- Heidelberg Adagio ma non Troppo in 3/6
- Miletus Allegro Vivace in 4/17
- Lübeck Allegretto un Piu Grave in 3/12
Heidelberg
- Heidelberg's cold, stone, red-
- orange Renaissance and
- Baroque bulwarks barri-
- cade cobble-stoned alleyways
- with one year's memory.
- At dusk, houses light
- up with internal glow which
- one by one the Nightwood
- Wanderer beckons.
- Who whom wittened by,
- hearkens to where they're
- called by name, Matthew/Robin.
Miletus
- Much-enduring Miletus,
- situated near the town of
- Selçuk, thrice of 4000 years,
- a bustling, prolific metropolis.
- By such odyssey now free from
- Society's pressure to "succeed",
- "look good", have a "nice" personality.
- Dances with Artemis, daughter
- of Zeus of the aegis, with her
- skirts wide open, toppled ruins
- carelessly filling Aydin's lap's valley.
- Sings with gray-eyed Athene by
- hollowed reeds and bleating sheep through
- secret corridors thrown wide open.
- Ah, but much-enduring Miletus
- has been betrayed, whose Northern gate
- to the Southern agora lays
- manacled in Berlin's museum Pergamum!
Lübeck
- When dawn's rosy fingers
- on Lübeck's Hafen
- to the maiden disclosed,
- she required no Muse,
- the fable to enfold.
- On Id so loudly,
- satisfaction refused
- could be not,
- clamors bread the for,
- or in a hand stroke that
- private place she forsook.
- Holding surprising form
- the sculpture heads of Ernst
- Barlach fragmenting,
- exteriorizing
- the house of Thomas Mann.
- Cathedral evoking
- instant of light and peace
- procures Gotthard Kühl.
- She speculates the
- ensuing goal: would God
- be real if she were
- to develop her soul?
Christy Bergman,
February 1998
Notes on the Meter:
Being a mathematician, I write poetry with an idea and a base beat in mind, similar to the way I play music. So, being new to poetry, I intuitively approached it similar to music.
In English language poetry, the basic measure is an iamb consisting of an accent-nonaccent pair, "te-TUM". The meter is determined by how many iambs there are per line, iambic tetrameter = 4 iambs, iambic pentameter = 5 iambs, etc. The other structural element in poetry is the stanza or number of lines that are grouped together.
In music, a measure has a given number of counts, the size of those counts determined by some metric. For example, 6/8 time means there are 6 counts per measure with a 1/8th note equalling 1 count or 1/6th of the measure. Putting this together, results in beats. So 6/8 time actually has 2 beats per measure, 3 counts per beat or 3-1/8 notes per beat.
For me the following parallels followed: Syllables are notes. (Thinking of syllables as notes presented me with an interested dilemma when I tried writing haikus later. Japanese is a syllabic language, each syllable pronounced equally, but English is accentual syllabic, the base measure being an iamb. This means Japanese meters having 5 or 7 syllables per line sound natural in Japanese, but a nice-sounding English phrase would have an even number of syllables corresponding to some number of iambs.) A line is a measure. A beat is how many iambs. So, a poem written in 3/6 would have 3 counts per line with 1/6th "note" equalling a count or 1/3 of the line resulting in 3 beats per line (or iambic trimeter in poetry parlance).
But how many lines to make the stanza? Poetic stanzas tend to be more rigid than music stanzas (groups of 4 lines in poetry is common; whereas a musical stanza can be any section of music to be repeated). I decided to make mine end when the number of beats represented as a numerator over the denominator in the time measure representation would equal 1 if interpreted as a fraction. I.e. a poem written in 3/6 time should be iambic trimeter with 6 iambs per stanza or 2 lines per stanza.
When I wrote this in 1998, I intended:
- Part I, Heidelberg; in 3/6 music time; is poem form trimeter with 2 lines per stanza.
- Part II, Miletus; in 4/17 music time; is poem form 3 lines of tetrameter followed by 1 line pentameter per stanza. Note stanzas 2 and 4 are only 13 and 12 iambs respectively. I put more space between the stanzas to represent the pauses or 4 and 5 count rests respectively.
- Part III, Lübeck; in 3/12 music time; is poem form trimeter with 4 lines per stanza. At the end, there's a 3 count pause.
In Part III, I wrote this poem thinking back on what it was like trying to appreciate art in a foreign country, in a foreign language, while cold and hungry. For stanzas 2-3, I took 3 5-word phrases and jumbled them: 15243, 14532, 15234. It just felt better.