slow sauntering, or a sudden jolt when stopping, and it may apply to the movement of the poem’s speaker/narrator or objects around them.
7. 7. Organic imagery: In this form of poetic imagery, the poet communicates internal sensations such as fatigue, hunger, and thirst, as well as internal emotions such as fear, love, and despair.

Strong imagery can help your reader relate to your work. Here are Joy’s tips for incorporating figurative language:

• Give yourself space. With her poetry, Joy gave herself a place to exist, a place for her spirit to “stretch out.” Often, this meant picturing one visual image. “I didn’t have the luxury of spacing out time. Maybe that’s what I did in my poetry… My poems were driven by one image like a warm south wind, a crow riding waves,” she says. “I remember when I wrote that, and I needed that. I needed a place to be far from Earth, and a place to be able to ride waves and have that vantage point… that wasn’t labored and that wasn’t burdened. That was the power of that particular image.”
• Images should serve a purpose. Imagery should serve a purpose, whether it’s mental, spiritual, or metaphorical. “I think about how a lot of Native art was created and is created to have a certain purpose,” Joy says. “So a lot of these images… serve a certain purpose. They can open up a moment. It gives a place of peace.”
• Lean into metaphors. You can use metaphors to help you effectively communicate your message. “It’s about going sideways so that the meaning is not only direct and literal, but the meaning opens up just like the consciousness opens up when you listen,” she says. “That’s how we humans find meaning; we find it in metaphor. It inspires us and keeps us going.”

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