Steve Wheeler and I had a fascinating exchange of texts not long ago. He really is a wringer and twister of all terms literary, and I am always thrilled to witness him in full blast poetry extrapolation mode.
I am also absolutely certain he has a washboard somewhere in his office where he wrings out thesauruses and dictionaries, then reuses the wordy wash water to concoct his wooly masterpieces! I only wish I knew what kind of soap he uses…
We were going on about literary devices… and he was turning them inside out.
When I told him about the Invisible Poets Facebook Group exercise I wrote on extended metaphors, he said I should use a contracted metaphor. When I asked him what that was… he replied he just wasn’t sure yet… he had just made it up! I was like “Wha…?!!”
He went on to explore something he called anti-similes.. a total opposite contrast of “as” or “like”… always unlike something… then pointed out a few. His examples included … “as a pig wearing lipstick” or “as a walrus wearing a corset”… and as a kind of “jumper on there” I wrote back “as an elephant walking a tightrope”…
It was just fun bouncing ideas between poets, but I started to see a window into my colleague’s poetic genius. He was creating inverted devices!!
A bright light bulb lit up over my head like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons!!! “Ehh…what’s up doc?!” Wow… the possibilities…
That’s when Steve’s literary wringer went into a spin cycle… and he washed out another zinger… “Anti-Malapropism - misappropriation of a word for another word and then reverting back for effect”… with the example “Tome becomes time becomes rhyme”. I answered “Rote becomes mote becomes rhyme”. He answered, “You got it. Go to the front of the class!!!”
Well… he didn’t really say go to the front of the class but it sounded good as I just wrote it…
Anyway (!),… what an amazing turn!!! To take a word, follow it with a word that only sounds like or may imply that word, then follow it with another word or words that actually resemble the subject word.
Some more exchanges followed into the twilight zone of extemporaneous exhalations of exemplary english proclamations that soared into my favorite kind of preposterous…
I offered, “Jellyfish baited with toast becomes a toast to jellyfish becomes a stinging belly of jelly.”… to which Steve killed it with, “To all intent and purpose becomes to all intensive purpose becomes a porpoise on intensive care!”
A porpoise on intensive care!
My favorite of his was “Ravel's bolero becomes unravelled hero becomes unruffled Nero”! He claimed, “It’s a great way to write abstract internal rhymes.”
This was just a little fun texting between poets, but it proved to be much more than that. It put a tiger in my idea tank for sure… It also showed me a glimpse into the mind of a professor and opened up a whole new range of possibilities pertaining to our craft!! I’m not sure what Steve would term these morphing brainstorms of his to construct new ideas, but I just referred to them as “Inverted Devices” for the purpose of this blog.
I had to share them with YOU!
Have you done this before reader? Can you think of any such “devices” you can turn inside out? Maybe you might even offer a few originals of your own… or some examples pertaining to the above “Anti-similes” or “Anti-Malapropisms”…
I would LOVE to see them! If so, PLEASE POST THEM IN THE COMMENTS BELOW.
And stick around… we will continue to explore a few more of these inverted devices together next time!
Until then, the writer writes… write on my friends…
Matt Elmore
It's important to note I don't go on these riffs without someone to bounce off. So Matt is really a partner in crime on this one.
ReplyDeleteIt’s fun to bounce ideas and brainstorm like that with a friend… many things come out of the wash that may not have been considered before. I know it did for me…especially a porpoise on intensive care! That alone was well worth the price of admission. Perhaps not for the porpoise but I got a kick out of it…!
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