METAPHOR DELIVERS:

An Integrated Approach to Teaching and

Writing Poetry

Jeri Kroll and Steve Evans, Flinders University

1. Introduction ‘… poetry is a train of thought that refuses to arrive’ Eric Beach, ‘I hate poetry’ (Beach 1993)

Eric Beach’s subversive, ironic and witty ‘I hate poetry’ suggests that a poet can be a kind of agent provocateur; poems can invite, tease, state, frustrate and illuminate. This article wants to prevent students missing the poetry train (and all the linguistic play it entails), so that they do not end up bored, hanging about the station, waiting for a train that never intended to stop. It aims to help teachers to be better conductors, too, so that they can be both passionate and knowledgeable about the familiar and exotic destinations to which poetry takes us.

First, it will engage briefly with the debate about poetry’s precarious status in contemporary culture. Then it will define poetry and focus on how metaphor, or metaphorical thinking, is at the heart of what poetry can do. It focuses on both the reading and the writing of it, because the two, we believe, not only complement each other, but are inextricably entwined – that is, if we want to engage fully with poetry’s benefits and challenges. Finally, it offers suggestions for exercises and poems that can be used in class.

The debate about poetry’s difficulty, its use in the schools and universities, indeed its social and cultural relevance, has been going on in the US, the UK and Australia in varying degrees since the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, the crisis in Australian education recently gave birth to a Poetry Australia Foundation Education Online Forum moderated by Warwick Wynne (pafeducation@yahoogroups.com) and a subsequent issue of the Poets’ Union magazine, Five Bells (Vol. 12, No. 1, Summer 2005), dedicated to ‘Poetry in Education’.

In 2004, discussing teaching standards in schools, Melbourne writer Christopher Bantick, wrote:

English teachers have been mortally wounded by their persistence in teaching inaccessible verse and then not being sure themselves of the intended meaning of the poet. The kids hate it, with good reason.

… The tragic truth is that poetry, through neglect by teachers, is terminally ill in the majority of Victorian schools.

… Without poetry, the minds of children are impoverished. Shocking as it may seem, children will not remember a letter to the editor. They will not remember a grammar lesson and they will not remember an essay topic on why computer games are wrong. But they will remember poetry well taught. (Bantick 2004, p. 11)

Some teachers might regard this crisis bulletin as hyperbole, but it will describe

the dilemma of others who fear poetry or feel poorly equipped to teach it. The help we offer is not of the various online varieties, or in the form of packaged lessons (Judith Wright in a pre-digested, family pack), as helpful as they might be in some cases. One of the most basic elements of poetry is within reach: metaphor. Not only does an understanding of metaphor help in specific instances, it leads to a grasp of the nature of poetic thought and, hence, the way in which poetry leads to the ‘stretching’ of ordinary language (Hawkes 1972, p. 71).

Poetry is a genre, a literary form among others, but it also involves a particular way of perceiving. Imagination — ‘the ability to conjure up images of what’s not actually there’ (Gross, in Harper 2005, p. 71) — gives rise to metaphoric thinking. It displays us at our most inventive, perverse and surprising, and is a faculty that seems ‘hard-wired’, or innate, as British poet and novelist Philip Gross says, in our species. It is this elemental quality in poetry that caused Aristotle to spend so much time discussing its qualities in the Poetics and the Rhetoric. He says that ‘the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor’ because ‘we learn above all from metaphors’ (Rehder 2005, p. xiv). It is one of the ways in which we begin, as children, to make sense of the world, as we will illustrate shortly.

Although poetry is grounded in language and its particularities, then, it is not necessarily and by nature elitist, because it can exploit language in all its richness and variety, from formal diction to colloquial idiom. Once students can be encouraged to see how we think poetically all the time in our daily lives, then the light bulb comes on, the door opens — the clichés crumble — and they can go on to fabricate their own metaphors, and hence those insights peculiar to them.

2. First Things First

‘Can Poetry Matter?’ Dana Gioia (1991) ‘Who Killed Poetry?’ Joseph Epstein (1988)

Before attempting to explain what we believe poetry is, we might as well jump in the deep end and ask the question that plagues teachers at both secondary and tertiary levels: does poetry matter? Why teach it and how do we justify it to reluctant students, parents and bureaucrats? Possible answers obviously condition how we present poetry to young people; what kind of poetry do we ask them to study and what models do we provide for their own writing?

A number of articles appeared in the United States in the 1990s addressing poetry’s decline (see Gioia 1991), focusing on the state of contemporary verse and the influence of universities on the poetry subculture. Public perception of poetry as difficult, elitist, irrelevant, etc., however, is paralleled in Australia. In fact, poetry hardly has a public profile, notwithstanding National Poetry Week; hardly any new collections are reviewed in newspapers and there is intense jockeying for space in the few journals that do so. Except for those who write bush ballads and/or those who have the time and energy to tramp round the country giving public readings and hawking their wares, most poets’ public faces are exposed only at literary festivals or on occasional school visits. What Gioia says of America seems to be true here as well: ‘Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture’ (Gioia 1991, p. 4). Recent US Poet Laureates such as Billy Collins (2001–03) and Ted Kooser (2004–present), and state Poet Laureates such as Sharon Olds (New York 1998–2000), among others, have attempted to rehabilitate poetry’s reputation through outreach programs, websites and popular anthologies (such as Billy Collins 1988, 2004, 2005 and Robert Pinsky 2004), but it is too early yet to see what kind of effect they have had on poetry’s public identity or the educational system at large, as opposed to their individual profiles.

