Hi everyone!
 
This month, I thought we could take a look at metaphor and nonsense poetry. First, here's one definition of nonsense verse – this from Literary Terms: A Dictionary:
 
"Nonsense verse: A type of light verse in which sense is subordinate to sound, and absurdity is sought for its own sake. Among the most famous practitioners of nonsense verse are Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the author of the following lines:
 
On the Coast of Coramandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods,
Lived Yonghy Bonghy-Bo.
 
                (Lear,"The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo")
 
(– Beckson and Ganz, 1983, p. 164)
 
Next will be looking at a classic nonsense poem that has captured the delight and imagination of many over the years – "Jabberwocky," [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42916] by Lewis Carroll. Please read the piece before continuing.
 
One of the chief ways that nonsense poems such as this one create metaphor and metaphor-like effects is through sound. Reread "Jabberwocky" aloud, and think about the sounds, especially of the made-up words – how do the sounds reach beneath your consciousness to a deeper, intuitive comprehension?
 
Already with the first two lines –
 
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
 
– one might sense something portentous and a little bit ominous… and this feeling is extended in other phrases, such as "mome raths outgrabe," " The frumious Bandersnatch," " vorpal sword," and "manxome foe." Caroll uses "neologisms" – newly coined words – as well as something called "portmanteau." The Merriam-Webster dictionary [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/portmanteau ] describes this as a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog). Read down the page when you link to this definition, to see how Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice (of Alice in Wonderland) the portmanteau of the words in "Jabberwocky" –for example, how "slithy" comes from a combination of "lithe" and "slimy." So this sense of familiar words combined into one also helps us bring meaning to the new word.
 
Another Definition of Nonsense Verse. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has this definition of nonsense verse:
 
"Some readers consider that any poetry which tells a fantastic story or which describes a fictive world in which the natural laws of the world as we know it do not operate (comparable to the prose example example of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland) is nonsense verse. And there are certainly, in the world's poetries, ample numbers of bizarre, fantastic, mythic, or surreal stories in verse which describe some autonomous world which clearly operates according to a set of laws which have their own internal logic.… These certainly have their interest. It is however naïve to believe that nonsense verse does not 'make sense'; much of it does, in its own way. 'Nonsense,' a modern critic has remarked, 'is not no-sense.' Rather, we must say, nonsense verse is verse which does not yield the same kind of denotative sense that sentences do in ordinary language or prose or even most poetry where the words chosen are of known lexical meaning (as recorded in dictionaries) and are arranged in normal syntax. Nonsense verse may in fact yield sense in only vestigial, disconnected, or centrifugal ways, or it may yield sense in unexpected, unpredictable, or hitherto unknown ways. But these are shard-sense or new-sense, not no-sense, which would be the verbal equivalent of a series of random numbers. Users of language live in meaning and will create sense wherever conceivably possible.
 
"Still, the term 'nonsense verse' is more properly reserved for verse in which the dislocation is less that of plot or fictive world than of language itself. Nonsense verse is most often constituted by unusual words – e.g., neologisms, portmanteau words – or unusual syntax or both."
 
                (– The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Preminger and Brogan)
 
We come to realize that a nonsense poem such as "Jabberwocky," with many made-up words and a variety of rich sounds (a few of which may seem unusual to our ears), employs onomatopoeia – words that sound like the thing they are conveying – though, since the words in "Jabberwocky" are made up, we don't always know precisely what they are conveying in a denotative sense, and yet we get the meaning from the context. Think of "whiffling" in these lines:
 
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
 
– we get the sense of a huffing, snorting, and/or wheezing creature.
 
And in this line: " The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!" the "snicker-snack" reminds us of the sounds of a sword fight. And in this line – "He went galumphing back" – we get the sense of a large animal perhaps made awkward from his wounds, ambling away awkwardly but as quickly as possible.
 
We also understand the joy in the sounds made by these nonsense words: " O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” (For practice: What nonsense words could you make up to express a sense of joy like this?)
 
But separate and apart from individual instances of pure sound-sense, we can think about how, overall, the sounds in "Jabberwocky" work in a metaphor-like way to tell this story and convey character, action, and emotion. Again, we don't always know what is being talked about, and somehow nevertheless we do! We experience danger, a rich, portentous setting, a sense of movement, battle, and triumph.
 
In one sense, nonsense poetry is based on the nonrational, but it most certainly taps into something deep within us that makes sense. And we could say that there is a bit of the nonrational in every metaphor – for metaphors compare often rather unlike things that are related in some way, and the mind must make a leap to accommodate that oblique association. This is what gives us a sense of freshness and even a feeling of transformation when we read a metaphor.
 
Here is what Robert Wallace says about the nonrational in poetry in his book Writing Poems:
 
"A good poem, read again and again over the years, seems always fresh, saying more each time than we recall, showing itself to us in ever new lights. Passing centuries may not dim this mysteriously self-renewing energy. We are not mistaken in believing that such poetry comes from, and keeps us in touch with, a fundamental power deep within the psyche, or dark rivers from time-beyond-memory carved in stone."
 
For Your Thinking and Writing:
 
Whether you next write a nonsense poem or one with conventional language and syntax, think about how the words you choose can add meaning purely through their sounds, perhaps also creating metaphor-like effects or supporting metaphors in the piece.
 
For Further Reading:
 
More links to discussions of Lewis Carroll and "Jabberwocky":
 
Poetry Foundation – https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lewis-carroll
 
Alice in Wonderland site – http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/analysis/poem-origins/jabberwocky/
 
Interesting Literature – https://interestingliterature.com/2016/01/22/a-short-analysis-of-jabberwocky-by-lewis-carroll/
 
May poem from Edward Lear: "The Quangle Wangle's Hat"
 
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44604
 
I always encourage you to simply play around with sounds – in your journal or in your shaped pieces – it is both fun and an excellent practice, and it may lead to a whole piece that uses sound as a strategy.
 
