[Allen Tice]

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.