Hello, and best wishes for the end of 2016 and the beginning of the new year! I hope 2017 brings you much creativity and enjoyment of existing pursuits as well as new endeavors.
 
One new thing I am doing is creating a website, where I will be listing my classes and archiving these metaphor discussions. Since it's not quite ready, one thing I wanted to let you know about is that, in addition to teaching at The Loft, I do one-on-one creative writing mentoring, tailored to the goals of the individuals I work with. You can e-mail me if at any point you'd like to know more, and I will also let you know when I officially launch my website.
 
Okay – on to Metaphor and More!
 
Today I wanted to look a little more at simile by giving you a link to a blog piece at the Poetry Foundation website titled "Similes and the Moving Van of Metaphor," by poet A. E. Stallings. In this piece, Stallings starts with some humor, punning, and interesting thoughts about etymology pertaining to metaphor. Then she goes on to talk about simile and what she appreciates about it. As we talked about in Mastering Metaphor, simile and metaphor are not competing with each other for greatness in the writer's toolkit – one isn't superior to the other, but it's useful and interesting to pay attention to their different uses, so that you may employ them with intentionality and impact. Stallings writes that she senses a misguided tendency in the writing world to view metaphor as superior and simile as more "prosey, discursive, dull" – and then she goes on show us some examples of simile used effectively.
 
I like how Stallings describes simile as a comparison of two things that create "an interesting dissonance that continues to vibrate." I think the fact that, in simile, the comparison is pointed out to the reader through comparison words such as "like" or "as" does create an echo between the compared things and our awareness of it as a comparison. In other ways, however, I think I consider metaphor as more of a vibrating "dissonance" – that is, a dissonance between the compared things themselves simply because the tenor is being stated directly in terms of the vehicle (e.g., "that child is a flower") rather than the two parts remaining more separated by simile's use of comparison words (e.g., "that child is like a flower"). How does it feel to you? There is a technical term, "cognitive dissonance," which is what we experience when we encounter metaphor – the discomfort we feel when our minds are asked to reconcile two different ideas. When thinking about a metaphor, our brain senses something discordant and quickly scans through all the characteristics we know about the things being compared to see how they could be seen as similar. I think cognitive dissonance may often be stronger with metaphor, but not always.
 
But I do get what Stallings means – "… to put it visually," she says, " it is as if the simile sets up two pictures before our eyes that we can continually go back and forth between, noting similarities and differences, whereas in the metaphor, the image of the metaphor almost replaces the original one it overlays."
 
I think Stallings is saying that because simile calls our attention to the comparison, we are more aware of the dissonance than we are in metaphor, where we are immersed in a blend of the two things being compared. That's a great point, but I don't know if that is true for me – in metaphor, I don't get the sense of the vehicle replacing the tenor. I still feel the blend, and I think metaphor may actually make the dissonance ring inside me a little louder via the fact that the two parts are being directly equated; but perhaps simile creates more of an intellectual dissonance and the metaphor creates more of an emotional-intellectual dissonance? What do these differences feel like to you? I think all of this is interesting to contemplate.
 
Stallings gives some examples from the Odyssey and Langley's "Gorse Fires," which she describes as "a condensing of the end of the Odyssey to almost nothing but its amazing similes," and you may find these interesting to read. At any rate, may we all, as Stallings says, become " enamored of the simile and its possibilities–of syntax, dissonance, irony, commentary, complexity, allusion, disillusion."
 
                                                                                      ***
 
As part of this discussion I thought I would also show you what I think are some effective similes in a poem called "Mind-Body Problem," by Katha Pollitt.
 
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2014/02/04
 
I find the following similes interesting:
 
1.
 
… made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife –
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels.
 
Here, the things that are being compared are the manner in which the speaker "tyrannizes and patronizes" her body and the way a "cruel medieval baron" treats his subjects or "an ambitious English-professor husband " treats his wife. That is, the two "things" being compared are each a complex of attitudes and behaviors.
 
I think this use of simile is very good. If it were changed to metaphor, the effect of the speaker's reflection on her life would be diminished, I think. Or it might make it sound too severe. It also wouldn't make as much sense, grammatically, unless it were rewritten, and it might be difficult to rewrite without making it awkward or destroying the effect.
 
