Speccie Supersize Me by 23rd January
 

Wel you know where THIS one came from. And, do you now what? I haven't written a poem to fit. Well, not yet.

No. 2782: supersize me

You are invited to write a poem in praise of fatness (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 January.

Fat is Good

Let’s hear it for fat people
(Though fools call us obese),
We’re checks, braces and hat people,
So let’s hear it for fat people,
The bums, bellies and splat people,
All chip-butties and grease;
Let’s raise glasses to fat people,
And scorn diet police.

We’re sit-down-for-a-chat people
We're swans slandered as geese,
We’re more-helpings-than-that people,
Who sit down for a chat, people
Who drink wine by the vat people
Who praise God for increase,
We're fat-cat-on-the-mat people
With two dinners apiece.

Let It Be

The universe weighed next to nothing.
God said, "I'll create
Things to fill this empty chaos.
Universe, gain weight!"

And all at once, at God's commandment,
Earth and Moon and Sun
Appeared and took their rightful places,
Time, at last, begun.

And what's the moral of this tale,
The lesson of this matter?
If you would serve the Lord who made you,
Go forth and grow fatter.

Nick Holbrook and I have been chewing the fat over this one. Here's what we've come up with so far.

I’m twice the man I used to be,
And working on a third;
My rollicking rotundity
May strike you as absurd,

Yet saucy wenches still cavort,
Despite my monstrous belly;
They find it tickles them to sport
Upon a mound of jelly.

Their mouths agape, my little tarts
Impale themselves with caution
When they discover all my parts
Are strictly in proportion.

So you may call me “tub of lard”,
But ponder, while you scoff,
That even Death will find it hard
To carry Falstaff off.

******************************

“Give me the fat!” cried Mrs Sprat,
“For that’s where all the taste is;
Bring streaky bacon, mutton fat -
To hell with where my waist is -

Beef dripping, lard, and turkey grease,
Just pile it on my platter.
Pork crackling, oily ducks and geese;
Who cares if I grow fatter?

I’m in a gastronomic dream;
A fat-free diet? Shove it!
Bring on the butter and the cream -
Cholesterol? I love it!

My husband wouldn’t touch a speck;
He said that fat could kill.
But then he broke his stupid neck,
So now I eat my fill."

John, highly enjoyable, although for my taste there may be too many repeated lines. But there's excess for you. (I have a friend and colleague who is known, for obvious reasons, as "two-dinner De Pratto".)

Roger, also very entertaining - but shouldn't it be "Time had, at last, begun"?

STELLA’S BIRTHDAY [1718 / 9] BROUGHT UP TO DATE

(If Jonathan Swift and Esther Johnson lived in modern times, and were schoolmates.)

When we were chums in seventh grade, a hundred pounds was all you weighed.
You were so scrawny, poor, and chaste; and had a 21 inch waist.
But, Stell, you’d flaunt your budding boobs, which wowed the preppies and the rubes,
( Though you confessed your greatest thrill came after you’d consumed your fill.).

In high school, you said "what the hell", and shed your moralistic shell;
A smile from you would knock the socks off trust-fund kids and football jocks.
But I was just a Classics geek, while Stella, you were blonde and sleek;
The star of the gymnastics squad, with cool guys lusting for your bod.

Each weekend you went on a date and shocked them with the chow you ate;
And after lusty college life, became a barefoot pregnant wife.
I’m saddened by your third divorce; in grief, you’ve eaten like a horse.
Your appetite exceeds your eyes, and so your belly does, likewise

Now at the age of 38, you’ve doubled both your age and weight;
Still muscular in butt and thighs, your waistline’s grown to twice it’s size.
Those jocks and trust-fund guys are wed, so you invite me to your bed …
Where, Stella, I let you take over; at love, you’re now a Supernova.

Nice stuff, Douglas.

Brian, I was led into the repeats by the form, but I think you have a point and I go too far. So I have revised accordingly. I hope it looks better. Does it?

John, would 'maligned' fit the scansion better than 'slandered'?

I think it's an improvement, John. Replacing the repeated lines makes it more inventive.

Thanks, Brian. I think so too. I like both of your but particularly the second. This is going to be a strong entry. Dammit.

Not to my ear, George. The short lines are supposed to go:

deDAH (pause) DAHdede DAH

Douglas, I like your piece. The trouble is, it's really a 32-line poem disguised as 16. But maybe the 'supersized' competition subject will let you get away with it.

I thought I'd have another go.

Fat is Good 2

It's the Lardy arses of the Working Classes
That make Great Britain great.
It's the haddock suppers, though we're on our uppers,
That fortify the State.

It's the gamin gutties with their thick chip butties
That prove we're on the ball.
It's the baked bean buyers and the Mars Bar fryers
That keep us walking tall.

So set us in our greasy spoons
To gorge on corned beef hash,
Big sticky buns and macaroons,
Fried sausages and mash.

It's the pendant bellies crammed with jams and jellies
That make us what we are.
It's the sweet tea slurping and the beery burping
That win us the cigar.

I'm thinking Sophie Dahl when she was a size 16. Hubba hubba.

And there's always Hattie Jacques. I don't know what size she was.

