Illness & Metaphor

The Prompt:

In this assignment, you will be writing about illness, whether your own illness or the illness of someone close to you. You should have significant personal knowledge of this illness, based on your own observations and experiences. For the beginning freewrite, write down everything you know about this illness, staying as physical and objective as possible.

Time yourself as you write in some way (with a timer, the length of a song, or the length of a page). Write for roughly roughly 10 minutes in response to the following prompt. Try to write for the whole time, without stopping, in sentences, without line breaks. Work to get all of your thoughts on the page, without worrying about what you are writing, or how. It is encouraged to follow wherever your mind leads.

After the timed freewrite is over, go back through what you have written, and underline all of the symptoms of this illness. Some of these may be physically apparent, such as a fever or a rash. Others may be cognitive, psychological, or emotional, such as confusion or irritability.

Take another sheet of paper and list out all the symptoms you have written, leaving ample space between each item. You can add to this list as well. Aim for 8-10 symptoms. After you have come up with your list, write 10-15 comparisons for each symptom. These can take the form of simile (one thing is like another thing) or metaphor (one things is another thing). Either way, the comparisons should be between two things that are fundamentally dissimilar and bring new understanding about the symptom. For example, if I say that a fever is an elevated body temperature, I am not discovering, or communicating, any new information about fever. If I say a fever is the desert in a body, or wildfire season, or a tongue packed in salt, that gives the reader a new understanding of my particular experience of having a fever.

List out as many comparisons as you can. Don’t worry if they make sense or are true. You may take several days to complete your lists.

Poems to Read:

• Rafael Campo, “What the Body Told”
• Patricia Kirkpatrick, “Vision Test”
• Paisley Rekdal, “The Wolves”
• Max Ritvo, “Your Voice in the Chemo Room”
• Danez Smith, “sometimes i wish i felt the side effects”
• Wendy Videlock, “The woman with a tumor in her neck”

Questions to consider on you own in writing, or in discussion with others:

• What comparisons do these poets use to describe their illnesses?
• What comparisons are used to describe the body?
• What pairings did you find most strange or surprising?
• What did you learn about these experiences you did not know before?
• Is metaphor or simile used to describe anything that is not related to the physical body? What do you notice about those comparisons? In what ways are they the same as metaphors that relate to the body, and in what ways are they different?

Writing Assignment:
Write a poem about your experience of an illness, your own or the illness of someone close to you. Imagine you are writing for a reader who has never had this particular illness, or any of the attendant symptoms. Begin with the comparison you found most strange or surprising in your list.