Before we get into it, and before the paywall: those interviews I promised went live! Here are links to my interviews with Todd Davis and Lucy Green.
Okay, now we can get started…
When I wrote poetry, I used to hide myself as the author. I didn’t want my readers to know my age or my interests. I often obscured the time period I was writing about. I thought the goal was to make a poem timeless, and I thought that meant to place it outside of time, and the individual, especially if the individual was me.
I came to learn that this had a lot to do with how I valued (or didn’t value) my voice, my perspective, and myself. I valued instead my abilities, my writing, my creativity. But for writing, for good writing, I had to value both my writing and the version of myself that the writing came from.
After my grandfather died, I started writing about what was actually happening in my life. I also bucked against most of what I understood poetry to be. I was bothered by how every poem I wrote about my grandfather’s death became a beautiful thing because poems are beautiful. Even when I tried to force them not to be.
I began avoiding figurative language at all costs—not for its beauty but for its negotiated arrangement with falsity. A simile not only says that a thing is like something else (or as, or larger than, or as striking as, or, or, or), but by its very nature it calls attention to how those two things are not alike as well. The comparison doesn’t exist until it’s articulated. It needs to be articulated. And so a simile is a dangerous thing, or so it seemed to me. All that can be brought into an image with that comparison.
I wanted to be frank and honest and direct and blunt. I wanted all of those adjectives hurled at my poems, even if they were used as insults.
Even after I stopped writing about my grandfather’s death, I still didn’t use figurative language. I focused on concrete details, sensory details, defamiliarization, dialogue, structure, surrealism, narrative. I focused on sentence structure, sentence variety, and the sentences’ play with/against the lines.
I’ve come to think this is an exercise that all poets should try for at least one poem—to not include figurative language. It can teach you a lot of things about what other places you can pull from to raise the stakes of your poem and to heighten your language.
It can also be useful as a tool for revision. Take out all the figurative language in your poem and see what’s left. Is it still valuable? Is there still meat on its bones? Is the figurative language the crux of your poem or does it add to it? If it’s the crux, are you aware of that and are you doing something with that—with how you’ve rested the crux of your poem on figurative elements? If it’s not the crux, is it necessary? How have you made each moment of figurate language necessary?