Metaphor meets metonymy
Linguistically experimental poetry tends to react against the hegemony of
metaphor in mainstream poetry, and the romantic idea of the poem as an
organic whole of which all the parts are tightly interrelated. Most well-
known poetry is metaphor- and symbol-driven. The lifeblood of a poem
by Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes is metaphor: when Sylvia Plath, in her poem
‘Stillborn’ (1981, p. 142) talks about stillborn embryos, you know that she
is really talking about the difficulty of writing, and is using stillbirth as a
metaphor for this. But as David Murray (1989) points out, metaphor
works on the principle of seeing one thing through another by screening
out the differences. In other words metaphor is actually intrinsically
unstable, because it is always suppressing differences in order to point out
similarities.
Even in a poem which is metaphor-driven we are aware of the instabil-
ity of metaphor, of differences emerging rather than similarities.
Experimental poems sometimes focus on these differences. As a result
such poems are often more metonymical than metaphorical. A metonymi-
cal poem works by association and contiguity not similarity. A metonymy
occurs when a part is substituted for a whole (crown for king, for
example); where two or more words are closely associated, for example, by
their physical proximity (eye, eyebrow and forehead); or where words
belong to the same class of objects (pen, pencil, paintbrush). In addition
much experimental work explores the idea of what I call ‘new
metonymies’, that is, words which would not normally be associated but
become so in the poetic sequence. An example of this would be the string
of words desk, pencil, poem, cloud, secret, impetus, where the initially
tightly controlled association (desk, pencil, poem) becomes progressively
looser to include words which do not have a strictly metonymic basis. We
began to experiment with this kind of loose associative sequence in the
word association exercise in Chapter 1.
The prose poem ‘wonderful’ by Ania Walwicz, of which there was an
extract in Chapter 1 (Example 1.9), is a good example of a metonymical
approach to writing. It is radically different from the Rhyll McMaster
poem in the same chapter, which uses the mirror as a metaphor. The
metonymical poem is centrifugal , it sprawls outwards; the metaphorical
poem is centripetal and pulls its elements inwards. However, many poems
combine both strategies, and because language is inherently metaphorical
(words speak of things other than themselves) metaphor is never com-
pletely absent from a poem. The relationship between metaphor and
metonymy is well discussed by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics
(1975) and The Pursuit of Signs (1981). The way in which metaphor and
Postmodern poetry, avant-garde poetics 171