Although a detailed analysis of why this has happened in Australia is beyond the scope of this article, some of Gioia’s comments apply. How poetry is presented at schools and universities is a common complaint: ‘One might say that outside the classroom – where society demands that the two groups interact – poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms’ (Gioia 1991, p. 6). Both the method and the work studied contribute to the problem. The nature of that interaction often determines that once they have left school, students will have nothing more to do with poetry. They do not leave with an appreciation, let alone love, of the art, and this affects our poets. Walt Whitman threw down the gauntlet: ‘To have great poets, there must be great audiences’ (1991, p. 7).

What are these audiences missing if they do not ever encounter poetry again? Gioia harks back to William Carlos Williams’ often cited ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, which suggests a dichotomy between what is current and supposedly therefore relevant and the intangible benefits of art. It is just like poetry not to pin down its intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic satisfactions. Human beings will not find ‘what concerns you’ in ‘what passes for the new’, but in

Despised poems. It is difficult

To get the news from poems Yet men die miserably every day

For lack of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams (2005 Online)

We will turn in a moment to the metaphoric nature of poetry to consider in detail why it matters; what kind of perceptions can it offer or discover? How does it make

us sensitive to words and, therefore, sharpen our thinking? George Orwell’s analysis in the 1940s in ‘Politics and the English Language’ of the effect that the decay of language has on an individual’s understanding of self and society is still relevant: ‘the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’ (Orwell 1966, p. 194). In particular, overuse of dying metaphors through laziness is one of the practices that impoverishes language (p. 196). Left unchecked, it leads to the situation where ‘political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’ (p. 203).

Poetry, on the other hand, stimulates the intellect and imagination; it is a site of linguistic complexity that both hones our verbal skills and generates aesthetic pleasure. As well, to stay vibrant and engaged, poetry needs to be remade for each generation, each culture. As Wallace Stevens says in ‘Of Modern Poetry’:

… It has not always had to find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time …

Wallace Stevens (Stevens 1965a, pp. 239-40) Teachers need to encourage the next generation, therefore, to say itself, using all

the linguistic resources available, drawing on individual and collective experience. When Language Poet Bob Perelman asserts that ‘poetry … remains alive by its insistence that there are no last words’ (Perelman 1999, p. xvi), he suggests that artists continually remake the truth and, therefore, continually need new ways to express it. Martin Harrison provides another way of understanding this process for teachers when he explains poetics as ‘a study of the way in which knowing is represented and a doing of that knowledge’. For him, ‘poetics is, in short, a study of what might be termed “realisation”. It is about bringing to consciousness one’s own and one’s work’s relationship with time’ (Harrison 1999, Online). The necessity for being aware of one’s place in the present and in literary history implies that teachers must help students to reinterpret the past that necessarily has conditioned what they are now.

The challenge is twofold then. Teachers need to seek out contemporary poetry themselves to discover the myriad of styles, forms and voices available. They also need to understand how voices from past centuries can speak to us. Poet and educator Ron Pretty conceives of the challenge in this way: ‘to convince teachers … and educational bureaucrats … that poetry is not a frill or “extension activity” but is in fact at the heart of the educational enterprise. The ability to use language in the service of vision, the ability to make connections, the ability to make imaginative leaps into understanding’ (Pretty 2005, p. 20) is what poetry offers — which brings us naturally to try to define it and, of course, metaphor.

3. What is Poetry? A poem should be equal to: Not true For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf

Archibald MacLeish 1973, ‘Ars Poetica’

Our approach so far has been to highlight the linguistic richness and variability of poetry. Poems are, to state the obvious, made out of words. As poet and academic Lewis Turco phrases it, ‘How something is said often has more to do with what is said than anything else’ (Turco 1973, p. 16). The sound and texture as well as the meaning of the words create the unit that is a lyric poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion in the Romantic period of poetry as something like ‘the best words in the best order’ is still perhaps one of the most useful in highlighting poetry as a craft as well as an art form that is firmly grounded in specific times and places: ‘A poem is that species of composition, which … propos[es] to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part’ (Coleridge 1973, p. 269). Coleridge believed that the poetic imagination creates an organic whole in each poem from the raw material of the world and so recreates that world anew: ‘[The poet] diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination’ (p. 267). In his manifesto, ‘Ars Poetica’, Archibald MacLeish doesn’t worry about the concept of truth but implies that poetry has the kind of unity and authority of any created entity: ‘A poem should not mean/ But be’.

The best words and their order that produce a new vision will shift for each poet as vocabularies change, as speech patterns vary, as society evolves. Understanding words of past poets in their social and cultural contexts will help us to apprehend their visions, and open our eyes to strategies that we can transform and update to embody our own. In addition, diverse reading can help to explain to students why imitating the diction of the past cannot give them individual voices, since archaic constructions and outmoded vocabulary do not reflect their experience. ‘Words do not “mean”; we “mean” by words’ (Hawkes 1972, p. 58). We have to rediscover language, and language in turn rediscovers us.

