metaphor

SunWinks! October 19, 2014: I Never Metaphor Part II

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]

SunWinksLogoDear 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: Continue reading →

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SunWinks! October 12, 2014: I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like

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A good title should be like a good metaphor: it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

Walker Percy

 

Dear SunWinkers:

I’ve danced* around it as long as I can. I must come back to the topic of metaphor. This is where I lose* some people. They immediately say, as though they were being confronted with somebody else’s religion,* “I don’t understand poetry!” “I could never write a poem!”

The mission of SunWinks! is to demystify the reading and writing of modern poetry. And so, sooner or later, we must tilt at the windmill* of metaphor. Poetry (as we understand it today) without metaphor is as banal as a greeting card.* Metaphor is the very stuff* of poetry.

*These are all metaphors. I will continue to mark similarly the metaphors in this column.* (yup, that’s another one…)

As you can see already, figurative language (metaphors) makes for compelling and colorful* writing, period, never mind poetry. Language itself is metaphor. Every word, Emerson said, is a metaphor; words are by their nature metaphors–the word “table” represents the four-legged piece of furniture we eat on. Words originate as metaphors; the word “column” refers to the fact that columns in newspapers were usually presented in narrow columns of type. These columns of type were so named as a visual metaphor to the tall, narrow columns which hold up ancient temples. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! August 31, 2014: Cubism Isn’t Just For Squares

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Cubism is an artistic movement of the 1910’s and ‘20s exemplified by Picasso. The idea of cubism is to deconstruct the objective components of a subject and reassemble them in striking ways. So Picasso pulls out eyes and nose and breasts and contours and assembles them on the canvas as though he had turned around and thrown them over his shoulder like a bridal bouquet. The effect is to open the mind and force us to look at the inner structure of things without being seduced by phenomena like symmetry and photorealism.

So it is with cubist poetry, which breaks its subject matter down into discrete pieces and juxtaposes them in unusual ways, creating a nonlinear effect on the mind that would otherwise be inaccessible underneath layers of the familiar flow of meaning and language. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! August 24, 2014: Keeping It Short

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers!

William Stafford got up at four in the morning and wrote a poem every day. Robert Bly admired this and spent a year writing a poem a day, which he subsequently published as Morning Poems.

 I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think you can write “The Waste Land” or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” every day. I was writing almost a poem a day a couple months ago, not in response to a challenge, just feeling fecund. Most are a page to a page-and-a-half long.

You get a feel for a certain length. The beginning is about half a page. The development is about half a page. And the ending is about half a page. You write the beginning, and after about 6-10 lines, it’s time to start thinking about getting into the development. It’s very much like the difference between sitting down to write a minuet or a sonata. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! August 10, 2014: Check It Twice

SunWinksLogoDear SunWinkers:

Reflexive Pronoun Error of the Week:

Illinois man ‘showing off’ shotgun to friends fatally shoots self in head to prove it is empty.

 

Now on to this week’s column:

 

You make them to take to the grocery store…

You make them to do your Christmas shopping…

You make them to keep tabs on your money…

What are we talking about?

Duct Tape Wallets, of course!

 

I’m kidding. We’re talking about…

 

Lists

There’s a form of poetry called list poetry, also known as the catalogue poem, that goes back many centuries. The ancient list poems served as mnemonic devices: Polynesian list poems, for example, helped the islanders remember the names of all the different Polynesian islands. What amounts to list poetry can be found in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Homer’s Iliad, and it would not be stretching the point too much to include the genealogy in Matthew 1. Continue reading →

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SunWinks! August 3, 2014: Renaming the World

Dear SunWinkers:

The other day, Carol found a lump under her armpit the size of a small lime. We thought perhaps it was a swollen lymph node from her recent bout with the flu. Her ob-gyn brought her in post haste for a mammogram. They discovered a lump in her breast, brought her back the next day for a biopsy. Two days later, the result was in. It’s cancer. It’s very early, will probably not require a mastectomy, and will certainly not kill her. She got on Medicare in April, which is the best possible news, insurance-wise. We are also grateful for the state of cancer treatment today. She will go to a sophisticated cancer treatment center literally right around the corner. Finally, we are particularly grateful to that lymph node, and I plan to write a big check to its favorite charity very soon.

Naturally, I wrote a poem. As I’ve mentioned recently, poetry isn’t just a creative outlet; it is a way to work things out, to put words to inchoate thoughts and emotions, to shed light on the unfathomable, to make connections as an anodyne to the randomness of reality.

Poets are also in the business of turning things upside down. Poet Adrienne Rich says: “If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is renaming.”

In his book Why Poetry Matters [New Haven, Ct: Yale Univ. Press, 2008], Jay Parini states, “Poetry, therefore, assists readers subjected to violent realities by opening their minds to fresh ways of thinking. Most famously, [Wallace] Stevens defines poetry as ‘a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.’”

“Lumps” is a straightforward piece, easy to see how it is the imagination “pushing back against reality,” and to that end, an attempt to turn the idea of beauty upside down from the ideal of Hollywood and Madison Avenue with which the culture is so saturated.

Poem: Lumps

 The Prompt

Write a poem about something you don’t understand, can’t get your head around. Try to find some images (think small), or begin by writing down random words that come to mind on the subject. From those notes, perhaps something will emerge that promises to give you some sort of handle or angle on a small piece of the puzzle. Begin to write about that, and don’t try to cover too much ground. If a poem results, fine, otherwise, just tell us about the process and whether it gave you any new insights.

Alternate Prompt

Write a love poem. Begin by writing down a number of interesting things about the object of your love, things that would not ordinarily go into a conventional love poem. Then go from there. Write it in the second person, like an ode, addressing the object of love, as I’ve done in “Lumps.”

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. Or put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to.

Then comment to this post with the link to your response.

I reblog this at WritingEssentialGroup.com (you should be following that blog, too) and will list and link to your responses there. I will also comment on all responses.

Love,

Doug

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg.

 

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