Armadillo Poet Laureate(s)

Well, we couldn’t procrastinate or plead an excessive work load much longer. We’ve had to take on the formidable and unpleasant task of judging the First Annual Bec Cartwright Armadillo Poetry Slam (FABCAPS). We say "unpleasant" because the number of hilarious, acerbic, visionary, erotic verses you all submitted way back when was overwhelming. Check them outhere.

Initially,we thought we’d get a few dozen responses, and three or four poems worthy of the name. Instead, we were inundated with hundreds of entries that had us, to use the lilting, Wordsworthian patois of the Internet, ROTFL. . . or trembling in the grip of revelation.

Guess what? You’re a Tribe of Poets. Who woulda thunk it? The bad news is that you might as well start getting used to living broke, laughing madly as you hold a match to yet another rejection slip, and wondering what would happen if you stuck your head in the oven (besides triggering an avalance of royalty checks and a mention in People).

In fact, the quality of the entries was so high that, in addition to designating a single, solitary winner (we’re going to post that last), we decided to highlight and comment on a number of entries that could just as easily have won, if we had been smart enough to have specific standards of judgment beyond passable spelling.

But first, I was so inspired by you all that I was moved to write a poem of my own. Well, okay, I took a poem some guy (Rudyard Kipling) wrote, called “If” (you’ll remember the famous lines from it, which hang above the entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court: If you can meet with triumph and disaster,And treat those two imposters just the same. . .). I had to edit it, because it wasn't quite where a great poem needs to be, so judge for yourself:

If What, suckah?

by Rudyard Kipling and Pete

Man, I cry every time I re-read it.

Anyway,  Let's move on to  meet the TW Poet Laureates:

A Fan’s Wish
By MWC

Of this one, Steggy says: "I enjoyed this one very much thematically. IMO, this entry had the best

command of meter and flow."

Next up is Ptennisnet, who, in one of his trademark, epigrammatic moments, chose to call his poem "Untitled" (and in lower case,no less!). Dude just won himself a beret and ivory cigarette holder!

untitled
by Ptennisnet

I love the bold, visionary way that Ptennisnet goes lower case on us, and just when we're ready to think he's just another cheap, two-bit e.e. cummings impersonator, a la Bob Dylan, he reverts - in the very next line - to proper use of the Upper Cases. Does this guy have poetry Wilanders or what? And that last line - priceless!

Steggy's take: "This one wins the limerick prize for the Majorcan pest line. I actually spit a coke all over my monitor when I first read it."

I don't know Steggs, I think our less post-modern readers might prefer this:

Ode to Justine
by Momofan

Next up is Rosia, or Rosangel, a high priestess in the TW coven of Rafael Nadal KADs. I see a literary firestorm (kind of a Mailer-Vidal thing) on the horizon, once Ptennisnet gets a load of her title:

Untitled
by Rosangel
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Steggy, who confessed to me just this morning in our daily 10:51 conversation that she spent half her youth writing mash poems to bad boys in high school, says of this one: "Simple, yet effective use of rhyme and rythm. Also, one of the few she submitted that wasn’t a ripoff of a famous poem by someone else."

Like who, Steggs, Kipling??????????

The only thing conventional about the next entry, by Ancicfan, is the title, "untitled." I don't know about you, but I'm starting to detect a trend here. I hereby declare "untitled" the official TennisWorld title. Isn't that just toooooo post-modern of us?

Untitled

by Ancicfan

English translation:

Steggy flipped for this one, commenting: "The only foreign-language original that had great meter, rythm,and rhyme in both English and its’ original language."And how about that seething "the love that dare not speak its name" undertone, folks?

We also received a surprisingly high number of poems in Hai-ku form; we like to think it's because of the delicate nature of that form, which was named for a minor Hawaiian Island with an awesome point break. But I suspect the reality is more mundane: Some of our contestants are lazy sacks of poop who are always looking for the easy way out. Hey, I'll do Hai-ku! just three lines and 17 sylables - how hard can it be?

As it turned out, though, we ended up with a spirited war of the Hai-ku slackers, in which Ryan and Matt Zemek got all big on everyone and submitted enough high-quality Hai-kus to fill a book. In fact, we could easily imagine their thinking: Hey,this is even easier than it looks! Wow. It's really inspiring, kind of like, like. . . playing a slot machine! Chag-ching, Cha-ching,Cha-ching.. . .

Think I'm kidding? Peruse these, starting with our favorite of the lot, by Ryan's entry.**

Steggy says: "Trust Ryan to make a Haiku funny as all get-out - and truthful." You'll notice that Steggy doesn't hyphenate Hai-ku -she clearly knows squat about Hawaiian culture. Somewhere along the line, I think caught Ryan-Matt fever, or is it just the ironist in me? Anyway, I have a funny feeling that if you actually counted sylables, you could call these guys out, but why bother? Here are a few more of Ryan's:

And while Ryan was all over the tennis map, Matt chose mostly to go "old school," which may or may not have been a transparent attempt to tug at our heartstrings in the hopes of winning something/anything. . . Check these out:

McEnroe-Connors 1984 USOpen Semifinal:

Becker-Curran 1985 Wimbledon Final:

Graf-Navratilova 1988 Wimbledon Final:

Edberg-Becker 1990 Wimbledon Final:

Capriati-Seles 1991 US Open Semifinal

Got to hand it to Matt, he sure knows his dates. Way to go fellas. Who says men are insensitive louts?

