24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
This class is FULL, but Kim’s class in the fall still has space.
“Juliet is the sun!” Shakespeare famously wrote. And Pound, just as famously, saw the faces at a Metro station as “petals on a wet, black bough.” The magic of metaphor: one thing in terms of another. Metaphor structures our thinking and daily lives. For poets, it’s one of our most powerful tools. Using two chapters from my book Ordinary Genius as a jumping-off point, we’ll read, write, and think together about how metaphor works in our and others’ poems, both as controlling conceit and as local fireworks to create surprise and depth. You’ll need to buy Ordinary Genius if you don’t have it, as it will be a resource for us beyond those two chapters, and there will be lots more material online. We will all try to remember the difference between metonymy and synecdoche, and we’ll have more fun than a barrel of monkeys, or a tornado in a trailer park.
Biography
Kim Addonizio is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. She has received NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, The Sun, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), and numerous literary journals. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. She performs and teaches internationally at colleges, universities, festivals and conferences, and currently lives in Oakland, CA, where she teaches private workshops.
