To take imagery deeper, and explore its potential for catalyzing new poems, you could expand upon the observation exercise above. For example, try taking one image from your observation and writing a page about it, not limiting yourself to what you see and hear and smell directly anymore, but allowing the sensory input to spark other thoughts, memories, images, story, and emotional weight.
Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt” seems to do just this, beginning as it does with a physical examination of how a shirt is made: “The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, / The nearly invisible stitches along the collar …” We imagine the writer may actually be looking at a shirt as he begins writing this. But then the imagination takes over, and the shirt’s journey comes to life: “the collar / Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians / Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break.” By line 10 of the poem we are in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911. Then a jaunt through Scotland, and finally the modern-day factory in South Carolina where this shirt has received its inspection by someone named Irma (a detail we presume the speaker knew from finding the inspection sticker on the inside of the fabric). The poem takes us on a high-speed, higher-intensity whirl through history, reimagining its scenes, and ends back where it started, in close examination of this shirt’s physical features, but with new import: “the buttons of simulated bone, / the buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters / Printed in black on neckband and tail.”