But not all submissions followed the time-honored, ancient dictums regulating meter and verse. Here, for instance, is a true TW modernist:

untitled

by MisterQ

Steggy liked this one because, "It's halfway between a poem and a limerick, I noticed that this one had a lyrical tone - I can see the Beastie Boys picking it up, for some reason."

And, of course, leave it to Veruca Salt, of the Dark Arts League, to take it to the next level and go full-out hip-hop, presumably causing weeping and gnashing of teeth among elders like Ruth, Ms. Rubin, Dunlop, Skip, Todd, et al:

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Mirka's Rap *

by Veruca Salt

To all of which is say, piffle! You want rap or poetry? You say poetry? Check this out:

Desire, in his Shadow I Tread
(An atonal song about a man who sterilized my heart against other men)

**by 10nis

Now that you've put down the Thesaurus and sit there with a blissed-out, baffled (or is it merely "clubbed") look on you face, I will say only this: real poetry always leaves you wondering, What the hail is he/she talking about? Or for the philistines among you: Go big or go home.

Knowing Marat as we do, we're hardly surprised at how easily he reached into the throats of our poetesses, grabbed their hearts, tore them out, and fed them, lightly fried and served with Flava beans, to some 5-11, blue-eyed blonde named  - well, he's forgotten that already. But our faithful D-Wiz travels where she will, undeterred by the advice of the Cad police, or even her concerned parents. Just check out the apologia (that's a word poets use, inn'it?), which she curiously applied as a preface to her poem. This is a chica who'll set her hair on fire with no fear of getting burned, and who I suspect has on more than one occasion said to herself: I know I ought to know better, but still. .

Her preface: As promised, a loser-ific, pathetically submissive ode to Marat, inspired by Bec Cartwright-Hewitt & Christopher Marlowe. Forgive the bits of plagiarizing Marlowe. (It's okay, D-Wiz, just keep your friggin'  mitts off Kipling!)

The Passionate Marat-lover to Her Love

by D-Wiz

Aw, isn't that sweet? I can tell D-Wiz is a really a good girl at heart (kind of like the chica in the Tom Petty song, Free Fallin') because her lengthy title needed no editing for upper-lower case consistency.

Lucy adopted Flavia Penetta's voice for a sultry, romantic ode to Carlos Moya. It was nice (you can look it up), but I have to tell you - I would have preferred for Lucy to go with what she herself was feeling as she penned that sunny love note in the voice of her principal rival - hysterical, bitter, homicidal jealousy. But our Lucy is nothing if not flexible, and she gets huge props for making the singular, most breathtaking conceptual leap in the entire FABCAPS, which probably means in the history of poetry. She actually wrote a poem about Dominik Hrbaty!

Untitled Limerick
by Lucy

Moving on, we learned the other day that Tim, when not working as a ghostwriter for the UNESCO (you knowm, that big oil company) and the bloggin' fool, Federerbear, is a big Joni Mitchell fan. Although he loses points for sticking too close to the text of a pop song, which is kind of like poetry, except worse, his voice here is pitch perfect:

Both Sides Now

by Tim

Well, Typepad is sending me menacing emails, saying I'm exceeding my post space, so we'll have to wrap it up soon. Ray Stonada blew away a lot of his fellow poets at the Slam with the sheer length and density of his submission (What did you expect - the dude lives in the East Village). This, to some, is everything a poem should be: awash in obscure references that only certain anointed individuals (fellow members of the Tribe) would understand; curiously in touch with low culture as well as high; filled with words that had to be banged left and right with a hammer to make them rhyme; unfocused; brilliant; prone to leaving you scratching your head, wondering, WTF?

Keeping in mind that this is a weblog devoted to tennis, it should add an extra dimension of meaningfulness (and isn't that what great poetry is about, always?) to recognize that Ray's untitled paen to God-knows-what is a self-referential, lyrical yet rigorously intellectual poetic riposte (that's a word poets use, inn'it?). So what if Steggy, with her understated taste, liked A Fan's Wish entry the best? So what I was a sucker for Desire, in his Shadow I Tread?  - if, at the end of the day, we were bowled over by the darkly alluring, not to mention bi-lingual, Untitled, by Ancicfan?

The bottom line is that TW now has its' classic text. Think of it as our very own version of Brad Gilbert's  Winning Ugly:

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Untitled

by Ray Stonada
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Congratulations to Ray, TW's Armadillo Poet Laureate for 2007.

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