Poetry from Daily Life: A poem like a painting

This week’s guest on Poetry from Daily Life is Maryfrances Wagner, who lives in the Greater Kansas City Area. This is her second column in the series. The first appeared on Nov. 19, 2023. Maryfrances began writing poems as an 8th grader and today writes mainly poetry and some essays. Among books she enjoyed writing are "The Immigrants’ New Camera" and "Solving for X." Her latest book (2025) is a collection of stories about her students and is called "Backstories." A unique fact about Maryfrances Wagner is that she has been hit by a car, not once but twice, while crossing the street! ~ David L. Harrison

William Carlos Williams and the single image poem

One of my favorite poets is William Carlos Williams, the imagist poet who believed a poem could be like a painting — words that provoke a picture and initiate thought. Here’s his most famous poem:

The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician for forty years as well as a poet. He says, “When they ask me ... how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.”

For a while, Williams joined the Paris crowd of writers and artists, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and several visual artists. They wanted him to stay in Paris, but he wanted to practice medicine in New Jersey. He’s only one of many writers who also held a medical degree. Others include John Keats, Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton and Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock Holmes.

The Imagist Movement became popular in the early 1900s through Ezra Pound’s promotion. Here’s Pound’s most famous imagist poem:

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Williams embraced the image poem and believed poetry should be concrete, focus on people and everyday objects, see beauty in the ugly, and create a reaction through appealing to one or more senses.

Here are a few other Williams poems:

This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold    

Poem
As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jam closet
first the right

forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flower pot    

Young Woman at a Window
She sits with
tears on
her cheek
her cheek on
the child
in her lap
his nose
pressed
to the glass

Here’s Williams finding beauty in the ugly:

Between Walls                      
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle

A single image can present itself in few words. Here are a few of my own:

The Potato Bug
The potato bug
on the Hosta
chews a doily.

Slug
Streak
in the sun
is a prism.

Train of Thought
It slices through darkness
pulling one good thought.
The smoke of promises
trails the last boxcar
out of town.

Take a few moments to stare out a window, walk around outside, or capture a memory of something you saw that startled you and write some of your own single image poems. It doesn’t take long to record what you see. 

Maryfrances Wagner was Missouri’s sixth Poet Laureate and winner of the Missouri Arts Council Individual Artist of the Year Award. She and her husband, Greg Field, have two rescued dogs named Annie Sexton and Lucille Clifton. For more information, visit https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/maryfrances_wagner and http://maryfranceswagnerwriter.fieldinfoserv.com.