The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Example 2.31

she searched out

her selves

wondering

whether

to open

one

In Example 2.32 we no longer have only one metaphor. There are several
in the poem: sowing seeds, weather and wind imagery. There is also a pun
on whether/weather and draught/draft:

Example 2.32

D reams blow their draughts

O n the wastes of decision

O nly the whether sows

R ites become reasons

Once you start developing metaphors the process is self-generative: one
metaphor leads to another. Sometimes you find the metaphor takes you
down a new path, and the poem starts to grow in an unexpected fashion.
In fact it can be liberating and creative to let the metaphors evolve in their
own way. Do not force all the metaphors to ‘agree’ with each other, the
assumption that metaphors should neatly fit with each other in the poem
is sometimes put forward as a ‘rule’ writers should follow, but very few
poems adhere to it. In fact the poem may be more dynamic if you allow
the metaphors to fly out in several directions at once.

Example 2.33

a tall door

a question which pales

the mark of a quest which dismantles

Here the unified sentence has prised itself apart, and become a series of
images which are almost independent of each other. The reader can make
them cohere into a series of events or thoughts, but the construction is
looser than in other examples.
You can see from the above examples how it is possible to either relent-
lessly pursue one metaphor through a poem, or introduce a number of
them. Some poems, like Michael Dransfield’s ‘A Strange Bird’ (1991, p. 354),

44 The Writing Experiment