metaphor

SunWinks! December 7, 2014: Grand Allusion

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Going through my old Gather columns, I next run into the topic of allusion. Allusion is a reference to a commonly known work of literature or piece of history or culture. As with personification, allusion lets the reader relate to your poem on a deeper, more visceral level. Namely, the reader reacts with the feeling or value judgment which he or she associates with the event or piece of literature being alluded to.

A classic example is “The Second Coming” by Y.B. Yeats.

And what rough beast, its hours come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 30, 2014: Poetry Personified

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table

T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

Wallace Stevens “The Motive for Metaphor”

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Two years ago, my third column for Gather was on the topic of personification. So far, going back to my old columns isn’t giving me much of a head start. Oh, well! I must have had a lot to learn back then.

Personification is the assignment of human qualities to an animal, an inanimate object, even an abstract concept. To wit, Emily Dickinson’s

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—he knew no haste…

http://www.newforestcentre.info/gothic-poetry.htmlAssigning human qualities to an object tells us something poetically about that object. In our example, Dickinson’s poem tells us something about death. She could have just said, “Death is patient.” Giving us the image of Death as a kindly carriage driver lets us to relate to her thesis on a personal level and experience it in a visceral, sensuous way. Death didn’t show up at the door in a black hoodie holding a scythe. Death didn’t throw a bag over her head and toss her into the back seat. Death opened the carriage door, smiled kindly, and invited her in. What does that say about death? Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 23, 2014: A Likely Story

As the deer thirsts for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O Lord.

Ps. 42

Like a virgin, touched for the very first time…

Madonna

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

I’ve added an index of all the SunWinks! columns which I’ve posted here on WordPress since May. Find it among the Page links (with “About Me and SunWinks!” and “Submission Instructions”) and also at the bottom of each SunWinks! installment. It will help you enjoy the SunWinks! series in a more systematic way, like an online tutorial. With that, I’m going to start polishing up and recycling some of the 60+ columns I did on Gather in 2012-2013 to fill in the topics I need to create a complete tutorial and, ultimately, “SunWinks!: The Book.”

(I’m thinking of calling it “SunWinks!: How To Write Modern Poetry and Get Away With It.” Whaddya think?)

Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 16, 2014: Making It Up As You Go Along

 ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

                   Lewis Carroll

 SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Neologism. We all do it but nobody wants to talk about it. You’re searching for a word, and you can’t find the one you want, so you make one up. I once had a co-worker who frequently said, “I was flustrated.” I don’t know if he was aware he had made up a word, but to my mind, it’s a brilliant example of a portmanteau word. A portmanteau squishes together two ordinary words to form a third; in the best examples, the new word combines both meanings from each word in a natural “that really ought to be a word” way. (A portmanteau is a suitcase. So you throw two words into a suitcase, give it to your typical baggage handler, and a new word comes out.) So “flustrated” would be a combination of “flustered” and “frustrated.” And it can be readily intuited that that’s exactly what it ought to mean.

Jabberwock by John TennielI’ve read that “slithy” could be a portmanteau word combining “slimy” and “lithe.” “Absotively” (absolutely-positively) is another great example; I’ve heard it in common parlance and used it in my work, so I was delighted to hear it used in Steely Dan’s song “Two Against Nature.” Or maybe it was the other way around. (The neologism “grok” from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land also shows up in the same song.)

In my poem “If God Is the Answer, What Was the Question?” I throw in a portmanteau of my own:

 Browsing religion books at Goodwill,
a once-burly blue-collar fellow sidles up
and pompulates: “Can you believe people
actually think we descended from apes? Apes!”

 These things can be ambiguous, but I’m pretty sure I meant “pompously postulates.” In another, recent poem I have the line, “Rats scutter across my path…” Sounds like it ought to be a portmanteau. A combination of “scurry” and “scatter,” perhaps. Or maybe I was just being onomatopoeic. I needed a fresher alternative to “scurry.” Whole books have been devoted to portmanteau words, but we will leave them for now. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! November 9, 2014: I Went To Write My Column and a Manifesto Broke Out

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

You had [indigenous American] cultures on the Plains where each person discovered, through a vision quest, his or her own inner voice, and then came back after a week of isolation and told the rest of the tribe “who I am.” And nobody could argue with that because it came from within.

Michael Dorris

Tintern Abbey

Tintern Abbey

Poetry must come from within, or else it is superficial, dry, and remote. Paradoxically, it must come from emptiness, a place of nothingness, because if the poet doesn’t get herself out of the way, her poetry cannot be universal. Put the other way around, as the reader, the audience, if I am listening to you talk about what you think about yourself, then I become an observer, not a participant. It becomes a second-hand experience, like watching TV. If, however, you speak of what is, without judging, without inserting yourself, without nailing things down, then I can be drawn in, I can be involved in your vision and experience the universal, the resonant, in what you have to say.

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SunWinks! November 2, 2014: Word Up

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

A few years ago, my daughter brought a boy home and the three of us played Scrabble. Hannah had been boasting on me, and as usual, I pulled no punches. The young gentleman asked me, “How do I get to be as good a Scrabble player as you?” My reply: “Stay in school.” I don’t think it was the magic bullet he was hoping for.

I was just watching a feature story on a college football postgame show. I didn’t catch the name of the student-athlete, but the story was about how when he came to college on a football scholarship, he could barely read at the junior high level. So he resolved to do something about it. Do you know what he did? Continue reading →

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SunWinks! October 26, 2014: The Shadow Knows

 

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

Robert Louis Stevenson

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

In her delightful book poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words,* a collection of vignettes each followed by a generous helping of poetry prompts, Susan Wooldridge suggests “listening to our shadow.” She cites Carl Jung as saying that in the normal course of development, a child of about six will split off the side of herself that is not approved of by the outside world and suppress it, and this becomes the shadow self.

*[NY: Clarkson Potter, Inc., 1996]

Jung’s concept is much more complex than this, but I went back to Jung and it made my head spin, so we’re going to wing it. Typically or stereotypically, the side split off is the fanciful, adventurous, independent, creative self which we often call our “inner child.” There are other sorts of scenarios and resulting shadows. The obedient “good child” may have a “wicked” shadow. The abused, violent, ultimately criminal child may have a conscience (“good child”) which has been so completely repressed, it isn’t even available to the conscious mind.

Continue reading →

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New Poem: The Barber

Dark Alley by michaeljtr

This is a response to my prompt of tomorrow, October 26, 2014 (I actually wrote it a few weeks ago) on the topic of The Shadow Self.

Additionally, if I had titled this “Introspection,” then it would be a response to the October 19 prompt. But that gives away the metaphor, so that’s why I didn’t. But you might want to look at this from the standpoint of that earlier prompt.

Poem: The Barber

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