August 2013 Flashback

Here’s a post worth recycling.

Give this word a whirl:

Poetaster.

Any guesses?

Potato taster?

Photo by Scott Bauer, USDA ARS via Wikimedia Commons

Try again.

Poet … taster?

Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning via Wikimedia Commons

Uhmmm, no, not that either. No eating of poets, no matter how yummy their words.

It’s actually pronounced poh-it-as-ter,

negating the whole “taster” angle.

Poetaster actually refers to

a bad poet, a disaster, a poet-aster.

Bad?

Yup.

Wikipedia tells us that “The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, too much use of the pathetic fallacy, and unintentionally pathetic choice of subject matter.”

Alrighty then.

So, if I were to take a stab at poetastric verse, it might sound something like this …

There once was a milk cow named Sassy

who lived in a pasture that was really … grassy.

She was black-and-white spotted,

Her hair was a little knotted,

But her hormone/antibiotic/GMO-free milk … was classy.

Photo by Keith Weller, USDA via Wikimedia Commons

Ugh.

Like fingernails on a chalkboard, right?

Positively poetastrical.