This craft talk will examine the many sides of metaphor, exploring metaphor as ornament versus locus of meaning; explicit and implicit metaphor; metaphor that clarifies meaning and metaphor that adds ambiguity; metaphor that parses and unites, and other considerations. While nearly every canonical poem and a great majority of non-canonical poems would possibly serve our discussion, we will read a few poems by some master metaphor makers such as William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, as well as poems by some contemporary poets, such as Mark Doty and Reg Saner and excerpts from various others.

Fred Dings was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and PhD at the University of Utah, where he studied with Mark Strand and Larry Levis. His books of poetry include The Four Rings: New & Selected Poems (SFA Press, 2020), Eulogy for a Private Man (TriQuarterly Books, 1999), After the Solstice (Orchises Press, 1993). His work has appeared in The New Republic, New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry magazine, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, and many other periodicals. Dings currently teaches at the University of South Carolina.