The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2015

Metaphor is most familiar as the literary device through which we describe one thing in terms of another, as when Shakespeare has Romeo say: "Juliet is the sun." But metaphor is much more than a literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. Metaphor is intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from economics and advertising to politics and business to science and psychology. Fresh metaphors are essential to writing fine lines, the rich, robust sentences that characterize the most compelling poetry. In this lively, interactive workshop, we will work with metaphor to create the kind of concise, vivid sentences that linger in readers' minds.