It's Madness indeed--the March Madness Poetry Tournament hosted by Ed DeCaria! On Monday evening I received my 10-seeded word--HYPOCRISY-- which in 36 hours I had to develop into a poem worthy of competition. The word gave me pause, certainly; I worried that I would, like many with even more challenging, abstract words, have to spend my eight allowed lines defining it. But my 10-year-old easily demonstrated his understanding of "hypocrite," so I forged ahead....
and wrote a rather serious, instructive piece that just didn't seem to be the right thing for the competition:
A
Little Light Lying
Your
parents teach you social graces:
“Really—you
look good in braces!”
We say
what we don’t really mean;
The
edge of truth’s a touch too keen.
But
falseness leaves an ashy trace
A lasting mask tough to erase
Face the mirror, fail to see—
That’s genuine hypocrisy.
~Heidi Mordhorst 2013
(draft)
So I decided to start completely over, with something involving a hippo. Obvious, right? And naturally comical. And then--now that I review my Tuesday night train of thought, I can barely discern how I got there, but it had to do with reading a lot about hippos and watching a lot of amateur YouTube videos of hippos and crocodiles--a line of poetry came into my head: "How doth the little crocodile..." That was all I had at first.
Luckily, Google rarely lets me down, and soon I had the voice of Alice (yeah, the Disney Alice) reciting her whole poem from Chapter Two of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Wikipedia similarly rarely lets me be, so there I discovered something I had forgotten--that Alice's crocodile recitation is her garbled version of a serious, instructive poem of the 18th century poet Isaac Watts. His poem is about a bee and is usually titled
Against Idleness and Mischief
How doth the little busy
bee
Improve each shining
hour,
And gather honey all the
day
From every opening
flower!
How skilfully she builds
her cell!
How neat she spreads the
wax!
And labors hard to store
it well
With the sweet food she
makes.
In works of labor or of
skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some
mischief still
For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or
healthful play,
Let my first years be
passed,
That I may give for every
day
Some good account at
last.
Et voila! A concept. By only a couple of hours past my bedtime, I had borrowed Isaac's form and diction along with Lews's parodic twist and submitted this to the MMPT competition:
Against Falsity and
Pretense
How doth the chubby hippo
Improve his shining hide
And bob the waters of the Nile
On every muddy side!
How jolly seems to be!
Then crushes skulls of crocodiles
With sweet hippo-crisy.
How doth the chubby hippo
Improve his shining hide
And bob the waters of the Nile
On every muddy side!
How jolly seems to be!
Then crushes skulls of crocodiles
With sweet hippo-crisy.
Is that cheating? I decided not (and it was, after all, AT LEAST a couple of hours past my bedtime). While not wholly original, I reckoned that I had done enough creative reworking to justify calling it mine, and part of the work was a new appreciation for the historical antecedents of our modern poetry for kids.
At this writing the competition is fierce! I'm up against Alvaro Salinas Jr. (aka M.M. Socks) and his funny "LeeAnn's Farm," and after an early lead I find that the the voting is EXACTLY EQUAL! Stay tuned to find out if my hypocritical bee/crocodile/hippo can garner enough votes to get me to Round Two!
And now we must give a bit of Poetry Friday attention to the PF Anthology for Middle Schools, edited by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong. I'm wondering what would have happened if those clever editors had told us what the weekly themes in the book would be, so that all us poets could have written to assignment, as we're doing in the Tournament or may have done for the poetry tag e-books? Would our pieces have been any better? Worse? More risky and edgy as we ventured outside our own comfort zones, as we're doing with these crazy words Ed has given us? Process is soooooo interesting!
The Poetry Friday round-up is with Jone today at Check It Out! See you there!
