by Frances Simon
Pizza is a slice of lifelike mother's milk,
moist and funny-
The crust is where it's at,
the outer most layer
a brittle solid-
Sauce is the art and essence,
key to success,
a sheer rumor-
Cheese is the source of all,
the secret to what it is
a thing of beauty-
Toppings are the quality of their naturalist staff,
an informally organized partnership,
a hobby that got a little out of hand-
Pizza is food for mind and body.
___________________________________________________________________
About the poem: So many thoughts, tumbling over themselves in my mind like Happy Kung-Fu ClamsTM, so let's get to them.
One of the first things I heard on the news this morning was that pizza is now a vegetable, according to the government, and while some (me) might have heralded that as a sign of the apocalypse, others (also me) might have rolled over in bed and said "Did you hear that? Pizza is a vegetable. Which means I'm the healthiest person I know. I'm going to eat vegetables for breakfast."
To celebrate, I then went looking for poems about pizza, which I figured there had to be, and there were, as shown by this poem, which is about pizza.
But then I got intrigued by that title, and that this is a "Found Poem," because I didn't know "Found Poems" were even a thing, but apparently they are.
The poet, when she posted the poem, said this:
A found poem is a poem that is composed of words encountered in random situations such as on signs or overheard from other people's conversations. This poem is written with the assistance of googlism.com. It is the digital equivalent of a found poem.
That amazed me, because without ever knowing that there was such a thing as found poems I had once done (and kind of gotten away from doing) something I called the found alphabet, which I should really get back to, but anyway, found poetry is a thing. From Poets.org:
Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.
A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
Examples of found poems can be seen in the work of Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff. In his book Testimony, Reznikoff created poetry from law reports, such as this excerpt:
Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her
first job--in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma'am, oh, so
anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging about her
shoulders, "knocking up" for Mary and Sadie, the stichers
("knocking up" is counting books and stacking them in piles to
be taken away).
Which is also amazing because I can make poetry out of stuff I see at work and I am TOTALLY going to do that now, and also because I actually did this myself without knowing it was a thing.
AND I did it almost exactly two years ago to the day: Back on November 12, 2009, I posted "A Mandolin For Your Thoughts," a "found poem" -- my words I used without knowing that it was some kind of official poet thing -- that I'd made up entirely of words underlined by the prior reader of the book Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
Which all more or less confirms that I'm a genius, which I knew, but coming on top of the fact that I've been eating Congressionally-approved vegetables daily, and in light of the fact that I'm leaving work at 1:30 today, makes this perhaps one of the most awexome Friday's ever.
And which just leaves me wondering what googleism is, and so I looked it up and here's what it is:
Googlism is some thing that will find out what Google thinks of you, according to the Googlism site. I don't know what that means, so I put my name in for a trial run, and got this:
Wow.
Way to bring me down, Googlism. Seriously. I was having a great day, and then bam! You lowered the boom. You know what? I don't know YOU. There. How's that feel?
I'm going to go eat some vegetables to cheer me up.
About the Hot People: I said last week that anyone can nominate anyone for the Hot Actress post, and Rogue Mutt went for the jugular with Betty White, who, as annoying as it has been to have to live through her late-career resurgence (I don't mind Betty White; I do mind that she was suddenly everywhere and that all people could talk about was Betty White, but I mind that whenever it happens to anyone, so I wasn't being a rabid antibettywhiteite) is not actually unattractive for a 133-year-old woman; if I look like that when I am her age...
...well, I'll be surprised, because I'm a man, but you get the drift. So I suppose in her way, Betty White is okay, but I think you have to agree with me, it was overdone there for a while, making her a triskadekagenarian version of James Franco. She's settled back down now and we've heard less of her, which is about the level of fame she should have.
Want to see your own Hot Actress/Hot Actor/Hot Who- or What-Ever? Leave a comment and pick one; I'm going to work through all the suggestions by posting two per Friday's Sunday's poem, so here's the one suggested by Erin O'Riordan to close out the post:
And here's my favorite song ever by Christian Bale, sort of:
NEXT WEEK: A FOUND POEM MADE UP ENTIRELY OF THINGS OPPOSING LAWYERS SAY TO ME THIS WEEK!
If I remember to do that, I mean.
2 comments:
Was that the sexiest current picture of Betty White you could find?
O Betty White. What will we ever do without the last golden girl?
I think it's funny that congress calls pizza a vegetable. It just shows how stupid a collection of people we have running this country (and how ineffective they are as a governing body).
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