Poetry was on my mind this week, listening to Amanda Gorman at the inauguration, I was thinking: a good metaphor really can knock you off your feet.
It is one of language’s most powerful devices. Emily Dickinson: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul.” John Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” A metaphor is a stand-in, an object that represents something else. It makes us pause a moment, it steps out above the sentence, it conjures an atmosphere while attempting to make precise through companionship what might seem abstract alone. It operates through collision, smashing together two often unlike things. Done well, it’s not a car crash so much as a coup de foudre, love at first sight.
Simile is metaphor’s younger sibling. A simile compares two things, often using the word ‘like.’ E.g., “crazy like a fox.” But metaphor is less hesitant, more mature. Metaphor is collaboration. It makes the reader participate in the meaning-making. Lucille Clifton did an entire book about quilting as a metaphor for human existence, but your experience of it would have a lot to do with however you think about quilting. “There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry,” Robert Frost wrote in an essay for The Atlantic in 1946, “but chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.”
My wife and I start each morning by reading a poem. Recently I grabbed Ariel by Sylvia Plath, a book I hadn’t opened since college. From “Daddy,” the second stanza:
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
“Marble-heavy, a bag full of God” – you could spend an hour kicking that around.
Let’s close on a brighter note, this is from “Morning” by Billy Collins:
This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
I know, it’s a simile, not a metaphor, but wow, I just love that horse.
A related note: my upcoming creative nonfiction book, Everything Now, uses the metaphor of a “city-state” in an attempt to make sense of Los Angeles as a nation unto itself. The book was recently named one of the “Most Anticipated” books of 2021 by The Millions, and it’s now available for pre-order. If you’re inclined, maybe call up your local bookstore, or place an order with Bookshop or Amazon, or anyplace else. Publishers and booksellers look at pre-order numbers as a significant marker of interest, and I’d greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
Here’s how the publisher is describing the book:
Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts.
What is this? A weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin consisting of (very) short essays about beautiful things. Any books mentioned can be found in a Bookshop list. Rosecrans’s next book, Everything Now, is available for preorder.
If someone sent this to you, subscribe here. If you already subscribe, thank you!