Poets & Writers
Published on Poets & Writers (https://www.pw.org)

Home > Image or Detail?

Image or Detail? [1]

Poetry [2]
3.2.21

Rick Barot’s poem “The Wooden Overcoat [3],” published in the April 2012 issue of Poetry, begins: “It turns out there’s a difference between a detail / and an image.” Barot develops this train of thought and proceeds to engage in differentiating between the two, positing that a dandelion on the sidewalk is “mere detail,” but “the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep / is an image because it moves when her body does.” Write a poem that sets up an argument in the first sentence and then proceed to test it through rhetorical devices and concrete imagery. How can you use a poem to prove a thesis?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/image_or_detail

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/image_or_detail [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/poetry [3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55470/the-wooden-overcoat