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Sue Cauhape's avatar

Love it! Much more interesting than reading it in class and studying how it illustrates enjumbment! (god I hate that word. Don't you think the person who invented that concept could think of a better word for it?)

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Chuck Rybak's avatar

Thanks so much for the nice words. I do confess to geeking out over specific poetry terms, but wow, why we would lead with that stuff and not save it for much further down the line is beyond me.

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Sue Cauhape's avatar

Another thing that got to me in academic poetry classes was how we were expected to buy this huge tome that even the instructor didn't like, and read ... oh ... maybe three poems. And it wasn't used much more through the class. To the instructor's credit (he was a poet himself) we focused on the actual writing of poetry rather than analyzing it. That group later morphed into a writers' group named the Jibboom Street Writers up in Truckee, CA. That was when my own poetry started gushing out. Great inspiration from those people. Now THAT'S a way to get people fired up about poetry. I doubt very much if anybody opened that huge tome ever again. I did get a kick, though, out of watching the instructor's lips flap like Mick Jagger when he said "enjumbment." God, what a word!

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