Imagine a literal world, in which nothing was ever seen in terms of anything else. Falling blossoms wouldn’t remind you of snow. A dancer’s sensuous grace wouldn’t resemble the movements of a lover; the shape of a cloud would never suggest a horse or a sailing ship. If such a world were possible, it would be a severely impoverished one.

Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux The Poet’s Companion [NY: Norton, 1997]

Dear SunWinkers:

First, some miscellaneous business: Boris called my attention to a book by Dr. Mardy Grothe called I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like. I hadn’t heard of it (and didn’t steal the title of last week’s column from him, although I hardly thought I was the first to think of that pun) so I looked it up. Seems like an interesting guy—how many marriage counselor/lexicographers do you know? He’s written a number of books in the same vein, he is published by Harper, and he’s earned the approbation of the likes of Richard Lederer (Anguished English), so check him out.

Second, I have to tweak Len Maxwell again. It’s just so much fun. Mister “Metaphors-Lose-Me” drew one of the most striking metaphors I’ve seen in quite awhile: “I have a throw-rug in my living room and, as I clipped my toenails, most of the albino boomerangs landed on that rug.” And boy did they boomerang on him when “Sandi” came home! I love it!

To the subject at hand:

Now, this is just the opinion of one man (me) who happens to be a poet in his own mind, a student and big fan of the poetry of the last half of the twentieth century known as modern poetry. (It’s like music, you never stop loving the music you listened to in high school.) Here it is: if you want to be a poet, but you’re not interested in metaphor, then why bother? Thinking in metaphors is the business of being a poet. Period.

*sound of diving to the floor in a heap ducking a rotten tomato*

Okay, the fact is, there are other ways to illuminate an idea or image in poetry. There’s the luminous image; the abstract poem; the technique of isolating in a compact and concrete way a particular, relatively small, thought or phenomenon (á la haiku), etc. I was just reading that Robert Creeley “largely eschews metaphor.” (I’ll check that out and report back…)

(I’m back. Creeley seemingly often works without drawing a metaphor, per se. But he can when he wants to. His poem The Language ends with a striking one: “Speech is a mouth.”)

So there’s more than one way to skin a poem. But for pretty much any serious poet, metaphor is an indispensable part of the craft. Without metaphor, you’ve got a Hallmark card. As Addonizio and Laux said above, a world without metaphor, were such a thing even possible, would be unbearably dry.

For me, exploring the territory (tension) between the metaphor (vehicle—a dissimilar image) and the thing being illuminated (tenor) is what makes me a better poet—and it’s also what makes writing poetry therapeutic. What the poet does—and this is what makes reading poetry enjoyable as well—is to make new connections, to cast new light on things of importance to human beings.

The Prompt

The following exercises, if done sequentially, may provide a sort of process for coughing up a poem. (I’d love to know if it works for you.) Or do one or more, in any order, whatever spins your mirror-ball.

1. Look through an anthology of poems and hunt for metaphors and similes. Mark or copy the ones that jump out at you. What do you like about them? What do they show you about the target of the comparison?¹
2. Make two lists of nouns, one made up of things you observe, the other made up of random, flavorful words that don’t refer consciously to the scene you’ve just been observing. Aim for a dozen words in each list. Then mix and match words from each list, striving for unusual connections.¹
3. Write a brief 7-10-line poem with an abstract title: Loneliness, Fear, Desire, Greed, Suffering, Happiness, etc. Make the poem a metaphor for the title without using the abstraction itself in the poem.²

 Adapted with gratitude from: ¹Creating Poetry by John Drury [Cincinnati OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1991] and ²Addonizio and Laux, op.cit.

Here are some examples of #3:

The Game by DW

(Before you say anything, the title is an abstraction. The word “game” inside the poem is not.)

The Derelict by DW

Futility by Wilfred Owen

Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery

Hearing by W. S. Merwin

Theology by Ted Hughes

Captivity by Louise Erdrich

Instructions for submitting your response to SunWinks!

Love,

Doug

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.