A Week of Metaphors

{ July 14, 2012 @ 8:53 am } · { Writing Process }
{ Tags: Marjorie Maddox }

Yesterday, I finished up a week of workshops with poet Marjorie Maddox.  The class’s main focus was poetry of place, which of course, is the focus of much of my work.  I’m always looking for new and exciting ways to explore sense of place.

And this week, I found lots of ways!  (The weather is too nice for blogging inside, so I won’t go into details here)

My weakness in poetry (next to playing with those line breaks — darn those enjambments!) is metaphor.  Now, I know what you may be thinking — how can a poet wrestle with metaphors?  Well, believe it or not, I have been able to write poems relatively metaphor free (I’m including similes in my definition of metaphor).  I tend to focus on image and strong verb use.  Often, when I try to write metaphors, they either come out too close to clichés or simply too bizarre with no logical connections.

But, this week, Marjorie gave us a lot of great (and challenging) writing prompts.  I feel more confident with exploring metaphor and even more confident with putting them in and even revising them out in the writing process.

I’m leaving this post with a link to a great poem by Bruce Snider titled “A Drag Queen is Like a Poem”   Now, there is a metaphor!

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