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Michael Mercurio's avatar

With all due respect to you and my friend Shannon and Marie Howe, I think the whole exercise of writing just observations -- the thing itself -- isn't so much about *not* writing metaphor as it is about allowing the thing itself to reveal its own figurative meaning. It's not *overengineering* metaphors (which is what I feel like 99% of similes are) -- the apple slice on the plate isn't *like* a sliver of sun above a horizon of clouds; it actually *is* that, but because it revealed itself as such, not because the writer constructed it as such.

Based on the transcript of the conversation from the On Being website, it seems to me like Howe's not actually saying anything meaningful about metaphor. In fact, when pressed by Tippett to say more about metaphor and "why it hurts," Howe changes the subject to her being made Poet Laureate of New York.

I've yet to find a better thinking-through of figurative language in poetry than Natasha Saje's book Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Critical Theory -- I highly recommend it.

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Olivia's avatar

Thank you for consistently providing content that I need to screen grab every single element of… Excited to read all of these things

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