Day: February 23, 2017

Caveat: Rooky Mountains

Banalities & Journaling

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There is a globe on a table in the entry area of our hagwon. It's been there (or on analogue tables in previous locations) for as long as I have worked at Karma. Sometimes I even have looked at it, and on a few notable occasions, I've borrowed it into my classroom.

I was waiting for coworkers last night, as we got ready to go to a hoesik (회식 = work meal), after work got out, and was looking at the globe. The globe is "bilingual" (Korean and English), which is sometimes intriguing. It dawned on me just what poor quality the English was. In the Western US, I discovered the "Rooky Mountains." It is easy to visualize a lot of inexperienced climbers plummeting to their deaths from these mountains' peaks and cliffs. Or perhaps in fact these are small mountains, not confident yet of their mountainhood, sticking up from domineering plains only tentatively.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrain #1

A Daily Poem / Ballad / Book 1 / My Poetry & Fiction

(Poem #207 on new numbering scheme)

The other day they forecast snow,
but then instead it rained.
I don't dislike a rainy day,
but snowless, I was drained.

– a quatrain in ballad meter.
I have decided to continue to challenge myself, and therefore the next poetic form I will undertake is a more native (i.e. traditional) English poetic style, called the “Ballad meter.” These are alternations of 4 and 3 (mostly) iambic feet grouped in quatrains, with a rhyming scheme a b c b. Much famous poetry in English follows this pattern, such as Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Many well known songs and hymns also follow this meter (or, also, the very similar so-called “common meter” which differs only in having a “tighter” rhyming scheme a b a b), such as the songs “Amazing Grace” and “America the Beautiful,” as well as the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.” I guess there is no specific name for a single quatrain of ballad meter verse, so I’ll just call them daily quatrains – or maybe sometimes I’ll try to make more.
I have never successfully done much poemifying in traditional English stress-timed meters – despite being a native speaker, the stress-timed patterns have always felt unintuitive to me, while I have been making more rewarding efforts at syllable-count-based poetry since middle school. I am much more comfortable with syllable-timed patterns such as predominate in e.g. Italian, Spanish, Japanese or Welsh. Hence my previous efforts at this “poem-a-day” blog have been on such forms as the nonnet (originally Italian) and englyn (originally Welsh), with occasional haiku back there, too.
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