Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Halfway Houses/Hawthorn Heights - 1843 Words

As the need for increasingly punitive community-based sanctions grew, the demand for a greater variety of programs and services became apparent, as did the importance of a more seamless transition from total incapacitation to total freedom of prisoners re-entering society. A variety of community corrections methods have developed over the years, one being the institution of halfway houses. To adequately understand residential community corrections, one must consider the origins, components, and effectiveness of halfway houses. Initially halfway houses in the United States were operated by nonprofit organizations as a means for recently released prisoners to find their footing upon re-entry. Between 1816 and 1930, the function of the†¦show more content†¦In many cases upon nearing completion of the program, offenders are able to maintain their own residence, but are required to return to the facility as scheduled to be assessed on their progress. (Alarid and Del Carmen 183-184) Certain key elements remain standard from program to program, while others vary according to the needs of the community and clients being served. â€Å"Characteristics of halfway houses include: 1) an identified process for selecting persons to live in the halfway house; 2) involvement, outreach and potential oversight by representatives of the community; 3) a local, regional, or statewide commitment to funding and oversight of the operations of the halfway house; 4) delivery of service of clients within a specified geographic area; 5) inter-agency collaboration, shared resources and problem-solving concerning offender case management; 6) delivery of specific clients’ services pursuant to contracts, standards and memoranda of agreement; and 7) feedback mechanisms, client case monitoring, follow-up and reporting of outcomes.† (Shilton 4) Offenders who have successfully completed their sentence in a halfway house/residential facility have reported positive results from the experience. Abstaining from drug and alcohol use and a greater ease of transition are specifically reported as byproducts of the program. The treatment aspect provided by halfway houses seems to be an important determining factor in theShow MoreRelatedExploring Corporate Strategy - Case164366 Words   |  658 Pagesmusic and media empire worth nearly  £150m. Two years later, Palumbo had quit as chief executive and the Ministry of Sound was looking for a new strategic direction. The Ministry of Sound’s start had been difï ¬ cult. Dance music had its origins in ‘acid house’, itself with its roots in the futuristic, electronic music of the gay clubs of Chicago and New York. The new style had been picked up by British DJs in Ibiza, who combined it with the drug Ecstasy to create a new ‘blissed-out’ sound. Dance musi c arrived

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Cause and Effect - Teenage Employment - 1498 Words

Recession : Teenage Employment In recent years, the economic recession has taken a toll in our economy affecting both rich and poor families. High School students are having a difficult time finding a job as well. The oil prices are skyrocketing, home sales plummeting, retail stores falling, driving more teenagers than usual to look for employment. In the past, teenagers had a choice to work part-time or enjoying leisure time while receiving weekly allowances. Since most parents either lost their jobs or received pay-cuts from employers, their teen children are affected as well. In order to recover the necessities they once had, they must find a job. â€Å"It is impossible to quantify how many affluent parents have trimmed allowances in†¦show more content†¦Sumit Pal, 17, a senior said his parents cut his $5 weekly allowance and doesn’t mind losing his allowance either as it will contribute towards other things, like groceries†(Foderaro 978). Once summer arriv es, teens will wonder what to do with their time. Are they going to bypass the benefits of employment, or having an interest in finding a part/full time position? Anyone who has the ability to do so in such a difficult economy would be irrational not to do so. The experience and earnings as a young employee will contribute to their future even if it is not that evident right away. It is important for teens to be employed to understand the concept of job responsibilities. â€Å"Dress codes, rules, punctuality, and being teachable is enrichment in itself, Mrs. Neiser said. You’re contributing to the economy, your contributing to your personal economy and picking up skill sets and habits that will prepare you for full-time employment† (979 Foderaro). It is never too early or too late to start establishing a job resume. This is foremast true for employers hiring them for the first time and starting to have the urge for money in their pockets at sixteen years old. A summer job will help teens stay out of trouble and become productive at the same time. Playing video games and waking up late may be fun for most, but it’s not a great idea to spend the entire summer, especially during the economic recession. By seeking employment, a teen will soon understandShow MoreRelatedTeenage Pregnancy Essay1238 Words   |  5 Pagesâ€Å"A baby with a baby?† That is what most people say, or think, when they hear about the pregnancy of an adolescent girl. Early pregnancy, commonly referred to as teenage pregnancy, is an ongoing crisis throughout the world. However, the United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the world. Since its peak in 1990, teen pregnancy rates have declined by half, but they are still fairly high. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, â€Å"roughly one in fourRead MoreTeenage Pregnancy : A Social Issue1551 Words   |  7 PagesTeenage pregnancy rates have been declining in t he United States, but when compared to pregnancy rates in other industrial countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom they are still relatively high. (Office of Adolescent Health, 2016). Teenage pregnancy is defined by UNICEF, as an adolescent between the ages of thirteen to nineteen becoming pregnant. (UNICEF Malaysia Communications). Teenage pregnancy is viewed as a social issue because of the way it affects a country’s economy, the mother andRead MoreTeenage Pregnancy Is A Public Health Issue1637 Words   |  7 PagesTeenage birth rates, defined as live births per one thousand 15-19-year-old US females, declined by 10% from 2012 to 2013 from 29.4 to 26.5. In fact, the birth rate has been on a steady decline over the past 20 years, from 61.8 in 1991 to 26.5 in 2013. Teenage pregnancy represents both a health and social inequality in our society. Specifically, teenage childbearing is a public health issue because teenage mothers are more likely to experience negative social outcomes such as dropping out of schoolRead MoreTeen Pregnancy Essay1121 Words   |  5 Pagesparents who have teenagers is pregnancy. Nowadays, teen pregnancy is a serious problem. Teenage have a lack