Blog Post #4

As Culler describes the relationship between poetics and rhetoric as “allies” it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that many poems happen to use a lot of rhetorical figures. In regards to the two poems we read, it is easy to find metaphor, as they tend to be quite common in literature, and most of us have been aware of their existence since we were in grade school. As I wrote in my annotation for Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the wreck”, the metaphor that I pulled out was when Rich stated “the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth”. As I have already written in my annotation, I believe that the distinction that Rich makes between the wreck and its myth is comparable to the distinction between our world, and what we are told about it. We’ve come to explore the wreck to see it for itself, not to see what we’ve been told. Exploring the wreck is compared to experiencing the world we live in. Whereas, the myth is all that we are told about the world. The different experiences that we as individuals, have written down or told others about. In order to truly understand others, just listening doesn’t work for everyone, some of us would understand better if we lived it. Although I am certain there are a few of the other rhetorical figures hidden in Rich’s work, I could not find any as my eye’s feel a bit untrained.