Killjoy

 (or, negative thinking in iambic tetrameter)

Sometimes I am afraid of joy,
As if it is too much--a trap--
Enticement to a leap iinto
Seductive light and perfumed air
That must end in a tumble down
A lethal twisting iron stair.

I guess the sour trickery
Of life has halved my optimism,
And turned me puritanical,
Worst-case scenarios deep-scripted &
Embedded in my skittish mind.
Yes, hard to trust in joy, I find.

hans ostrom 2024

Marriage-Tetrameter?

(image: two geese [I bet you guessed that], which allegedly
mate for life, although there are probably goose pre-nuptials)







My goodness, a "marriage-tetrameter" sounds like some kind of medical device. Eek.


In class the other day, a student asked whether I were a doctor. I said,"Technically, yes, as I earned a Ph.D. in English." I should pause here and explain that, in the academic world, there are those who like and want to called "Doctor," as opposed to professor or Mr. or Ms. or by their first name. Then there are those who do not want to be called Doctor. I don't know what the percentages are, nor do I know what the sociological correlatives are, but I do think it's based on something more than whim.


At any rate, I went on to say that I am not licensed to practice medicine but that, if someone on an airplane flight were to have trouble scanning a poem written in a traditional meter, the flight attendant could get on the intercom and ask, "Ladies and gentlemen, remain calm, but we have an emergency; a passenger in 24-D is having some difficulty with a 17th-century sonnet. Is there a doctor of literature on board?"


At another any rate, we have plunged into formal verse in the poetry class--meter, rhyme, traditional forms, scansion, enjambment, full rhymes, half rhymes, sprung rhythm, blank verse --the whole prosodic enchilada (a word that has two trochees, I think.)

I have great fun teaching this "unit" because I get the students writing in meter first by encourageing them not to make sense. In a way they're just writing "sound poems." Ironically, because they're concentrating just on meter, they come up with some wild, unpredictable lines--which can serve as the seed for a "real" poem. There's also a bit of groaning, of course, because some of them had a bad time with "iambic pentameter," etc., in high school.


Physician of prosody, heal thyself.

Because I'm having my students work through some prosodic exercises, I thought I should do one myself. The assignment is simply to write some modified blank verse on any subject. By "modified," I mean iambic tetrameter (8 syllables, 4 beats, with the or stresses occuring on the even-numbered syllables), unrhymed. Rather arbitrarily, I chose marriage as the topic, but really "tetrameter" is the implicit purpose of the, ahem, "poem."

No doubt I committed some "inversions" (a trochee in place of an iamb). In two places, I got too cute and split words at the end of lines, and in one place, I rhymed without intending to. In other words, it's pretty rough tetrametric road.


Tetrameter for Marriage


It seems that marriage is a kind
Of complicated puzzle that's
Constructed slowly but not solved.
One part is lust. It's there and not.
Lust is mercurial. We all
Know that. Another part is love--
I said it; there it is, plain sight--
A deep appreciation of
The other, and of what the other is
In fact, not what one wants him/her
To be. The person will be dear.
Bourgeois, the "institution?" I guess.
If you say so, though that sounds like
Pretentious babble to two ones
Who have been married, gay or straight,
Transgendered. Well, another part
Is laughter, running jokes, and irony.
It is a comedy-routine,
Is marriage. It's improved, a schtick.
I'll tell you, money helps as well--
Enough so that you have enough
To eat, to keep a place, to live.
A certain discipline's required--
No, not that kind, but if you are
Interested in that kind, you go.
Let's see. What was the topic? Oh:
A certain discipline's required,
Some self-control, especially when
Temptation cruises by, or times
Are tough. A lot of independence,
Personal space: Yes, these two help
A lot. But in the end, if mar-
Riage works, luck has to be involved.
You just keep going, laughing; work.
Link love and lust and like and laugh.
You share. You are adults, and you
Are friends. Your marriage is a puz-
Zle--that's for sure. Be sure to live
It well. It's not something to solve.
*
*
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Net Worth?

So, if things continue to move apace (what a wonderfully vague contingency), we'll move into a condominium in March or April. Separately, we lived in dorm-rooms, rooms, and apartments of various kinds before we met, then we lived briefly in an apartment, but otherwise we've only lived in houses--aside from relatively brief stints in NYC and Sweden. This condominium-thing, then, will be new to us. "It" is in a refurbished old (by West Coast North American standards) building, built like a battleship, if battleships were built of brick and concrete. The floors are composed of concrete, ten inches thick, for example. The interior walls are concrete, too. The builders also recycled lava-rock taken from ships, in which the rock was apparently used as ballast; some of the lava-rock is situated between layers of concrete, for insulation. I like Old School improvisations like that. (Assuming the ballast-story is true, I wonder if the ships in question came from Hawaii.)

Condominium is a good gray Latin word, and when it got absorbed into English, it meant something like "joint ownership" or "joint sovereignty," according to the OED online, anyway:

a1714 BURNET Own Time (1823) IV. VI. 412 The duke of Holstein began to build some new forts..this, the Danes said, was contrary..to the condominium, which that king and the duke have in that duchy.

1882 Sat. Rev. 16 Sept. 361 The establishment of a new condominium with all Europe.

So, in the example from around 1714, the king and the duke have joint control--or condominium--over that "duchy." Co-dominion might be an improvised cognate, yes?

Not until around 1962--and in North America, probably the U.S. first--did "condominium" get used to refer to joint ownership of a building combined with individual ownership of spaces therein. One example from the OED online is taken from the Economist, a British magazine, which was reporting on this new concept (and a new denotation of an old word) from the U.S. However, I don't know how new the concept was, really, as I assume apartments had been "owned" in various countries around the globe for a long time before 1962. But, apparently, the word "condominium," applied to the concept, was new in '62.

Of course, unless one has the capacity to pay "cash on the barrel-head," as my father used to say, one must secure a loan, and to do that, one has to (or two have to) estimate "net worth." When I think of this concept, I sometimes think literally of a net. "What is your net worth?" "Not very much, but I have caught some fish with it, if that interests you." At other times, I imagine a scene in which someone arrives in Heaven and, wanting to impress an angel, scribbles something on a piece of paper and says, "This was my net worth on Earth!" Thunderous laughter then rocks the Afterlife.

--A poem, then, not about a condominium, but about wealth and worth. I don't remember which came first, the experiment with blank tetrameter verse or the topic; a confluence of the two might have occurred. Anyway, . . . :

Wealth and Worth

He is a nervous, wealthy man.
He fidgets, squirms, and giggles; counts,
Divides, and multiplies. He rubs
His face. And when he comes into
A room, he seems determined to
Invest himself in it and get
Its interest in him as return.
He wants and gets. He plans and plots,
Accrues. He is confused because
The more he gets, the more he gets,
And yet and still and nonetheless
He seems to him to be just he,
A discontented “I,” a sphere
Of fear and calculation and
A worry-furnace. He’s a rich,
A nervous, wanting, getting man,
So oddly sad, despite his wealth,
Because despite net-worth, he can’t
Account for feeling worthless.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom