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POTATOES, SONNETS, AND THE ENORMOUS MUSE
Aren't you just dying to know why I asked? Well, here's the scoop.
Said event is likely to shake, rattle and roll the contemporary literary and poetic world to greater depths than even Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones might ever have hoped to, and with — goodness knows what reason? Actually, in all probability goodness knows what has little or nothing to do with it. We are therefore left with no alternative but to be as tactfully tomato modest, blushing, as we must, crimson red, to introduce our guest reviewer. Our protuberous ponneteer invité/e (I fain would refer to him or is it her? - as a sonneteer) is none other than his loamy Majesty, the Potato Tarquin Grendlebaum Orbisfleur Terror III, whose rather starchy biography you may unearth with a convenient spade here, POT = Welcome to the Home Page of the Potato of Terror. POT is the pot-bellied author of that masterpiece of literature, baked to perfection, THE LOST BOOK OF TUBERLANTIS, a much more mystifying read than the Legend of Lost Atlantis, which utterly pales in comparison. Unfortunately for lil' ole me, la tomate enragée (the enraged tomato), your customary Vallance reviewer, I have been -tartly, I dare say - squished into pulped submission (what S & M fun!) by said Royal Highness of Spud-dom, who has taken upon himself (or herself, as the case may be) to write his (her?) own high cholesterol review. Ah, such pluck! Well, I suppose if he is so pitch fork bent on digging his own garden, I must step down or be stepped on and puréed.
Portrait of « la tomate enragée » (unpuréed)
And so, fair ladies and gentlemen, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, eggplants, beans, corn, legumes and the rest of the ingredients of V-8 juice, I humbly defer to the potato-eyed vision of our well-starched reviewer, who has the following words of Tuberlantian wisdom to share with us on the genesis of his ponnets, to wit: Cher Fair Richard de Vallance and Vegetarian Readers, I am deeply honoured to be asked to pen this protruberous review. Yes, I thank you from the primal depths of my deepest soil. Now I sat up half the night in my glow-in-the dark Hulk pyjamas, and finally up popped this article. This deep riddle of the (spud) Universe has bemused vegetables, animals, philosophers, pixies, psychiatric practitioners and other such quacks for countless centuries. Small wonder! It has certainly shaken me to my very roots. But then, many things do. Alas, the Murky Past!In order to grasp this brain-boggling question, we must first embark on a journey to some of the very first sonneteers of history, you know, the likes of Francis Petrarch, Wee Willie Shakespeare, and of course, the little-known Spudnacious Bong, whom history has all too blithely forgotten, if not tossed aside like a hot potato. Long before the concept of the "sonnet" was nursed into belated being, Spudnacious Bong was busily cooking up the most mind-imploding, gusset-immolating quatrains that a tuber being could ever conceive of! Imagine — and before Shakespeare had even grown the first of those little fuzzy-wuzzy hairs in his youthful beard! Alas, the quatrains of Mr. Bong were never to see the light of day, beyond those few scattered remnants salvaged by a local maritime museum somewhere in Devon, England. It is thought that poor Bong tossed off most of the manuscript over a cliff somewhere in the vicinity of Plymouth, while in the grip of a near-apopleptic rage. Tragically, he died after changing his mind, tossing off himself after it, in a vain attempt to valiantly retrieve his life's culinary art. A few pages of the manuscript were blown in shreds up and upwards beyond the starch White Cliffs of Dover to land in twisted trees and on small ledges. Those surviving pages serve to remind us of the poignant anguish engendered by such deep mental malady. To belabour our point, take this example, from the very deeply-moving quatrain Passages of Uranus [2]: O planet of preposterous deceit! This discombobulated quatrain rambles on in a similarly distressful fashion after the introductory hiccup stanza, which typically expresses medieval folks' tendency to blame misfortune on the movements of the planets — instead of their own stupidity — which could, at times, be fatal. Not to say that we, in the Third Millennium, fare any better: for it is just as likely we would tend to blame our misfortunes on natural disasters the likes of the Mount St. Helens volcano and Saddam Hussein. But enough unearthing through the murky medium of political analysis! Bong was indeed deeply addicted to absinthe... but that's a whole new essay. In any event, it would appear that Bong was sorely troubled by the planets, as attested by these all too telling verses:
And bares his backside terrifyingly, While Saturn is a satyr in disguise And whispers to the moon of thee and me; Petrarch wrote of similar such torments, but his lamentations and wringings of hands were mainly inspired by his love for the beautiful Laura [3], a lady he could never have, though his mellifluous Italian sonnets aspired to the stars [4]. Shakespeare, however, touched on something rather ticklish and more akin to the astro-tuber phenomenon when he composed his rather peculiar Sonnet 14:
Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck, [ASIDE BESIDE BACKSIDE's BACKSLIDE: You didn't think I was going to quote Shakespeare's sonnet in BROWN FONT?] But how was Shakespeare, in his limited human understanding, to even begin to delve the excruciating pains Spudnacious Bong so suffered, I hear you expostulate? Well, the answer is self-explanatory. After all is said and done, Shakespeare was not a potato. But he was a living being, with limbs where a potato's tubers protrude, and he too, like those of us of Tuberkind, experienced deep emotions, though only human. Not only that - (horror of horrors, for us maybe, but not for the Elizabethans and certainly not for Tuberlantians), some of his male actor friends were obliged to gussy themselves up in women’s clothes to play female roles, since it was then deemed a woeful sight to ogle at real women actresses on stage. Hence, to his great surprise and delight, Spudnacious Bong found himself plucked from obscurity to a kind of semi-obscurity with his first teetering steps on the Globe's stage, where he played a rather rotund Juliet, Alas, however, he never crossed that invisible threshold from vamp to fame or even notoriety. 
