Canadians readers have probably already seen that the longlist is out but for those who haven’t, the Relit Award for fiction and poetry.
Claudia did her first workshop of 4 at Tree last night. About 8 people came to this one with a focus on metaphor, with some exercises and example poems (Pablo Neruda, Paul Tyler, Lorna Crozier, Susanne Buffam, Mark Doty and herself) and an essay by Mark Doty.
Any talk on metaphor seems more of a trip-thru than walk-thru since the comparison seems hard for people to get explicitly, even tho people do it as a matter of course. English does the word and thought structure everywhere. Maybe because the definition shape (noun is other noun) is so ubiquitous that we forget it isn’t true definition or equivalent? It seems a nature of being, the comparison invisible? Or people are looking for something more complex?
It was a nice mix of poetic principles and of practice. She had us do, as a group and individually, a brain storm for each word on each side of the “is”.
As a group the collaboration we did was “Death is a sofa”.
What are the associations with death? People volunteered words in brainstorming (black crepe, funerals, little deaths, shiva a mourning period, Shiva the destroyer, sadness, grief, release, etc.) She encouraged to think in the round of all kinds of associations rather than pursue one channel then asked, What are the associations with sofa? (cat hair, basement, crumbs in cracks, slouch, squeak, spring, back, arms, doilies, plastic cover, sex, antimacassars)
She led each turn. She solicited and scaffolded how one would weave the two concepts and edit and look for a good ending point to build a structure. A person contributed a line. She suggested a direction to go to extend the metaphor in another direction. People came up with one more description of a sofa that linked the ideas in a sort of braiding without dropping either. What’s something that is more positive? What about functions? What does a sofa do? How does a sofa support you? How does it feel? What does it sound like? and other question to see what people would bring forward. The first draft group result:
death is the sudden give of a sofa.
its leather creak embraces you.
it doesn’t care about the lace on its arms,
or the coin offerings in its folds,
or its broken spring against your back.
it will be put out on the curb on garbage day.
Rather than leaping from subject to subject, it is more radial, in a way. There’s expansion and contrast but within a smaller frame of reference. As Mark Doty said, study, examine describe and it will naturally “yield depth and meaning that lead me to insight”. You lead with the object rather than drag the object around to what you want to talk about. It becomes the oracle and implicit of psychic state without explicit unpacking of what you mean. It can be quite elegant and economical of words.
Making other word pairs of things that don’t naturally go together (thunder is matching luggage, money is a confession, a candidate is an argument, my soul is a polished stone, a tatoo is a rubber duckie, chef boy-r-dee is a tazer) and use the same method she encouraged us to keep using the method to brainstorm another set and to also extend the death is a sofa idea.
The next workshop is floor 2A of the Arts Court on Daly at 6:45 on August 24th.
I’ll have to return later get back to the rest of the evening…