…………………………
Here is another example of simile from the poem:
 
2.
 
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sydney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
 
 
In this simile, she suggests that even though she and her body have had their differences, perhaps they could have found more common ground and bonded under times of duress. (The reference is to a 1958 crime film called "The Defiant Ones," starring Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier, about two escaped prisoners who are shackled together and must cooperate in order to escape.)
 
Again, the simile, with its comparison word, is perfect for this context, I think. Taking out the "like" and rewriting it has metaphor would eliminate a bit of the sense we have of the speaker's reflection and sense of wonder:
 
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other –Tony Curtis
and Sydney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
 
And one more simile from the poem:
 
3.
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog.
 
I find this a very powerful simile, and I think it is more effective for being a simile rather than a metaphor. Consider it if it were written as a metaphor:
 
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body,
a swift and powerful dog.
 
 
I think that the original, which calls our attention to the comparison, reflects the speaker's wonder –and astonishment – at time, aging, and how quickly it all goes by the time you're in middle age. Perhaps it also reflects her ability to perhaps be in denial part of the time. (We can always still say it's "as though," when we don't want to face up to our own mortality.) Rewritten as metaphor, I find myself more focused on the ways in which the speaker's body might look or act like a dog rather than the allusion to the body's time clock.
 
It's also interesting how, in each of these examples, the simile is part of an extended metaphor of the speaker and her body being two separate "individuals"– individuals who are somewhat at odds with each other. We can say that the body is being personified – which is curious, because we think of our body as being part of our person, but the body without the mind is different from what we think of as our self – we don't normally think of the body as having a life apart from the rest of us, which is how she describes it here. This brings up some great philosophical points for all of us to contemplate!
 
I hope you enjoyed reading this poem.
 
As you think about the end of 2016 and the beginning of the new year, what might you write using simile? Perhaps it could be something such as "The end of the year is like…" Or
 
"My anticipation of the new year is like…"
 
Have fun, and all best wishes for your writing and everything else in the new year!
 
Jennifer

​Hi everyone,
 
I hope you are well.
 
In this month's installment of Metaphor and More, I'd like to take a look at Grace Paley's very short story "Mother." You can find it at this URL:
 
http://tinyletter.com/tolmorris/letters/mother-by-grace-paley
 
Before reading my commentary below, please read this story and gather your thoughts/make some notes. Here are some questions for you to think about: What kind of emotional situation does this story present? Think about how the story is written; what effect does this create for you? Where do you think you identify some metaphor-like effects?
 
Here are my thoughts…
 
This piece strikes me, overall, as a portrait of the speaker's remembering her mother – and to some extent, both parents. She recalls particular memories and details, but it's the way the piece is written that creates an impressionistic portrait of the daughter remembering and having feelings about those memories. The author creates this portrait of memory through metaphor-like effects.
 
The speaker goes into some detail about individual anecdotes/memories, but also paints with broader strokes in some places. For instance, the first paragraph recalls some details of a particular memory, but the paragraph ends with what I consider the "broader strokes" in a portrait of the mother: "She had begun her worried preparations for death." I also like how the first paragraph sets up a motif for many of the memories – with the mother standing in various doorways. And this is an interesting image – almost like a photograph, in that a doorway is like a frame.
 
In the second paragraph, the speaker describes a memory jogged by the image of her mother standing in the doorway of a different room than the one described in the first paragraph. One could speculate that this memory might be from the speaker's adolescence or young adulthood since she is still living at home but is involved in politics.
 
We can note some metaphor-like effects in the way there are diminishing transitional elements between paragraphs. After the final sentence of the second paragraph, "We guessed it all," the third paragraph begins with "At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch." We don't know how much later this statement was spoken or what took place between it and the event described in the previous paragraph. This abrupt transition replicates, in a metaphor-like way, the shifting memories of the speaker and the way memory works, generally – memories can reflect various time periods, and things can be juxtaposed and related in unusual, not always obvious, ways (though they may make perfect sense to our below-the-surface consciousness).
 