Some writers push this need to say ourselves further, suggesting that poetry is one of the prime ways we can apprehend reality in a godless universe. Wallace Stevens transforms the classical idea that poetry was divinely inspired to suggest that we, as imagining beings, create reality, which is why ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction’ (‘A High-Toned Christian Woman’, Stevens 1965a, p. 59). Furthermore, it offers the solace of some kind of truth, relative though it is, which religion no longer provides:

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us

search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them.

(Stevens 1965b, p. 32

He then logically moves on to state that ‘Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words’ (p. 33). What does it reveal? What kind of knowledge and why should that appeal to us?

First of all, poets illustrate the way in which our imaginations work. Ted Hughes begins ‘The Thought-Fox’:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star; Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness:

(Hughes 1972, p. 1)

The speaker then goes on to describe a fox, but where has it come from? The text implicitly asks: which comes first – the external world or the internal one of the imagination? Can a thought-fox be created without an external prompt? Can it leap out and return, leaving its prints on a page? We have already cited Aristotle and Coleridge on imagination and metaphor, so our minds obviously work by making images and using language to shape those images. Let us turn now to what we do when we strive towards knowledge by constructing metaphors.

4. What is Metaphor?

– through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent!

William Carlos Williams (‘A Sort of a Song’, Williams 2005)

Let us start with an assertion: the use of metaphor is integral to poetic vision. Here is another one: metaphor is critical to the way we gain understanding in our day-to-day living and to the way in which we communicate with each other. And now a third: metaphoric thinking shows us how our imaginations work. Metaphors make abstractions into particulars; they are concrete conveyors of emotion. We can link these three statements by saying that poetic vision itself is fundamental to how we apprehend the world, for poets and non-poets alike. The frequent use of metaphor in everyday life (phrases such as ‘to go out on a limb’) provides copious examples, and we all know clichés that are simply exhausted similes (‘he was as good as gold’). Reminding classes of this common exploitation of metaphor is a simple way to introduce figurative language. It also allows teachers to define clichés and to begin a discussion about why they do not work. Exhausted similes, originally created to

capture specific perceptions, lose that freshness and specificity through overuse and function like abstractions.

For the purposes of our discussion, similes and metaphors can be grouped under the rubric of figurative language. In fact, the order of complexity moves something like this. The base is the image, or picture. A word can be a picture (fire, for instance). Jacques Derrida followed Anatole France in asserting ‘that metaphor inheres in individual words and that consequently our thinking is pervaded by metaphor’ (Rehder 2005, p. xvii). Then comes the simile, comparing two unlike things using ‘like’ or ‘as’: ‘The mother’s skin feels sheer as a moth’s wing’; ‘the mother’s nose sniffs/like a dog’s in unfamiliar territory’ (‘The Mother’, Kroll 2004, p. 33 – see full text at end). Then metaphor takes over, where the two things are compared directly, or one thing is spoken of as if it were the other. ‘I … want to drift my hands/through this flood of flame’; ‘as she descends/a torch in the suburbs’ (‘The Invention of Fire’, Evans 1992, p. 1 – see full text at end).

How do we define metaphor? Let us move beyond the bare dictionary definition of ‘a term or phrase … applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance’ (Macquarie Dictionary, p. 1117) to the heart of metaphor. As Robert Rehder reminds us:

Etymologically, metaphor derives from the Greek verb to transfer. Meaning is transferred from one term to another. Exchange is perhaps a better word, or comparison. Because metaphor causes us to see both terms differently, it offers a new vision of things.

(Rehder 2005, p. xvii)

To highlight the function of transference, some critics have named the two related items, so that ‘the thing that undergoes transference’ is ‘the tenor’ while ‘the source of transferred qualities is the vehicle’ (Wallace & Boisseau 2000, p. 198). Together, the poet creates on the simplest level a new relationship between tenor and vehicle, but also a new perception.

Coleridge describes how the poet’s imagination and, in particular, metaphor operates: ‘This power … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession … (Coleridge 1951, p. 269). The addition of ‘order’, ‘judgement’ and ‘self-possession’ emphasise that the yoking together of disparate entities cannot be arbitrary; it should usually be appropriate to the context.

In the first example above, from ‘The Mother’, ‘skin’ is the tenor, while ‘moth’s wing’ (source of transferred qualities) is the vehicle. There is a range of qualities related to touch, sight, sound, smell that comes to mind immediately about a moth’s wing. These are graphic and non-emotive in isolation, but in the context of a poem about an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease, they help to deepen the meaning, since moth’s wings are fragile and moths do not live long. In ‘The Invention of Fire’, the woman’s hair is the tenor, while the flood of flame is the vehicle. In fact, by the conclusion of the poem ‘she’ is now ‘a torch in the suburbs’ with her flaming hair. Not only does this metaphor allow us to visualise her, but the vehicle suggests

heat, passion, danger, lack of restraint, warning – all qualities appropriate to a situation where the ‘I’ of the poem is a voyeur aroused by a stranger.

