Tag Archives: Ursula Le Guin

Ghost metaphors

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

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An aside: I just read a curated selection of Ursula Le Guin’s blog posts, No Time to Spare, written mostly between 2010 and 2015. I find her clear-eyed and curious view of being “really old” pragmatic and refreshing…something to emulate, should I live so long. And her continuing interest in reading and writing and thinking about the world–I definitely want to emulate that approach!

And now, back to the garden. We got some rain–hooray–but it made the weeds as happy as it made the tomatoes.

Hominid animals

Reading Frans de Waal’s books always gets me thinking about the use of anthropomorphism/personification in poems. When I was studying and first learning about poems, the general thinking from critics seemed to be to treat anthropomorphism, and even personification, as a “no-no” in contemporary poetry. We were not to make trees or grasses or wolves “humanized”–which does make a kind of sense; instead, we were told to observe and describe what we saw with less of a reflection on whether the non-human thing bore resemblance to human things.

For example, the bee was not to love the flower or the hive, nor the ostrich to love a fellow ostrich. A willow shouldn’t sway like a dancer. It should sway like a willow in the wind. There was science behind all this, maybe Skinner’s science but still; and there is Nagel’s bat: how can a person imagine being a bat the way a bat experiences being a bat? I’m not going into reductive materialism here, don’t worry. Just trying to provide some context outside of poetry to suggest there may be forces behind the trend away from anthropomorphism, some of which are valid.

I have always been tempted to title a book The Personification of Everything.

Now science is fairly certain that emotions preceded “rational intelligence” as life evolved and that animals possess traits and behaviors that aren’t so fundamentally different from ours; we are hominid animals. I would add that, as reflective hominids who employ language for reasons beyond basic information, human beings make connections (metaphor, simile, parallelism…) and can observe the “others” in our environs as not always so unlike ourselves. Or dream of inhabiting the lives of those others, or imagine telling stories from those vastly strange (to us) points of view.

So I’m coming around to appreciating anthropomorphism and personification as dwelling in the realm of the imagination that is not the domain of philosopher or scientist. After all, writers have been taking other perspectives on stories for quite some time, especially during the past century. Ophelia’s perspective (Hamlet), Persephone’s (The Odyssey)…Kazim Ali re-writing Icarus’ story (Sky Ward, 2013). Why not, then, write poems using the perspective of the spotted lanternfly, as Robin Gow has done?

One of my favorite short stories by Ursula Le Guin, “Direction of the Road,” takes the perspective of an oak tree. It is about the relativity of time and motion, but one thing the piece brings home–without any preaching–is that human lives are comparatively brief and, dare I add, not as important in the scheme of things as we may believe. Once we can accept that possibility, maybe we can more gently embrace the world and the things of the world.