Hi! I’ve just come from your glorious analysis of the Hot Dog water poem, and I was wondering if you had any advice on resources for learning more about this kind of poetic analysis? I’ve been really interested in learning more. Thanks!
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I've only got one resource to recommend. It's a book that changed the trajectory of my life because I found it at the perfect time for it to do that, and I love it very much; but it is only one book.
Mark Forsyth (@.TheInkyFool on twitter last I checked)'s Elements of Eloquence: Secrets to the Perfect Turn of Phrase is a book I picked up quite some years ago and it is one of my most beloved books, beside my copy of Wingbeats and the recent addition of Legends and Lattes (I don't have many books which belong-belong to me unfortunately, working on remedying that slowly).
The book's central thesis is that shakespeare and all them wrote such good words because they'd been explicitly taught the figures of rhetoric in grammar and made good use of those lessons in their work, and we don't get taught that bullshit (affectionate) in school anymore, and your lucky to know what an alliteration is by the end of your learning, let alone a chaismus or zuegma.
To borrow Forsyth's opening argument's metaphor, Shakespeare and them were given full access to a pantry of spices and taught which spices do what things; meanwhile our asses over here cooking blindfolded and hopen' for the best.
The aim of the text then, through through 39 short essays marked as chapters each one dedicated to a single figures of rhetoric (the patterns in the stucture of words), is to remove the blindfold, so that we can at least get to the same starting position as shakespeare.
The first poem I ever consider* myself having wrote, was a response to chapter thirty-two Epanelepsis, which said, "this one's difficult to use, Shakespeare had trouble getting it to work, [cc]" and my contrarian ass said "Bet," put the book down for a minute, and drafted an okay version one of a poem which through revision became an okay poem, focusing on Epanelepsis's effect.
Pick up the book if you can, have a read through, maybe try your hand at writing a poem or two in each figure that strikes your fancy. It's as good a starting point about this sort of thing as any other.
*My childhood poems wherever they might have flown are alas, gone too far a field to return and thereby I don't consider them to count.
