Today’s first device from Packard’s A Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices is

Ode: An extended lyric, on a single theme or subject, often of considerable length and usually using recognizable STANZA patterns. The word “ode” comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and the form may have had its origins with Sappho in the middle of the seventh centruy B.C., because her surviving work includes one complete ode and four stanzas of a second ode. The later Greek poet Pindar wrote triumphal odes, and the Roman poet Horace wrote odes as well as SATIRES and EPISTLES.

I am sharing here the first two stanzas of an original poem entitled “Ode to Today.”  It is quite lengthy, so I won’t post the entire poem.  The “single theme or subject” is the kind of sadness that is brought on by loneliness or rejection.  As for recognizable stanza patterns, there are not any; at least, not the way I think Packard means.  The stanzas get “fatter” on the page (the lines get longer) and build to a middle, a crescendo, before they shrink again.  That effect was not anything I tried to achieve consciously, but it is suitable for the poem. Continue reading “To Commemorate the “Lost Day” of April 16th” →

Today’s device from William Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices is

Oxymoron:  A radical paradox; a conjunction of extreme opposites.  “Dry ice is so cold that it burns” is an example of oxymoron.

In poetry, oxymoron also functions metaphorically (see METAPHOR) to express a state of ambivalence or contradiction. …

Old Lamb
(by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner)

“What did the tired nurse
say to the complaining
patient?
‘Take your Oxy
Moron.'”

And that’s what
every interminable
minute was like
with him: a slow
trot from one
sad joke
to the next.

From William Packard’s The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices:

Noh:  A tradition in Japanese poetry and theater that is over six hundred years old; called “the immeasurable scripture” because it is a synthesis of song and dance and poetry and drama and religion. …

Well, obviously no noh happens in one sitting, and it won’t be happening here! My only other option under “N” is a cross-reference (NARRATIVE  See DRAMATIC-NARRATIVE POETRY; GENRES) and I am too much of a purist to fool with cross references for this exercise.

We shall, however, honor the Japanese poetry form with a tanka.  Thanks for reading!

Thunderstorm

The calm that settles
over us before a storm
is a counterfeit;
it is not fury’s absence.
It is fury coiling up.

-Suzanne Baldwin Leitner