I did a creative writing assignment for one of my high school English teachers that consisted of a collection of poems and short stories. I’m not a real fan of poetry, but I enjoyed taking a stab at it. I actually still have the project and it’s almost painful to read now… a reminder of how tragically earnest and superficially deep I was at that age.

I still remember a comment my teacher wrote on one of those poems. Next to a particular turn of phrase he scribbled this: “Great line! Could drive a whole poem… and doesn’t, yet.”

I think it’s the “yet” that made that comment stick in my brain. Such an odd formulation. Wouldn’t most people write “and yet it doesn’t.”?

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