Today’s episode is guest hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Transcript

I’m Jason Schneiderman and this is The Slowdown.

Sonnet 135 is possibly the filthiest poem in the English language, and yet very few people know that. I often find myself explaining that Shakespeare, and the writers of his time, were generally very careful when they wrote about religion or politics, but sex wasn’t really a sensitive topic to them the way it is to us. When I teach my undergraduates Sonnet 135, I warn them that the content is pretty racy. The first time through, they look at me like I must be, well, wrong. They don’t see anything “sex” anywhere. Then I explain the slang terms from Shakespeare’s time, and all of a sudden, they are blushing as hard as I am.

I won’t be sharing Sonnet 135 today—I’ll let you explore it on your own—but I will say that sometimes poems need a little bit of explaining. Or not explaining, exactly, but a little bit of background. When I’m introducing poetry to a new class I’ll often give them a packet with a huge number of poems of very different styles. One of the poems they all find baffling is a poem that repeats a single word about 100 times, and I let them talk about why they don’t like it, what they think it’s doing.

But in the following weeks, as they write parodies of that poem, they all find each other’s work very funny. Slowly, I point out that when they first encountered that poem, it made them feel like outsiders, and they felt a little bit… insulted. But as they began to play with it, and as it became this shared foundational text, they came to love—if not the poem—what they can do with it. Poetry doesn’t aim to make outsiders—but it can do something special when we share being insiders.

Today’s poem requires a little bit of that insider background knowledge, but I think it’s worth it. This poem is part of a series that the poet calls Sonnagrams. He uses a program to rearrange the letters in each of Shakespeare’s sonnets to get a whole new poem, and then he makes a title out of the letters he didn’t use yet. Without knowing that the poem is an anagram of sonnet 135, it might not make a lot of sense. But knowing that it is, you’ll hear both the technical accomplishment of the poem-sized anagram and the playfulness of the composition process.

Uh Huh: Hi, Hula Tooth
by K. Silem Mohammad

From Sonnet 135 (“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will”)

Will refried catnip addicts find a cure?
Will daytime televangelists go broke?
Will Algorithmic Horses go on tour?
Will nineteen shekels buy one thin, thin Coke?

Will innovative inverts be reported?
Will weasel-human hybrids rent a maid?
Will hesitating oxen get aborted?
Will analysts of real estate get laid?

Will hoochie-coochie nuns remove their mink?
Will enemies of hotness shut it down?
Will tame aphasic mynahs learn to think?
Will Hi-Ho hunt the hound in Ho-Ho town?

Will Willy Loman eat a thousand ants?
Will Willa Cather do that nasty dance?

“Uh Huh: Hi, Hula Tooth” by K. Silem Mohammad. Used by permission of the poet.