Transitions seem to disappear altogether as we move to the fourth paragraph: “Then she died”; the juxtaposition of paragraphs is now felt even more strongly. For me, this is a portrait of the daughter's impression of how it feels, at least in retrospect, like things happened so quickly, underscoring the sense of a longing to see her mother again. The movement between the last sentence of the third paragraph "What will become of you?" And the fourth paragraph, "Then she died," works very much like a metaphor (and like strong enjambment in poetry) in that the movement between these paragraphs compares a certain aspect of the mother's presence with a sense of her absence.
 
The fifth paragraph begins with a sentence that feels like a natural transition, after expressing the loss of the mother: "Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places…" And the rest of that sentence shifts into continual present with the participle "looking" – "at the window looking up and down the block, in the country garden among zinnias and marigolds, in the living room with my father." And even though we get a bit of a transition with that participle, the abrupt shift from the fifth paragraph to the sixth creates a metaphor-like effect, comparing that juxtaposition to the abrupt shifts of memory itself: "They sat in comfortable leather chairs. They were listening to Mozart…" and on through the rest of the paragraph. This transition from talking about remembering to an actual memory, and the way it is put in present tense as if it is just unfolding, works in a metaphor-like way for the speaker's moments of remembering and her state of mind. It does strike me as a portrait of memory, with these verbal structures on the page replicating the way one may reflect on time and remembering and then go into another specific memory. For the daughter in the story, it is almost as if she is there with her parents. She can see the chairs, hear the music, see the expressions on their faces.
 
She pulls back from that specific memory and reflects on past and present again in the seventh paragraph, which is a single sentence: "I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room."
 
Then there is another abrupt shift from that paragraph to the eighth, giving us a specific memory again: "She stood there a minute. Then she sat beside him. They owned an expensive record player. They were listening to Bach. She said to him, Talk to me a little. We don't talk so much anymore." Perhaps the short sentences are employed to reflect her mother's speech, and/or reflects the way memory comes in.
 
The ninth paragraph is remembered speech from the speaker's father, or what she imagined he would have said, even if she doesn't remember exact words. Note the abrupt shifts, the non sequiturs, between some of the things the father says in that paragraph: "Listen to the music, he said. I believe you once had perfect pitch. I'm tired, he said." I think this likely reflects how she is stitching together remembered bits.
 
And then we have a final shift – from that paragraph to the last paragraph of the piece: "Then she died." Again, for me, this shift creates an impressionistic, metaphor-like effect for how little time the speaker feels she had with her mother, how she misses her, and perhaps how she feels her mother chafed against some of the things that happened in the family – how she worried about her daughter, how she longed to talk to a husband who didn't always want to talk. These shifts and juxtapositions create emotion without spelling it out.
 
I find this to be a powerful portrait of remembering, and I hope you find it interesting. If you have some thoughts about it that you'd like to share, feel free to e-mail me, and you could also let me know if you would like to share them with the whole group.
 
All best wishes for your reading and writing and everything else!
 
– Jennifer
 

 

Hi everyone,
 
Greetings from the end of September! Hope you're all doing well and having a good start to your autumn season.
 
Beginning with this installment of Metaphor and More, I would like to invite you all to respond to these postings, if you feel like it – but absolutely no obligation at all to do so. To protect your confidentiality, I am still not showing the individual e-mail addresses, however; so if you feel like responding with a comment you can just reply to me, and when you do, please let me know if it is okay to share your thoughts with everyone else, and then I will do so. This list goes to all students who have taken Mastering Metaphor with me through The Loft and a handful of others who have heard of the list and were interested in joining. Also as always, please be sure to tell me if you want your name taken off this monthly discussion list.
 
Okay – down to talking about metaphor!
 
This month I wanted to look at a passage from a work of fiction – Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is set during the first World War. I was recently reading a discussion of this work, in an article in the May/Summer edition of the AWP Writer's Chronicle (publication of the Associated Writing Programs) titled "Double Vision – The Clarity of Narrative Distortion." The author, Scott Nadelson, talks about how some fiction writers’ way of portraying a character's varying mental and emotional states can have some interesting metaphor-like effects. In the article, Nadelson talks about Pale Horse, Pale Rider, among other short works. The editors of the AWP Chronicle were very gracious in sending me a PDF of his article so I could share it with you. It is attached.
 