of skills to handle a pregnancy. So that impact strongly on the future of a young woman. Teen pregnancy is associated with negative consequences for adolescents for three reasons: lack of education, medical complication, uncertainty about the future, and financial difficulties. First, the main causes of teenage pregnancy are the lack of education on safe sex, whether it is from parents, schoolsRead MoreA New Zealand Health Issue : Teen Pregnancies1404 Words   |  6 Pageswell-being of groups or populations in a way that causes (public) concern. In this report I will be discussing why teenage pregnancy is a health issue in New Zealand and how it links to all the determinants of health which are influenced from teen pregnancy and parenthood. I am going to be discussing three determinants of health, these being; cultural, economic and social determinants of health. I will also be including implications and strategies related to teenage pregnancy and motherhood. We can see thatRead MoreHealth Education Reduction Of Teenage Pregnancy1647 Words   |  7 PagesHEALTH EDUCATION REDUCTION OF TEENAGE PREGNANCY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM (2010-2015) Introduction Teenage pregnancy (known as under-18 conception) negatively affects the health and wellbeing of both the young mothers and their children. Early parenthood is prone to the risk of postnatal depression, poor health (including mental health), social exclusion and by the age of thirty (30) there are more likely to live in poverty, have limited education, career and economic prospect. There is high risk ofRead MoreThe Problem Of Teenage Pregnancy1720 Words   |  7 Pages Like Amy and Loeber (2009), when it comes to the ecological paradigm of teenage pregnancy, Corcoran, Franklin, and Bennett (2000) also believe one’s socioeconomic status is a huge factor that contributes to this problem. A person’s socioeconomic status a lot of times determines â€Å"education, expanded family size, single-parent household structure, and lessened resources in terms of employment and income.† These three authors claim that educational performance and goals â€Å"dictate the potential costsRead MoreSocietal Norms Of Teenage Pregnancy1480 Words   |  6 Pagesno types of contraception used. According to Mollborn (2017), it is found that 1 in 7 of these teenage girls become mothers. Teenage pregnancy has many negative lifelong implications. When a teenager becomes pregnant they are forced to make some very tough choices, and no matter which decision they make about the outcome of their pregnancy, their life will be changed forever. There is a do mino effect that takes place when a teen becomes pregnant. The father of the baby, the parents and familiesRead MorePersuasive Speech Outline For Non Rising Of Minimum Wage Essay1228 Words   |  5 PagesCalifornia should not increase, but first, let me inform you of the effects of increasing the minimum wage, next, let me explain the causes, and finally, let me offer several solutions to solve these issues. Body I. First main point: First, let me inform you on the effects of increasing the minimum wage. The minimum wage is the lowest wage that is permitted by law or by special agreement. A. Subpoint: One of the main effects of increasing the minimum wage is that it would result in job loss.Read MoreMinimum Wage, And Unemployment1673 Words   |  7 Pageslower-skilled workers in a negative way. According to conventional economic analysis, employment levels for lower-income workers in jobs such as fast food, or any job that pays minimum wage, have steadily decreased with the rises in the wage (â€Å"Effects of Raising†). While it will negatively affect the lower-income workers, the other half of Americans who work for higher wages and are not in poverty, will have increased incomes (â€Å"Effects of Raising†). Raising the wage will not produce the desired outcome and will

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Entrepreneurship Katie Page

Question: Discuss about the Entrepreneurship for Katie Page. Answer: Introduction The purpose of the study is to evaluate the characteristics of an entrepreneur. An Entrepreneur is the person who is responsible for starting his or her business or has helped in the development of an existing business. For this particular study, Katie Page has been selected as the entrepreneur. She is the existing CEO of Harvey Norman and has been ranked among the successful entrepreneurs of Australia (Carmody et al. 2016). Although she might not be given the credit of establishing her own business but she has been responsible for the expansion of the business of Harvey Norman. Right from the beginning of her career with Harvey Norman she has been able to identify the right platform for the expansion of the business and has been successful in doing so (Cew.org.au 2016). A detailed investigation of the entrepreneurial characteristics of her shall be discussed in this report. The study also includes the background of Katie Page and the farsightedness that has helped her to become a successful entrepreneur even in the competitive era. The later part of the study, shall also suggest some of the evident features that Page might undertake to improve her business and entrepreneurial skills. Background of the Entrepreneur: Kay Leslie Katie Page is the Australian business executive and the Chief Executive Officer of the retail company Harvey Norman. She was born in 1956 in Queensland, Australia. Graduated from the Brisbane State High School in 1973, Katie has been always a courageous and surveyor in her life (Cew.org.au 2016). When she was 21 years old, she moved to Sydney where she participated in raising funds for the autistic children. There she met Gerry Harvey, as he was one of the judges of the panel. After six years, Gerry offered her a job at a new Harvey Norman store. She was responsible the sales and marketing department and publicity of the firm. Later the couple married (Cew.org.au 2016). Katie Page has been working as an assistant at Harvey Norman since 1983 but became the Chief Executive for over 200 stores in Australia and 86 stores abroad (Kruger 2014). She has been referred as the mastermind behind the success of the retail stores in major media interviews. She might not have created her own business brand or a new venture but she is responsible for the overall business development of this brand (Powell 2016). Thus, she is an entrepreneur in her own terms. It is the ability and the farsightedness of this business woman that has given her the name and fame of an entrepreneur. Characteristics of the Entrepreneur: Katie Page has a strong attitude that has helped her to reach her the position where she belongs to. She has effective leadership capabilities that have made her capable of working with around 200 retail stores of Harvey Norman. It was under the leadership of Katie that Harvey Norman expanded into New Zealand in 1996, in Singapore in 2000 and in Malaysia and Slovenia in 2003 (Lehmann 2016). In addition to this, the Company has entered in the online retail market as well