Winter 2025

Paroxysm

a sudden attack or violent expression of a particular emotion or activity

Anodyne

unlike to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive often deliberately so

Limn

Depict or describe in painting or words

aleatory

(adj) depending on the throw of a dice or on chance; random.

relating to or denoting music or other forms of art involving elements of random choice (sometimes using statistical or computer techniques) during their composition, production, or performance.

Inhere

(V) to exist essentially or permanently in

Effete

(Adj) affected and overly refined

Feint

(N) a bluff; a deceptive or pretended blow, thrust, or other movement, especially in boxing or fencing

Spurious

(Adj) not being what it purports to be; false or fake

(of a line of reasoning) apparently but not actually valid.

Aesthete

(N) a person who has or affects to have a special appreciation of art and beauty

Ascesis

(N) the practice of severe self-discipline, typically for religious reasons.

Coterminous

(adj) having the same boundaries or extent

in space, time, or meaning

Tendentious

(Adj) expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one

Provisionalism

(N) supportive behavior that contrasts certainty. This is when one person feels they are correct but is willing to listen to the other person and is prepared to change their mind or opinion if the other idea is more reasonable.

Impugn

(V) dispute the truth, validity, or honesty of (a statement or motive); call into question

Putative

(Adj) generally considered or reputed to be

Retinue

(N) a group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person.

Prolepsis

(N) 1 the anticipation and answering of possible objections in rhetorical speech.

2 the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered.

Teleological

(Adj) relating to or involving the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise

Heuristic

1. enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves

2. proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined

Assonance

(PD) repetition of vowel sounds (anywhere within the word) on the same or following lines of a poem to give a musical, internal rhyme. The sound will be a vowel sound, but doesn’t have to use a vowel

anaphora

(PD) a technique in which successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany. 

Negative Capability

a phrase coined by John Keats in an 1817 letter to his brothers; describes the poet’s ability to live with uncertainty and mystery; Keats believed the Shakespeare possessed this in spades

End-Stopped Line

(PD) a metrical line containing a complete phrase or sentence, or a line of poetry ending with punctuation; the opposite of enjambment.

Rising Meter

(PD) meter containing metrical feet that move from unstressed to stressed syllables. Ex: an iamb

Falling Meter

(PD) meter containing metrical feet that move from stressed to unstressed syllables. Ex: a trochee

zeugma

(PD) when word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

Caesura

(PD) a pause for a beat in the rhythm of a verse, often indicated by a line break or by punctuation. 

Acrostic

(PD) a form in which names or words are spelled out through the first letter of each line.

anapest

(PD) a metrical foot containing three syllables, the first two of which are unstressed and the last of which is stressed. 

Ars Poetica

(PD) a poem about poetry, examining the role of poets, poets’ relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.

Chiasmus

(PD) a rhetorical device where identical words and phrases repeat in a reversed order.

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order" 

"Love without end, and without measure Grace" 

"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" 

Contrapuntal

(PD) interweaves two or more poems to create a single poem that can be read in multiple ways depending on how the poem is designed on the page.

Elision

(PD) the omission, usually via apostrophe, of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a verse. 

Golden Shovel

(PD) a poetic form wherein each word of one line from another poem serves as the end word of each line for a newly constructed poem.

Iamb

(PD) metrical foot containing two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the latter of which is stressed.

"I ate my sister's soup, and it was good" 

Octave

(PD) an eight-line stanza, and also refers to the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet, usually in iambic pentameter and with a rhyme scheme.

Quatrain

(PD) a four-line stanza, or unit of four lines of verse, rhymed or unrhymed. 

Synesthesia

(PD) an attempt to fuse different senses by describing one in terms of another

Volta

(PD) a rhetorical shift that marks the change of a thought or argument in a poem. 

• In Petrarchan sonnets, occurs between the octave and the sestet 

• In Shakespearean sonnets, occurs before the final couplet

Labile

Liable to change; easily altered

Unreconstructed

not reconciled or converted to the current political theory or movement

Transvaluation

refers to the act or process of revaluing something, often in a completely new or different way.

It's particularly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, where it means a reassessment of commonly held values.