The image is at once easy to identify and difficult to define. If the image is, in a basic sense, the visual language of poems, the concept also extends to modes of meaning making which sometimes have little to do with visuality, as well as to related concepts such as metaphor and conceit. This chapter explores this complex conceptual field by considering examples by Amy Clampitt, Bernadette Meyer, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Plath, and others. It shows that the image serves often to unify a poem or structure its narrative, and it proposes that we approach the image as both procedural and constructed. A single poem's presentation of an image in process or the repetition of an image across multiple poems may, in this way, represent a psychological drama or a narrative of intellectual understanding. From this perspective, images are not merely found; they are made.

This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.