Light Verse 9: Innards
 

Innards

For PMN

Oh, blow the trumpets, bang the gongs,
Tell the stories, sing the songs
Of those who seek to right the wrongs
Of innards.

Some are native, others foreign
Marshall, Shatzki, Barrett, Warren -
They all discovered more and more on
Innards.

What was it made these heroes choose
The inclination to enthuse
About the ceaseless squeeze and ooze
Of innards?

Oh, stuff your ifs and hush your buts,
Think twice about your tasteful tuts
And praise all those who have the guts
for innards

You too, good Sir, are on this list –
A gastroenterologist
To whom I trust each loop and twist
Of innards.

The poem you are trying to think of which dances along to the same metre (a kind of rhymed Sapphic in general shape) is probably the one Byron sent his publisher complaining that other Lords (Oxford and Waldegrave) got better publishing contracts than he did. It ends:

But now this sheet is nearly cramm’d,
So, if you will, I shan’t be shamm’d,
And if you won’t, you may be damned,
My Murray.

Perhaps there are others. Some Spherean will surely know.

What I like about this, beyond its technical expertise and the goddam lilt of it, is its sheer inconsequentiality. Who the hell is PMN, for a start? Marshall, Shatski et al. – a quick trawl through google reveals to be men who have indeed written about innards. They would be (I suppose) gastro-enterologists.

Of course PMN could refer to the PMN count. The what? The polymorphonuclear count, you dummy. Your gastro-enterologist conducts such a count in cases, among others, of cirrhosis. Ahah! You should have laid off the sauce, good poet. You really should have. I hope all went well.

I do agree it is a mystery why doctors choose the specialisms they do. I knew a girl, a pretty girl too, the wife of the politician Robin Cook, who won the VD Medal at Edinburgh University. And what (except money of course) could ever prevail upon a medico to opt for dentistry?

It may be harder than I thought to find other examples of this stanza. Intensive googling came up only with the devout Charles H. Gabriel.

If I have craved for joys that are not mine,
If I have let my wayward heart repine,
Dwelling on things of earth, not things divine-
Good Lord, forgive!

I like this one a lot; it's quite clever and congratulations for fitting "gastroenterologist" in with the meter. I'd like to see the title changed; a title that faintly touches on the subject matter (because I love when titles do that!) because it's the kind of poem that could benefit from it, something like "How to Play Your Eternal Organs Overnight" or "the Last of the Microbe Hunters" or "Escape Pod from the World of Medical Observations" but not those specifically because I just stole them from Stereolab.

Yeah! It's a good poem.

Well done and clever. The meter, the rhymes, the language, all work - there is a flow of thought through the poem - and it's intelligent. Plus extra points for probably being the first poet in history to use "gastroenterologist" in a rhymed quatrain! One of my favorites.

My only caveat is that it's a little too inwardly driven with the list of names in S2. They would mean nothing to anybody but another gastro-whatsis. The poem is so delightful that I think it can easily carry an additional stanza, a new S3, that humorously expands on what Marshall, Shatzki, Barrett, Warren did - gets into the kishkas, so to speak - and makes it more universal.

Excellent. My favorite so far. This poem deserves to be read alongside Chris O'Carroll's poem about a sigmoidoscopy:


http://www.the-chimaera.com/Feb2009/...O_Carroll.html

I wish I liked this more. S3 is really good and I enjoyed the pun in S4. The rest of the poem feels like it's skating on the surface of a better poem, one that could have been realized but wasn't. The language in this strikes me as "lazy", for want of a better word. For example the opening words: "Oh, blow the trumpets, bang the gongs, tell the stories, sing the songs." And the second stanza is almost flat. The poet didn't quite put in the extra work to make this extra special, or even merely special.

I love this one. Surprising and funny. We could all write more stanzas now that we have been shown how and I must confess I am repressing some very saucy rhymes. Bravo.
Janet

I have a pretty good idea who wrote this excellent poem. Who else could make music out of the gross and disgusting and foul and stinky?

My favourite stanza:

Oh, stuff your ifs and hush your buts,
Think twice about your tasteful tuts
And praise all those who have the guts
for innards

Well, Mary, Robert Burns could. This is a stanza from 'Death and Dr Hornbook'. Death is complaining that Hornbook's doctoring is so good he is cheating Death of what is his by right. Hornbook was a friend of Burns.

“Ev’n them he canna get attended,
Although their face he ne’er had kenned it,
Just shite in a kail-blade, an’ sent it,
As soon’s he smells ’t,
Baith their disease, and what will mend it,
At once he tells ’t.

A kail-blade is a cabbage leaf. German doctors are very good at this I am told.

nevermind

nevermind

Like many occasional poems (and I assume this was one), this poem showers a lot of brio, style, and wit on something that may not seem very consequential to someone who doesn't know the person and occasion. It strikes me as being very clever and adept, but not especially funny, except in terms of the distance between the high style of the poem and the low subject matter. The allusions to individuals probably amused the gastroenterologist in question, but are not likely to ring bells with the general public. The public needn't recognize the names to get the general point of the verses, but they may feel shut out of a private joke, to some extent.

Susan

I believe Shatzki is misspelled. I think it should be Schatzki.

The poet has identified this as an hommage to Longfellow. Was it "Excelsior"? One of the all-time good bad poems.

As far as "innards" are concerned, two Brits have opened a restaurant in Houston that I must get to soon:

http://events.nytimes.com/2009/04/08...tml?ref=dining

Offal must be the next dining new frontier.

The French have been doing it for years. I dined in a restaurant in Paris at least a decade ago in which all of the specials contained offal of some sort. Of course, the French can make anything taste good. But I have to say that I have been to other restaurants there that I have enjoyed more.

Susan

Well of course it was Excelsior. How could I have forgotten. Do you all know the illustrtaed Excelsior by James Thurber? He did a number of good bad poems. Surely the BEST good bad poem is Newbolt's 'There's a breathless hush in the close tonight'. It's actually cfalled something classical. And perhaps it's just good-good.

Perhaps innards are a Brit thing. Just after the war, when I was a little boy, tripe and onions was consumed pretty generally (meat was on the ration) and steak-and-kidney pie for dinner and liver and bacon for breakfast are again very traditional fare, not posh restaurant at all. Having said that, alas, sweetbreads are pretty well impossible to get since various health scares concerned with beef.

Chicken liver, ah there's something well worth consuming. Of course it isn't us, but those cheese-eating surrender monkeys who are foremost in the preparing and consumption of parts of a beast you wouldn't believe. In Caen, in Normandy, the supermarkets vie with one another in producing huge tins of tripe a la Caen, or whatever is the exact nomenclature. Bloody good tins too and (as in generally the case with innards, very cheap.

And my cat, beside me as I write, would like you to know that liver is the stuff to give the troops, ah yes.

And the Scots would likwe to know if haggis counts.

Sam, tell us about your Texan restaurant. Texas, the stomach of the USA!

There isn't anything to be done in the eating line with fish guts is there?
Seagulls like 'em!

My wife tells me I've got to lose weight. What for? I enquire.

And this is an offal pun.

A good one on the subject of innards was perpetrated by James MacAuley (half of "Ern Malley") when he was told that half his large bowel must be removed or he would soon be dead: "Better a semi-colon than a full stop."

Fegato alla Veneziana is food for the gods.

Oh, Offal and Longfellow and terrible puns! This is how a competition of this sort should end - not with a grunt but a gizzard.

A E Housman's take on "Excelsior!" began:

The shades of night were falling fast, the rain was falling faster,
When through an alpine village passed an alpine village pastor...

What larks! Thanks again, everyone.