in 2014. Some of the entrepreneurial characteristics that she enjoys are versatility, creativity and persuasiveness, superb business skills, risk tolerance along with flexibility and open mindedness (Kozubkov et al. 2015). It can be said that all these entrepreneurial characteristics are present in her and this is the reason that has made her capable of dealing with the competitive situation of the market and bring her own company out for all the success (Lehmann 2016). Processes of Opportunity Recognition and Idea Development: Page has been found to come up with a new business idea. She identified that womens sport has been most undervalued in the country. In addition to this, the womens sports products have been most undervalued. Therefore, the alarming need to improve the situation was felt. In the mean time, it was found that the women sports team has been doing well in the sport. The Rugby Sevens team won gold in Rio (Lehmann 2016). The AFL also planned to launch the national womens league and the female cricketers have been found to come up with a bash (Powell 2016). However, as it was evident that no matter how well the women performed in the sports, all the sponsorship goes to the mens team of cricket or football. This was the time, Katie got the opportunity to speak for the women and show participation in the field of women sports. She insisted on pushing the barrow of gender equality as not a matter of fairness but something that the women should be given. In 2005, Katie was appointed to the board of the National Rugby League (Carmody et al. 2016). She was the first woman to be appointed to such a high post in a major sport board in Australia. She has always encouraged women for sports and their role in various activities. She has also served as the Director of Rebel Sports Limited and is currently the Director of Pertama Holdings Limited Singapore. It has to be noted that her powerful entrepreneurial skills has also lead her to become a proprietor of Magic Millions, where she eventually owned 25% but now owns 50% of the business (Carmody et al. 2016). Type of Business Developed and the Competitive Advantage(s) of the B usiness Compared to that in the market: Apart from the contribution that Katie made in the retail outlet of Harvey Norman, she has been active as a backer of several professional sports. Along with Harvey, she owns the Magic Million Thoroughbred racehorse auction house along with four breeding studs and 1000 racehorses (Carmody et al. 2016). She is also an active supporter of women sports. The credit for the retail success of the Harvey Norman can be easily given to her. Even in the competitive age, she has managed to keep pace with the other marketers. The idea of going online has fetched the company huge profit and the complete credit can be given to her (Carmody et al. 2016). She also took the advantage of the market and purchase Magic Millions. The Company has not been found to suffer any kind of loss or back lag in the recent time. The value of the Company has risen to billions. If similar businesses are compared that are present in the market, it can be said that the expansion and the idea of going online along with the presence of marketing and advertisement using the social media platforms have been the most effective steps undertaken by Page that has benefitted the Company a lot. The expansion of the business in Asian and European market at the right time has added more value to the Company. The credit for these activities can be given to Page (Carmody et al. 2016). It is her entrepreneurial skills and ability that has helped her to take the business to that point where one can see only success. Future Suggestions for the Entrepreneur As it has been evident that Katie has been quite active to support womens sports, it can be recommended that she tries her business luck in the sports industry. Katie has enough knowledge about the retail business and has been successful in her career. Therefore, it can be recommended that she starts her own sportswear brand for women. She has been well known for her participation in women sports activities (Rojas and Huergo 2016). Therefore, she might come up with a retail clothing brand of sportswear for the women. As for the sales and marketing, it is recommended that she use the online platform. She might also come up with retail outlet where sportswear and outfits would be sold along with other sports activities. The social media tools like Facebook, Twitter can be used for the purpose of marketing the product. It is also expected that since Harvey Norman has its presence in domestic and international platform, the newly formed business can also be expanded in these countries (Kozubkov et al. 2015). This shall increase the value of the brand by many folds and Page can become a more successful entrepreneur in her later stage of her life. Conclusion: With the detailed analysis of entrepreneurship has been conducted. Katie Page, the CEO of Harvey Norman has been identified as one of the successful entrepreneur in Australia in the recent time. The success of the retail store and the expansion of the business in domestic and foreign land can be easily given to her. It has also been identified that she has all the event entrepreneurial characteristics has helped her to reach the point where she or the Company is right at the moment. In addition to this, she has shown interest in women sports as well. Keeping this perspective into consideration, it has been suggested that she might undertake the approach of expanding her career in the womens sportswear and other related items. This study has provided the opportunity to know about the quality of a successful entrepreneur. References: Carmody, B., Richards, R. and Keating, E., 2016 Australias top 30 female entrepreneurs 2016 Available at: https://www.smartcompany.com.au/lists/top-female-entrepreneurs/australias-top-30-female-entrepreneurs-2016/ [Accessed on: 13-4-2017] Cew.org.au 2016 Katie Page Available at: https://cew.org.au/members/katie-page/ [Accessed on: 13-4-2017] Kozubkov, L., Bels, J., Bilan, Y. and Bartos, P., 2015. Personal characteristics of entrepreneurs in the context of perception and management of business risk in the SME segment.Economics Sociology,8(1), p.41. Kruger, C., 2014 Harvey Norman CEO Katie Page Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/business/cbd/harvey-norman-ceo-katie-page-a-bargain-at-207m-20141122-11s0b6.html [Accessed on: 13-4-2017] Lehmann, M., 2016 She's CEO of a retail empire and a powerful agent for change in women's sport. Katie Page means business. Available at: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/tight-reins/news-story/95652c6094e51c55d75c4d4ecec39774 [Accessed on: 13-4-2017] Powell, L., 2016 Australias Most Successful Female Entrepreneurs, Revealed Available at: https://www.mydomainehome.com.au/most-successful-australian-female-entrepreneurs [Accessed on: 13-4-2017] Rojas, F. and Huergo, E., 2016. Characteristics of entrepreneurs and public support for NTBFs.Small Business Economics,47(2), pp.363-382.

