This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» I am reading Rosanna Warren’s book, Departures, and liking it a great deal, and, since I find her poems especially keen on using the entire spectrum of poetic concreteness between representational abstraction and non-representational abstraction. I’ll use her “Portrait: Marriage” as a grounding for what I am trying to get at here as we continue . Prior to the modernist “revolution” (it was more of an evolution with certain revolutionary slants) poets used a rich and heavily Greek/Latin-influenced sense of occasion and rhetoric to formulate their poems. There were the small lyrics, and the very free madrigals and airs but even these were homages to the small lyrical poems of the Greeks and Romans. Here are some of the more common rhetorical devices. 1. Apostrophic address: speaking directly to the dead, to roses, to nation states, to states of [...]
Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say daughter: tulips must break soil. Twiggy stuff pokes the ground from below, while sun spikes the ground from above: it’s all a spiky operation— just as you drew in your first grade class! A world of piercings! things piercing and being pierced— that is as good a theory as any other— out of being: a sort of ongoing power point demonstration: Poke the pertinent facts! Say: grass! tree! Woman bending over in imitation of a peasant in France. She is not in France. She is in Cobble Hill. She is not a peasant. She is [...]