Rosetta
Sometimes poetry is serious, and sometimes poetry is an excuse to make a ridiculous pun, and sometimes a poem that starts as a pun ends up being serious. Two years ago I won the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition with a poem called Rosetta. The theme for the competition was ‘stone’ but the poem is about (as much as a poem is ‘about’ anything) language, via the Rosetta Stone.
The ‘joke’ is that while a stone can be a record of language, language itself isn’t ‘set in stone’. Ha ha ha. The pun turned into a poem and the poem turned into something serious… and then I started hiding jokes in the poem again. Serious And Illustrative Jokes! Which wouldn’t be funny if i explained them, but which you, O Reader, should definitely try to look for.
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