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…