Brain Teeze

Brain Teeze

WHO AM I?

I’m not exactly lawless, but I don’t obey rules of metrical verse.

I demand:

• a sensitiveness to cadence

• a musical balance of phrases:

When it was hard for me to win friends and influence poets one of my champions said, ‘Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’.

I was practiced by masters who never knew my name.
(Deutsch 58)



WHO AM I?
I am the feature of a poem which shows the poet’s attitude toward its theme, toward a speaker or a person addressed in the poem and toward the reader.

I am the formality or colloquialism of the vocabulary, its vagueness, or precision, simplicity or complexity of the style, the energy or languor of the rhythms . . . the use or abuse of certain technical devices.

(Deutsch 185)



WHO AM I?
I originated in 1650–60, modeled after obliterātiō obliteration but intended to convey a deriv. of littera letter.

I am the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter, as in apt alliteration's artful aid.

Examples of me are the repetition of the beginning sounds of words, as in “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” “long-lived,” and “the fickle finger of fate

(Dictionary.com)





WHO AM I?

I am language that implies a relationship, of which similarity is a significant feature, between two things and so changes our apprehension of either or both.

Aristotle said that for a poet the greatest thing b far is to have a command of me!

(Deutsch 84,85)





WHO AM I?

I occur when double or multiple meanings attach to words or situations.

All figurative language is somewhat me.

When I engage several meanings in a contest I can illuminate complexities and make room for alternative meanings.

I can make a detail effective in several ways at once.

I can make two or more alternative meanings fully resolved into one.

I can give two apparently unconnected meanings simultaneously.

I can be contradictory or irrelevant forcing the reader to invent interpretations.

(Deutsch11)


[Free Verse / Tone / Alliteration / Metaphor/ Ambiguity]