Speccie: Trochaic
 

Chris o'Carroll carried our banner not once but twice, for he is also Smith. So our transatlantic flavour is back and the Brits this week are vanquished. Well done Chris!

The competition looks something we can all do. The Hiawatha metre is so easy you can churn it out all day - which Longfellow did, after all. Carroll (Lewis) has a marvellous poem about photography which is worth looking up.

No. 2653: Trochaic
You are invited to submit a poem, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, describing Hiawatha’s experiences at his computer (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 June.

Carroll's prose opening to "Hiawatha" is in the same meter.

Not quite on message perhaps:

Hiawatha’s Computer

Hiawatha from his teepee,
Squatting at his new computer,
Sends a steady stream of emails
Winging to the global village,
Words of wisdom transcendental:
Buy the shares in British Petrol.
Buy them by the hundred thousand.
Put your shirt on deep sea drilling.

Winging like a shower of arrows
To the weaklings and the women,
Give no ear to idle prattle,
Wind farms, wave power, solar panels.
Spurn the devil. Put thy trust in
Technological advancement.
Follow Microsoft and Google.
Buy more shares in British Petrol.

John, I can't make the second line work because I give cross-legged three syllables. If you want to make sure that muppets like me don't lose the plot so early on, you'd have to change it to "cross-legg'd" or express his position otherwise.

Also, you're using "sat" to mean sitting, rather than the past tense that sprang first to my mind, making line 3 sound wrong "should it not be sending?" I asked myself.

What if he were "squatting at his new computer"?

Just thinking aloud, as it were, while squatting at mine.

Ann, I think I have perpetrated a scotticism. He was sat there doing bugger all. I shall adopt your excellent sugestion.

John,
I'm glad you've adopted Ann's excellent suggestion, but you need to insert a 'q' in 'squatting'.
I'm reelly good at poof- readig!

Thank you, Jnaye

By the store of Johnny Lulu
By the shiny Big Mac Donald’s
Lurks the dingy cyber-café
Haunt of four-eyed yenadizzes
Signers-on and city-clickers.

Here the noble Hiaw@ha
Beautiful with beads and tassels
Came to buy an hour’s amusement.
Sent his Minne-lol a message
All bedecked with smiley-faces
On the modern wand of willow.

Outside, many young kenabeeks
With the awful eyes of Pauguk
Clocked his beads and mocked his tassels
Called him poofter, kicked him shitless
Left him lying in the gutter.

By the desk of Hiawatha
On the screen his cursor traveled
In the window he was viewing
Flashed the face of Minnehaha
Streaming in a pixel head-dress
Down across a naked torso.
In the corner of the window
Blanks for writing Visa numbers
Flashed and Hiawatha fumbled
For his wallet from his pocket
Where he found the plastic writing
He could use so Minnehaha
Would not fade away and leave him
Like a camper in a wigwam
By the shores of Gitche Gummee
Beating shining Big-Sea-Water.

Can you tell that my "official" summer vacation has just begun? :)

HIAWATHA JOINS FACEBOOK

Glitchy software made him gloomy,
But his mission lay before him:
At an antiquated laptop,
On a modem that was dial-up,
To defeat the website filter
That his granny had installed there;
To mark “login” box, then “password”
Like the pale bark of the birch-tree
With his art of picture-writing,
So his friend request could reach her—
Minnie H. from North Dakota,
Savvy owner of an Ipad,
She with callused thumbs from texting.
Would she add him or ignore him?
He clicked “like” for Redskins fan page
As his granny lay there snoring . . .

The trouble with this sort of thing is that it is so easy to do. I once did a jolly good one on how to boil an egg. There is no space for the metrically ingenious. Auden never tried it and there has to be a reason for that.

All the postings so far are good. The winners will just be those that Lucy happens to like. Having said that, I can't help feeling that Julie and Ann touch the most bases so far.

Congratulations to Chris on his double-header!

I'm not a very high-tech type, so I had to keep it simple on this one.

Hiawatha bought an apple,
not the kind that hangs from branches,
but a new and strange invention
bought with many strings of wampum.
With the apple came a mouse pad,
not the kind that's made of mouse pelt,
but a new and strange invention
with a mouse to run across it.
Day and night did Hiawatha
strive to overcome the apple,
mastering the mouse and mouse pad,
gazing in its eye fluorescent.
Till at last he cried “Eureka!
I have overcome the apple!
Now we need not write on birch-bark.
Now we'll send each other e-mail!”

I like Ann's very much -- it's violent and fun.

Nice one, Gail

Hiawatha bought a mini
Laptop he could take to meetings
Using it for notes and email,
Not to mention voice recordings
(Always, though, with full disclosure).
Soon he based his life upon it,
Never took a step without it,
Never left it home a minute,
Never looked men in their faces,
Always needed to be checking
Something vital in a window.
Then one day the thing malfunctioned,
Crashed and left him helpless, flailing.
With a rueful, sighing chuckle
Hiawatha saw the humor,
Named his laptop Minnehaha.

By the Bay near San Francisco,
with its wigwam pyramidal,
in the Valley Silicon’ish,
built of lucre made from ether,
Hiawatha had a venture.
There he soared the dot-com bubble,
like the roaring Yahoo, Cisco,
rode the NASDAQ, strode the FTSE,
burned like WorldCom, fell, as Nortel.
So he paddled further westward,
where he spends his days now, phishing,
spamming, scamming, cyber-texting,
Greetings, I’m a prince from Lagos . . .
Hi! I’ve got a flat to let you . . .
send a Western Union transfer . . .
claim your prize by money order . . .

-- Frank

It is not only Hiawatha who has problems with computers. At Lighten Up Online all our email addresses have been pirated by spammers. This means that several of its contributors may find that their service providers have either sent all my communications to their Spam folders or simply stopped them from being received at all. This seems to have affected the USA in particular and, I suspect, for some time. I shall shortly be emailing contributors using my hereto non-buggered-up personal address, then setting up new email systems. My apologies for the shambles -- and just as we were getting a really strong USA representation. Please do no give up in exasperation.

In the meantime :--

Old Nokomis, high-tech hacker,
doctors Minnehaha’s emails
sent to lovesick Hiawatha:
forwards them to One-Eyed Ferret,
nerdy brave in next door tepee.
One-Eyed Ferret gets impression
Minnehaha loves him deeply,
wants to sleep beneath his blanket,
get her hands upon his wampum,
click “Delete” on Hiawatha.
Hiawatha he use firewall --
bonfire, matches, smoke-stained blanket --
handed down by low-tech forebears.
Him make smoke of next door’s Amstrad.
One-Eyed Ferret reads the signal.
Old Nokomis gets the message.

trochaic
 

Congratulations to Chris O'Carroll on his Hiawatha win.

Congratulations as well to Basil and to Julie Kane. Sorry to hear that Ann and Martin Parker just missed.

Susan