Skip to main content

The Poet Test


How to become a poet

Answer these questions:

  1. What are the four standard feet in an English prosody?
  2. What is an implied metaphor? Give two examples, don't be specific.
  3. What is the best rhyme for orange? (Hint – it’s not door hinge.)
  4. Why was Robert Frost so grouchy?
  5. What is the best time of day to rummage through Arby’s for old sandwiches?
  6. What kind of line is it when you, and this must be exact; combine a dactyl and a trochee – in that order?
  7. Why is an English sonnet easier to write for a white person than an Italian sonnet?
  8. Why did your mother dress you up as a girl until you were in grade school, and then, as a boy?
  9. How long does it take, on average, for people to wean themselves off Paxil without crying?
  10. In what way is the word scuttle not like a crab?

That’s almost it!

Please send your correct answers to me, as well as three examples of your best work, (along with a check or money order for twenty dollars (American) for my administrative costs.)

Congratulations!

(After your check clears, you will receive a license to practice Poetry that is valid in all States, and most Countries.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explain nothing, except your self

Explain nothing, except your self. I feel like the last of a tribe struggling to keep my identity a secret from the mob, one step ahead at best, reduced to hiding in bushes from the monsters waiting to snag and devour me. Sort of a delicacy and a poison – a non-specific drug that exudes memes instead of hormones and physical highs – subconscious, primitive analog get-off-ness apparently responsible for some weird competitive advantage consolidating over geological time out of our mixed genus ancestors, or maybe Texans. At the same time, I feel like spasmed dots from gods own printer cartridge ejaculated onto the canvas of a great emptiness, the thought of which is expressed in the three-dimensional representation of the position I’m braced into while doing the splatting -- all hologram like but only juicier and used -- like an in and out burger wrapper chewed on by a trashcan opossum. Or better, a goat in a pickup heading for a quinceanera debating Schrödinger with the
Post a Comment
Read more

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body before the brain
Post a Comment
Read more