Lately I have felt myself more frequently moved by the majestic mundanities of living. That lizards and small birds share the space of a shrub delights me— those unlikely roommates. That there’s fog on some mornings, low enough to the ground as to create a sort of dreamlike atmosphere, evokes new joy in me as if I’m a child seeing it for the first time.
It isn’t even just natural occurrences that deliver me into this state of awe. I feel brand new on this earth every day.
It amazes me that I can listen to essentially any song I want at any time, that I can take my pick of centuries worth of literature to consume, that I can send these words out electronically and know that someone will read them.
So often, we think of poetry as an art that elucidates the beauty of our world. Take William Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” for example:
Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
While this poem uses typical poetic techniques such as simile (“This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning”) and personification (“The river glideth at his own sweet will: / Dear God! the very houses seem asleep”), it is charmingly literal.
One can imagine Wordsworth standing on the bridge, looking out at the city of London on some early autumn morning and putting his observations into words.
Similarly, Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” takes on a relatively simple subject, but goes a step further by constructing an extended metaphor wherein the human soul is reflected by the spider’s actions.
A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
The equation of this poem is fairly straightforward. An isolated spider reflects human isolation, the filaments of its web recalling the invisible threads of a person’s soul that reach outward, endlessly building and exploring life.
There are, however, uses of figurative language that involve the taking of greater creative license, stretching further into absurdity, surprise, and wonder.
Immediately, in the first line of “West of Schenectady” by Chen Chen, we get a delightfully unusual simile:
The sun sets like a whispered regret behind the hills or is that a mountain.
What does a whispered regret look or sound like? Is it hills, plural, or somehow just one mountain? Some of these associations are not rooted in anything tangible, so the reader’s mind must open into new realms of imagination.
The sun sets like an expensive fragrance. Like the memory of a neck.
There is no need, in this poem, to reference one sense at a time. The sunset, a mostly visual occurrence, is attached to sound (“a whispered regret”) and smell (“an expensive fragrance”).
A poem like this challenges conceptions of how figurative language can and should operate. To me, it is almost like a form of worldbuilding. Each poem is its own little fantasy world, containing a sort of magic system or set of rules that govern the narrative. The beauty exposed here is not observable, not exactly, but it is just as satisfying.
Chen continues the string of unique sun similes until the end of the poem, closing out with this:
The sun sets like a science special I hated once.
In the world of this poem, meaning is almost secondary. We are better off just taking each line for what it is and remaining fascinated by each unlikely turn of phrase.
One of my favorite parts of writing and reading poetry is that anything can be related to anything else. The basic equation of figurative language holds: this is that (metaphor) or this is like that (simile). But from there, poets have freedom to place any image, concept, or notion into those spots.
Jean Valentine is a poet who stuns me each time I read her work. Her minimalist construction and matter-of-fact delivery make for such an engaging experience, even as she presents surprising and sometimes confounding ideas.
Here is the short poem “So many secrets” from Valentine’s Door in the Mountain:
So many secrets held you in their glass Fear like a green glass on the shelf It hurt like glass It hurt like self
I find it impossible to read this poem just once. It is quietly cyclical, the repetition of “glass” in every stanza creating an alluring yet intricate echo alongside the subtle rhyme of “shelf” and “self.”
Perhaps it is the glass of a window or a lens, and being “held” in it means being looked at. Or it is a drinking glass, or a decorative piece of glasswork, displayed “on the shelf.”
“It hurt like glass” in the final stanza strikes me deeply. Whatever “it” was, it did not hurt like broken glass, only “like glass.” And then “it hurt like self.”
I don’t come to this poem to understand it perfectly. I come to be awestruck, aflame with possibility. This poem and the Chen Chen poem I mentioned before are the sort that make me want to be a more imaginative and unabashedly bewildering poet.
I have also been thinking a lot about the role of the poet, what exactly we do when we write. On a craft level, the poet’s job is to make the unknown seem familiar, to build sturdy relationships between unrelated things. There is much beauty to be found in this making of patterns.
But figurative language is not the only language fit for poems. In fact, the literal carries an elegance of its own.
I often return to this conversation between Marie Howe and Krista Tippett. Howe explains a weekly project that she assigns to her students: “write 10 observations of the actual world.”
This is not only a poetic exercise, but a meditation, a means of stretching the muscle of pure attention, free from all association.
Howe goes on to say this:
Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason. […] We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.
Both ends of the spectrum, from the wildly imaginative to the extremely literal, are crucial to me as a poet. I love to draw comparisons between things that are nothing alike and capture the reader’s sense of awe in that way. But I also recognize the great power of simply relating something precisely as it appears in the real world, without metaphor.
Ultimately, saying what things “are” is a way of seeing, of noticing, of offering genuine attention. Through the poet’s eyes, the world is a set of swirling imaginative associations.
All the while, though, the world is still the world, its truths unmoved by our poetic magic tricks.
One of the earliest poems I can remember reading as a child is Matsuo Basho’s Frog Haiku, often translated into English as such:
The old pond; A frog jumps in — The sound of the water.
I immediately took to the haiku form for its brevity and its roots in simple observation. This is probably where my interest in writing poetry began. (I preferred stories to poems for the first decade or so of my existence.)
I’ll end off with the first few stanzas of an untitled Alberto Caeiro poem anthologized in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe. This piece and a few others recently opened my eyes to the practice of simply observing without relying on the figurative.
The astonishing reality of things Is my discovery every day Each thing is what it is, And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, And how much this suffices me All it takes to be complete is to exist. [...] Sometimes I start looking at a stone. I don't start thinking about whether it exists. I don't get sidetracked, calling it my sister. I like it for being a stone, I like it because it feels nothing, I like it because it's not related to me in any way.
This idea seems to me like a more optimistic take on Adélia Prado’s statement in the poem “Passion,” translated by Ellen Watson:
Once in a while God takes poetry away from me. I look at a stone, I see a stone.
To see the world the way the poets do does not have to mean perceiving everything as some glittering, complicated metaphor. To look at a stone and merely see a stone is not antithetical to poetry— it just requires one to step back from the figurative mode and make use of language’s other abilities.
As poets, language is our toolbox. The handles of our metaphors and similes are worn— and rightfully so. But a stone is still just a stone. The world is still just the world. Let’s look at what’s there and, just once, resist the urge to transform it.