Here's an exercise guaranteed to increase your ability to write crisp, evocative images. Take a postcard or picture that really grabs you and write a poem about it. Here's some strategies:

Closely describe the image itself.

Link what is there to someone/something else, or let it trigger something, like a memory, or an idea about love, life, truth, beauty, etc.

Make a story out of it. What happened just before the moment captured in in this picture? What will happen next?

Let the people or objects in the picture speak. Give them a voice.

Remember figurative imagery: What are the things in the image like? Use similes and metaphors to expand perception of the image beyond the frame.

Did you think about the five senses in poetry. 

Are you noticing the five senses in poetry you read? 

And most importantly, are you using them in your poetry?

Set up a "Fermentation File". Say you think of a line or phrase, but the poem hasn't flowed out just yet. Set up a special place for cool, emotional phrases and lines in your poetry journal and write these down. Go back to these gems often and someday, a lovely poem will flow out of them. About a year after I started doing this, I was sitting in a coffee house in Bezerkeley, bored stiff, and took out this file and from it wrote six poems! Those little phrases had been fermenting and transmogrifying in my mind and eventually came out, transformed!

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