More Tony Hoagland

The second chapter of Real Sofistikashun has the title: "'Tis Backed Like a Weasel": The Slipperiness of Metaphor. It is broken into three sections, each titled metaphorically: 1. Cloud, 2. Whale, and 3. Weasel.

His premise in the first section, is that metaphor is a gift and that "an urge to claim wild similarities is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit." The kid lying in the backyard pointing upward calling out, "elephant, raspberry, big wheel," doesn't care about the metaphor equation Hoagland gleans from Stephen Dobyns, where object half and image half combine to make a functional metaphor, and she doesn't care that these shapes she is fetching exceed logic. She's just reaching into that unknown vastness inside and making metaphors with clouds.

Metaphor, Hoagland says, is slippery, and it is huge. Can this be why his section section is titled "Whale"? He talks about how metaphor's work lessens the poet's, the metaphor eliminating the need for a thesis statement, the unintended adjunct meanings that creep into poems via metaphors, these additional meanings making metaphor uncontainable and elastic. He brings in Mary Oliver to tell us how unnecessary extra images will make our poems wild carnival rides that lose their sense of purpose and disrupt the poem's cumulative power. The proper status, he illustrates with a poem by Robert Hass, of metaphor, is to serve the whole, to function almost underground, underwater maybe, working and moving the poem forward, to "supplement and augment the poem's discourse" but not devolve to self expression or self glorification.

In the third section, Hoagland says the metaphor, is "an enriching device, but must not toss the rider from the horse." But, he says, the metaphor resists logic and care, is "an allergic reaction to too much reality." He brings Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet to illustrate. Polonious, the unimaginative keeper of the status quo, has been sent to bring Hamlet to an audience with his mother. Hamlet, wildcard and metaphor maker, is dangerous. He resists Polonious's attempt to bring him to heel with metaphorical play with a cloud, calling it first camel, to which Polonious agrees, then weasel,Polonious agreeing, "It is backed like a weasel." "Or like a whale?" Hamlet asks, and Polonious follows after, "Very like a whale." Hamlet, "that subversive figure, that poet, will not cooperate -- he continuously changes his images, ...moving out of reach," which "protects his right to dream, which, like all freedoms, is dangerous."