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Literary Terms Modern Essay free essay sample

The aim of this glossary is not to set in concrete words that are constantly changing and evolving, but rather to help students develop the critical tools and vocabulary with which to understand and talk about poetry. Since poets themselves often disagree about the meaning and importance of terms such as free verse, rhythm, lyric, structure, and the prose poem, and since control of literary discourse is part of each new generation’s struggle for poetic ascendancy, it seems only reasonable and appropriate for the student to view all efforts to define critical terminology in a historical perspective and with a healthy degree of scepticism. This mini-glossary reflects the continuing debate between traditional metrics and free verse, and between differing conceptions of the poet’s craft and role in society. A fuller and more lively debate may often be found in the notes on the poets and in the poetics section. We will write a custom essay sample on Literary Terms Modern Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In a number of instances, I have been less concerned to offer hard-andfast definitions than to alert readers to the controversy that surrounds certain critical terms. The following list is by no means complete, but is intended to aid and provoke, to stimulate discussion and debate and send the curious reader on to more comprehensive sources. I have made use of and recommend highly A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957), by M. H. Abrams; the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974), edited by Alex Preminger, Frank, J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr; and The Poet’s Dictionary: A Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), by William Packard. G. G. ccent The emphasis, or stress, placed on a syllable, reflecting pitch, duration, and the pressures of grammar and syntax. While all syllables are accented or stressed in speech and in poetry, we tend to describe the less dominant as unstressed or unaccented syllables. In metrical verse, accented and unaccented (stressed and unstressed) syllables are easily identified. Robert Burns’s famous line â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose† might be described as an iambic tetrameter line, with four feet each consisting of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. However, it can be argued that such a reading trivializes and effectively undercuts the emotional power of the poetic utterance, and that the sense of the line dictates a slightly different reading, which locates three strong stresses or accents in the second half of the line: â€Å"My love is like a red, red rose†. See also FEET and METER. 2 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th alexandrine A twelve-syllable line, usually consisting of six iambic feet. alliteration A common poetic device that involves the repetition of the same sound or sounds in words or lines in close proximity. Alliteration was most pronounced in Anglo-Saxon poems such as â€Å"The Wanderer† and â€Å"The Seafarer†, which Earle Birney imitates in his satire of Toronto, â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street†: Dawndrizzle ended dampness steams from Blotching brick and blank plasterwaste Faded house patterns hoary and finicky unfold stuttering stick like a phonograph While such intense piling up of consonants was once a common mnemonic device (an aid to memory), changing literary fashions have, to a large extent, rendered such self-conscious exhibitions too blunt and obvious for the contemporary ear, except when used for comic purposes. Exceptions include rap poetry and spoken word, both of which make extensive use of alliteration and rhyme. Nevertheless, the repetition, or rhyming, of vowels, consonants, and consonant clusters (nt, th, st, etcetera) remains a still a central component in constructing the soundscape of the poem, just as the repetition and variation of image and idea enrich the intellectual and sensory fabric. The most talented practitioners will be listening backwards and forwards as they compose, picking up and repeating both images and sounds that give the poem a rich and interlocking texture. See ASSONANCE, CONSONANCE, RHYME, and PROSODY. allusion Personal, topical, historical, or literary references are common in poetry, though, to be successful, they require an audience with shared experience and values. Biblical or classical allusions, for example, or Canadian political allusions, might be totally unrecognizable to an Asian Muslim reader. Although readers soon tire of verbal exhibitionism, they still expect a degree of allusion to challenge them and to stimulate curiosity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s â€Å"Junkman’s Obgligato† assumes the reader’s familiarity with both T. S. Eliot’s â€Å"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock† and W. B. Yeats’s â€Å"Lake Isle of Innisfree† for a full appreciation of the ironic counterpointing of down-and-out urban images and those of an idealized pastoral landscape. At the same time, the poem also overflows with topical and literary allusions from the junkyard of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American culture. ambiguity Words and the texts they inhabit are susceptible of a variety of interpetations. While a word may denote one thing, usage and context often bring various connotations to bear on the meaning, or meanings, of that word in the poem. As the American poet Randall Jarrell explains in his essay â€Å"The Obscurity of the Poet† (in Poetry and the Age, 1953), what we speak of as literature ranges from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its seven levels of meaning, to Reader’s Digest, which, Glossary of Poetic Terms 3 like pulp fiction and greeting-card verse, barely manages half a level of meaning. Sophisticated readers not only enjoy, but also demand a certain level of ambiguity, or mystery, in poems. They find such ambiguity in Shakespeare, who loved puns, double-entendre, and various kinds of wordplay; they find it also in such early Moderns as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, who were influenced by seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets, for both of whom the poem retains something of the quality of a riddle. As a result of declining audiences, a general trend towards a democratization of the arts, and the pressure of new kinds of psychological and political content, the pendulum of taste since mid-century swung towards less ambiguity. While puns and worldplay still add to our sense of the fecundity and depth of poetic expression, contemporary poets admit that a rose may, at times, be intended only as a rose; and they tend to avoid the use of obscure and esoteric references. See Robert Graves’ Poetic Unreason (1925) and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one: / ? ? ? /. See METRE. anaphora The rhetorical device of using the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines