Prompt: Cartoonish

"Betty Boop's Bebop" by Barbara Hamby (from All-Night Lingo Tango) is one of about a dozen poems of hers that I heard over the years of listening to The Writer's Almanac program. She imagines the cartoon character Betty Boop telling us how she is not who we think she is. She has read Rilke! This Betty reminds me of Jessica Rabbit (from the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) who sexily cooed "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

Our September call for Submissions is a simple one. Tell us the so-far-untold story of a cartoon character. It's a character we know pretty well on the screen or paper, but we never got the full story. We never heard from the character in a way that was not controlled by writers and artists.

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024 for issue #327

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times.
She is the author of seven poetry collections including Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), and Babel (2004). Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire (1999) won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Delirium (1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Barbara edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby.
She teaches at Florida State University where she is a Distinguished University Scholar.
"Betty Boop's Bebop" is from her collection All-Night Lingo Tango (2009, University of Pittsburgh Press) Her website is barbarahamby.com

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Southey and the Three Bears

I saw a reference to poet Robert Southey who had been one of the English Poet Laureates. I had never heard of him but that doesn’t mean much to his fame. Though I read a lot more poetry than the average person, all I have to do is look at the table of contents of the Norton anthology of poetry on my shelf to realize how many poets I have not read and didn’t even know were poets.

Robert Southey was born in Bristol, England in 1774 and is considered one of the leading poets of his day, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. He belonged to the so-called Lake School of English Romantic poetry. Today his poetry is pretty much forgotten.

But we do do know one short children's story he published anonymously called "The Story of the Three Bears" (1837). 

He said his uncle had told him the story as a child. It was about an old woman who invades the house of three bears, tries out their porridge, their chairs, and their beds, and then jumps out the window when they come home. 

Southey's story has rather grim ending: "Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her." 

The story has been rewritten many times by other authors and in the later more upbeat versions, the old woman becomes a little girl named "Goldilocks" who gets away unharmed from her break in to the home of the bears.

I feel bad for Robert that he is only remembered for that little story (though it has sold millions of copies over the years), so here is one of his sonnets.

            SONNET IV.

    I Praise thee not, ARISTE, that thine eye

      Knows each emotion of the soul to speak;

    That lillies with thy face might fear to vie,

      And roses can but emulate thy cheek.

    I praise thee not because thine auburn hair

      In native tresses wantons on the wind;

    Nor yet because that face, surpassing fair,

      Bespeaks the inward excellence of mind:

    'Tis that soft charm thy minstrel's heart has won,

      That mild meek goodness that perfects the rest;

      Soothing and soft it steals upon the breast,

    As the soft radiance of the setting sun,

    When varying through the purple hues of light,

    The fading orbit smiles serenely bright.

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Ready to Write With Steve Martin

“The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready."  - Steve Martin

I'm not sure why Steve thinks of himself as an actor first and a writer second. Is it that he is just not ready to write? Does he need someone to get him working and that happens with acting?

As a film actor, we know Steve for ROXANNE, FATHER OF THE BRIDE, PARENTHOOD and THE SPANISH PRISONER. He is also the author of a varied shelf of books including the bestselling collection PURE DRIVEL, THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY: A NOVEL, has written several plays, including Picasso at the Lapin Agile and a highly acclaimed novella, SHOPGIRL. His work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times. No poetry so far, but he will - when he's ready.

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

To Publish or Not to Publish

I don't think it's a good idea for writers to think too much about the publishing world. I sense in a good many books, even in books by the best writers, an anxiety about how it will do in the marketplace. You can feel it on the page, a sort of sweat of calculation.
   -   Elizabeth Hardwick

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org