A while ago, comments on the board of DMR concerned a particularly striking metaphor, one that appeared to dominate the first part of the poem and with no such striking a piece to follow anywhere else in the poem. The comments noted this one metaphor and wished for a second metaphor to round out the piece. I have to confess finding that discussion troubling at the time; it has nagged at me ever since although I had forgotten the reasons that lay buried in my mind and festered under this disruption. Memory works that way, sometimes.

In my professional reading I stumbled on an article concerning the use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in a particular sort of application in the study of culture and religion. In introducing the theory he proposed to use, the author, Edward Slingerland, brought back to my conscious memory earlier discussions about metaphor. For it is a commonplace among us any more that metaphors are figurative additions to the use of language, particularly in literature. They provide a flowery flourish and are entirely optional. He referred to them as “rhetorical spice”, meant to flavor the expression with an illustrative swirl.

About then, I said to myself: "Oh, yes" as I thought again about that discussion that urged another metaphor in the poem. For I recalled that I had come to the agreement with a school of thought that says we think by means of metaphors. When I was introduced to that school of thought three decades ago, I considered my own technical work as a Chemist and as a Chemical Engineer, as both an undergraduate and graduate student. There, to the relative dismay of my professors, I thought of what I was doing in metaphorical terms; they thought I should be more level headed. But my metaphors taught their students to think through their processes creatively, and successfully.

I attempted to put this concern into a questionnaire to let someone else do this article for me; but I failed to find a way to get it together. So, here I am again, talking all by myself. There is always the danger that I end up talking to myself as well.

Nonetheless, as I have been reading poetry on the board and elsewhere since re-encountering this notion, I have been nearly overwhelmed by the omnipresence of metaphor within the structure of the poems themselves. These are not figurative additions but provide the fundamental structure of the poem, the way it comes to life, if it comes to life. This afternoon, I did hear a poem read by C.K. Williams, praised by the interviewer – it concerned 9/11. The poem, heard as I was driving down a country road, was notably flat – “telling” rather than “showing”, we would commonly say. It was also wooden in its use of metaphor; or so I thought as I heard it.

I had a previous attempt to deal with metaphor by way of interview in this column, an attempt that ran back to the work of Philip Wheelwright that I interiorized over thirty years ago. That also did not work, in part because his talk is so far from the common approach to metaphor that we take in our thinking about them. We think of how figurative language illustrates our point, whether by metaphor or simile or some imagery pattern, even the use of symbols (though we are patently adverse to speaking of symbols as we talk about our poetry: I have used the term only to see revision move directly away from any symbol-construction that might be embedded in the poem). But we tend to not consider how the language we use carries our thought with power – by metaphor where the identified carrier picks up the internally established topic and delivers it to the mind of the reader, or where disparate images collide and project their fresh reality before the mind’s eye, much as we might look at a spectacular display of fireworks (I just corrected the typo: firewords), or where language constructs create a symbol that throws the whole into a crucible and brings it forth white hot and searingly present to the heart of the reader.

And sometimes, beyond mechanics and contemporary orthodoxy, it helps to think about what our language is actually doing, at the level of its deepest power.

Bill Flewelling

Desert Moon Summer Contest Results

Judge: Sachi Nag

The theme of the contest was to write a poem about one of the following or a similar contemplation on the earth’s dwindling resources: "Earth without electricity"; "Earth without oil"; or "Earth without water" -- that is, the poet had to use his or her imagination to envision our Earth without some essential element. What would life be like then? How would we survive?

First Place winner is Jude Goodwin's "With your dry lips," Second Place is Fred Longworth with "Craters from the Sun," and Third Place goes to David Benson for "Inanna Whispers to Her Sister." Congratulations to Jude, Fred, and David. Poems and comments from judge Sachi Nag can be read on the board. The winning poems plus member and staff poems as well as poems by our judge will appear in the upcoming Summer issue of Crescent Moon Review edited by Mustansir Dalvi.

Chris George