Comments on: Similes and the Moving Van of Metaphor

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:25:27 +0000

Er, “which both Clare and I” – what is it about this little box that makes us so typoprone? Excuse me: typo prone.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:22:04 +0000

First a correction: Ricks gets the phrase from Empson, with both Clare and I ought to have known! Ricks explains that the “self-inwoven simile… is a figure which both reconciles and opposes, in that it describes something both as itself and as something external to it which it could not possibly be.” (He’s talking about Marvell; see The Force of Poetry, p. 34)
Guinn Batten finds an example in Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes:
The rain comes flapping through the yard
like a tablecloth that she hand-embroidered.
My mother has left it on the line.
It is sodden with rain.
Empson’s own example was Shelley:
With mighty whirl the multitudinous orb
Grinds the bright brook into an azure mist
Of elemental subtlety, like light,
etc.
“Poetry which idolises its object naturally gives it the attributes of deity, but to do it in this way is to destroy the simile, or make it incapable of its more serious functions,” says Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Shelley, he says, “seldom perceived profitable relations between two things.”
Thus.
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:21:00 +0000

Sorry to be dense… but do you think you could provide an example (or two), Don? I’m not sure I know what a self-interwoven simile would be… Or come to think of it, the TLS is probably in that pile of papers on the living room table somewhere.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:24:11 +0000

I’ve stumbled upon a more articulate way to express what I was saying about false similes, above. It’s from a review by Aingeal Clare (what a name!) in the December 7, 2007, Times Literary Supplement, in a review of Fiona Sampson. What I’ve been getting at is called by Christopher Ricks the “self-inwoven simile” – in Clare’s words, “whereby things (which are, by the way, ‘unalterably themselves’) are infused with poignancy by an over-indulgence of the reflexive verb. It is a kind of poetic tic, valuable because it presents a handy short cut to significance: but it can be rather addictive…”
As Clare remarks, one is a “much better writer” when one “ignores the lure of tacked-on importance.”
Back to your regularly scheduled thread about metaphor!
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By: rachel hadas

rachel hadas — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 19:32:28 +0000

Rachel here again: SOOO interesting that Major J. (hi, Major) calls simile “a little brother,” since in my essay I refer to it as a younger sister.
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By: rachel hadas

rachel hadas — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:06:13 +0000

Enjoying this spate of conversation about similes. Re that “cars nose forward liek fish” – take away the “like fish” and we have, I guess, a metaphor. More dynamic? more participatory, leaving us to do more of the work?
More years ago than I can stand to remember, I enjoyed this simile from LOLITA (describing one of the motels Humbert & Lolita visit): “a row of parked cars, like pigs at a trough.”
Many of Kay Ryan’s wonderful poems are metaphoric but actually work more like a Homeric simile, in that we enter a little story inside the figure, a story whose plot becomes the poem, but she avoids
“like” or “as” in setting up the figure.
Full disclosure and/or horn-tooting here: an essay of mine, “Similes,” is forthcoming in SOUTHWEST REVIEW in the spring. Its 3 diverse sources: 1) my experience listening to swatches of the Iliad read aloud a couple of years ago at one of the “The Readers of Homer” events; 2)
the invitation from The Academy of American poets (2 years back?) to quote and talk about a favorite line, and I chose Stevens’s “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation” and began to think about that; and 3) my husband’s dementia, which has given me lots of grist for the simile mill, though I notice doctors don’t by and large make use of the many eloquent similes lying around begging to be noticed.
In “The Changing Light at Sandover,” Mirabell the bat uses (M) to signal a metaphor, and JM picks this up, eg: “I used to be/Aware of (M) black holes in me…”
Thanks, Alicia! And thanks for mentioning me. Talking to you informs my thinking all the time.
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By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:51:32 +0000

Don, I’m glad you have faith in the simile! Thanks, Mary, for another inspiring example. Henry, I appreciate your anxiety, and know I can drift into the school-marmish…
I did think it would be amiss not to include perhaps the best send up of similes on the books, and a favorite poem of mine, Ogden Nash’s brilliant Very Like a Whale, a piece I am ever thankful for. To fully appreciate, it must be read aloud. Enjoy!
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:29:07 +0000

In sphagnum fields on the longest day
When dawn and dusk like frustrated lovers
Can kiss, legend has it, once a year.
Michael Longley in 11/19/07 New Yorker
from poem called Cloudberries
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:04:27 +0000

