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.

Yuck

This is awful. And the methodology is even worse when considering how the list and the accompanying article are framed. No offense to the author, who, I think, may be attending that "top" school.

I've met poets from several of the top fifty schools listed, and the training they received varies widely. Not a good list at all to be publishing.

The ugly of poetry starts somewhere in the fact that this list exists from Poets and Writers and the fact that I've just linked to it.

Judging Poetry

Some time ago, trying to sharpen why I did or did not like a poem, I came up with a list of criteria for judging poems:

• linguistic diversity
• development of a theme/idea
• denseness of idea
• denseness of imagery
• abstraction handling
• narrative arc
• importance to my life at the moment
• importance to my study as a poet
• difficulty of reading/understanding the literalness
• presence/adherence to any rhyme scheme
• presence/adherence to stanza forms
• presence/adherence to meter
• presence of outstanding sonic devices
• richness of language suggestion
• surprise at direction of thought
• line break use (as opposed to feeling like the line breaks simply fall where they may)
• attention to inherently interesting ideas
• use of regular or twisted syntax
• impressionistic versus deliberation
• metaphor extension or cleverness
• allusion

There must be more criteria, surely. Or fewer? I know most editors and poets I know take the stance of Justice Stewart's description of pornography, "I know it when I see it," when judging what is fantastic.

Or do I? Perhaps this list will engage some commentary at some time. And perhaps someone will use it and see if it helps them articulate a a particular poem's value.

If I could predict what I want, I would want a discussion as to what criteria seem more important than others, what criteria are missing, and what these criteria mean. Is such a list a good thing or should we stumble blind and happy?