I wanted to look at a few paragraphs in one particular passage of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, one of several in which the main character, Miranda, who has contracted the flu, is going in and out of dreamlike states of consciousness. (During World War I, as you may know, there was a great flu epidemic.) Her boyfriend had come by and, not finding her, had left a note for her. Here is the passage I wanted us to take a look at (pages [space] from The Collected Short Works of Katherine Anne Porter). It begins with a nurse reading out loud the note Miranda's boyfriend left for her:
 
 
"Here, I'll read it," said Ms. Tanner. "It says, 'They came and took you while I was away and now they will not let me see you. Maybe tomorrow they will, with my love, Adam,'" read Ms. Tanner in a firm dry voice, pronouncing the words distinctly. "Now do you see?" She asked soothingly.
 
Miranda, hearing the words one by one, forgot them one by one. "Oh, read it again, what does it say?" she called out over the silence that pressed upon her, reaching towards the dancing words that just escaped as she almost touched them. "That will do," said Dr. Hildesheim, calmly authoritarian. "Where is that bed?"
 
"There is no bed yet," said Ms. Tanner, as if she said, We are short of oranges. Dr. Hildesheim said, "Well, we will manage something," and Ms. Tanner drew the narrow trestle with bright crossed metal supports and small rubbery wheels into a deep jut of the corridor, out of the way of the swift white figures darting about, whirling and skimming like water flies all in silence. The white walls rose sheer as cliffs, a dozen frosted moons followed each other in perfect self-possession down a white lane and dropped mutely one by one into a snowy abyss.
 
What is this whiteness and silence but the absence of pain? Miranda lay lifting the nap of her white blanket softly between eased fingers, watching a dance of tall deliberate shadows moving behind a wide screen of sheets spread upon a frame. It was there, near her, on her side of the wall where she could see it clearly and enjoy it, and it was so beautiful she had no curiosity as to its meaning. Two dark figures nodded, bent, curtsied to each other, retreated and bowed again, lifted long arms and spread great hands against the white shadow of the screen; then with a single round movement, the sheets were folded back, disclosing two speechless men in white, standing, and another speechless man in white, lying on the bare springs of a white iron bed. The man on the springs was swabbed smoothly from head to foot in white, with folded bands across the face and a large stiff bow like merry rabbit ears dangled at the crown of his head.
 
The two living men lifted the mattress standing hunched against the wall, spread it tenderly and exactly over the dead man. Wordless and white they vanished down the corridor, pushing the wheeled bed before them. It had been an entrancing and leisurely spectacle, but now it was over. A pallid white fog rose in their wake insinuatingly and floated before Miranda's eyes, a fog in which was concealed all terror and all weariness, all the wrung faces and twisted backs and broken feet of abused, outraged living things, all the shapes of their confused pain and their estranged hearts; the fog might part at any moment and loose the horde of human torments. She put up her hands and said, Not yet, not yet, but it was too late. The fog parted and two executioners, white clad, move towards her pushing between them with marvelously deft and practiced hands the misshapen figure of an old man in filthy rags whose scanty beard waggled under his open mouth as he bowed his back and braced his feet to resist and delay the fate they had prepared for him. In a high weeping voice he was trying to explain to them that the crime of which he was accused did not merit the punishment he was about to receive; and except for this whining cry there was silence as they advanced. The soiled cracked bowls of the old man's hands held before him beseechingly as a beggar’s as he said, "before God I am not guilty," but they held his arms and drew him onward, passed, and were gone.
 
***
 
Nadelson writes that this passage shows the use of different kinds of narrative distortion – "mental distortion, as Miranda drifts in and out of consciousness… A distortion of time, as memories rise at overlap… and sensory distortion, seen first as Miranda witnesses a dead body carried away by two orderlies." After quoting the passage he goes on to say that "Along with the fog comes a syntactical blurring, one sentence tripping into the next, twisting and extending as Miranda's mind slips into fevered dreams… Coherence and frenzy, chaos and order, life and death: we see it all at once, as if caught together in a single photograph."
 
