Words With Impact: Draw Poetry Techniques Into Fiction Interpretation

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Every poetic image, therefore, is to some degree metaphorical. It looks out from a mirror in which life perceives not so much its face as some truth about its face.” C. Day Lewis

A tree is often used as a symbol or metaphor of growth and life. However, in reverse, it can also impact story by exposing lies and shadows. Fairy tales and folk tales are rich with living images in all forms, literally and figuratively.  Scriptures too remind us that choices spread beyond immediate actions.

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.” Romans 8: 20-21 NRSV

In the opening of the movie Penelope, a curse is laid upon the family for their refusal to take responsibility for their actions. The tree is the courtyard falls into immediate decay as well. Yet it doesn’t die. Instead it remains as a visual image reminding the family and others of the curse. Even if they try to pretend it doesn’t exist, the tree stands in judgment as a silent metaphor.

And it raises story questions such as why are women willing to marry into this family? Do they not believe in the curse or do they not care? Or because it was a tree did they believe that growth would come again to restore life?

What metaphor warning could your character not see or acknowledge? Or what warning does she represent to others? Silent metaphors woven into your setting can speak into volumes of interpretation.

Action Steps:

1.     Brainstorm a list of growing vegetation, or other geographic elements, that could be a metaphor for loss to your protagonist and then be restored at the end of his ordeal.

2.     How do you hope your reader will interpret it?

Share: What did you choose and why?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Draw Poetry Techniques Into Fiction Interpretation

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Pablo Picasso

Reading for Interpretation

This creates opportunities for both perspective and voice. What part of a scene or image do you want the reader to understand the most or identify with?  Two well-known poets have used the same source with startling differences while at the same time remaining true to the story they explore.

The Fall of Icarus by Breughel

1. Read over the following interpretations of the myth of Icarus. What do they have in common?

2. What do they each choose as the special focus point either in theme or detail?

3. Both poems were written in response to the same painting yet they both reflect the actual myth itself as if they hadn’t seen the painting. How?

4. See number three exercise in movie prompt at the very end.

William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

                                    According to Brueghel

                                    when Icarus fell

                                    it was spring

                                    a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

sweating  in the sun

that melted

the wing’s wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning.

Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Which version affected you the most? Why?

Action Steps: Movie Prompt

1. Take one particular scene from a recent movie you’ve already watched and put it on pause. Whether you like to write poetry or not pick out words and phrases from the visual sight that you would incorporate in a poem, with the idea that a reader may, or may not, see this ‘painting’ for themselves.

2. Write a poem based on your selections just for the fun of it.

3. Do the same exercise for a visual scene in your own novel.

Share: Did you notice anything in this scene that you missed the first time around?

Read deep, marcy