Thread by @tagreathouse

OKAY FOR FOLX WHO ASKED:
A THREAD ON VISUALLY MAPPING METAPHORS
(16 tweets)

@Danez_Smif @SheilaJSadr @sam_l_rush @briskwalk @TheEnsslin @boobzi1er

https://twitter.com/tagreathouse/status/1225924021247762433

So, the philosophy behind this comes from thinking about metaphor as a bridge with the two things compared having a distance between them. Just like a physical bridge, the greater the distance, the more cognitive support the metaphor needs to not collapse. (1)

So, I will parse out a sentence into start location & end location, then work out how either a poet is bridging the distance, or how I could in my own writing. I’ll give a few examples of these maps with other 2 people’s poems & one of my own. (2)

So in class we were discussing the use of various metaphors in “[Somewhere in Los Angeles] This Poem is Needed” by @loma_poetry & “my miracle now” by @AnitaTheLesbian. Links below:

bit.ly/3bllSj7

bit.ly/2SckqbA. (3)

Ex. 1) my students loved the line from Loma’s poem “homes are being crushed [like cigarette butts].” So you identify “home” & “cigarette butt” as the two locations. Big jump! But the common verb crushed connects them. They are alike in that they can both suffer this fate. (4)

While this was the simplest chart I showed my students, it made a fantastic object lesson in using the shared verb as the ligature in a metaphor, which can be a great place for folx to start when they have no idea how to come up with strong metaphors (5)

The line in Anita’s poem we focused on was “a murder of girls caws at my altar.” Here, context w/in the poem is important to the enactment of the metaphor—knowing that one of the many things this poem discusses is the killing of black trans women. (6)

So, to parse out the locations we reduce the collective noun of murder down to “crows” which are compared to “girls.” Once again, a jump. But the metaphor’s bridge happens in a few ways. First, crows as symbols of death, as well as the pun on murder both as a verb & as a noun (7)

Second, they are connected through the idea of blackness. One student also brought up the way this line could be working through an abstract allusion to Jim Crow laws. (8)

So Anita’s poem charts in a more complicated way & was fantastic for showing them how metaphors can parse out to carry several meanings, as well as how important the overall metaphor & image system of a poem is to its individual moments. (9)

The last one I’ll show you is one of my own where I used this kind of charting generatively in the writing process. It’s a line from my poem “Hapnophobia or the Fear of Being Touched.”

palettepoetry.com/2018/12/19/hap…. (10)

So, the metaphor I wanna focus on (which is referring to a fish) is “Blade dragged from anus to throat. Its guts // a door kicked in.”
Which has kind of a massive leap—“fish guts” to a “door.”
So here’s the unfinished chart: 1st sentence is crossed out bc we don’t need it rn (11)

But I actually arrived at this metaphor thru of an earlier line: “my father made me hold the knife. Showed me on the fish where to find an entrance & make it open.” So entrance & open lead me to door. Kicked in is the strangeness here, but evokes a violence already present (12)

So, ultimately, here is my chart (w/ dotted lines showing the relationship from the earlier line & the square around “guts” to denote that it serves as a metonym for the whole fish. (13)

So creating that chart for my unfinished metaphor sort of let me make a multiple choice question out of an image I was struggling with. The original chart looked like this but with “door” missing. It’s a helpful technique for reading others’ poems & getting unstuck in my own (14)

[Unrelated bonus, bc it’s own of my fave subtle moments in this poem: kicked-in is a slant rhyme w/ kitchen, which subtly adds to the building’s implied violence of domestic space within this poem](15)

Anyways! If anyone has any questions about this idea of visually charting metaphors I’m more than happy to answer them! This was a really fun thread to write.
P.s. I’ll go back & add image alt text for screen readers soon, but my bloodsugar tanked & i need to eat (16)

Okay, so twitter is not letting me add alt-text right now, so I'm going to respond image descriptions to the tweets with images in them. So sorry for screwing this up y'all (17)

Image Description: the line "homes are being crushed [like cigarette butts]" is written with a line beneath it. Below, "home" and "cig butt" are connected with a line that branches off to the verb "crushed."

Image Description: "a murder of girls caws at my altar" is written with a line beneath it. Below, the word "crows" is connected to "murder" and "girls." Between crows & girls there are lines leading to the phrases "killing of trans women" & "invocation of blackness" (1/2)

Image Description part 2: There is also a dashed line connecting the word "murder" to "killing of trans women." (2/2)

https://twitter.com/tagreathouse/status/1226150674016153601?s=20

Alt-text: "Blade dragged from anus to throat. Its guts a door kicked in" is written above a black line. The first sentence is crossed out. Below the line, "fish guts" and "door" are connected by a branching line. Above, the word "its" is connected to the word "fish"

Alt-text: The first chart with the line "its guts a door kicked in," with details added. There is now a box around the word "guts" & the phrase "can open" at the bottom of the branching line. A dotted line connects this phrase to "entrance" & "door."

Alt-text: a screenshot of "Hapnophobia."

"Its guts a door kicked in" is underlined in yellow & "find an entrance & make it open" is underlined in black. Arrows connect both these to "this on its own is a huge jump but I actually ligature it two sentences earlier" (1/2)

Alt-text part 2: An arrow also leads from the above phrase to "which also enables a spatial shift into the kitchen. In a sense we match cut from the fish into the doorway of the house." (2/2)