This discussion of new perceptions brings us back to what we stated earlier – that poets reinvent their world for themselves and their community and metaphor is one of the prime enabling vehicles. As technology has grown, notice the vocabulary that it has spawned. We now ‘email’ and ‘text’ each other; we ‘google’ a concept we don’t understand. Writers have begun to exploit this new vocabulary, too. Let us offer a more basic example now of the way in which metaphors help us make sense of reality. Consider for a moment what happened when non-Indigenous people first arrived in Australia.

When European explorers saw a kangaroo for the first time, they would have thought in terms of the animals they already knew, trying to fit it into an existing grid of knowledge. What land animals do I know that have this height, stance, colour, movement, etc.? Is this a perfect match, or a promising one, or a poor one? They would have gone through a process of ticking off attributes that had been previously catalogued, so to speak. What does this animal resemble?

That process is something we develop from infancy, as we acquire knowledge through experience. An eighteen-month-old child looks into her nearly empty cereal bowl and declares, ‘Moon!’ Sure enough, there is a crescent of milk that looks like a moon. A toddler holds up a hard-boiled egg and tells his mother, ‘Moon!’ Of course, neither milk in a breakfast bowl nor a hard-boiled egg is the moon. Without being coached or nudged, however, both children have looked at one thing and seen something else. Two different things have been separately and usefully linked to a common third, and both children have employed metaphors to identify the shared characteristics. They have also experienced a moment of recognition, when their power to compare and identify brings them pleasure. They have at once felt, understood and expressed in words what their imaginations apprehended. We go through our days doing this, mostly without conscious effort; one thing is identified through comparison and contrast with other things we already know.

William Carlos Williams celebrates the power of language and especially metaphor in the oft quoted poem, ‘A Sort of a Song’:

– through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

William Carlos Williams (2006, Online)

The ‘no ideas/but in things’ pronouncement frequently appears in essays debating concretism and abstraction in poetry, but note how it is the metaphor that is the bridge ‘to reconcile/the people and the stones’.

This composing, or making the world anew, does not mean oversimplifying or making the world transparent. Australian Christopher Kelen says that ‘meaning is never fully understood or controlled, and never subject to the control of any single agency. Words are the community in which is shared all coming to consciousness’ (Kelen 1998, Online). As we read we

are, in a sense, always arriving. Each sentence we read delivers us information that requires a moment of recognition, an interpretative flash.

Some of the information flowing about us can offer startlingly fresh and even entertaining insights. In fact we expect this when we are specifically reading for quality. When we discover a striking new metaphor, we go through that instant of recognition as some part of our world is remade, and this is true whether we encounter it in reading the writing of another or in creating our own work. We can call it enlightenment, the ‘a-ha’ moment or satori, or a number of other terms that amount to the same thing. These reactions can be summarised by the statements: I never knew that; or Yes, that’s right. I didn’t realise I knew that; or I did know that, but I forgot that I did.

Poetry is a specialised form of language in which, by design, those moments of recognition should be more vivid and frequent. It does not need to operate like everyday language, though it can do so, and is always conscious of its own ‘manner of speech’. Writer and academic Dominique Hecq maintains that ‘poetry is a language mode that challenges speech’ and which can ‘ceaselessly raise the question of how meaning is articulated’ (Hecq 2005, Online). This is not just a comment on unconventional uses of grammar or sounds. Poetry is a place where our intuitive or assumed understandings about written language and meaning can be questioned and/or nuances exploited; one of the key ways of arriving at meaning is through metaphor.

In the twentieth century, Robert Frost sketched out the parameters of not only what metaphor can do in poetry, but in our daily lives. In ‘Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue’, originally delivered as a talk at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he explained to undergraduates:

What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.

(Frost 1966, p. 160)

Metaphors are employed in social and political life constantly, and are frequently abused (politicians have a facility for the mixed metaphor) as George Orwell explains in detail in ‘Politics and the English Language’. They can also be a source of unintentional amusement. Charles Schultz’s Snoopy, the dog with a burning ambition to be an author, is so delighted with his efforts he calls himself ‘Joe Metaphor’. Below is a sample of what made him so proud:

Though fiery trials had threatened, oceans of longing had kept them apart. Now, a new icicle of terror stabbed at the embroidery of their existence. (Conrad & Schultz 2002, p. 39)

This collection, Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, is a delight, by the way, and a handy source of easily digestible material about writers’ lives as well as their craft. Like peanuts, Snoopy cartoons are addictive; it’s hard to taste just one.

When metaphors do work, however, when they clarify something or surprise us or make us shudder with recognition, they are ‘one of the enlargements of life’ (Stevens, ‘Noble Rider’, xiii). Here is Frost again:

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.

(Frost 1966, p. 158) Critics still debate whether metaphor actually says one thing and means another,

makes new meaning entirely or clarifies meaning, but our general point here is that the connection between reality and the meaning behind that reality that poets attempt to chart has to do with the way in which they manipulate words. This reinforces our previous assertion that poetry, fashioned from language, a living force, must alter as language does.

