Monday 23 January 2017

My problem with alliterations, metaphors and other stylistic means

I was already suspicious when I learned about alliterations, metaphors and other stylistic means in school. I never understood the point of them. Then I was young enough to treat it like a game to identify those things in highly questionable poetry. Since then I've really struggled to see why you'd use them. It was a problem at University as an old-fashioned lecturer (a proper Modernist) really got off on them...in fact, they were the best thing that could happen to music. I remember having to write an essay about an Oliver Knussen piece and because there was nothing at all interesting about it I wrote about the imagery and symbolism in it - as a joke. I remember laughing lot when I wrote it. Of course, I got an A. I was devastated. Anyway, I think I've just worked out what the problem is: People say that these stylistic means add weight to something, introduce other layers of meaning, open a discourse and so on. To me it feels like all they do is point away from its actual concrete self. It's a sign of a lack of confidence. If you could say it straight, why would you dress it in fancy things that might look pretty but hide the core. People will always make links, find contexts, create contexts, but as a creator I will keep staying away from those tools. It happens naturally anyway. You are never without context and everything that you do relates to something else, so why add to it artificially. Metaphor-lovers often call things that don't have these meta-layers "shallow". I love this shallowness because it allows me to add my own layers of meaning.

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