The Rhyme of Things: a new approach to metaphor with Don Paterson

Our poetic practice is still informed by very old ideas of what a metaphor is: we often think of it as the means by which we explicitly compare something within the poem to something outside it, as a way of investing it with 'additional' meaning. But there's another class of metaphor which works through undeclared connection, and is left for the reader to discover – something Don calls an 'isologue'. This is where two or more elements within the poem will 'rhyme', sometimes across many lines: this means they yoke themselves together conceptually, allowing the poem to cohere through shared aspects of form, effect and tone. This way of uniting poetic material into a harmonically deep and resonant whole is most explicitly seen in the work of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, but identifiable in the work of many other poets. If you're interested in learning about this powerful and…