Poetry as an art form is, then, not merely emotional expression. There is a risk, especially (but certainly not exclusively) with newer writers who are scared by demands for technical expertise and feel that their individuality is threatened. For teachers there may also be a risk that they have to deal with students who see poetry as simply an opportunity to pour out their feelings in a cathartic spasm. As Michelene Wandor (2004) suggests, however, a myriad of How-to Books that support the psychotherapeutic function of poetry do not help students to write better poems or to understand set texts. A focus on metaphor provides an opportunity for dialogue about the work of others and for specific exercises for students’ own writing.

Let us return to Hecq’s statements. Literary language that stays in comfortable territory will bore, but if it strays too far from the more commonly used forms it will appear strange, sometimes too strange for readers to bother with. Good poetry represents the human mind finding means to challenge customary ways of expression and understanding, and it can operate at the edge of common forms of language; or it can exploit colloquial idiom and so reinvigorate that language.

The challenge for writers is to identify pairings that are logical but that always contain an element of surprise. To pair things meaningfully and productively requires finding the borders of recognition – moving beyond cliché and safety but not right over the horizon and into the land of tenuous or altogether fractured connections.

on a white plate the single passionfruit is a dimpled claret golf ball an art deco hand grenade

(‘Passionfruit’, Evans 1992, p. 55) the stars a fortune in small change at the bottom of a well

(‘The Money Poems’, Evans 1992, p. 16) I’m a limestone cliff against which his energy washes,

a mountain he wears away from within. By the time he’s grown and gone, how beautiful I’ll have become, what intricate lacework in the rock, what shawls and stalactites in the caves.

(part vi from ‘A Subtler Lesson’, Kroll 1990, p. 45) She avoided tax scams, fancy trusts, the word ‘estate’ only whispered, a skeleton in the closet rattling her thoughts.

(‘My Mother’s Will’, Kroll 2004, p. 78) A metaphor is a rich package. It allows or, should we say, requires an ontological

flicker in which the reader constantly jumps between two things and the very action of apprehending both introduces a new reading. The first metaphor in the group quoted above is both graphic and sensual. Picture a ripe passionfruit on a white plate and think about what else it looks like. Think also about its taste, its name (actually, its name comes from the supposed likeness of a pattern in its flower to the cross of Jesus, so its name is based on simile, but passion is still passion!), its texture, the acts of opening it and eating it. Somewhere in all of this you too might have thought of a golf ball or, more oddly, drawn together the two separate notions of art and war, pleasure and destruction, and come up with ‘an art deco hand grenade’. Far fetched, yes, but the connections can be made.

In the second example, stars are coins. This means that coins must sometimes also be stars – even if they can be something else. The metaphor relies on the reader’s knowledge of reflection and an understanding of both wishing wells and wishing on stars, but without explicitly mentioning either.

The third example demonstrates how a metaphor can initially evoke visual associations that then feed back into our understanding of the relationship it describes. The harried mother of a toddler compares herself to a limestone cliff that is worn away by the emotional stress of parenting. The child’s energy, in effect, eats away from within. But anyone who has ever been inside a cave with stalactites, stalagmites and shawls will tell you how amazing and delicate those structures can be. They take centuries to form, but they are enduring, testifying to the relentless but subtle power of water on rock. The complex interplay of personalities and power produce the friction and beauty characteristic of families.

The fourth and last example demonstrates how metaphors move us onto deeper levels of understanding after that first flicker of surprise. The levels spiral from the primary context, the metaphoric pebble that the poet throws into our consciousness, where new associations ripple out. An estate is what the deceased leaves behind, but someone making a will might not want to think about his or her possessions as ‘an estate’, because that brings intimations of their mortality. Families with skeletons in closets try to forget them, but the music of hanging skeletons (composed of bones without cushioning flesh) can rattle a mind that fears the future.

Christopher Kelen refers to the poet making himself or herself a ‘barbarian’ (Kelen 1998, Online), an outsider who has to interpret, who has to make sense of the strange things around him. This focus on the poet as translator of reality, or as

explorer, helping us to rediscover what we do not notice in our daily lives, is epitomised by the English poet, Craig Raine, in his 1979 collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. Here is an extract from that evocative title poem:

Model T is a room with the lock inside — a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.

(Raine 1981, p. 73) In this poem, books, television sets, telephones, toilets, and even dreams are described as if they had never been encountered before. The lines quoted above sketch the experience of being in a car and looking in its mirror while driving. Raine was very influential in popularising what was called the ‘Martian school of poetry’, in which writers described things as if seeing them for the first time. It necessarily employed a great deal of metaphor.

Students will find innumerable examples of metaphoric inventiveness in twentieth-century Australian, British and American poetry. Les Murray’s ‘The Domain of the Octopus’ refers to ‘prawns’ cellophane chatter’ and ‘young palms like trashed venetians’ (Murray 2003, p. 17). Note these examples, too:

Sultry night. The moon is small and fuzzy, an aspirin in a glass of water.

(‘17 Poems’, Gray 1990, p. 10)

This is the plum season, the nights blue and distended …

… apples that drop and rot sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands

(‘Late August’, Atwood 1974, p. 93)

You carry it like a carton of eggs with damaged hinges along a wet asphalt street in an unfamiliar part of the city where the neons pulse like sick arteries and you’re mortally aware of the sudden cat and the slammed door and the jangling siren with its swivelling ruby

(‘Grief’, Dawe 1983, p. 194)

Her lover departed to the warm purry bed of his wife, … the mouse … stands on firm mouse-muscles & potato-crispy, cat-delighting

bones. (‘Mousepoem’, Harry 1995, p. 22)

Everywhere, Millipedes criss-cross the soil, a plague of serpents, seen from a height, no – runaway Italian express trains. Crash! One’s an ammonite.