a Rather Rotund Juliet Unbeknownst to him, the neighbouring villagers soon enough ceased regarding him as the local hamlet jester, to his astonished delight, and even began to ask him to sing songs or recite a stanza or two of his own poetry (offstage, of course). And even more gradually, he began to realize that he could only do this when he was at least partially inebriated, while sporting women's attire. Well you know how it is, dear poet friends. Here it is, one of those balmy, moonlit summer nights and you are standing there in your local drinking establishment, dressed as Bronhilda [6], when suddenly the vagrant Harvest Moon's Muse seizes you until you are practically burgeoning with poetic frenzy! Then it all comes bursting forth, in a torrent of eye-popping visionary words, as you brandish a butternut squash over your head. No? You don't know? Oh. Well maybe it's only me then. Trust me, that is also how it was for Spudnacious Bong, God rest his tatered soul. Just conjure his image up before your boggled eyes: a gender-crossed vamp who wanted to be a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Yet, alas, this was not to be... because, as we now know, Spudnacious was very, very mad [7] indeed. But his = her story does not end there.
Now, this brand of latent madness, lurking just beneath my creative crust, is just is one of many qualities I have in common with Spudnacious B. That is to say, it comes and it goes, like (the) passing wind [8]. And, like the passing of wind, here is a sonnet of mine which burgeoned forth recently, after a particularly rampant night on the tiles:
Annointed with whale oils and hemlock, fair; You hymn me with your screech songs of the deep, Weave bladderwrack and kelp into my hair. I swim with the endorphins, in my tights, I burble with the bright elephant seals, Huge scuba tubers shimmy through my nights, Until I wake covered in welts and weals. Come smother me in shiny mermaid's purse! Come bounce on me until I cry "no more!" Berate me with your fearsome ocean verse, Anchor me, helpless, to the dark sea floor. I am your slave, enormous ocean muse! Give your commands and I cannot refuse. © ~The Potato of Terror~ 13th July 2003 11:19 am What message lurks here in the lush plot of my thoughts, mes enfants? Does it float in a hydroponic sea somewhere between hetero/homo autoerotic, aquatic and psychotic, perchance? Or have I simply evoked that feeling we all know and love, to wit, that of the utter abandonment of the self to the too too rampant Muse? I aver I must have stumbled on something close to some semblance of an answer to this seemingly preposterous riddle this morning as I sat in rotund leisure on the roof, watching the dandelion down blow across my neighbour's lobster-red bulbous navel, as he lay prone like a beached whale on his front lawn. As he grappled blindly towards his beer can, grimacing and looking so very much like an enormus lobster, the entire Siren of The Deep Sonnet came to me, fuelled, I admit, in part by last night's excesses... ... which brings us closer to the crux of our Sphinxter’s riddle: Why indeed does a potato write a sonnet — er, ponnet? Darlings, why does the sea tide come and go, why does the sun rise and set, why does the moon growl at potatoes? OK, so that's probably just when I happened to gaze distractedly upon it?... because it must, because I must, simply because it was there [9]..... 1. "Whoso Squeals or Grunts", by Fair Richard De Vallance (A tribute to Whoso Lists To Hunt - Thomas Wyatt). FAIR WARNING! You will regret you ever read this sonnet! I would recommend more “further readings”, but I fear they might terrorize you. So out of deference to human sensibilities, I shall refrain! 
