Sea to Sky Literary Contest

January Assignment

“TELLING IT “LIKE” IT IS

“It seems poets can never get enough of metaphor and simile. Aristotle declared that “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”

Metaphor means (literally, from the Greek) transference: we transfer the qualities of one thing to another, something normally not considered related to the first thing, as in “The sun is a bauble hung in the trees.”

Conventionally the subject, the thing that undergoes transference, is called the tenor (sun); the source of the transferred qualities is called the vehicle (bauble). Simile shows similarity between tenor and vehicle announced by like or as (or as though, as if, the way that). “The sun hangs like a bauble in the trees” is simile.

Writing great metaphors and similes that are fresh and exciting is definitely not easy, as explored in this humorous poem by Tom Andrews, in which he plays with a great Victorian poet’s struggle to discover one thing in terms of another:

Cinema Vérité: The Death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
by Tom Andrews

The camera pans a gorgeous snow-filled landscape: rolling hills, large black trees, a frozen river. The snow falls and falls. The camera stops to find Tennyson, in an armchair, in the middle of a snowy field.

Tennyson:
It’s snowing. The snow is like . . . the snow is like crushed aspirin,
like bits of paper . . . no, it’s like gauze bandages, clean teeth,
shoelaces, headlights . . . no,
I’m getting too old for this, it’s like a huge T-shirt that’s been chewed
on by a dog,
it’s like semen, confetti, chalk, sea shells, woodsmoke, ash, soap,
trillium, solitude, daydreaming . . . Oh hell,
you can see for yourself! That’s what I hate about film!

He dies.

I included Andrews' poem here simply for your entertainment. It made me laugh and feel a bit better about my own struggles with metaphor and simile. You need not use it as a model for this Challenge. We will work on the following.

A metaphor or a simile has been omitted from each of the following passages. The bracketed information tells you what has been omitted:

1. Raspberries _______, redly in their leaves [verb]
2. Four cars like a _______ behind the hearse, old Chevies and a Ford, they flutter up where the land rises out of view [noun]
3. A black fly flew slowly up, _______-ing the halves of air [verb]
4. In a week or two, forsythia will shower its peaceful _______ all over town [noun]
5. The clarinet, a dark tube _______ in silver [verb]
6. Big as _______, two white launches march down the bay [noun]
7. The creek was whirled by the boat’s wash until it became _______ [noun]
8. Dreams are the soul’s _______ [noun]

What comparisons would you choose to make? Try to come up with as many different metaphors or similes as you can for each of the eight statements. Attempt to reach for unique comparisons, ones that show insight and that you feel have not been explored before. You need not restrict yourself to single words; you can use proper names, compound nouns, phrases, etc. For instance, “The creek was whirled by the boat’s wash until it became Queen Anne’s Lace.”

Choose the one (1) line for which you feel you’ve written the best comparison, and write something (poetry or prose, any style, any form) in which you incorporate your completed line. The line can appear anywhere within the piece – beginning, middle or end. The subject matter can be anything your completed line suggests. And do try to liven up your work with additional metaphors and/or similes if the piece has room or potential for them. Please keep this to under 500 words, or if a poem, to 24 lines or less.

~ An exercise from “Writing Poems: Fourth Edition” by Robert Wallace and Michelle Boisseau