December Post #1 - Poetry

[highlyeccentric]

At majoline's request, some thoughts on the year of poetry posting:

I'm finding it really hard to envision *ceasing* to post daily poems. I thought, when I wrote a series of reflections for poetree a few months ago, that I would be incredibly glad to stop, but now I'm faced with two points of consternation: one, what are the chances that I will finish the two anthologies I'm working through, and two, what am I supposed to do with things I read now?

I really struggle with the process of reading without some form of associated output, can you tell?

It's interesting how separate poem-a-day remains from my teaching. I'm teaching detailed poetic analysis and I really have no desire to try that out on the poems I post here - although this week I learned about 'zeugma' and you bet I'll post here the first poem I find in the wild with a zeugma in it. I want a whole poem FULL of zeugmas!*

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This has been your first December prompted post! Pls to be giving more prompts.

Week 1 - Poetry meme, as per majoline
Week 2 -
Week 3 -
Week 4 -



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* Tangentially, today I taught my class about Dad Jokes. I told them many zeugmas were puns, but not all puns were zeugmas, and then they wanted examples of non-zeugma puns.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Uh...what's a zeugma and what have they to do with puns?

[highlyeccentric]

I WAS HOPING SOMEONE WOULD ASK THAT.

So a zeugma is what you get when you hang two parts of a sentence off the one verb or preposition. Bonus points if the verb or preposition has to operate in a literal sense for one and a figurative for the other. The example in our textbook was from a poem by Pope: 'Or stain her honour, or her new brocade'. A better example of the punning capacity is from Pickwick Papers: 'She went home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair'.

[alexseanchai]

Oo okay.