Hello, dVersifiers – and welcome to dVerse, the poets’ pub. Tonight I want us to have some fun with verbing. I’ve been haring around all day, ferreting out ideas for this, but now I want to sit down and pig out on some poetry. Listen to me rabbiting on! Time to stop horsing around and do some writing.
Have you ever noticed how some animals have become verbs? You can dog someone’s footsteps. You can weasel out of something – but nobody cats, and I’m pretty sure you can’t elephant. You can lark around, you can badger somebody, you can clam up, but you don’t dragonfly.
I’m not sure how these words became verbs. They are often verb phrases, actually, – you pig out, you horse around – and they are little hidden metaphors that we can easily overlook, part of the poetry of everyday language. They’re rather lovely.
Let’s play with them.
You have choices! You can take one of these well-established verbs, like Peg Duthie did here, with rabbiting. It’s different to “talking” or “chatting”, isn’t it?
The commentator’s rabbiting on and on about how it’s so easy for Roger, resentment thick as butter still in a box. Yet word from those who’ve done their homework is how the man loves to train—how much he relishes putting in the hours just as magicians shuffle card after card, countless to mere humans but carefully all accounted for. At hearing “luck” again, I stop until my hands relax their clutch on the cone from which a dozen more peonies are to materialize. I make it look easy to grow a garden on top of a sheet of fondant, and that’s how it should appear: as natural and as meant-to-be as the spin of a ball from the sweetest spot of a racquet whisked through the air like a wand.
And the lightness of “larking” in this poem, with its connotations of sky, and early morning:
My wife sits in her swivel chair ringed by skeins of multicolored yarn that will become the summer sweater she has imagined since September. Her hand rests on the spinning wheel and her foot pauses on the pedals as she gazes out into the swollen river. Light larking between wind and current will be in this sweater. So will a shade of red she saw when the sun went down. When she is at her wheel, time moves like the tune I almost recognize now that she begins to hum it, a lulling melody born from the draft of fiber, clack of spindle and bobbin, soft breath as the rhythm takes hold.
Here are the animal verbs I can think of – you might be able to think of another one! I’m sure there are some animals that aren’t local to me that haven’t become part of my vocabulary.
ape
badger
beetle
bug
dog
ferret
goose
hare
hog
horse
hound
lark
parrot
pig
rabbit
squirrel
weasel
wolf
worm
Photo by Boys in Bristol Photography on Pexels.com
You can take one (or two, or a whole menagerie) and incorporate them into a poem.
Or (because poets love to verb!) – you can verb an animal of your choice. What would it mean to tiger? To gazelle? To cow? To spider? Would it be movement, or more complex behaviour? Do you know someone who does this? Do you sometimes like to cat? Do you occasionally butterfly?
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