Monthly Archives: December 2012

Fifty-Five English Words for Snow

Snowflake                   snow/single Frost                           snowflake/having formed flatly on surface Flurries                        snow/falling Precipitation              snow/and+or other/falling Snowfall                      snow/having fallen Accumulation             +quantity snow/having fallen Snow drift                   piled snow/by wind Snow bank                  piled snow/by man (with machine)

Domokun and Symbolism

In my poetry classes I often find myself going on about symbolic conventions and symbolic systems, especially in the context of broader discussions of figurative language, and often to point out some distinctions between symbol and metaphor, or to show why a certain set of symbolic equivalences are irrelevant to the poem at hand (colour […]

Found Auburnun, by Geoffrey Hill

Inspired, or egged on perhaps, by my own recent discussion of found poetry in the satirical, parodic, or derivative mode, I’ve put together a new poem by Geoffrey Hill. Source below, plus the rules of composition, but let the poetry speak: Auburnun      fiede at acesaga ubur in ex lecta none Plumage coloration: sexually selected […]

Poetry. Whatever.

This from Ernie Lapore and Matthew Stone at the NYT Opinionator blog, “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” [2.12.2012]: In short, a poem — and artistic language more generally — is open to whatever we find in it.  Whenever we notice that an unexpected formal feature amplifies our experience of a poem in a novel way, […]