to obtain the effect of incantation. See Ginsberg’s â€Å"Howl† and Cohen’s â€Å"You Have the Lovers† and â€Å"style†. apostrophe A literary device of â€Å"turning away†, usually to address a famous person or idea. In the classical Greek plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the chorus would march across the stage in one direction chanting various stanzas, or strophes, and then reverse their motion in an anti-strophe, or verbal about-face. In twentiethcentury poetry, the apostrophe is just as likely to be used ironically, or for romantic or satirical purposes. rchetype When you sense that a literary character, situation, or idea has significance far beyond its specific, or particular, occasion in the poem, you are probably in the presence of an archetype. In an essay called â€Å"Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype† (English Institute Essays, 1950), Northrop Frye says: â€Å"By archetype I mean an element in a work of literature, whether a character, an image, a nar rative formula, or an idea, which can be assimilated into a larger unifying pattern. † Psychologist C. G. Jung, in an essay called â€Å"The Problem of Types in Poetry† (1923), gives another dimension to the matter: â€Å"The primordial image or archetype is a figure, whether it be a daemon, man, or process, that repeats itself in the course of history wherever creative fantasy is freely manifested. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject these images to a closer examination, we discover them to be the formulated resultants of countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, as it were, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same type. 4 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th Sibling rivalry, the betrayed or rejected lover, the innocent abroad, the rebel, the fool, the seasonal cycles of rebirth, fertility, and death, the enchanter or enchantress—all are common characters or situations in literature that can deepen our appreciation of a work of art. However, the search for universal symbols can be reductive in the reading of a poem ; so, too, can excessive efforts to make a work symbolic or archetypal reduce a poem into a sociology text or an essay on psychology. ssonance Also called vocalic rhyme, assonance is the repetition or recurrence of vowel sounds within a line (or lines), a stanza, or the overall poem. Listen to the long vowels conjure expiration and death in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Greater Love†: â€Å"As theirs whom none now hear, / Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed. † Assonance is most obvious among words beginning with an open, or initial, vowel (open / eyes / eat / autumn), but equally powerful as an internal rhyming device (tears / mean, thine / divine). allad A popular short narrative folk song, usually transmitted orally, and making use of various forms of shorthand, including truncated action, psychological and historical sketchiness, and a chorus or refrain for heightened impact and easy memorizing. A direct link can be drawn between such early folk so ngs as â€Å"Barbara Ellen† and â€Å"The Skye Boat Song†, country western music, and such contemporary ballads such as â€Å"Frankie and Johnny†, Leonard Cohen’s â€Å"Suzanne†, and Stan Rogers’ â€Å"The Lockkeeper†. lank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse has been a staple since it was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540 in his translations of Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakepeare and Christopher Marlowe both used blank verse in their plays; in poetry, Milton used it for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Wordsworth for The Prelude, and T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. Eliot claimed in Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (1930) that the decasyllabic (or ten-syllable) line was â€Å"intractably poetic† yet had many of the capacities of prose. As such, blank verse could be said to be a precursor of the prose poem, which seems more aligned with ordinary speech and the counting of syllables than with poetic meter. broken rhyme The dividing of a word between two lines to fulfill the requirements of rhyme: Madame had learned to waltz before the charge of falsehood had been laid . . . cadence When poet John Ciardi describes the poem as â€Å"a countermotion across a silence†, he comes close to defining cadence, which refers to the pattern of melody established from line to line that creates in the reader a sense of time slowed down Glossary of Poetic Terms 5 and palpable. While cadence originally referred to regular traditional poetic measures, in which syllables and feet could be counted and identified, the term has come to be used more in relation to irregular patterning, where stress and accent are much looser and determined primarily by phrasing and syntax. Cadence is what Ezra Pound was referring to when he spoke of composing with the musical phrase instead of the metronome. Also worth reading is Dennis Lee’s essay â€Å"Cadence, Country, Silence†, in which he employs the term broadly and with greater cultural import. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, RHYTHM, and SONG. caesura This term is used to refer to any substantial break or pause within the line, though it is most often found in lines of five or more feet. The caesura was a regular feature in Anglo-Saxon poetry, dividing the two alliterating units within the line, bluntly drawn in Earle Birney’s â€Å"Anglo-Saxon Street† or more subtly in Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Arms and the Boy†: Let the boy try along this bayonet blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. anto While in the twentieth century the term is often used to mean, simply, a song or a ballad, the canto was originally a subdivision of epic or narrative, which provided both a simpler organizing principle for the creator of the long poem and a muchneeded respite for the singer during delivery. Ezra Pound draws on both meanings of the word when he calls his great epic-length series of meditations The Cantos. conceit When a METAPHOR or other FIGURE OF SPEECH is extended over many lines, it is called a conceit. oncreteness Concrete nouns referring to objects, such as lip, flint, hubcap, gunbarrel, wheel, smoke, sugar, and fingernail, seem capable of making their appeal through the senses. So, too, verbs, such as run, scream, chop, and lick. Concrete words activate the imagination and anchor poetry in the world of particulars. A gifted poet such as Samuel Johnson can use abstract words in such as way as to make them feel concrete, as in the line â€Å"stern famine guards the solitary coast†, where the abstract idea is given the quality of ternness, the action of guarding, and a spatial location. e. e. cummings concretized abstractions in much the same way: â€Å"love is more thicker than forget, / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail†. concrete poetry This name was first applied in the twentieth