Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Mad for Metaphors!

Metaphor is what makes writing delicious. In our Sevenoaks Transformative Writing Retreat, Kim Garcia asked us to look over our timelines and choose a particular event. We were to freewrite about the event and then to come up with a series of “it was like” statements. Then we were supposed to get rid of the “like” and simply go to “it was.”

Metaphor is sometimes stronger than simile, she told us. We struggled a bit with this exercise but by the end of the workshop, poetry was springing up all over the place. Once the mind gets into the metaphor habit, it’s hard to stop.

I want to share another piece by Sharon Glynn from that workshop. This is her response to the “What happened was” prompt that we did at the end of the workshop:

The edge of this clean, crisp day
Cream thumb prints mark the
blue palette of sky.
I see so far into the eye of morning
And the plump ball of mango
moon last night
Just a glowing sphere suspended
on a gossamer thread
Just a hush
curled into the vast night sleeve
of silence
I cradled it into my arms.

Lovely. Just lovely.

WIY: Play with similes and metaphors. What is this moment like? What is the scene like outside your window? Choose an event, a moment, a feeling, and come up with ten things that is like, no matter how silly. Now, take out the like.

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