Until next time, best wishes for your reading and writing!
 
Jennifer
 
References
 
Beckson, K, and Ganz, A. (1983). Literary terms: A dictionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
 
Preminger, A., and Brogan, T. V. F. (Eds.)(1993).The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
 
Wallace, R. (1982). Writing poems. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company.

Hello, everyone!
 
Perhaps because it is April, National Poetry Month, I have been thinking about a category of poems called ars poetica – poetry about writing poems. Probably all of us have read some of these kinds of poems; in this installment of Metaphor and More I'm going to take a look at a few of them and the metaphors they employ.
 
First, a couple more in-depth definitions. The Poetry Foundation, states that ars  poetica is " A poem that explains the art of poetry, or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. " You can link to this definition in the Poetry Foundation glossary here:
 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/glossary-terms/detail/ars-poetica
 
You can also find a discussion of ars poetica at the Academy of American Poets under this link:
 
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/ars-poetica-poems-about-poetry
 
I got to thinking about all this while musing about white space and remembering Sharon Bryan's poem "White Space," which I reread and realized might be an example of ars poetica. The poem can be found at the Poetry Daily website, under this link:
 
http://poems.com/poem_print.php?date=14546
 
There is no "I" mentioned in Bryan's poem– we don't overhear the speaker talking directly about the process of writing, and yet through the personification of words and white space, we understand we are hearing a story about writing. I think I first really began to feel the commentary on the writing process with these lines, talking about words:
since everything they did 
was meant to point
to something beyond 
themselves anyway--
The poem feels like a comment on the dance between letters, words, and white space, and we can ask, how does that dance come together? I like the personification of the components and this way of talking about the mysteries of the writing process without mentioning the writer. And the form of the piece shows us some of the things that poetry is about. There are lots of things going on in this piece, and the personification alone is very interesting.
 
A couple of other examples of ars poetica from the Poetry Foundation:
 
1. "Ars Poetica," by Archibald McLeish. This well-known poem can be found under this link:
 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/17168
 
I think this poem is wonderful because it describes the nature of poetry through a series of metaphors. What do you think about the lines "A poem should be wordless/As the flight of birds"?
 
For me, that speaks to how poetry employs words but the meaning is beyond words – which is really to say it is describing how metaphor works – creating a meaning beyond and above the sum of those parts of the individual words – that is (continuing to read through the poem to the end),  "A poem should not mean/But be." And in the last section, third stanza from the end, he also describes the importance of images:
 
For all the history of grief 
An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 
 
I think it's interesting how he describes silence, stillness, and meaning in the different parts of this piece…
 
 
2. Another is "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe," by Elizabeth Alexander, which you can find at this link:
 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53005
 
Poetry, she tells us, is often in the small things, in the everyday things, like dirt in the corner or something overheard on the bus; not always the larger events or passages in our lives. In the final two stanzas, the speaker says:
 
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
 
and are we not of interest to each other?
 
 
A question for all of us: When we each think or talk about poetry, where in that discussion do we "hear ourselves the loudest"?
 
3. Here's another one from the Poetry Foundation, by Rita Dove, that you might enjoy taking a look at (and you can search for many more at this and other websites) –
 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=36878
 
Think about how the poem as a whole serves as a metaphor for writing.
 
4. And finally, I wanted to show you a couple of poems that are in the ars poetica vein, being about writers and writing, from Linda Pastan's new book (2015) Insomnia. I have this book out from my library right now and am enjoying it a lot! The first piece I wanted to show you is called "The Poets."
 
The Poets
 
They are farmers, really –
hoeing and planting
 
get strict rows ripe with manure,
coaxing each nebulous seed
 
to grow. Year after year
of drought or rainstorm,
 
locust or killing frost, they bundle
their hay into stacks
 
of inflammable gold, or litter
the barn floors with empty husks.
 
At the market they acknowledge
each other gruffly and move on,
 
noting who has the more bountiful
harvest, whose bushel baskets
 
are laden with beets and tomatoes,
tumescent with fruit.
 
Under the sheen of success
or the long shadow of failure,
 
with a labor for remains
the same: their own muscular
 
beanstalk rocketing skyward
from a single bean.
 
– Linda Pastan
 
In this poem, I love how the couplets look like rows of planted crops in the field, and how that supports the metaphor of poets as farmers. And I think it really speaks to how people who keep writing are people who really need to write – whether they experience the "sheen of success" or "the long shadow of failure" – they have the need to tend that "muscular/beanstalk rocketing skyward."
 
William Stafford (1914 – 1993) is a wonderful poet, and one I encourage you to look into if you haven't already. He was known for his daily routine of writing in the early morning, which Linda Pastan alludes to this poem:
 
Remembering Stafford on His Centennial
 
When you said there was no such thing
as writer's block if your standards
were low enough, everyone laughed
and I laughed too, but you meant it, didn't you?
 
The point is to follow the winding path
of words wherever it wants to take you, step
by step, ignoring the boulders, the barbed wire
fences, the rutted ditches choked with ragweed.
 
How complicated such simplicities are.
Forget the destination, you taught us,
forget applause; what matters is the journey.
And started one yourself, each morning.
 
So, whatever form your writing journey takes, I encourage you to keep following that road! And while you are on it, perhaps you might try writing an ars poetica poem yourself! What metaphors might you use for your process of writing poetry?
 
May you have had a wonderful National Poetry Month, and may you celebrate poetry and metaphor every month! And as always, please let me know if you'd like to be taken off the list.
 
Best wishes until next time,
 
– Jennifer
 

​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.

​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.