century to works that exploit the visual and auditory limits of poetry, ranging from contemporary â€Å"visual puns† back to a seventeenth-century â€Å"shape-poem† whose typography was de- 6 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th ployed to create the image of an altar. Since so much of the power of poetry is derived from sound—from rhythmical patterns, the residue of recurring vowels and consonants—it’s hardly surprising to find poets who break words into component syllables and letters, downplaying the intellectual dimension of poetry and emphasizing, instead, the psychic energy to be found in the acoustic dimension of language. See the notes on, and poems and poetics by, bpNichol, as well as An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), edited by Emmett Williams, ed. consonance Consonance is the repetition of consonants in words or syllables with differing vowels: winter / water / went / waiter. See, for example, Wilfred Owen’s â€Å"Strange Meeting†, which proceeds with a series of consonantal half rhymes: escaped / scooped, groined / groaned, moan / mourn. content The substance or subject matter of a poem, as opposed to its style or manner, is what we usually refer to when we speak of content. But content cannot, properly, be discussed apart from form. A poet may begin to write a poem, broadly speaking, about war, love, or beach-combing; however, as soon as his or her thought begins to take shape as poetic language, as form, it is so transformed by the process that it bears little or no relation to the original impulse. Ideas or anecdotes that find their way into a poem are not the poem’s content, though they are certainly germaine to its overall impact. In fact, everything in the poem contributes to what we might call its content. Poets have reacted strongly to attempts to oversimplify their work or reduce it to a generalization or two. Archibald MacLeish argued that â€Å"A poem should not mean, but be. † Most poets believe that the poem is its own meaning. Robert Creeley insisted that content and form are indivisible, and rejected â€Å"any descriptive act . . . which leaves the attention outside the poem†. It’s probably most useful to stop asking what a poem means and begin to consider, as John Ciardi suggests in his book title, How Does A Poem Mean? If you begin to examine the formal and technical elements in a poem, the ways in which certain effects are achieved, you are more likely to arrive at a point of understanding and appreciation of the poem far beyond any simple statement about its content. See also DICTION, FORM, PROSODY. couplet The couplet—two lines of verse, usually rhymed—is one of the most common and useful verse forms in English and Chinese poetry. The couplet’s brevity encourages a pithy, epigrammatic quality; its two-line split provides a fulcrum which lends itself to argumentative summary and generalization, as in Alexander Pope’s â€Å"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man†. Closed couplets such as Pope’s or Dryden’s, which use mostly iambic pentameter lines and complete their thought with the final end-rhyme, are also called heroic couplets, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century English neoclassical period. Glossary of Poetic Terms 7 The couplet has many uses, as a concentrating unit within the poem or as a separate stanza form. Shakespeare used the couplet to conclude his sonnets forcefully. See also GHAZAL. dactyl A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables: / ? ? ? /. See FOOT and METER. diction Word choice. The French poet Verlaine felt the need to remind us that poems are made of words, not ideas. This is useful to think about, since poems are often spoken and written of as if they were chunks of autobiography, representations of nature, or little treatises on how to conduct, or not to conduct, our lives. Words are magical. When nature, experience, or ideas—any of which may give rise to a poem—pass through the rucible of language, they are transformed, as surely as white light is split into a spectrum of colour when it passes through a prism. Words, similarly, slow and alter those non-linguistic elements that endeavour to use or pass through them; that’s one reason poems, stories, and other verbal texts give us the impression of time slowe d down, of felt time. Words and the ideas they carry fly rather quickly through the brain, but when you speak or hear them you become aware of being immersed in another element, like a diver suddenly encountering water. These considerations are central to postmodern poetics, which seeks to remind us that the poem is not a mirror of nature or a window through which we see the natural world, or so-called reality, but rather a verbal reality in its own right. When the word, or language in general, is foregrounded, poetry ceases to be simply a vehicle for conveying pictures of, and passing on information about, quotidian reality; it aspires, instead, to the condition of other arts such as music and painting, where representation and referentiality are not the only, or even the primary, concern. In a sense, words are the poet’s paint, his or her primary medium. Coleridge once spoke of poetry as â€Å"the best words in the best order†. He was using the word best in the sense of most appropriate in a specific context, not with the idea that certain kinds of words are forbidden or inherently better or worse than others, though the choice would have its own moral significance. Words are dirty with meaning and can never be washed clean; we use them for ordinary discourse, to sell lawnmowers, to deliver sermons, and to make political speeches. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, using the Archimedean metaphor: Give me the right word or phrase and I will move the world. M. H. Abrams reminds us that diction can be described as â€Å"abstract or concrete, Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, colloquial or formal, technical or common, literal or figurative†, to which we might add archaic, plain, elevated. See CONCRETENESS and WORD, and also Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction (1952) and Winnifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use (1962). 