Now, since everything is, if you will pardon the _expression, ass-backwards about this review, you will allow me, your Tomato reviewer, to end with the beginning, by referring you to yet another of our guest potato's eminently salacious literary studies, the editorial in the dead of Winter 2002/2003 issue of SONNETTO POESIA, for which I made the egregious error of inviting said spud to submit some of his truly earthy creations, only to discover that he (or she as the case may be) was to take it upon herself (à la Dame Edna) to write the editorial to that issue as well! I suppose I could not have been surprised. As it so happened, I myself was so stumped about what on earth I should venture to say on the subject of ponnets that I simply threw my tomato vines up in despair and let the cards fall where they may. Now, as you can see from the rather uproarious results, said editorial so successfully delves into the underground world of the ponneteer as to leave us all quite breathless. I mean, that potato was so hot you can hardly have expected me to have held onto it! Here then is the final coup de jardin, the creeping link to the Potato of Terror's illustrious contribution to the literary scene of the early Third Millennium, Eddytorial, SONNETTO POESIA, Vol. 2, no. 1, Winter 2002//2003 [ISSN 1705-4524] It is this very eddytorial (so-called, because it is liable to set your head spinning), penned by POT’s protuberous appendages, which sets forth in exhilarating and/or excruciating detail the premises of his or her revolutionary theory of the Sonnet or, as the case may be, Ponnet, duly titled, “Sonnet Style: the New Tuberism — a Potato’s Thoughts”. I am sure you will all find his theorizing most edifying if not in fact edible!
... well, not really! After all, this is POT's review, so permit me to round it out with a few little bulbous quotes of his wisdom: Excerpta (lat. for potato chips) from the oeuvres du chef of the Ever-Bulbous Potato of Terror (to be taken with a grain or a liberal sprinkling of salt, butter and sour cream): FROM: Panto Time
As bring pantomime-horse backsides to smile. FROM: An Ululation to Panto-Spud by Extra Virgin Olive Oil, a.k.a. Brian Whatcott (no, that's his real name!)
more pure, more kind, most like Snow-White; more rousing of my fiercest appetite. FROM: Spring Potato Goes Boing!
Graces these eyes of luminescent blue, And as the cherry blooms unfold their frills I bring my silk-clad kneecaps into view. I could go on and on and on and on, but I don't relish driving you to an early grave. © by Richard Vallance, a.ka. la tomate enragée and the Potato of Terror, a.ka. His Holiness the Spudnacious Tater (August 25, 2003)
[1] Richard Vallance has edited this section of the review, which is expanded (or more likely exploded, like a baked potato left too long in the oven) from POT’s original notes, which our Tomato unearthed from some obscure e-mail message he dug up from POT’s multifarious babblings and rantings. 
A glamorous entrant from the Bronhilda Competition [7] Not Mad as a Hatter, but almost! |
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a été publié le numéro actuel de :
SONNETTO POESIA [ISSN 1705-4524]
Le poète en vedette dans ce numéro est Jim Dunlap, qui réside à Des Moines, Iowa. Y inclus aussi, il y a deux sonnets écrits par Sara Russell du Royaume-uni et deux autres par Richard Vallance du Canada. Dans le cadre historique, nous avons inclus les grands poètes suivants : Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), John Keats (1795-1821) et Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Les sonnets de Ronsard et de Baudelaire sont tous les deux publiés en français et traduits en sonnets anglais par Richard Vallance. Un troisième sonnet, composé en 1932 par l’écrivaine américaine moins connue, Margaret Bruner, figure dans ce numéro, puisqu’il traite des chats, à l’instar des sonnets de Charles Baudelaire et de Richard Vallance.
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SONNETTO POESIA Vol. 2, no. 3, Summer, 2003 [ISSN 1705-4524] has been published. Our featured poet for this issue is the American poet, Jim Dunlap, who lives in Des Moines, Iowa. Also featured are Sara Russell of the United Kingdom and Richard Vallance of Canada.
Several historical sonnets are also included, by such renowned sonneteers as Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), John Keats (1795-1821) and Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Ronsard’s and Baudelaire’s sonnets are each published in their French originals, and as English sonnets translated by Richard Vallance. There is also a delightful sonnet by a lesser-known sonneteer, Margaret Bruner, who was an American poetess of the early Twentieth Century.
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