(‘Blackberries and Walnuts’, Owen 1990, p. 25) The richness of these images — their precision, their rightness — jumps out at

the reader who can hear and/or visualise. Identifying is not busywork if it leads to an understanding of how metaphors arise from a poet’s personal and cultural contexts and helps them to make sense of their world. Students can then practise honing their own metaphorical skills in order to capture their individual visions; one mind can communicate in this way with others. Wallace Stevens wrote in his notebooks: ‘Reality is a cliché/From which we escape by metaphor’ (quoted in Rehder 2005, p. 15). Rehder interprets further: ‘it is the imagination that bestows value. Metaphor is another country in which we find our meaning and ourselves’ (p. 15).

5. Reading is the Best Cure

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

(‘Introduction to Poetry’, Collins 1988, p.58)

It is certainly true that sometimes too much attention is paid to the techniques in a poem and not enough on its overall effects, its sound, its soul. Questions are replaced by too many statements. A focus on technique annoys some readers and, indeed, some writers of poetry. They prefer to gloss over the how of creation and let writing work its wonders in an apparently magical (or, should we say, ‘unscrutinised’) way. For them, analysing a poem is tantamount to blasphemy, especially in cases where an individual’s inspiration is seen as an automatic answer to any critique. Here are the extreme positions: poems should only be uncritically enjoyed or rejected (‘I know what I like’); poems should be bound and beaten until they yield their meanings.

The painter, Marc Chagall, is reported to have said, ‘Don’t look at how it’s done. Look at its chemistry!’ (2005). This sounds rather like the plaint of a few students who don’t want to explore the engine of a car lest it spoil the illusion of magic at work when the vehicle actually moves. The need to stop and look at a poem arguably has to come after the experience of reading or hearing it. It can work its magic and yield a range of meanings. These do not preclude one another, and the same emphasis does not suit every poem.

Billy Collins wryly captures the various possibilities for poetic engagement in the classroom in ‘Introduction to Poetry’:

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive. … I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.

(Collins 1988, p. 58) Originally published in The Apple that Astonished Paris (1988), ‘Introduction to

Poetry’ is quoted in part at the head of the Poetry Daily website: ‘The urge to “tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it” lessens when poetry arises freshly each day’ (Poetry Daily 2005, Online). Of course, the existence of such poetry websites or storehouses no more guarantees better teaching than does owning a poetry anthology. We can use them, however, to introduce students to poetic devices such as metaphor, especially with an emphasis on their own reading and writing.

Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher finding or constructing a suitable library of poems that can be read to and by students on a regular (we would suggest daily) basis. In this way, the students cease to see poetry as foreign and intermittent but, instead, familiar and everyday. It is not just something that they are forced to do at one particular point in space and time. The way that their own language employs poetic terms, especially metaphor, can be noted and incorporated into writing activities. Discovering how to use metaphor can encourage a wider interest in poetic techniques. It is not such a big step to take but a very valuable one.

In addition, students can be made aware of the element of craft in other art forms. Why should poetry be any different? This emphasis validates wide reading as well as the necessity for revision of their own work. Musicians and painters have techniques to learn that are peculiar to their instrument (for example, a violin) or medium (oils). They copy the masters, they practise, they compare. They learn about tradition and innovation in their field in order to understand what has not been done and, therefore, what they can contribute. The same should be true of student writers. In other words, they also need to be adventurous readers. They will find models to copy or to react against; they will be inspired or annoyed. Bob Perelman talks about why some Language Poetry incorporates a range of allusions: ‘Stitching together swaths of writing from different centuries made for more capacious emotional, psychological, and historical spaces than my own single could have generated’ (Perelman 1999, p. xiii). In other words, he found his frame of reference extended; he could exploit the resources of other times and places.

Another strategy for extending young writers’ frames of reference, of course, is the workshop. They not only find out what others are writing and reading, but they have the opportunity to be voyeurs, in a sense; they can observe the act of reading from the other side. In the front row, as it were, students watch what they have created impact on others. As Gross says, ‘a workshop is almost the only chance a

writer gets to see the reading of their work happening, in real time, as if through a window into readers’ heads’ (Gross 2005, p. 5). They can observe the other students’ faces, listen for that indrawn breath that sometimes signals recognition, note a raised brow or a frown or smile. They will hear the discussion, listen to the way in which others talk about their poetry, not a set text. What is opinion, what is fact, what is prejudice, what is irrelevant? Gross comments: ‘part of your craft is knowing how to “read” your readers, then accept responsibility for the creative choices you make’ (p. 5). To summarise, asking students to write as well as read poetry, asking them to perform it (theirs and others) or to attend a reading, shows poetry in its myriad forms and possibilities.