8 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th idactic While classical and neo-classical poetics argue that poetry should both teach and delight, in didactic poems the teaching function tends to override the imaginative. Such works, often dismissed as propaganda, recall Yeats’s distinction, that his argument with the world produced only rhetoric, whereas his argument with himself resulted in poetry. And yet all great works are overtly or covertly didactic, whether they teach us indirectly and subliminal ly through the senses (by way of imagery and patterns of sound) or by arguing transparently. And, of course, all art, while it may not be a blatant call to arms, is an effort to persuade us to view the world differently. dimetre A line of verse consisting of two feet. dissonance An effect of harshness or discordance in a poem, often achieved by combining rhythmical irregularity and a jarring concentration of consonants. distich A COUPLET. dramatic monologue Unlike the soliloquy, in which a character on stage reveals his or her inner thoughts by â€Å"thinking aloud†, the dramatic monologue assumes and addresses an audience of one or more people. In the process of addresing this audience, the speaker of the dramatic monologue manages to confess, or simply reveal, a character flaw, a dread deed, or an impending crisis. Robert Browning pioneered the form in poems such as â€Å"My Last Duchess†, â€Å"Andrea del Sarto†, and â€Å"Fra Lippo Lippi†, but it has been used by Tennyson in â€Å"Ulysses†, by Eliot in â€Å"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock†, and by many contemporary writers. duration The length of acoustic or phonetic phenomena such as syllables. According to linguists, the sounds we produce when we speak have pitch, loudness, quality, and duration. Aside from grammatical and syntactical considerations, the pacing in, or the speed at which we read, a poem is largely determined by the length of time it takes to enunciate syllables, lines, and stanzas. Short vowels speed up the poem; long vowels slow it down. See also MEASURE, MUSIC, PROSODY, RHYTHM, and SONG. elegy Originally a specifically metered Greek or Roman form, the elegy has come to refer generally to a sustained meditation on mutability or a formal lament on the death of a specific person. The conventional pastoral elegy included a rural setting, with shepherds and flowers (all nature mourning), an invocation to the muse, a procession, and a final consolation. Classics such as Milton’s â€Å"Lycidas†, Thomas Gray’s â€Å"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard†, and Shelley’s â€Å"Adonais† are clearly the chief source and influence on such contemporary elegies as W. H. Auden’s â€Å"In Memory of W. B. Yeats†, Michael Ondaatje’s â€Å"Letters Other Worlds†, Seamus Heaney’s â€Å"Requiem for the Croppies†, and so many of the poems of Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Lorna Crozier and Michael Longley. In fact, one Glossary of Poetic Terms 9 might safely say that the elegiac tone is dominant in English poetry from Beowulf to the present. enjambment A means of escaping the limitations and rigidity of the end-stopped line or closed couplet, enjambment occurs when a sentence or thought carries over from one line to the next. The enjambed line, with its greater freedom and flexibility, has served to focus a great deal of attention on the position of line-breaks in twentiethcentury poetry. See LINE-BREAKS and also Al Purdy’s poem â€Å"The Cariboo Horses†. pic While the epic, or heroic, poem such as Homer’s Iliad and Odsyssey or the AngloSaxon classic Beowulf—each with its elevated style, tribal or national struggles, invocations to the muse, occasional use of the supernatural, and cast of important, or exalted, figures—belongs to an earlier age, it has not lost its appeal to poets of later ages. From Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s F? r ie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dryden’s and Pope’s mock epic satires to such contemporary long poems as Pound’s The Cantos, W. C. Williams’s Paterson, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the long, or extended, poem has provided an alternative to the limited scope, self-directedness and, perhaps, too intense heat of the lyric. See LONG POEM and NARRATIVE. epigram A short, witty poem or statement, seldom more than four lines long, whose form dates back to Roman epigrammatist Martial. Alexander Pope’s poems are full of condensed witticisms that might be displayed as separate epigrams: â€Å"To err is human; to forgive, divine†. ye-rhyme An eye-rhyme features words or syllables that look alike but are pronounced differently: come / home; give / contrive. feminine ending While it may no longer be politically correct, this term is still used in criticism to refer to a line that ends with one or more unstressed syllables. Far from suggesting weakness or passivity, feminine endings are more flexible and colloquial, and their in formality and irregularity have been especially useful in dramatic blank verse. feminine rhyme A two-syllable (or disyllabic) rhyme, usually a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: witness / fitness. igurative language When language is heightened so that it moves beyond ordinary, or literal, usage, it is said to be figurative. These figures, figures of speech, or tropes (â€Å"turns†), as they are sometimes called, include simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, paradox, and pun. An extended figure of speech is called a CONCEIT. 10 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th figure A group of words that evoke the senses by transcending ordinary usage. Consider, for example, Gloucester’s comment in Richard III: â€Å"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by the sun of York†. oot In A Poet’s Dictionary: Handbook of Prosody and Poetic Devices (1989), William Packard provides an interesting account of the origin of the metrical foot: When the Greeks described poetry as â€Å"numbers†, they were alluding to certain conspicuous elements of verse that could be counted off: â€Å"feet† were strong dance steps that could be measured out in separate beats of a choral ode or strophe or refrain. These â€Å"feet† could then be scanned for repeating pattern s of syllable quantities, either long or short, within strophes and antistrophes of a chorus. Greek metrics, then, did not derive from accent or stress but rather from the elongation required in the pronunciation of certain vowels and syllable lengths. Instead of the quantitative designation of long and short syllables, we now use the terms stressed and unstressed, or accented and unaccented to describe the components of the poetic foot, which is essentially a group of two or more syllables that form a metrical unit in a line of verse. The most common feet are the iambic (/ ? ? /), an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable (delight); the trochaic (/ ? /), a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable (action); the anapestic (/ ? ? ? /), two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one (interrupt); the dactylic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones (comforting); and the spondaic (/ ? ? /), two stressed syllables (handbook). Other feet include the pyrrhic (/ ? ? /), one or more unstressed syllables; the amphibrachic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed, one stressed, one unstressed; the bacchic (/ ? ? ? /), one unstressed followed by two stressed; and the chorimabic (/ ? ? ? /), a stressed, two unstressed, and a stressed. See METER. form Form in poetry is no less intriguing and no less difficult to define and describe than form in the other arts. We can easily identify obvious elements of form, such as rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, stanza-lengths, and traditional modes like the