300 words Required reading https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57326/variations-on-a-theme-by-william-carlos-williams https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/time-and-line I need it Wednesday 6th at 3pm

Okay, here's an important term you'll want to master: ambiguity. And here's another: enjambment. Enjambment is, in essence, a word that refers to a sentence that is broken by a line break. Sentences are different from lines in poetry. Here's an example of a line: My father saves babies That's a line. But notice that there's no period there. So if we wanted to continue the sentence over the line break, we could do so like this: My father saves babies In rusty cans. Now what we have is enjambment; the sentence is enjambed, and that enjambment creates ambiguity of meaning and highlights the polysemy (which means multiple meanings: a word that means more than one thing is polysemous) in the word "saves." in one sense, it means to remove danger, to take someone away from something bad: "The fireman saved my life by carrying me out of the burning building." But "saves" is polysemous, and thus it also means to put something away for later, to store: the woman saves her money for a rainy day. (It can also mean spiritual salvation: the priest saves souls.) So now the two lines (an unrhymed couplet) are ambiguous. The first line suggests a positive meaning, but after the enjambment, we find out that the "saves" isn't positive. We discover that the father (a priest? a dad? "father" is another polysemous word) is some kind of serial killer or crazy person, saving babies (dead babies?) in rusty cans (yuck!). Now consider Charles Bernstein's poem "Of Time and the Line," which is filled with ambiguities and polysemy. Dig these lines: "My father pushed a / line of ladies' dresses--not down the street / in a pushcart but upstairs in a fact'ry / office." These lines are all about fun, playing with language. "Pushing" can mean "to shove" but also "to sell aggressively" (like a drug pusher does), so the speaker's father can be literally "pushing" the line of dresses down the street or "pushing" the line onto customers. (His poem is in Course Documents.) You'll find ambiguity and polysemy and enjambment in just about every poem we read this semester (but not all!), but Li-Young Lee's "Persimmons” is especially rich with it. And of course, enjambment it crucial to William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say." So, for this week: find some lines in the readings--any of our poems for this week--that you think use these techniques (ambiguity, polysemy, and enjambment) in an interesting way, ideally finding an example that uses several of these techniques in concert with one another. Then discuss the lines you've chosen. You can focus on one of the terms (ambiguity, for instance), talk about two, or (again, ideally) find a way to show how all three work together. You can focus on two lines or more: it's up to you. But try to say something interesting about your selections. Use my examples above as a model for the kinds of things you can say, but you'll want to go further, attending to the language used, talk about connotation and denotation, and employ terms and concepts from the readings we've been assigned so far (from the "how to read a poem" pdf and the Norton). But most importantly: try to have fun. Take some risks. Play with the language like a poet and show how the lines you've selected can be read in several ways at once, show how they're ambiguous at heart