I cf.d Celan, and can’t imagine him using a simile, but then again my German isn’t good enough to be sure.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:36:04 +0000

Forgive me, Alicia – no, I was just being ornery for Thanksgiving – I like to trouble & provoke the dusty moose-smeling urn of Beauty & Truth – and am actually Thankful for your edifying exposition here -
yet I’m of two minds – I worry about how Knowledge & Technique will Armor-Plate a complacent mandarin-professional poet-Caste – As when yon tyro Clerk, puffed-up with some safe-seeming Sinecure, exhaling pompous Jargon-Mysteries, lords it over the trod-down hoi-polloi. . .
& how true poetry transcends its own technique, surpasses itself. . . & how the Masters of the Art, by reading the best Readers of the Art, grow ever-more humble about their limitations. . .
& how Poetry is not Rhetoric nor Grammar, but something almost beyond Art itself, an anti-Art (cf. Celan).
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:41:31 +0000

I adore Koch, and “The Art of Love” in particular. We’re not all Kochs, however – and that people can churn out stale similes doesn’t kill off the simile any more than a stale sonnet or stale free verse poem condemns those forms intrinsically. I use “false” in the sense that it is false to use a tactic precisely in order to avoid the revelation or creation of meaning you describe! I just assume that a good simile is still possible because if I didn’t, I’d have to give up on all the other possibilities of verse construction, too. In other words, blame the poor practitioners not the practice; it’s not the convention that’s bad, it’s the being merely conventional. And you can be just as conventional doing the Koch thing as the love-is-like-a-red-red-rose thing. Etc.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:05:11 +0000

Ah, it is as I feared… the simile’s stock is down! Yes, it is easy to pull out a stale simile–or a stale metaphor. I guess what I am more interested in is the possiblities of the extended simile, which I think can be a part of lyric (as Frost’s Silken Tent), as well as narrative. In narrative it does something else as well–I like the idea of a “short episode”–and allows Homer, for instance, to intersperse the pastoral with the epic, the contemporary and domestic with the bronze-aged heroic and mythological past.
Henry, thanks for your moose. I’m sorry about your canoeists…. true, it is art to hide art in a work of art, but I think it also worthwhile to discuss nuts and bolts (to use a stale metaphor) as practitioners. Sorry it isn’t to your taste…
Steve, it is an interesting point about Longley and hexameters, which I hadn’t thought about. It’s true very few poets can pull them off, they tend to drag their weary length along, especially if they travel, elegiacally, in the company of pentameters. On their own they can work. Here, say, he gets their inherent music:
Terezin
No room has ever been as silent as the room
Where hundreds of violins are hung in unison.
No doubt having spent time with classical hexameters (though these are very English iambic ones) tuned the ear in some way to their longer frequency. It is also a nifty example of the subtle effects of simile.
There’s a neat interview with him here that touches on the Butchers.
It’s words like “fumigate” that make this read to me almost like a brilliant, idiomatic translation, because in fact it is exactly the right word–Od. does fumigate or smoke out the hall, using fire and sulfur–to cleanse the place of pollution.
As he says in the aforementioned interview:
“Homer gave me a new emotional and psychological vocabulary. The last poem in Gorse Fires, ‘The Butchers’, was a cleansing, a catharsis. I was purging feelings of distaste – distaste for Northern Ireland and its filthy sectarianism, for the professional career I’d pursued for twenty years, for Public Life and its toxins.”
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By: Ange

Ange — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:46:55 +0000

I just have to add, in a spirit of mischief, the best simile I read today:
“As Auden noted, the gospels describe the commandments to love one’s God and to love one’s neighbor as ‘like’ each other, and for Auden the moral significance of one’s neighbor becomes clear when one thinks of him as created in the image of God.”
I say “spirit of mischief” because normally I agree with Matt above: regular similes are stale (“cars nose forward like fish” — yawn). I like outrageous similes.
But if we’re going to talk about “true” and “false” as regards likeness — well, likening one’s fellow man to God tests the real limits of symbolic truth!
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By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:57:46 +0000