So, through language and juxtaposition of images, Porter shows Miranda going in and out of lucidity into more of a dreamlike state due to her illness by creating a metaphor-like effect – that is, by juxtaposing and sometimes intermingling a more expected type of description with a more surreal and dreamlike narrative, often with fewer paragraph breaks. In this way, Porter mingles a more traditional narrative with one that includes unexpected shifts and images, and this transports us into another reality as we read (or, perhaps, another "reading reality"), much as Miranda is transported into a different reality through her fluctuating states of consciousness because of her illness. This is similar to the way traditional metaphor states one thing in terms of another – the way it gives us an "immersion" experience. (As we talked about in Mastering Metaphor, you can understand this by comparing "That child is like a flower" [simile, where we are overtly invited to consider the comparison] with "That child is a flower" [metaphor, where we are immediately steeped inside the comparison].)
 
In his article, Nadelson talks about the way Porter (and the other authors he discusses in the article) creates a kind of distortion "that becomes a passageway to their narratives' underworld of subtext.… they accomplish what poets do with metaphor" (page 22). Nadelson describes this "narrative distortion" as follows:
 
"By blurring or confusing the sensory experience, we urge our readers to pay close attention. We may seduce them into a narrative with a surface that at first appears lucid, but one may ruffle that surface, doubling their vision with sometimes contrasting, sometimes contradictory, sometimes bewildering sensory experiences, we expand their scope of view: they can step back from the plane of the literal and glimpse the figurative complexities suggested by event and consequence." This is also what metaphor does. In another part of the article, where Nadelson talks about similar effects in Grace Paley's story "Mother," he writes, "This, of course, is what metaphor does, and also subtext: what we see on the surface is complicated by what we can intuit beneath."
 
Nadelson goes on to conclude that "Porter, like Hawkes and Paley, muddies the surface of narrative in order to lead us into the more complex, more mysterious terrain beneath. Distortion of the work of all three writers becomes a passageway to their narratives' underworld of subtext. By clouding our vision or doubling it, by showing us two things at once – steam and the horror it masks, past and present, dream and reality –they accomplish what poets do with metaphor, suggesting connections that allow us to see their characters' struggles from a fresh vantage point. By blurring the senses, or time, or states of consciousness, they make us leave closer squint to see more clearly."
 
Though I've quoted several passages from it, I encourage you to you read Nadelson's whole article, or at least the part about Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is on pages 22 –26. Again, feel free to comment back to me about any of this, if you like, and if you do, let me know if I can share your comments with everyone else – and it's perfectly fine if you just want to respond to me and not the whole list; but if you do feel like sharing with everyone, they will benefit from your remarks as well.
 
Until next time, all best wishes with your reading and writing!
 
– Jennifer
 

​Hi, everyone!

I am recently back from co-teaching a haiku workshop at the Song of the Morning Yoga Retreat Center, located next to national forest land on the Pigeon River, just outside of Vanderbilt, Michigan. The high was 3° the day after I arrived, but the landscape was beautiful, and inspiring for thinking about images.

For this month's installment of Metaphor and More, I wanted to look at a couple of haiku that happen to include winter imagery, and I'll talk about how simple accumulation and juxtaposition can work in a metaphor-like way. Here is the first piece, which is a good example of accumulation of image and idea:

snowflakes
each perfect
instant

– kate s. godsey (Modern Haiku, volume 46.3, autumn 2015)

The only concrete image in this haiku is in the first line – "snowflakes." The other two lines contain abstractions – the second line, about the notion of "perfection" (a foreign concept to nature, since everything is perfect!), and the third line, an abstraction from our human concepts of time – "instant."

When we move from the first line to the second, we get the idea that each snowflake is perfect. And implied, through the word "each ," is something that most of us have probably learned – that every snowflake is unique. So here we may get the sense that each snowflake is perfect in its uniqueness.

Then, with the addition of the third line, "instant," the piece unfolds in at least a couple of different ways. One thing it does is give the sense of how instantly the snowflakes appear and vanish. This then leads us into an awareness of the moment and how we can be present to it as a "perfect instant" – which I think is actually one of the great things about haiku – that haiku themselves do this, and being "small" (short, that is), each is itself like a unique snowflake.

So it's wonderful how we can take each line separately and see how each adds meaning – in the first, we have the image of snowflake; in the second, we have the idea that each is perfect and unique; and in the third, we have an awareness of time through the word "instant," which might make us think both of how the snowflakes appear suddenly and how they last for only an instant – which can also be a metaphor for our lives as well.

