“I mean like…”: The Simile as Engine with James Ciano

About the workshop:

Dating back to Aristotle, the simile has held a fraught place in our poetic conscience. “Weak,” “distant,” “imprecise,” are all words leveled at the simile, especially in relation to its “stronger” and more assertive figurative twin, the metaphor. 

 But what if, beneath the pejorative connotations of the simile, there exists a foundation to move, think, and associate freely in our work? What if those perceived deficiencies are actually moments of productive tension or instability? And how can a close attention to, and exploration of, the simile open new possibilities in our poems? 

 In this workshop, we’ll talk briefly about the simile’s history and applications and then look at examples of poems where the simile offers its poet a way to travel in space and time. We then will spend our second half together completing generative exercises in hopes of illuminating the myriad possibilities that the simile can provide, not just as a tool to create unlike equivalences, but as an engine of movement and intellect in our work.

About the author:

James Ciano is the author of The Committee of Men (Boa Editions, 2026), and an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf, 2026). He holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California, and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, The Hopkins Review, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review. His reviews and writings on poetry have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the 2025-2027 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University, and lives in Decatur, Georgia.

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