Walking out in a morning drizzle, I remembered the beginning of a poem Carolyn Street brought to Nelson Bentley’s workshop at the University of Washington over thirty years ago:
“This fucking, fucking rain….”
Our esteemed professor said, “Visualize your metaphors.”
It was the advice he gave whenever we came up with ridiculous metaphors. In this case, he made Carolyn’s line famous, remembered by everyone who was in the class. That line couldn’t be called poetry and I don’t remember anything about the rest of the poem. It’s more like a single-scene comic: simple, obvious, impossible, yet true.
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