I wanted to bring your attention to how the accumulation of these lines bring in these different comparisons, and so work in a metaphor-like way. For example, we might construct an implied metaphor something like this:
 
snowflake = moment; or
snowflake = this perfect and transitory life

These metaphors aren't stated blatantly– nowhere in this haiku does it say "this snowflake is a moment" or "my life is a snowflake," but these thoughts and/or feelings are implied through accumulation. This is how, as Jane Hirshfield says, "…not everything will be given -- some of a poem's good weight will be found outside the poem in us. All image in this way involves the mind of metaphor: it is only tasted and understood when carried into itself." (Jane Hirshfield, 1997, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, p. 115.)

I also wanted to look at another haiku, one which is a good example of the power of the juxtaposition of images:

unsent letters
to my daughter
winter wind

– Carolyn Hall (Modern Haiku, volume 48.3, autumn 2015)

This piece juxtaposes two primary images – the unsent letters to the daughter and the winter wind. Considering just the juxtaposition alone, we see how it lends a feeling – an emptiness, a wistfulness, a poignancy. Perhaps there is a difficulty in this relationship, or perhaps this parent discovered that she simply forgot to send the letters. In either case, an opportunity for a specific kind of communication at a particular time was missed. The juxtaposition of the images leads us to register a comparison on some level, which, if we were to consciously think about it and write it out might be something like

unsent letters = a cold or empty feeling (or a sharp feeling)

Again, we don't know the exact circumstances, but we get a feeling from these lines. Perhaps the decision not to send the letters has made the speaker sad, so she feels more sharpness of the winter. Or perhaps there were some consequences for not sending the letters that felt like a sharpness. At any rate, this shows the power that the simple juxtaposition of two images can have.

Haiku is a whole genre of its own that takes practice, just as learning any form of writing takes practice, but, if the form interests you, I encourage you to try reading and writing haiku. But it can also be wonderful just to practice writing images each day in a few short lines – something you see, hear, feel, taste, smell, or touch – this can be a powerful practice.

​Hello everyone!
 
Having passed the equinox, we are leaving the "white space" of winter behind… (it may feel more or less like white space depending on where you live and how much the foliage and weather change). This month I am e-mailing you a link to an essay I wrote on white space and metaphor that was published at the Poets Quarterly website last summer. I included language from this essay in some of the lesson units of Mastering Metaphor, but I go a deeper into some of these ideas in the essay. I hope you will find something that is useful to your writing and that you will enjoy looking at some of the quotes and poetry examples. You might also enjoy knowing about the Poets Quarterly website if you don't already, and reading some of the other current or archived articles. Or perhaps you'd like to contribute an article yourself sometime.
 
The main page is www.poetsquarterly.com and  my article is "White Space as Metaphoric Frame."
 
One thing I will say about the Li-Young Lee quote in the final paragraph of the essay – I know what he means when he says "prose means mostly in one direction" – I believe he is thinking about the way we use grammar and syntax in sentences. And I don't disagree with what he's saying, but I want you to also keep in mind that prose can be expressive on many levels at once, and that it does interact with white space as well (sometimes we aren't as conscious of it in a page of prose, unless something else about the prose challenges our expectations); prose can incorporate many aspects of poetics, which can create layered meaning or "manifold presence." And yes, there is prose poetry – a whole topic unto itself! But I just wanted to emphasize that prose can be expressive in poetic ways, but Lee is making a point about how some of the unique features of poetry can create multifaceted meaning.
 
****
 
I hope you are enjoying spring in your part of the world. As you go about your days, I recommend paying attention to the different kinds of transformation that takes place during a change of season – transformation being something we can also experience through literary metaphor. What metaphors might you be experiencing with your body as you experience spring? Are you experiencing some elements of winter at the same time you're experiencing some elements of high spring? How do you experience that blending of elements? How might you put that down in words or lines?
 
Happy spring, and I'll be back with another edition of Metaphor and More at the end of April.
Many best wishes,
 
Jennifer
 
PS – As always, please let me know if you wish to be taken off the list.