WhimsyLand

I received another contributor's copy of Iowa Review today, a pleasant surprise and good read.  Phillip Lopate's keynote address to the Nonfiction Conference is therein, interesting as I never did understand what creative nonfiction was and now I think I do.  It "allows the nonfiction writer to user literary techniques ... such as scene-setting, description, dialogue, action, suspense and plot".  Huh.  That would be an interesting addition to a treatise on global warming mayhaps.  I read all the poetry, really.  There were no poems I thought were entirely successful, but what of that?  Going through again, I decided to look for the interesting metaphors.  And similes, her subordinate and unsubtle cousin.  Here's what I found:

Margaret Gibson, Fuel:  "I am, said the voice in the oil spill of rainbow radiance".  (actually, I would have dropped the radiance).

Joshua Kryah, Neverbody:  "Bone, ivory, dentin — / the body's bright Braille to sift through"

Arthur Vogelsang (which always reminds me of birdsong, and for good reason), I Don't Know:  "A fan is an unlikely bird unmuscled"

Gregory Galloway, insominia in:  "she dragged the spoon along the bottom of the cup / until it sounded like a train pulling out of the station"

Tod Marshall, Ars Poetica IV:  "Love is peasant.  Love is find.  It lends me, it is unlike toast, it is prow."

Bruce Bond, Madam Zero:  "She saw her image everywhere / as the thing that was missing / the eye in the stone, the sleeper's stare, / the clock's dice clicking in the fist."

Stephanie Ivanoff, Point of View, or Submersible:  "A mood of oyster / Conspires in an oyster bed, // A mood of lead, / Even as these, newly-wed // Lean stone sober / Over the wall-eyed cake."

There's also a dandy article by David B. Morris called Eros Modigliani, which includes what would have been in my youth called dirty pictures.  Apparently all of Modigliani's models were large-breasted.  By contrast, all of the bare-breasted woman of my youth were African.  Bound between the covers of National Geographic.   I remember one particularly regal woman with a large gourd of water balanced on her head, pointing out something on the horizon.