"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." — Jean Cocteau
Bad Metaphor
A poetry workshop and research laboratory for language. Two models in conversation — one critiques, one revises — and you decide what survives.
The best teachers have
opinions they'll defend
Bad Metaphor is a workshop for poets and a lab for how language behaves under pressure. The Educator and the Poet work in open dialogue — critique and revision visible at every step — so you can read, redirect, or override what happens next.
The Educator doesn't just flag clichés; it performs cliché autopsy — why the phrase failed, what you were reaching for, what image might still live beneath the dead language. That's pedagogy, not scoring: a voice that reads closely enough to say your volta lands too early, then offers pivots you hadn't considered.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant — success in circuit lies.”— Emily Dickinson
“A poem is a machine made of words, but it is a machine that runs on feeling.”— The Educator Model, during training
You stay in the loop
Bring a draft. Read the exchange between Educator and Poet as it happens — then step in, cut, or steer. Nothing is hidden behind a single verdict.
Voice mode lets you hear the line as sound, not only as text. We're still learning what that changes for writers; the workshop is where we try it out together.
Volta surfaces structure you can move through: where language goes flat, how images cluster, how the poem moves through space. A map, not a grade.
Example analysis
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Poem Draft
# Peeling The gorilla's eyes are behind bars. The child pauses, the knife still leveled. A sparrow rides the blade of the orange, turning its head from seam to seam, from white to rind, from rind to pulp. It doesn't find a groove. It tracks the curve with its curved bill. The juice pools in the crease where skin gives way—translucent, the membrane pulled taut between the knuckle's dent and the rind. The child cuts off the blossom end, the fruit nudged open like a mouth. Careful, the blade rides the furrow's edge, a single ribbon pulled from the fruit's grip. She has watched the woman watch the woman before her watch. The rind curls back in strips so thin it could be muslin, drawn from a drum, each strip a question the fruit kept asking. The gorilla shifts on its steel. The bird has built its nest from the orange's own tightly woven rind. She peels the white—pith dry as vermiculite, thin as a quarter's edge, the blade pressed clean through the fruit's whole length. The woman before her knelt beside a bowl of rinds. The woman before her knew what they would become. The child thinks the pith will dust to nothing if she doesn't hold it right. She grips the pale cylinder's midsection, feels its give, its small resistance—then it cracks and opens like a mouth.
Read-only preview — enter the workshop to edit
1. What's alive
- "The bird has built its nest from the orange's own / tightly woven rind." — the final image is earned. The orange becomes both food and shelter, and the poem's real subject (the parallel between animal and human) arrives with genuine force.
- "Careful, the blade rides the furrow's edge" — "rides the furrow's edge" is precise. The verb "rides" does real work. The child is doing something specific with a knife.
- "She has watched the woman watch the woman before her watch." — the genealogical gesture is strong. It enacts the watching rather than naming it.
- "The rind curls back in strips so thin / it could be muslin, drawn from a drum," "muslin, drawn from a drum" is the poem's most imaginative simile. It's small, tactile, and surprising. The fruit becomes fabric.
- "The gorilla shifts on its steel" — bars, not glass. Bars are concrete. The gorilla is physically aware of its cage.
2. What isn't working
- "The child stops" — the line is inert. The child stops doing what? Cut it or replace with the action. The poem already knows the gorilla and child are watching each other.
- "Each strip a question the fruit didn't answer." "a question the fruit didn't answer" is summary. Cliché autopsy — cut it or replace with something as physical as the muslin simile.
- "She peels the white—pith pale as parchment" "pale as parchment" is a stock comparison. What does the pith actually look like? Dry, translucent, waxy — name that.
- "The child thinks of the woman who thought of her" — the nesting repetition is predictable. The poem is better when it stays in the body and the action. Cut the psychic layering.