On critters and other poetical transferences (7.25.22)

This is a follow-up to yesterday's posting on conceits and what makes them so powerful in a poem. Elio Soldi, one of our W@1 writers, shared a poem last week with these lines in it:

I have a mind and it tickles my toes

when I am distracted by life as advertised,

a critter making strident noises

when I start being properly occupied.

It's the fairly complex critter metaphor that interested me at the time, that spurred this week's project on conceits.  Likening the mind to a critter?  Genius!  But why?

A conceit is what the critics call a "trope of transference."  It brings together two very unlike things or ideas into an expression or an image.  The attributes of one thing become applied to, transferred into, the attributes of the other, thus creating a third thing or idea.  The more foreign the two things or ideas are in relation to each other, the more powerful that third thing or idea.  Theoretically.  In this case, mind and critter.  

The more you think about critters and critterdom, what you know and feel about these, the better this metaphor becomes.

So, what do you think of when you think of critters?  Wild animals.  But not lions and tigers and elephants and whales, and not butterflies and bees either.  A critter is much closer to home.  A critter is dull and crawly; if it bites, it won't kill you and eat you, and it would prefer not to come near you at all.  A critter is no happier to be in your living room than you are to have it there.  We don't confer upon them our grander human values, like king of the beasts, plough of the ocean, trumpeter, etc.  It's all animal and all wild.  

It's also undifferentiated.  One critter is pretty much like any other.  

So, when a writer likens his own mind to a critter, all sorts of transference take place.  And the less he does so in the form of a direct comparison, more as an implication, the more powerful the transference.

Would this transference have worked had Elio deployed "steel trap" instead of "critter"?  Of course not! Well, maybe if he'd been the first writer to make that connection, as somebody surely was. But the expression lost that power to surprise somewhere in the misty past, after the millionth use of it.  He'd have just copied a cliché that has lost all its ability to surprise, to arrest, to expand our associative horizons.  No, the transference requires a fresh set of terms.

Here's another transference at work, from a short poem by Bennett Myers, also shared at last week's W@1.

Vagrant

Held in Jerusalem Rikers

No shekels for bail or fine

Waiting list for a cross

Charge

Impersonating God

We all know about Jesus and the crucifixion.  And we're all (too) familiar with Rikers Island, the bureaucracy of waiting lists, and the crime of appearing to be who you aren't.  One a story with mythical elements; one a common piece of reportage, from your local police blotter.  You wouldn't normally think to put the two together, they seem so alien to each other, but this poet does.  Transference ensues.

Just to repeat myself, that transference works partly because the terms of the comparison are so alien to each other.  But also because the comparison is not made explicit by the poet.  Nowhere does the poem say "Jesus is like a common criminal in a holding cell on Rikers Island, charged with impersonating somebody else for profit."  Part of what makes a good conceit work is that you, reader, have to complete the transference by yourself.