Glossary of Poetic Terms

A figure of speech in which one verb or preposition joins two objects within the same phrase, often with different meanings. For example, “I left my heart—and my suitcase—in San Francisco.” Zeugma occurs in William Shakespeare’s “Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun”: “Golden Lads, and Girles all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust.” Here, “coming to dust” refers to the chimney-sweeper’s trade as well as the body’s decay.

A Japanese hybrid form that can be traced back to Sei Shōnagon’s 10th-century text The Pillow Book, zuihitsu is often translated from the Japanese as “following the brush.” This capacious genre incorporates nonfiction, musings and confessions, poetry, and miscellany to create a spontaneous, layered text. In her poetry collection The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2008), Kimiko Hahn writes that “the sense of disorder” is “integral” to the form of zuihitsu. 

Other examples of zuihitsu include Essays in Idleness by Kenkō, translated by Donald Keene (Columbia University Press, 1967); “Zuihitsu” by Jenny Xie from her collection Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018); “False Dawn” by Khadijah Queen; and anthologies including The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2014) and The Land We Saw, the Times We Knew: An Anthology of Zuihitsu Writing from Early Modern Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018).