Metaphors in the Flesh: an in person Master Class on Metaphor with Patrick James Errington

Metaphors are often thought of as the domain of poets, a rarefied and purely linguistic trope. But metaphors are everywhere – when we have meetings coming up, when you find yourself in an argument, when you (hopefully!) grasp what it is I mean. And not just in language; linguistic metaphors emerge from our thinking and being alive in the world, though sometimes becoming so familiar we hardly even notice them. One way we might think about our work as poets, then, is about bringing these calcified ways of thinking – these metaphors – back to life, putting them back in the flesh, making meanings feelable, graspable, maybe even changing an old metaphor for something completely new. This craft class, led by poet, translator, and multidisciplinary researcher Patrick James Errington, will bring together research in poetry, philosophy, and neuroaesthetics to offer a new way of thinking about poems, showing how putting metaphors back in the body, in the flesh, can well and truly change everything.

NB: This class will be held in person at HVWC and capped at 12 students. Please reserve your seat ASAP as we expect it to sell out.

Patrick James Errington is an award-winning Scottish-Canadian poet, translator, and academic. He’s the author of the chapbooks Glean (2018) and Field Studies (2019) and the collection the swailing (2023), and has received numerous prizes, including the Poetry International Prize, the Callan Gordon Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. He has translated, among others, singer-songwriter PJ Harvey’s The Hollow of the Hand into French (2017) and is currently translating then French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks for New York Review Books. As an researcher, Patrick’s work spans creative writing, literary theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroaesthetics. Patrick currently lives in Edinburgh where he is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. His work was just featured in Forbes.