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When writing poetry, is there a known method of some kind that exists that makes it easy to turn a concept I'd like to illustrate into a metaphor? If so, please elaborate as much as possible.
EDIT:
I am asking if there is a way to come up with metaphors quickly and easily, so that if I want to illustrate a concept or a thought or a feeling I can quickly come up with a solid metaphor, rather than ask and puzzle about it.
Quick and dirty way?
Grab the nearest adjective describing given noun. Grab another noun described by that adjective. Find an adjective or another description that sets them apart. There, you have the metaphor.
Glass - transparent - air - solid - solid air.
Hand - limp - jelly - fingered - fingered jelly
Bar - noisy - classroom - drinks and cigarettes - classroom of drinks and cigarettes
Bus - long - sausage - streets - Sausage of the streets.
As you certainly notice these aren't top notch. This is a quick&dirty method as you requested. If you want quality metaphors, you must painstakingly craft them, or experience a flash of inspiration, no way around that.
To quickly generate metaphors I grab my thesaurus and I find words that mean the same thing as the concept I'm trying to metaphorize. I tend to pick out words that do not sound at all similar despite having the same meaning. After I have a collection of words as a baseline, I write a sentence each to describe each of them. I pick the most illustrative sentences and I expand them to paragraphs. Once that's done there is always a metaphor waiting for me in my mind. This is an exercise that I learned at a writing conference, and it almost always works for me. The presenter suggested that it's because the act of writing concrete structures describing words that mean what you're trying to illustrate gets your subconscious to think about the metaphor while you're concentrating your conscious mind on the act of writing descriptions. YMMV, but, as I said it works for me.
I asked the question hoping to get more exercises like this one, not to answer my own question, because the times that it doesn't work I often end up stuck. :)
No. Absolutely not. You should puzzle over everything you write until you know that the words convey exactly what you want. There is no abstract "metaphor machine," so to speak.
When I need a metaphor, sometimes it's there, waiting for me. And sometimes I have to sit for five minutes and think, iterating over different aspects of the world we live in until I find the one that best mirrors the subject and fits the context.
And sometimes I put in a blank and think about it for days.
Don't write if you're not practically exploding with passion. Write to a person, a thing, an audience, a listener, a love, and just tell them (or it) what you need to say in the most concise, comprehensive, and truthful way you muster.
