"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
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