Girls Are Like Metaphors

I got into an argument last night -- well, technically it was this morning -- with this damn girl about metaphors. She was all hot-to-trot for the use of metaphor, claiming that it was the only worthwhile literary device. I disagreed. In fact, I'm rather anti-metaphor. Just say what you have to say, for fuck's sake; use the patter of everyday language and you've done something. Granted, I'm a fan of kennings and synedoches, but most metaphors (and people who try to use them) are just phoney. Wittgenstein could fuck up a metaphor. He had a right to write in metaphor. But he was a philosopher. Weird. Yes, I was drunk last night/this morning. Yes, I'm a little drunk right now. Still. She was very much mistaken. She was kind of hot, though. And the weird thing is that a discussion about a dead whale shark at the Atlanta Aquarium led us into this damn argument. She suggested that the "corporate" mentality at the aquarium was culpaple in the big fish's death. And it was all downhill from there. So to speak. It was pretty heated.

Anyhoo. Here's a dash of Tom Leonard, a poet who rarely uses metaphor. And he's fucking awesome.

100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose

poetry stops before the end of the margin
you can talk about prose without mentioning school
you don’t read poetry to get from Glasgow to Saltcoats without noticing

John Menzies doesn’t stock poetry
whoever heard of war & peace having the line as a unit of semantic yield
you can call a poem what you want and say its poetic licence

poetry is the subliminal history of linguistic shape
ahem
poetry has four wheels, two wings and a pair of false teeth

poetry is the heart and the brain divided by the lungs
poetry is the world’s oldest cock and fanny story

you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters
nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose
aristotle never wrote The Proses

if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose
poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs

poetry is quintessentially contrapuntal
the square root of poetry is an ever-evolving quark
whenever Vergil looked in the mirror, he beheld an epic Latin poet

poetry is all the juicy bits in the juiciest order
poetry is jellied religion
pascal: if your labourers complain too much, try taking them to a poetry reading

prose goes scchhpludd
prose goes scchhpludd scchhpludd clomp clomp clomp
are you sitting comfortably

then I’ll end