A final note on reading aloud. This practice should be encouraged for any poetry, either studied or written in class. Poetry is an oral art form, but somehow since the invention of print, and certainly in our stressed, crowded, media-mad society, ‘Literature [has] lost its voice’ (Le Guin 2004, p. 117). Another way of discovering what is in a poem, – what works, what doesn’t in your own, or what a word really means in someone else’s – is to read it aloud. Suddenly, the syntax is clear when it is vocalised; the lines make sense.

Reading aloud in class or in public brings us back to literature’s origins. As Le Guin says, ‘an essential function of literature is that it is reciprocal: a social act. The audience is part of the performance’ (p. 119). We have forgotten that, either reading to ourselves or not reading at all. Writers feed off the audience, take their cues from responsive listeners. New meanings are made in a group context and new ideas can arise from a responsive buzz. Students can experience this two-way exchange reading both their own and others’ work. In addition, they might understand in particular poems just how much inheres in the words and how much in their performance. Reading aloud, thus, can help students to understand the work of others. It can help them to revise, and it can help them to appreciate writing as an act of communication.

6. Exercises and Suggested Poems

The French have it wrong, said Larry; the self isn’t a historical fiction or a cultural construct or a linguistic hallucination, the self is a creature and it lives in a burrow under the hillside of history

(‘Still Life’, Hoagland 2003, p. 22)

As we have said, Aristotle believed that metaphor was one of the prime ways of ‘gathering the meaning of things’ (1955, p. 328). What ‘things’ or subjects need to be investigated, the meanings we discover and the way in which we express those meanings can vary with time, place, race and gender. The sanctity and stability of the self, for example, has taken a fair battering in the twentieth century, as Tony Hoagland wryly suggests in ‘Still Life’.

In a concise way, metaphors offer new perspectives on the world around us, and bring us a better understanding of how we fit into it. Metaphor can be brief or more protracted, and the exercises at the end of this chapter suggest how students can begin to explore its possibilities. Metaphor is serious stuff and not so serious, like life, ranging from the surprising and unusual to the almost expected, when we encounter something we feel we have always known. It can embrace knowledge of past and present form and practice and also challenge what has been accepted. It allows teachers and students to play with meaning while honing the craft of writing.

Chris Mansell encourages us to take chances, to let our imaginations off the leash in ‘Good Poetry’, which itself employs a relative of the extended metaphor, personification (a rhetorical device where the poet invests abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities – see Macquarie Dictionary and Abrams 1993, p. 69):

… Good poetry would never insult your mother & goes out of its way not to be too smart or wild, although sometimes it has a drink, even two, on a Saturday night. It never throws up on your sofa. … Good poetry is not the first to be lined up against the wall & shot because no one cares what good poetry says.

(‘Good poetry’, Mansell 2004, p. 20-22)

Metaphor can make wild connections – it simultaneously lets loose and tames. It reveals how the imagination works by recognising, comparing and synthesising. We hope that our musing on its essential place encourages others to promote it in teaching poetry.

EXERCISES: BEGINNING WITH SIMILES A. Portraits Here is a poem that employs similes to create a visual picture of an old woman, but at the same time it communicates a sense of what the world seems like to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. The similes are chosen to emphasise fragility, insecurity, indeterminateness, disorientation and irritation. The poem concludes with a metaphor.

The Mother The mother’s skin feels sheer as a moth’s wing. The mother’s eyes look pale as winter sky nearly empty of rain. The mother’s nose sniffs

like a dog’s in unfamiliar territory. The mother’s hip explodes like peanut brittle. She prods the world with a cane, peevish for answers. The mother loses nouns and verbs, flaps like a bird counting chicks in her nest, keeps coming up with the wrong number. The mother is a still pool, waiting for me to ripple with my words. I stir and stir.

(Kroll 2004, p. 33)

Exercise: Choose a person (as in ‘The Mother’). Begin with similes that focus on the visual, then try to create ones that say something about the quality of the person’s life. Set yourself a minimum number, say ten. When you have finished, re-read them and remove those that do not contribute to your overall portrait, even if they work well visually. Don’t throw those away, though. Writers have deep bottom desk drawers (and huge hard drives).

B. Extending the Range: The Five Senses and Similes Exercise A simile compares two different things using ‘like’ or ‘as’. For example: ‘A poem should be palpable and mute/As a globed fruit’ (‘Ars Poetica’, MacLeish 1973, p. 307-308). In this exercise, you can stretch your senses and limber up your imagination. Think of it as a kind of poetic callisthenics. Do it at home or in a congenial park.

• Find yourself a tree or bush either at or near home, or at school. • Get to know it well. • Look at it. Smell it. Touch it. Rub up against it (if no one is looking). • Imagine what its leaves taste like. (Please, no actual tasting. Don’t poison

yourself!)

Now create similes about the whole tree or any part of it (leaves, branches, trunk, etc.) using each one of the five senses. You don’t have to follow any particular order. It is up to you which sense you apply to which part of the tree.

For example: The palm looks like an umbrella (sight). The bark feels like a hand that has washed too many dishes (touch).

When you have finished, explain which similes you think are the most successful. Why? Explain which similes don’t work. Why?

This exercise encourages you to really see things that you look at every day.

