A poetic woodworker might carelessly attempt to build a shelf out of jello in order to bring a change in mind, a sartori to a young child for that is looking on:
A shelf of jello? Only words make such constructions, the phrase is metaphoric imagination.
An old silent pond...
A surprised frog jumps in . . .
Plop! Then silence.
Matsuo BashÅ
Haiku are edgy, one can’t deny they pack a wallop. But haiku hasn’t time to dwell on a inner personal voices, or character development or any of that. It has to get right to the point. This famous haiku by Basho has metaphor only in the simple fact that the wallop of ‘plop’ or 'splash' is not an actual frog going in the water. It’s a word going into your brain
Metaphor is probably most misunderstood as a poetic 'device' when it reality metaphor is the stuff of poetry itself. What's not metaphoric, isn't poetry. By definition it's prosaic.
A poem must be pulled away from stated subject. If anything the subject of a poem is the surface of a river. It is a fiction, yet it is all we see. It is not the water itself, but it's appearance and it's appearance only from one point of view. The river itself that is it's current, flowing eternal, vast deep is filled with fishes and plants and crustaceans and things you cannot see. Or is it the bedrock, the bed of the river that holds the flow, even if the river dries up in the summer before the rains.
A friend wants to write about divorce, and in her poem there is the word 'divorce'. And this part of the poem is like a legal brief. It is purpose driven. But hidden at the end there is this piece about dividing up common property in particular some sculptures, made of wood, one is of a loon, another of a bear.
Did the beautiful living branch want to be carved into a bear?
There’s the metaphor. The wood giving up wood-ness for loon-ness.
So crazy to take a branch and strip it
And make it agree to become a loon.
In almost every piece of writing there is the kernel of a metaphor that could fly to unforeseen heights. But in almost every instance that metaphor is buried, imprisoned, caged, a leopard pacing in a zoo.
A thousand Buddhists on a lake whisper in unison. Some grunt, some make clicking noises, others chant the letter 's' others short bits of 'a' or 'o' or 'p' or b. The sounds all fuse into the echo of a human voice speaking from the mountains.
That’s what a poem is. The Greeks defined this in their early theater experiments. They used voices speaking and singing behind masks to set up a reaction in the audience’s mind. It was more vivid than cinema. People had heart attacks, vomited, passed out and committed suicide the day after. It was scary stuff. Dionysus was there with all his terror. He could evoke war, battlefield hell, love, intimate love, ecstacy. . . . and did it all by not being specific, but instead setting up that echo. Behind masks!
Words take off their clothes and leave the imagination behind, a desired effect once we’ve forgotten . . .
