As always, Wendy: the voice of playful reason.

Nemo

I’ve been reading Stephen Burt’s essay, “My Name is Henri,” in which he discusses devices that poets ([editing in - "Mark," not "Phi"]particularly Mark Levine) presumably cribbed from Berryman, noting: “Berryman’s ‘I am X, I am Y’ theoretical figure, in particular, has become (partly thanks to Levine’s example) an almost predictable feature of first and second books: “I am a service revolver in a swimming pool . . . I am a love letter “ [I’m* not going to give the attributions, you can look them up if you want]; “I was that season, the little ends I made” . . . “I am spring, I am not spring/ I am Voltaire he said” . . . .

Anyway, it strikes me that this might make for a good D&A contest – see how many you can cram into one [that's one, Martin] poem.

"I," am FOsen/the smithy of my angst . . . .

I suggest that we move this to D&A, with a competition for poems that use all of these "moves."

Your wish is my command, Sam, and here we are. Let's see what folks do.

Come on, Michael. Share your wisdom with us. What is divelication?

Actually, the "I am X, I am Y" business goes back to ancient Babylon.
No reason to give Berryman the credit!

John - I'm only responding because I thought I would be the last man alive to use "divelicate" or any of its variations, and now you've used it, so I must climb back to the top of the heap. And, in so doing, I discovered that I would have been particularly safe in my position, because I also misspelled the word (which explains why you couldn't google it, if you tried.) It's "divellicate/divellication".

I found it years ago in a moldering Walker's Rhyming Dictionary that was printed in Britain in, I would guess, the Thirties. The entire dictionary is in reverse alphabetical order, it provides words but no meanings, and it contains some of the most arcane language imaginable. I had no idea what that particular word meant, but found it in another of my moldering reference works - a three volume, 3000 page Webster's - it's archaic, from the French divellere, and means to pluck at, to twitch, to pull apart.

I'm with Maryann on polysemy, and noted with Susan that most of these are Free Verse examples. It's what passes for cleverness in that usually dismal world. How else can you show off when there's no net? Only by being super. Most of my early crap is loaded with this, because I thought it was what people wanted. I still send a few out, but with embarrassment. A great many seem imitative of previous successful examples, but like ancient "frigid" rhetoric, they generally leave one cold ; whereas the Dylan Thomas example mentioned is hot, hot. Most try for humor, which is OK, but Gee, humor is so often ephemeral.

Wendy's is a gem ; only a mastiff would eschew it.

Many are just feeble, yet I hear them all the time at the "better" open-mike venues like NYC's Cornelia Street Cafe. There's a whole Antarctic glacier of modern writing full of this stuff, and lots of it gets published since the editors can't.... (Sorry, editor friends.)

A real MFA or a realer grad degree in lit would show these up for what most of them usually are : warmed up left-overs from someone else's frenzy.

Thank you, Michael. Divellicate eh? Wasn't Walker's Rhyming Dictionary the one Byron used? Have you checked the provenance of your copy? Who knows... it may... and does Byron use divellicate anywhere

I made a brief attempt at using a series of these, but the idea of doing them all myself gives me brain cramp. Frank, would you settle for a collaborative effort?

Here are two lines and a bit to start. Feel free to alter meter, switch to FV, whatever:

I am wormwood, I am gall.
I am supposed to use them all,
these moves....