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Power Lines's avatar

Before I write, I used to go to wikipedia and come up with examples for all the figures of speech. It's a kind of like doing scales before playing piano. It worked for me. Once I started a substack, I created little slideshows for each figure of speech: https://mattjgarland.substack.com/s/rhetoric/archive?sort=new. I'll start filling up the comments with more copycats soon, since I need to write. You are welcome to as well! It's humbling for sure, comparing your own attempts to the best in class, but I find that exercises when I am not in the flow pay off when I am in flow.

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

What a great exercise! I should try that.

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Power Lines's avatar

A lot of the examples are actually from songs and movies, but that's because traditional rhetoric lives more in them than in modern poetry.

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Claire Adderholt (Craft)'s avatar

this is really cool!! such a creative concept, and great for practice. (and I love Bogart movies so good choice there)

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Raju Tai's avatar

This explains so much about why I feel like my poems are not suitable for submission. (But they are suitable for me and that's good for now.)

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LP's avatar

“There’s actually something of an emerging renaissance of formal verse in academia and some lit journal publishing but it hasn’t yet filtered down, generally speaking, from high-end journals to the mid and lower tiers yet. Good luck finding formal, metered poetry in anything except a handful of journals!”

I write metrical verse, and have been looking for suitable journals to follow and submit to. Do you have any recommendations? I also plan to share some of my own verse on Substack, though under a different account name.

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Claire Adderholt (Craft)'s avatar

sorry I was buried in work after publishing this post and just saw this!! I have an article coming out in a couple weeks on where to submit metrical work so stay tuned! but as a frist stop I always recommend New Verse Review!

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

Lovely list of literary devices. Sporting some of my personal favorites: allusion, repetition, and apostrophe. I'm pretty sure I've used all of those in the past week. Oh and rhetorical questions. I'm weaker than I'd like to be on rhyme and meter, but I do try my hand at them regularly to keep in practice. I love synecdoche, but don't think use it as much as I ought.

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Claire Adderholt (Craft)'s avatar

that's amazing!! Super inspiring that you use so many (and I love your poetry so makes sense). I'm actively trying to use more of these - I do use questions and repetition and only recently started using allusion. Meter is my weak spot but I've only been trying it for a few months in the background. I would LOVE to see more apostrophe - if I had to pick just one from this list that's actually what I'm most interested in reading, it gives such focus and a different, often more narrative and epic slant to the poem

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Claire Cayson's avatar

Thank yiu Claire

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Joel Schmitz's avatar

Been feeling this.

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Tom Shaw's avatar

I'd love to see more epic poetry for sure, so much so I'm considering making that a focus on some of my works for the foreseeable future. Formic poetry in general has fallen by the wayside in favour of free verse, and I do feel we're missing a lot from its presence!

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Claire Adderholt (Craft)'s avatar

agreed on both! any idea what theme or types of settings you'll use for your epic poems? I'm curious!

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Tom Shaw's avatar

I'm drawn to a retelling of Robin Hood as an epic poem... but I have one or two other ideas too 😁

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Timothy's avatar

This may have been written tongue in cheek, but there are some good reminders about what poetry from the past can contribute to poetry today.

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Timothy Daugaard's avatar

There's a good chunk of those in mine.

https://soundingoutthewonder.substack.com/

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Sol ☼'s avatar

I really appreciate these reminders! I feel we could all benefit from refreshers like this

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