Thomas Erickson
October/November, 2024
I wrote a poem yesterday. This is not usual behavior for me. An explanation is called for.
Now, it’s true that I’ve been paying more attention to verse lately. I’m taking a Shakespeare course and have become intrigued by the way he uses language. Faeries and other magical creatures speak in rhyming verse. Gentle folk often speak in the iambic rhythm of blank verse, rising into rhyme during moments of passion, and faltering into arrhythmia when in distress. Common folk speak in prose, of course, though it is sometimes inventively mangled for humorous effect. All this has raised my awareness of language and rhythm. Sometimes I’ll track iambic feet that trip along a sentence, I’ll read and with my finger tap, di-DAP, di-DAP, di-DAP, di-DAP.
But while it’s fair to say that verse has infiltrated a bit of my mental ecosystem, the poem I wrote had nothing to do with Shakespeare; nor was it motivated by any sort of poetic impulse. Instead, it had to do with geochemistry, and with memory. Still, the exercise had many points of interest.
Let’s step back in time, just two days, to lay out how this began.
I awoke to an episode of BPPV: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. It sounds like a punk rock band, but it’s really an inner ear disorder. I have periods where I get dizzy when in a particular position: to wit, if I am lying in bed and roll over, the room starts spinning.
It is quite unpleasant. I find that I do not agree with the “benign” part of my condition’s name. But since “benign” presumably means that I’m not having a stroke or aneurysm, I should not complain.
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