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!

A Dawn Pond Pantoum

Another poetic format I previously taught my middle school students, and one I will attempt to write myself today, is the pantoum. A pantoum is a poem with a fixed structure of repetition. Written in two stanzas of four lines each (quatrain), lines 2 and 4 of stanza 1 become lines 1 and 3 of stanza 2.

When I taught this from to my students, and they struggled to find a topic (focus), I suggested that they seek inspiration by simply looking around a room in their house or school, or even out out the window, to try draft a pantoum about what they see.

Like many forms, the level of adherence to structure is totally dependent on how comfortble you are. In the case of my pantoum, I'm going to use two qautarins, thereby employng the following scheme: 1-A, 2-B, 3-A, 4-B; 1-B, 2-C, 3-B, 4-C.

Standing in silence at the pond's bank amidst a tuft of long grass,
the shaggy plume, just below the great bird's slender neck, blows listlessly in the early morning winds.
A pair of geese, goslings in tow, calmly make their way under his gaze and across the glassy surface.
Staring out across the calm waters, the heron's bill points northward, and anew the day begins.

The shaggy plume, just below the great bird's slender neck, blows listlessly in the early morning winds.
Goslings create a cacophony of bleats and honks announcing an intent to follow their paternal guide.
Staring out across the calm waters, the heron's bill points northward, and anew the day begins.
Signaling with his own throaty croak, he takes flight across the water, eventually settling on the far side.

Stay Poetic!