Let's talk about senses . . .

Knoxville Tennessee

I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep

Nikki Giovanni

_______________________

This is an easy expansion to our exploration of metaphor and image. Take a place you know well. Make that the title of your poem. Then explore the senses it conjures. How do things smell, sound, feel, taste and look? Do you have a sense of balance? Direction? Temperature? Humidity? Does it make you feel warm, fearful, angry, happy, sad, content? Use concrete examples like Ms. Giovanni.

The key is to capture the feeling of the place so well that by the end of the poem your reader is feeling it.

Thank you Nikki for the great work.

The Power of Image

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

     William Carlos Williams

Without a doubt, images are more indelible than words. That is why we are moving from a print driven society to an image driven one. Images catch the eye, send more information in fewer lines and leave a longer impression. So, learning to use images in writing is crucial. They focus the power of metaphor with lethal accuracy.

Dr. Williams was the greatest imagist of the 20th century. He leaned on images to help him deal with the stress of his medical practice. His poems were often short (if you go to the Library of Congress, check out the originals written on his prescription pads), yet they were pithy.

When Dr. Williams retired from medicine, he traveled the college circuit and delivered his poems with rock star status to gobs of students.

The poem above was a particular favorite. Was it talking about creation? How man intrudes on life, yet life keeps going? The insidious beauty and fertility of life?

It turns out Dr. Williams lost a patient on the operating table while performing a simple surgery. It left an impression on him. He came into his office, looked out the window, and the little red wheelbarrow is what he saw.

The image somehow anchored him in reality and comforted him.

Let's use his opening to create our own images:

So much depends

On a fish

Filling my nostrils 

and belly.

     Try being more concrete. Expand one of your caption poems:

So much depends 

Upon the sails flapping

Then filling with wind

As the boat leans in the water.

     Now reach into your past:

So much depends upon

A little red wagon

Rusted by the rainwater

Beside the blonde puppies.

Further down the rabbit hole of metaphor

Remember this?

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

             e e cummings

This is actually an image/metaphor poem. 

The letters outside the parentheses make the word:         loneliness

The words inside the parentheses make the phrase:        a leaf falls

Cummings arranged the letters in a way to make them look like falling leaves.

He is the Picasso of poetry.

I contend metaphor is the basis of all poetry; rhythm and rhyme are but metaphorical after thoughts and counter points. They are eddies of swirling dust coming off the pounding feet of metaphor.

Here's an easy way to explore metaphor following Cummings pattern,

Write an abstract noun (a thought, feeling, idea):                    peace

Now write a concrete image that illustrates it:   sails fill with wind on a glassy sea

Joy

A dog’s panting smile

Sadness

The last kiss

Patience

“Do it again, daddy.”

Image Poems---rolling with metaphor

unlimited potential

clipped freedom

loving cup



gateway to Valhalla 

are leaves falling

freedom?

independence?

or loneliness?

ask the birds

Creative Lines

I----------------------------------------------------------------------------------I

sailboat       travel         journey         peace       obstacles       life       rat-race

I-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------I

tree        roots        branches        trunk         life        harmony        wind

I---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I

cloud        cycle        life        foreboding       hope       pent-up        growth

Just one image and a word create a poem, especially if the word is abstract and the image concrete---which is what we will delve into as we further explore metaphor.       

Dabbling in Metaphor

Traditionally, English teachers like to demarcate between similes and metaphors. You can use basically the same definition for both, the simile includes like or as. Metaphor: He scraped me with his claw-tipped hand. Simile: He scraped me with his hand like a claw.

There are sometimes when one is more appropriate to use than the other. One has to feel it out and think it through (the general direction of all good writing).

However, in exploring the metaphor and how it is used in poetry, for example, one must recognize the sliding scale.

If I drew a sun and then asked you to put a literal label under it, you would write the word 'sun'.

If I asked you to put a label under the picture of the sun that reflected how the sun makes you feel, you might put the word 'warm.'

Ah, we see ourselves sliding from the literal to the metaphorical.

Now if we were to put the word 'life' as a label for the sun, we've slid even deeper into the metaphorical.

What if we put the word 'eyeball'? Have we slid too far?

It depends on the context and the thought it conjures. If there is absolutely no connection for the reader, it slips into the ether of non-sequitur.

Literal                                                                                                 Metaphorical

I-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I

sun           warm           energy           gas             life               truth             eyeball

Exploring the Metaphor

Some preliminaries:

Language, by its nature, is symbolic. Thus begins the long relationship with metaphor.

As mentioned in a previous blog: Letters represent sounds. Put letters together and you have a word. The word represents an idea. Put the words together in a comprehensible string and you have a complete thought. These are all symbolic in nature.

Among the complete thoughts you can have is a metaphor.

A metaphor takes two unlike things and smashes them up together in a comparison to create deeper meaning.

We don't put any two random things together in a metaphor. They are two things thoughtfully connected to create greater understanding.

Two random things connected is a non-sequitur.

Examples: Non-sequitur = Babylonian Tupperware.
                  Metaphor = Ship of State.

One is nonsense (and often the basis for humor), the other is quite useful in understanding how things work or feel.