IN-CLASS: Here is a variation for teachers to try in class. Bring in several pieces of fruit. Ask students to consider their attributes and then to list other things of which they are reminded as a result. You can ask them to include one simile for each sense. C. Similes to Metaphors: Choose one of your similes, turn it into a metaphor and extend it. For example, if your tree looks like an umbrella, describe other aspects of the tree in related ways to reinforce the similarity – for instance, the leaves might feel like tattered cloth, the twigs might look like spokes, etc. Describe as if they were in fact those things.

EXTENDED METAPHORS A. Transformative Metaphor The poem below involves extended metaphor, but the key idea is carried by metaphoric representation that is triggered partway through, when a girl becomes a torch in an unexpected and transforming moment during a bus ride. The power of light!

The Invention of Fire Her stop approaches. The girl in front of me stands, shakes her red hair back, and then it happens. As the bus leaves the shaded avenue the light pours in and her hair ignites. I gape like a tourist, want to drift my hands through this flood of flame. Such a fiery distraction I forget the introduction I’ve rehearsed for blocks and abandoning care stare too obviously as she descends, a torch in the suburbs.

(‘The Invention of Fire’, Evans 1993, p. 1)

Exercise: Think of one thing that could turn into another. It needs to have one strong inherent quality that ‘justifies’ the transformation into its next form. In the preceding poem, it is a colour, red. B. Psychological Metaphor: Poets will sometimes extend a metaphor in which one core idea is consistently developed throughout the poem. In the example below, the possums seem to be real, doing the kinds of annoying things that possums do (scurrying overhead, peeing in the roof, nibbling on what is stored in the attic). But that annoyance is psychological

as well. For instance, why do the possums choose just those things that singe the nerves of the poem’s speaker? These are the ‘ferals/who slink at the edges of dreams’, the personal and private jealous shadows we all have. Note the use of ‘who’ instead of ‘which’ (normally used for animals) to emphasise the connection between the possums and the speaker.

Possums I hear them in the night scuttling across my mind, nibbling at neurons, peeing on synapses, shorting out links between words. Renegades in the roof, they ransack musty boxes – footprint mother’s wedding dress, nest in my juvenile poems. Why did they gnaw father’s hard hat – the builder’s safety shell – and sister’s sexy photograph? Because this is my crawlspace and these are my ferals who slink at the edges of dreams. A nose, a whisker, an ear – I have trouble recalling their faces. Are they sharp-snouted, dangerous? Are their eyes moist and confused as an old woman’s peering through curtains? We’re all territorial, I suppose. Possums must tread the same pathways. By this age, I’m resigned to the damage. Once I set traps, but they’re far too clever, keeping just out of reach of my pen. And if I had caught them where would I dare let them go? Not on a genteel suburban street, these wild and jealous shadows. So I shut up the ceiling for good. Now we will never escape.

(Kroll 2004, p. 133)

Exercise: Choose an animal that has particular psychological associations for you. For example, dogs might mean warmth and friendship or alternatively danger and

fear, depending on your past experiences with them. Begin by describing an encounter with the animal and see where the description takes you. Have you begun to say something as well about your own emotions and preoccupations?

C. Personification In the next example, the central ‘character’ is actually an unspecified poem, personified as in Chris Mansell’s ‘Good Poetry’, but this specific instance has run amuck, behaving like a monster in a B Grade movie.

The Poem The poem is everywhere. It wreaks gleeful havoc. Thousands flee in panic. The authorities are tightlipped, ignoring interviewers as they leave for the airport. This will not save them. The mutant poem terrorises the city. The airforce is helpless. Priests discuss it heatedly on radio, TV. The multinationals offer a merger. It crushes them mercilessly. Exorcism fails. It will leave no fossil for future archaeologists to muse over. There will be no future after the poem.

(‘The Poem’, Evans 1993, p. 207)

Why write a poem this way? Partly, it was an exercise in characterisation undertaken to poke fun at the seriousness with which some writing is regarded. Read me or I’ll destroy your city! There was also a little contradictory wistfulness that poetry is not taken more seriously at times. Essentially, one central metaphoric concept was taken out for a run. Along the way, the poem also offers some social criticism, particularly of politicians and big business.

This poem offers a different slant on the strategy of personification, where an abstract notion or inanimate object is given human qualities. Here, the object (‘The Poem’) is given the characteristics of a non-human creature, alive and sentient. Anthropomorphising (ascribing human qualities) has great potential, too, though it can be overdone.

Exercise: You might think of a single thing that can be described in action as if it were something else altogether. It’s best if that combination is sensible but,

nonetheless, adventurous. Why not let the object speak? Set a line limit for this exercise to encourage editing discipline and to allow focus on a meaningful ending. Additional Short Exercises: A Martian Poem

We quoted earlier from Craig Raine’s poem, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’. Look at the whole poem for ideas of objects that students might briefly describe as if they, too, were visiting from another planet. Perhaps they could be time-travellers instead.

Offer them pictures of a series of objects (culled from magazines) to prompt ideas.

Emotion Poem List a range of emotional states and ask students to complete the metaphors:

Anger is … [a stone?] Pity is … [a wet umbrella?] Jealousy is … Boredom is …

This exercise provides an opportunity for students to break out of conventional ways of perceiving feeling. It encourages them to be inventive and to cross boundaries.

All of these exercises offer a licence to explore the resources of language and especially the power of metaphor.