Paraprosdokian

Turning the beginning on its head: a reading

Welcome to LeeAnn’s Punctuated Poetry. This Sunday I’m featuring the reading of a poem from the July section of Gathering the Pieces of Days. This poem brings two of the pieces of my life together—poetry and editing. A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the end of a sentence or phrase or longer piece of writing creates a twist in a way that reframes the beginning.

You can find many examples online. Here’s one from Stephen King: “I have the heart of small boy—in a glass jar on my desk.” And a somewhat fitting one from Winston Churchill: “We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.” (We seem to be in a phase of exhausting all the possibilities right now, to say the least, but I digress…) I like this one from A. A. Milne in Winnie the Pooh: “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

I hope you enjoy the reading and the poem.