sonnet and sestina; but the intricacies of language, timing, syntax, counterpoint, verbal play—those elements that contribute to the formal beauty and power of a poem—require some training and considerable attention. However, in an essay called â€Å"Admiration of Form: Reflections on Poetry and the Novel† (Brick / 34), poet and critic C. K. Williams offers some useful thoughts, reminding us that, among other things, form and content are inextricably allied: The important thing about form, though, is its artificiality. In English poetry, the historically dominant iambic foot is closely related to the actual movement of the voice in our language between stressed and unstressed syllables, but the regularity of the iambic line, and the five beats of the pentameter, for instance, are purely conventional. In irregular, or â€Å"free†, verse, where the Glossary of Poetic Terms 11 cadences are not regular, and not counted, it is what Galway Kinnell has called the â€Å"rhythmic surge†, which defies and controls the movement of language across its grid of artifice; the line in free verse becomes a much more defining factor of formal organization than in more arithmetical versetraditions. The crucial thing about form is that its necessities, though they are conventions, precede in importance the expressive or analytical demands of the work. Although a poem may to a greater or less degree seem to be driven by its content, in fact all the decisions a poet makes about a work finally have to be made in reference to the conventions which have been accepted as defining the formal nature of that work. If a ompelling experience is conveyed in a verse drama, if an interesting philosophical speculation occurs in a lyric poem, if a poem involves itself in an intricate and apparently entirely engrossing narrative adventure, these are secondary, although simultaneous with, the formal commitments of the work, and they must be embodied within the terms of those commitments, although in the end these almost playful divisions of an experienitial continuum, whether in the structures of a musical mode, or the pulse and surge of a poetic line, will mysteriously serve to intensify the emo tion and the meaning which the work evokes. I should mention, perhaps, that the dour and puritanical and ferociously self-serving â€Å"new formalism† has nothing to do with the notion of form I am elaborating here: the new formalism is rather a kind of conceptual primitivism which seems to gather most of its propulsive force from a distorted and jealous vision of the literary marketplace; it calls for a return to the good old safe and easily accounted-for systems of verse, with counted meters, rhyme, and so forth. All despite the generation over the last few centuries, from Smart to Blake through Whitman and countless others, of an enormous amount of significant poetry in non-traditional forms; and despite the fact that many verse-systems in the world require neither rhyme nor strictly counted meter, and despite the practice of many modern poets, who have been quite content to use whatever verse-form fitted the poem they were composing. One would not want to sacrifice either Rilke’s â€Å"Duino Elegies† or Lowell’s â€Å"Life Studies†, just to mention two poets who worked in both systems. In his essay â€Å"Rebellion and Art† (in The Rebel, 1956), Albert Camus argues that â€Å"A work in which the content overflows the form, or in which form drowns the content, only bespeaks an unconvinced and unconvincing unity. . . . Great style is invisible stylization, or rather stylization incarnate. † See PROSODY, STRUCTURE, and STYLE, and also Denise Levertovâ⠂¬â„¢s â€Å"Notes on Organic Form† in the Poetics section. free verse Poetry written with a persistently irregular meter (which is not to say without rhythm) and often in irregular line-lengths. The King James translations of 12 20 -Century Poetry Poetics th the Psalms and Song of Songs are often held up as models of how dynamic nonmetrical poetry can be. Ezra Pound advised composing with the rhythms of the speaking-voice sounding in your ear, rather than the regular beat of the metronome; Robert Frost insisted that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net; and T. S. Eliot claimed that no verse is free for the poet who wants to do a good job. All three were concerned to emphasize that, whether regular or irregular, the music of poetry bears close scrutiny, for it accounts for much of our pleasure as readers and, far from being incidental or decorative, is fundamental to our total experience of the poem. See LINES-BREAKS, METER, MUSIC, RHYTHM, PROSODY, and SONG. ghazal A Middle Eastern lyric, most commonly associated with the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz. The ghazal consists of five to twelve closed couplets, often using the same rhyme. These seemingly disconnected couplets about love and wine are held together not by a narrative or rhetorical thread, but by a heightened tone or emotional intensity. Not surprisingly, the apparently random or non-rational structuring of the ghazal has proven attractive to twentieth-century poets as diverse as as John Thompson (Stilt Jack), Phyllis Webb (Water Light), and Adrienne Rich. hexameter A line of verse consisting of six feet. hyperbole A figure of speech that involves extremes of exaggeration: big as a house, dumb as a doornail. ambic pentameter A line consisting of five iambic feet. Iambic pentameter is considered the poetic rhythm most basic to English speech. See FOOT and METER. image Ezra Pound described the image as â€Å"that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time†. Other poets have spoken of images as concentrations of linguistic energy directed at the senses. The image is a controversial term, which has often been used to m ean, simply, a verbal picture; however, the poetic image may also conjure things, events, and people in our minds by appealing to senses other than sight. Images are so central to language that, in the line a brown cow leapt over the fence, which constitutes a composite image, we also find four discrete images: a cow, a fence, the act of leaping, and brownness. Imagery, along with prosody, is one of the two central ingredients of poetry; and its evocative power cannot be divorced from the texture of sounds through which it is delivered. Specific images seem more likely to stimulate the senses than images that are generic (tree, animal, machine). The difference between a line such as â€Å"I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree† and the following—â€Å"Don’t hang your bones from the branch / of that gnarled oak, exuding elegies. / The chihuahua’s waiting in the Daimler†Ã¢â‚¬â€has as much to do with diction and specificity of image as with the difference between metrical and non-metrical verse. Glossary of Poetic Terms 13 Imagism A poetic movement in England and the US between 1909 and 1917, which reacted against the discursiveness, sentimentality, and philosophizing of late nineteenth-century poetry by trying to focus on the single image.