Strange & Sublime Similes

In an essay on figurative language, D. A. Powell notes that “simile has fallen out of favor in some circles of contemporary poetic thought,” and is now used largely ironically, as in John Ashbery’s “Night falls like a wet sponge.” Maligned as the black sheep of the figurative language family and considered too “elementary” by some (likely because many of us first practiced similes in elementary school), similes nonetheless continue to dazzle readers with startling, visceral, and sometimes goofy associations. Using Powell’s essay as a jumping-off point and then looking at examples in poems and songs by Lucille Clifton, Leonard Cohen, Aracelis Girmay, Chelsey Minnis, José Olivarez, Anne Sexton, and others, we’ll discuss what makes a comparison take off or crash land, and then we’ll construct poems around some of our own similes, whose strangeness might stumble into the sublime.

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BECCA KLAVER is a writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and literary collaboration conjurer. She is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Midwinter Constellation, a book cowritten with 31 other poets in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, was published in early 2022 by Black Lawrence. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is currently co-editing the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and has created pop-up journals such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants and Across the Social Distances.

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