An AP Pantoum

Since my summer break began nearly three weeks(!) ago, I have been trying to bone up on a myriad of literary terms and concepts in anticipation of teaching AP (Advanced Placement) English Composition and Language this fall.

Following an initial Twitter post in the wee hours of the morning declaring my (limited) progress in understanding ("@ 4 am i experience a small denouement re: tropes, schemes, rhetoric & discourse, miraculously concepts begin to fall into mental boxes"), I came home from my summer school teaching gig, aching to bang out a pantoum on the subject (such as it is was is):

Indecipherable terms float about without tether--
metaphor, irony, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, simile.
Confused and off-balance is my own internal rhetor--
parallelism, antithesis, repetition, climax, anastrophe.

Metaphor, irony, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, simile--
the "trope" a crafty departure from the definition of record.
Parallelism, antithesis, repetition, climax, anastrophe--
but "scheme" is an cunning change from a familiar arrangement of word.

I still have a lo-o-o-ong way to go, but weeks with which to do it, and I am finding myself excited by the possibilities...

Stay Poetic!