“Dinner Conversation” (Stuttgart, 1980s)

This poem, written in the 1980s in Stuttgart, reflects an early phase of formal discipline in my work. It is structured in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, a traditional English form associated with hymns and lyric poetry. The controlled meter mirrors the poem’s thematic concern with decorum, social codes, and restraint.

The poem employs full and slant rhyme, vowel echo, and controlled metrical reduction, creating a tightly regulated acoustic field. Assonance, internal rhyme, near rhyme, and sound clustering—particularly around the long oo vowel (do, rule, due, ooze, soothe, cooed)—generate a rounded, muffled acoustic field that reinforces themes of suppression and social containment.

The final word blood, though visually aligned with the “oo” cluster, breaks the phonetic pattern. Decorum is maintained in meter, while rupture emerges in sound.

This early poem remains within inherited form. Later texts test how little structure is required for form to remain.