Faint Whiff Changes Outlook

Sometimes I'll have a thought or an imaginary wandering for a moment that gives me a point of view that used to not be mine. I'll smell, for a short second, how someone else approaches the world, and it has an eerie deja-vu quality. Once I felt as a mother screaming at her child out of fear. Another time I thought like a man who couldn't climb stairs without hurting. At still another, I looked at a beer as a constant escape yet downfall.

The last outlook-change came just a while ago as I was wandering off while staring at Facebook and listening to Diane Rehm show. As I let go a bit I imagined -- no, felt is perhaps a better way to put it -- how someone I know could fundamentally approach poetry as a collective, social endeavor. I don't mean in the sense of collaborating on poems, but how it feels to be a participant from the ground of one's art up. How to say it: it's as if one approaches the page as a kind of blog -- meant from the outset for social consumption and for participation in the readers of poetry.

I've always had such a silly purist individualist approach to writing poems, but now I've caught the whiff, as if in dream light, of the feelings that go with approaching poems from a largely socially-considered position. And now that I've put this smell-netting into such intellectual terms, I wonder if its impact is, like deja-vu, already a lesser thing, lesser thing, than it once was.

Long time, No Metaphor Sea

The metaphor class I'm teaching had a conversation, via a Polycom "Batphone," with illustrator/sculptor Shan Wells this past week. Many provocative questions saw light.

One particularly sharp one centered on revision and tied into another one about when he knew an idea was going somewhere metaphorically -- how does he know when a developing piece has that multivalent, rich content?

His answer, also found in so many other comments he made, was that you develop a sense for it after many many hours of work. Work, work, work. So there's really no substitute for getting sentences, lines, words all over you and then doing it again.

So, if you're working your ass off, for a long time you might not see a metaphor working, but you can sense it. You can't see the ocean from inland, but occasionally you catch a whiff and keep walking. And then others will make the meaning, anyway, smelling stuff you never thought you put in there.