Thread by @jerichobrown

Let’s see if I can teach this in a thread before my 5:30 appointment. Every metaphor is made up of two parts: the tenor & the vehicle, as in “the linebacker was a bear.” The linebacker is the tenor & the bear the vehicle...

https://twitter.com/baggylaggydaddy/status/1324789614230478849

One way to remember the parts is to think of the vehicle as if it is literal: it brings brings you closer to the thing you want to better know. In this case, you want to know more about the linebacker, so I tell you he was a bear. Now let me be clear...

The vehicle is not literal. It is not there at all. When I tell you the linebacker was a bear, you don’t go to the football game thinking you’re going to see a bear. If you see a bear at a football game, run.

The point I was making today is that it’s okay not to know what you have to say when you sit down to write. As a matter of fact, it’s best not to know when you’re writing a poem as not knowing is what facilitates an authentic experience of investigation & discovery...

So you begin your poem in language rather than in idea. And you allow the literal images and items in the poem to guide you toward your metaphors. And you use those metaphors to tell you what you have to say when you don’t know...

The spur of the moment example I used today was, “My life is like a tree.” It is very difficult to define a life, but I can talk about trees, forests even, all day long. I can write really concretely about a particular tree, say a crape myrtle because I really love crape myrtles.

The more I say about crape myrtles given wha to know about carpet myrtles the more you think you know what my life is like. More importantly, the more I write about crape myrtles while in the act of writing, the more I’m learning about my own life....

If I keep writing about crape myrtles, I become more & more convinced that this poem was waiting for me, that I’ve loved crape myrtles my whole life because I was meant to better understand my life through the fact of the tree. More soon. Gotta call Mayo. I’m eight minutes late.

Okay. I’m back. Been trying to get my treatment appointment moved up because I don’t want to be at a hospital over the New Year. Where was I?

Oh yea, trees, crape myrtles. The more I say about crape myrtles as I write, the more I’m willing to also say things about my life in spite of the fact that I was mystified by my life when I first sat down to write. & here’s where the GREAT American poet Lucille Clifton comes in.

She’s not the only poet who does what I’m about to discuss here, but she’s undeniably one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century, and so far, the best of the 21st, so generally you can use her work to learn any strategy you’d like to employ in your writing 😃...

Let’s look at “The Lost Baby Poem.” @-ing @diasporter @BlkLibraryGirl & @Deardarkness here as I know them to be people who have things to say about this poem in particular and Clifton in general, so they might add something exciting other than the craft element I’m discussing...

If you’re still following along, it may be of use to you to read the poem before you read the very short piece of text I’m about to write: poetryfoundation.org/poems/53239/th…

Also, I’m not going to say speaker when I talk about this poem because I’ve seen Clifton herself discuss it, and I feel like it would be disrespectful to do so. In Clifton’s life there an event that lead to the following language:

the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

Sorry about the linebreaks. I’m using my phone. Having an event that grants us a piece of language is generally how most of us get started on a poem. That’s okay. I’m imagining that’s the case with Clifton too...

Note everything that’s told here is literal! These are all very possible things, right down to not knowing waters can rush back. What happens to most of us when we get a pice f language like this is that we start looking at the ceiling for the next thing to say. Not Clifton!

Clifton let’s the poem lead her to the next thing to say given the language she’s already used. She believes she has everything she needs given what she already had. Then comes a shift:

“you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car...” Notice before the em space (@sottovoce11 calls these spaces within the line halting measures) Clifton begins leaning toward metaphor with the word “into” and the phrase “the year of”

I’m late for a reading that starts at 6 lol. I’ll finish this though once I’m done.

The reading was a q&a with a small group of students. The event is actually at 8. I’ll finish this after. 💙

Okay just finished my reading for Millbrook. Where was I? Oh, the em dash. Following that move Clifton allows what she’s written this far to guide what she says next through a system of metaphors. Grown folks like to call this “conceit.”

All the metaphors for the experience of having the baby get written because she started with water, hence: “ice” and “snow,” both of which are not in the poem as exactly as how to you’d watch an infant “slip into strangers’ hands” or how an infant falls “naked.”

The particular genius here is the fact that in one strophe we go from gas to wind to ice to snow, all forms of water (or at least liquid when it comes to the gas). At any rate, all of this adds to the conceit...

To be clear, I mean that knowing about snow can allow the poet to imagine the baby naked. Knowing about ice can allow the poet to imagine the baby slipping into someone else’s hands. The vehicles in the metaphors ignite the imagination in the poem....

None of these things happen to the baby because Clifton never had it. The baby, as the title suggests, was “dropped.” The third strophe pushes the metaphor further in a way everyone else fails...

It’s one thing to let a metaphor help you write your poem. It’s another thing to figure the opposite of your metaphor & make that work in the same poem. Clifton decides that if water (gas, snow) has to do with not having a baby, land must be what it means to be a good mother...

She makes this decision while writing the poem because while she didn’t have that baby she does have children. And she has to be a “mountain” for them...maybe even for her entire race. She says the proper result of not being a mountain is the treatment the lost baby got...

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas        let black men call me stranger
always        for your never named sake

I hope you see that the em dash that took her from the land of the literal to the land of the metaphorical is repeated here. She wants you to know those alienating black men are as real as the “almost body” was, though that body was “never named.”

Okay so back to the point so I can go to sleep for three days. Cliffs starts with a piece of language that includes water and allows that language to help her figure what she has to say next. She may not knowing how to talk to her dead baby but she know the forms of water...

Writing about the forms of water make relating to the baby—this is a poem of direct address!—possible. And it also allow her to get to a epiphanic lyric moment of crazy intensity without feeling that moment is dramatic or sentimental:

“let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas”

If we can allow our vehicles to bring us closer to our tenors, we make real discoveries. That’s all I got on that. I hope that makes sense.

Bye