I don’t think the use of “false similes” is repulsive. I often find regular similes to be stale, like month-old cookies. See what I did there? A more thought-provoking simile might be something like, “stale, like a morning panda.” This kind of simile forces your mind to think about something it’s perhaps never thought about before, in this case the relationship(s) between staleness and mornings, as well as pandas. And of course you have the added bonus of trying to figure out what a “morning panda” is anyway.
A better example would be something like this, from Kenneth Koch’s “The Art of Love”:
“Tie your girl’s hands behind her back and encourage her
To attempt to get loose. This will make her breasts look
Especially pretty, like the Parthenon at night.”
Breasts don’t normally make you think of the Parthenon, and vice versa. Koch draws attention to an essential quality of something–the prettiness of breasts and of the Parthenon–rather than obvious physical characteristics. It isn’t really “false” after all, it’s just revealing a hidden meaning, or creating a new one.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:32:49 +0000

I forgot to add that Samuel Johnson wonderfully referred to the simile as “a short episode.”
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:18:55 +0000

My favorite used book find ever was A Dictionary of Similes, by Frank J. Wilstach, published in 1916. Its epigraph: “It is hard to find a simile when one is seeking for one,” by George Moore! It’s a sort of OED of simile. Some of the entries are famous, some completely obscure, and some just gems: “Reputation, like beavers and cloaks, shall last some people twice the time of others,” by one Douglas Jerrold, or J.M. Barrie’s “As repellent as a boy’s drum,” and Conrad’s “He could have reproduced like an echo.”
Still, it appears that contemporary poets really do slight the simile. Most of the poems I see now use what might be called the false simile: the word “like” followed by something not like what preceded it at all – a kind of mild would-be-witty surrealism, I suppose, as if one would be ashamed to use a “true” simile. Just keep your eyes peeled for the appearance of a “like” in a contemp. poem to see what I mean! It’s a practice that “repels one like a cudgel,” as C.N. Bovee says in my dictionary.
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By: Major

Major — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:57:29 +0000

Hi Alicia,
I would love to get hit by a Moving Van of Metaphors. All of contemporary poetry could use a little bump. Don’t you think? Thanks for articulating some of my thoughts about the metaphor vs. the simile, that little brother of figurative language.
Libertad
Major J
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:40:30 +0000

The holidays are coming, & I’m feeling obstinate. As when a massive moose lingers knee-deep in the river, somewhere in the swampland north of Embarrass, Minnesota, and, chewing lazily on a stalk of arrowhead, gazes askance at the two trembling aesthetes (I mean canoeists) who would like to paddle peacefully by, so I regard these explicit enthusiasms for poetic technique; they strike me as exertions which, in their glaring explanatory articulation, take the canoe of poetry out of the realm of poetry itself, to drift somewhere into the slough of what we call (in Embarrass) “magazine verse”.
Too much the self-conscious “kraftwerk” attitude; too much literary dissection laid out on a platter of poetry-patter. Let the critics take responsibility for that mess. A poem is more than the sum of its interior deocration.
ARS EST CELARE ARTEM. Grrr.
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By: Evankindley@gmail.com

Evankindley@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:54:04 +0000

There’s an Auden line somewhere, can’t remember where now (oh, it’s “Brussels in Winter” — thank you, Google), about a phrase that “goes packed with meaning like a van” — and now I know what he means.
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By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:55:51 +0000

What a good example of Longley’s style! Alicia, do you want to say something about how he manages English-language hexameters? He has to be the only poet in the language who can get away with them all the time– and his classical training has everything to do with it.
Also Longleyesque: the domestic-modern-unpretentious, and large, vocabulary (“fumigated”) applied to a classical subject. He’s got a couple of newish books out too.
I like to remember that in British (and perhaps in other Commonwealth) English what Americans call a moving van is instead usually called a removal van. The metaphor giveth; the metaphor taketh away.
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By: myshkin2

myshkin2 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:19:14 +0000

I can trace my own simile-averse poetics to an early overdose of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” definition of poem as field/”high energy construct,” one in which similes become an energy drain in that poetic transfer. (Maybe if he considered feedback loops, the whole thing might have come out differently.) Thanks for this defence of the epic simile–besides the possibility they offer in terms of gender, I remember that great short essay by Simone Weill (The Iliad: Poem of Force–?) which argues that Homer’s similes, in effect, transform the horrors of war into domestic scenes of peace, thus offering a clear alternative to Greek war mongering.
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By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:31:47 +0000

PS–I should acknowledge Rachel Hadas here, since she and I had some interesting conversations about similes on Spetses over the summer…
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