The fall of 1988, I enrolled in the only creative writing class I ever took until I started grad school. The class, under the direction of Robert Mezey, focused on writing metric verse. This entry is apparently one of my attempts.
The waxen complexion gazes from its berth—
A former | person, | bathed | in | [illegible]preservatives,
Eyes sewn |shut, shut out their [illegible]shut, small | comfort | for they who live,
To see |[illegible]the departure from [illegible]
The coach, a casket, cedar and brass,
Silk clothes | and on sa|tin | sheets will last,
longer | than the | flesh they | adorn, even
When the | best arts | of man | and mortician
Are a|pplied. The | flesh will | decay, | but no
Matter, | the art | must last | two days: although
Its im|pression | will last | a life|time (’til
DEATH do | us part) | When the | face is | encased
In earth, | the soul | having | left, its decays[illegible]Will remain un|seen. | Who | knows? | No | one will.
The grey vertical bars are my marking metrical feet, and showing that I had no rhythm at all in my poetry at that time, something that would plague me for most of the semester as I found myself eventually giving up on writing iambic pentameter to write shorter lines (tetrameter, trimeter and occasionally even dimeter) before finally gaining some sense of meter. There a few bits of nice language here (“best arts of man and mortician” and “waxen complexion” stand out), although the text is also self-contradictory—I have a waxen complexion gazing with eyes sewn shut (!) and more than a little of a mess.
I generally don’t represent my poetry as metrical, although there is at least some attention paid to rhythm nevertheless.
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