When I was ~9, my mom put me in a group-homeschool class for poetry writing. I remember they gave us the instruction to write metaphors, how one thing was like another random thing. I thought this was weird, but I did it - I picked random things that had vague traits 1/
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in common and wrote a series of lines that said "x is like y" in flowery language.
I remember thinking it was stupid, or trivial? Like, it was extremely easy to do and I didn't get why they wanted me to do it. It wasn't meaningful or moving for me, I wasn't interested in it. 2/
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But after the class was over they pulled me aside and said I was one of the best and they wanted to move me to advanced class, and I remember being so confused. I believed all the other kids must have done poorly because they were actually trying to write fun, meaningful things 3
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and didn't have the heart to follow the shitty boring rules they wanted us to.
In hindsight, this is really interesting to me. As a child, pulling creative metaphors was super easy, but also boring and meaningless, and adults praised me for it because *they* valued it, 4/
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and didn't care about whether I enjoyed doing it or if that's the kind of poetry I found really engaging.
It's also interesting how meaningless the metaphors were when I was a kid. Why were they so trivial for me, but so important to adults? 5/5
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I think you're mixing up similes and metaphors. I also remember this growing up, I didn't understand what was so special about similes since they were so easy to do, maybe that's just a child brain thing adults find harder to do?
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Maybe poetry is above all about a certain freedom wrt language, and a will not to follow sheepishly linguistic clichés. Maybe that was precisely what you demonstrated. So you thought you were cheating or not doing it, but you actually were.
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