Brian;
I hereby dub thee “Poetry Detective”. This began as a fairly close parody of Swift’s original, which is in tetrameter. But, to get the whole narrative, I was actually up to 44 lines! I whittled them down to your stated 32. Then, I recalled my Organic Chemistry lab, where we made monomers of something into dimers of something else. So, using some poetic polymerase, 32 tetrameter lines became 16 octometer lines. While Swift hoped “To split my worship to in twain”, I opted for fusion, rather than fission.
Metrically, this is not strictly kosher. But, as you say, maybe I can slip my supersize lines in on account of the subject.
By the way, my computer is old enough that its spell check underlines “supersize” in a wavy red line.

That's nothing, Douglas. I'm so old that my internal spelling checker keeps trying to change "show" to "shew".

Appropriately and deliciously gross, John. But I started thinking about the third stanza, which diverges from the pattern, and came up with the following, although it doesn't exactly match your rather tricky metre:

On bums like half-moons, we sit in ‘greasy spoons’
To gorge on corned beef hash,
Macaroons, sticky buns, treacle pudding in tons,
Fried sausages and mash.

P.S. On reflection, John, your variant third stanza may be a good idea, so feel free to forget my preceding remarks.

Brian,
In 1950s America, a top-rated TV program was Ed Sullivan's variety show. Ed would begin each episode by saying "We have a really big shew for you tonight" . I suspect that this still lives on in youtube land.
Ed was no fool, by the way. He introduced Elvis and the Beatles to nationwide US audiences.
But, anybody under about 50 does not recall Ed saying shew.

My idea, Brian, was to make it like a song. The third stanza is like that bit in a blues, you know what I mean. I like your stanza though.

Is it a blues I'm talking about? Something to do with songs. Maybe I mean the sort of thing Fred Astaire sings.

John,
I think the songwriting term for what you mention is "bridge". But, I am a babe in the woods about music, and may be wrong ... there are other Spherians far more educated in these matters than I am.

'Elephantine'.

That could be it, Douglas. The phrase 'middle eight' is hovering somewhere. Middle eight what? Bars?

Nonetheless, Bazza, she had her admirers, and not just John le Mesurier.

Indeed so, John. She even moved her fancy piece into the marital home. Still & all, I am an admirer. The matron of matrons.

middle eight and bridge
 

John,
I just did a web search, and we both are right. Under the Wikipedia article "thirty-two-bar form", both "middle eight" and "bridge" are described; and essentially mean the same thing. It seems that this technique became popular about 1925, and literally thousands of popular songs have used this structure since.
So, I guess that it sounds natural to our ears now. Oddly, I have not seen it mentioned in any of the eight or ten textbooks books on prosody which I've read. But, in a little book on how to write a pop lyric that I bought at a second hand shop, a whole chapter is devoted to it.
It does juice up your poem, by the way.

Thank you, Douglas. May I recommend ... ah, I can't find it. It is a book about the art of the great songwriters, Cole Porter etc, from the 1920s to the 1950s. I have found it very useful. I will put it up here when I do find it. It will be useful to all those poets who write the sort of stuff we do.

The name of it is 'The Poets of Tin Pan Alley' and it was written by Philip Furia.

Fashion demands that human forms
Be, like some lattes, skinny;
Not many dare to flout such norms
So Fatty yields to Thinny.

High time to break the media spell,
This curse of weight reduction,
To let the fuller figure swell
Unscarred by liposuction!

The Michelin man -that bouyant air
And sensuous rolls of rubber! -
Should make both sexes well aware
Of beauty born from blubber.

Cat-walk designers, start afresh,
Dump models looking willowy
For those with Rubensworthy flesh
Plump, succulent and billowy!

Regarding all sins of the flesh I’ve a theory --
While friends may regret their own blubber’s deployment
the truth is beyond any possible query.
The greater one’s flesh then the more one’s enjoyment.

Exponential’s the word to describe my joy’s curve
at the sins of the flesh which I’ve tested and tasted;
and the corpulent verve of my unrestrained lurve
simply proves that such sins are much better unwaisted.

God made me a lard-butt -- a matter for joy!
My poor sinful flesh will not care to or dare to
attempt to deny that I’m proud to deploy
the heightened delight that my more flesh is heir to.

And when at the Crem I seek final release
I’ll burn so much better well larded with grease,
while pitying friends who, with less of a skinful
of fat, found the same sins less fleshfully sinful.

(Not exactly on topic, but what the hell?)

You call me fat? You puny sprat!
Without this coat of blubber
I’d surely freeze in icy seas,
You skeletal landlubber!

You’re skin and bone, a thing like Jonah -
Indigestible.
The little krill I slurp and swill,
Are more comestible.

I plumb the deep where lobsters creep,
My massive lungs inflated,
And when I sing, the oceans ring
With music unabated.

Your little boat may help you float,
The breeze may drive your sail;
But when I blow, why, then you’ll know
The power of a whale.

John,
I found a used copy of Mr. Furia's book on a internet book megasite for $1.00, plus $3.00 postage. This was a big saving over the gas I would need for a 75 to 100 mile roundtrip to a college library.
Anyway, it arrived yesterday, and I was up until the wee hours reading it. It's a good piece of scholarship, and a fun read. Plus, now I am getting to know why those songs that I listened to (50 years ago) on my mother's old 78 records sounded so great.
Thanks for the tip.