Dealing With Double Trouble! The very mention this week of tautology in a conversation sparked a memory of how annoying it is to hear such redundancy, used so frequently, and so unwittingly. Here are a few that immediately come to mind: At the present time Very unique Mystery puzzle Wet monsoon Past history Pair of twins Free gift Sad misfortune Invited guests End result Boat marina Will and testament ATM machine I'm sure you get the idea… Tautology occurs everywhere. While living in America some years back , the frequently used term, ‘TUNA FISH sandwich’ left me constantly bemused. At JFK airport, I would sit waiting for my flight home to Australia and at regular intervals I would hear the announcement, ‘ This is the LAST and FINAL call for flight…’ and start twitching. In Australia, I frequently hear people offering an opinion and qualifying it with, ‘If you ask ME PERSONALLY, well I think…’ and I’m sure we don’t need to hear FINAL and SHOWDOWN alongside each other ever
As poets we spend so much time thinking about those ideas we wish to write about. As the saying goes, anything can be the focus of a poem. Well, pretty much everything... This week I completely flipped my thinking and began to consider those matters for which I hold absolutely no interest. This is quite clearly a personal preference I'm exercising here and someone else's list may look decidedly different. That's as it should be. My poem is quite obviously a list poem and has a rhyming introduction. You could decribe it as an anti poem. I Fail To See These Poems In Me I doubt that you will ever see These poems upon a page -by me Just forget it Don’t regret it They’re locked outside the gate Unneeded They shall remain forever unheeded Topics I just fail to rate: My love for green trousers Admiration for influencers Garters Hot dog eating contests The thinness of Donald’s orange skin Wordle game result posters The history of lint Onions as gifts Recalling lost lemmings Ho