POISON TEA FOR WHO?
by Tom Kreitzberg
One day, tired of the clerihew rut I had fallen into as a doggerel writer, I wrote a little piece that went something like this:
He poisoned her coffee, he poisoned her tea,
Expecting that soon he'd be rich.
But once she was offed, he discovered that she
Had spent all her money, the bitch!
I fired the piece off to a broad-minded editor, and when she bought it, I proceeded to write and send her several more along the same pattern. (Well, I mean, wouldn't you?)
Just what is the pattern? It's a quatrain in ballad stanza meter, in which the tetrametric lines comprise three amphibrachs and a concluding iamb, while the trimeters have two amphibrachs and a concluding iamb. And if you know what that means without looking it up, you already know more about poetry than you'll ever learn from me. The easiest way to explain it is to say that it's the meter the above quatrain has.
The other element to the pattern is the first line: it should be as similar as possible to, "He poisoned her coffee, he poisoned her tea." That is, the poems are all about poisonings, and there are always two items that are poisoned. Of course, there may be more than one person poisoned, or even more than one poisoner, as one of my favorite examples shows:
He poisoned her coffee, she poisoned his tea.
Their marriage had troubles, you'd say.
But though they'd have scoffed, the facts of the case be
They sleep side by side to this day.
As the inventor of this type of poem, I got to name it, and the name I've given it is "poisontea."
Structurally, poisonteas are jokes, with the payoff in the final line. When you're joking about murder, you tend towards black humor -- at
least I do, so my poisonteas tend to show all parties involved in a bad light. A poisontea also works well as an ultra- mini-twist, as in this version of the hoary old plot:
He poisoned her coffee, he posioned her tea,
Then practiced his tears for the wake.
But at his first cough, he detected that he
Had picked up her mug by mistake.
I might even say that this poem is a piece of short mystery fiction. (Others might say it is a piece of something else.) Since a poisontea does need to tell a story, it is closer to prose fiction than other forms of doggerel generally are, and might make a nice vehicle for a simple idea that doesn't warrant complete treatment as a short story.
Dark humor in quatrain form is nothing new, of course. It was all the rage in the early part of this century, for example, following the publication of Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. Imagine a book full of verses like "Billy":
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the grate and was burnt to ashes.
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven't the heart to poke up Billy.
Graham's success led newspapers to run "ruthless rhyme" columns, and the poems came to be called "Little Willies," after the "hero" they most often featured. My favorite is this one:
Willie fell down the elevator --
Wasn't found till six days later.
Then the neighbors sniffed, "Gee whiz!
What a spoiled child Willie is!"
I don't expect to start a new craze in poetry with poisonteas, but they are enjoyable to write and to sell. That they happen to be in "ballad meter" has led me, in idle moments, to consider the idea of singing them, too. Alas, no editor is broad-minded enough to pay me for that.
Tom Kreitzberg
tak@smart.net
http://www.smart.net/~tak/poisontea.html
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